Be Sure You VOTE !

.
It just doesn't get any better stated than this:

When the President took office, not only had the car gone into a ditch, the car had flipped over and was rolling down a steep embankment. We, the American people, were in the back seat, and the Bush Administration had removed all the seat belts, so we were all flying around the interior of this car as it was rolling and flipping and careening down this steep embankment, headed to a 2,000 foot cliff. And at the bottom of that cliff were jagged rocks. And alligators.

Now, at noon on January 20th, 2009, as the car was careening toward the cliff, George W. Bush jumped out of the car.

President Obama somehow managed to dive in through the window, take the wheel and get control of the thing just inches before it went over the precipice. Then, he and Congress starting pushing this wreck back up the embankment. Now you can’t push a car up an embankment as fast as it careens down the embankment, especially if some people are trying to push against you. But we got it going in the right direction. And slowly we’ve gotten ourselves up the embankment, out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the road.

There. That’s what happened. Al Franken

You don't believe it?

The Democrats actually managed to shrink the deficit -- in spite of the all the Republican "help" (help 1--most recent), (help 2), (help 3), and on and on and on, from the very beginning of the current administration.

The GOP is like a criminally reckless 16-year-old complaining that he's abused because his parents didn't have enough in savings to buy him a car--all while conveniently ignoring the fact that all the money was spent bailing him out of jail.

VOTE!

.

Universal Health Care & the GOP

.
At the Center for Media and Democracy, there is a really good analysis that helps to explain why conservatives hate the concept of a universal government health plan.

• Michael F. Cannon, a pundit at the libertarian Cato Institute, has written a blog post that highlights the importance of what I believe will be one of the most important issues in play once Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency. "Blocking Obama's health plan," he writes, is " key to the GOP's survival."
• [What is] Cannon's big fear -- a fear that has been haunting conservatives in the United States for more than a decade? They worry that a universal government health plan, if it should ever come to pass, will be so wildly popular with the public that they will reward Democrats for passing it.
  
• The same fear was expressed in 1997 by Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who famously declared that his goal is to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." In an interview with the libertarian Reason magazine, Norquist said that he was motivated in the early 1990s to organize his conservative coalition by "sheer terror of Clinton's health-care plan.
  

When you go read it, be sure you check out the graph more than mid-way into the article, "Let's Destroy Your Health to Save the GOP." It shows life expectancy at birth (in years--42nd in the world; we are behind France, but hey, we are ahead of Turkey.) vs the total per capita expenditures on health (in dollars--$6,102 in 2004--WAY ahead of everybody else). That means we pay much more and get much less.

Yep, that's a reason to keep doing things just the way we have been.

In addition, a study in published April 2006 found that the United States has the third-highest rate of deaths from medical errors, among 26 countries reporting.

Very enlightening.
.