Time Passages

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The speed at which time passes is flexible--rather, our perception of the speed at which time passes is flexible. Anyone who's ever been in a life-threatening crisis will testify to that. While the crisis is going on, time seems to stretch as though one is falling over the event horizon of a black hole. Once the crisis has passed, the putative victim is inevitably shocked to discover that what seemed like hours of agony really took but minutes, or even seconds, to pass.

I have been thinking a lot about the human brain's flexible response to the passage of time. I spent much of the first 60% of my life moving, not just from state to state, but overseas, once each to Southeast Asia and to Europe. The reality of being so frequently on the move not only helped me keep my own personal entropy under control; it helped me stay connected--plugged in, if you will--to the larger energy of world-wide events.

I have spent the subsequent 40% of my life to date living in one place. Yes, I've taken trips [though, mostly for logistical reasons connected to my lung disease, I've had to keep these trips to one day's length--Ed.], but somehow it's not the same. I still pay a great deal of attention to the events passing on the world's stage, and I still actively pursue learning so as better to evaluate the effects of those events on not just my life, but ultimately on history itself. But the sense of being "part of the flow" has vanished. And my own personal entropy has gotten totally out of hand.

Sometimes, I feel that even though I am still alive, my life is slipping away from me. I find that frightening. I'm not even distracted by the hum-drum of the minutiae of everyday living. I'm disconnecting from it. Some 40-year-old memories I have are more vivid in my brain than are memories I've generated in the past year. Maybe this should make me glad--I'm sure it reduces my levels of stress. But I cannot escape the vague sensation that somehow, it's very, very wrong, and I should fight it as hard and for as long as I can. I do not want to have to move, not ever again. But maybe it's exactly the physical jolt I need to overcome my mental entropy and the physical entropy surrounding me.

I am still quite good at working up some righteous anger over the injustices I see in the larger world, as anyone who's read more than one of these posts can attest. I have made it a habit of expressing my opinions and the reasons for them in more, and more diverse places. The beauty of a good idea is that once it's given expression, it's able to influence untold numbers in untold ways . . . not unlike the impact an excellent teacher can have on someone's life. Or such is my hope, that one of my little mental gems has sparkled and caught the attention of someone I don't even know, and that it has [in a way I cannot predict--Ed.] made a difference for the better in that person's life.

If this is mere dream or delusion, so be it. Leave me my dream, my delusion. It's all I have left.

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Another odd thing about humanity's flexible perception of time involves anticipation. Note that anticipation is not necessarily a good thing. One may anticipate happy events that are to come, such as weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, reunions, what have you. But one may also anticipate upcoming appointments with dread, as I surmise the football players of Louisiana-Lafayette must have felt as their game against the mighty University of Nebraska, played yesterday, approached. Many people who watch the History Channel are getting all het up about the upcoming end of the world that's been predicted for 12/21/2012. Getting to yesterday must have felt that same way to the Ragin' Cajuns as they came to Lincoln to accept their drubbing at the hands of the Cornhuskers. If it wasn't the apocolypse, it was a pertect storm, and the Ragin' Cajuns knew they were plunging into its heart.

The factors creating this perfect storm? (1) Homecoming for the Huskers. Every team is hyper-hyped to win its homecoming game. The Huskers are no exception. (2) The 300th consecutive stadium home game sell-out in NU history. This is the longest active streak in NCAA history; Notre Dame holds the second-longest streak, at a 1/3 shorter 207 games. The only proper way to celebrate such a milestone is with a win--a BIG win. (3) Nebraska was coming off a loss, by one point, to Virginia Tech--a loss the Huskers let happen after having had the game in hand for about 58 of its 60-minute duration. Anyone who knows anything about Nebraska knows that the opponent facing NU the week after such a painful, self-inflicted defeat is going to be chewed up and spat out. And then stomped on. And then stomped on some more.

The final score was 55-0. Yes, Nebraska won. I hope the Ragin' Cajuns' share of the take from ticket sales and pay-per-view was worth what it probably cost the Louisiana-Lafayette players' psyches. True, they could see it coming. The first two factors have been known since the game was put on the schedule. But the third factor happened only a week before, and that's what makes me wonder about how the Ragin' Cajuns perceived the passage of time in that week before their annihilation for the sake of NU's quest to get back national championship glory.

I'm guessing the week seemed to pass very slowly to the Ragin' Cajuns. No sane person looks forward to being on the receiving end of such an experience. I would think they'd want it to be over and done with as soon as possible . . . thus making the time before it happened slow to a crawl. Oddly enough, I suspect the Huskers felt the same way. Every day they had to live with the taste of the Virginia Tech loss only increased their desire to replace the bitterness with the sweetness of a huge win. Who cares that the opponent was the proverbial 97-pound weakling?

And that's what is so odd about how human anticipation affects human perception of the passing of time. It's the waiting that's the operative factor, not whether the predicted outcome is dreaded or hoped for. Not to mention that when the event finally happens, it seems to fly by quickly and be either much less painful or much less satisfying than anticipated. Doubtless there is some biochemical explanation for this, but I cannot help but hope that biochemistry isn't the end of it. My experiences tell me that when we die, we're done. We're gone. But my heart hopes my experiences aren't telling me everything.

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In our minds, we are free to jump about in time--that's why I so love history and science fiction--but our own personal time-lines are linear and one-way. And history gives us good data for making predictions about the future--if we "read the tea leaves" correctly, that is. But even though we can anticipate certain outcomes, there's always room for that once-in-a-million shocker, that upset of epic proportions which ameliorates the sense of dread and impending doom faced by, say, people about to go to the dentist, people about to go to a tax audit, and the Ragin' Cajuns last week. The shockers are rare, to be sure. That's why they are, literally, one in a million; but they CAN happen. And I suppose that that is why our sense of dread/impending doom does not overwhelm us. On paper, Team A is far better than Team B. Yet Team B can, and on rare occasions, does, win the game. That, to quote the sports cliché, is why you have to play the game.

This year's Chicago Cubs illustrate this most excellently. Last year, the Cubs won 97 games, and took the NL Central title handily. And got swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Dodgers, 0-3. So the front office made personnel changes, and the talking heads on ESPN and MLBTV thereupon agreed that the Cubs once again would be the class of the league. Not all the fans agreed, however. Many of us wish to this day that the Cubs had not acquired Milton Bradley and had kept Mark DeRosa, but why the fans so often seem to know better than management is a topic for another day.

You still have to play the game . . . and when you do play the game, things happen. Unexpected, unanticipated things. Bad things. Third baseman Aramis Ramirez missed something like 50 games with a dislocated shoulder. The Cubs were almost 10 games over .500 when Ramirez got hurt, and went straight into the tank when their leading RBI man was lost to them for almost 1/3 of the season. They were as low as 4th place in mid-summer, though they did manage to claw their way back into a brief tie for the division lead before sinking firmly back to second place by the end of the dog days of August.

Outfielder Milton Bradley, always a prickly personality, did not play anywhere near his potential, or even up to the level he'd played for Texas the year before. His acrimonious relationship with the fans shocked me. Chicago Cubs fans embrace the Cubs like almost no other fans in any sport. They follow the careers of former Cubs and continue to root for them and wish them well (except for maybe when they are actually playing against the Cubs, that is--but Cubs fans still applaud them when they are introduced and when they come to bat).

The one thing Cubs fans hate is the player who isn't giving his best efforts at all times, the player who acts like he doesn't care. To the fans, Bradley did not seem to care or to be giving his all, resulting in his being mildly chided by some. But then Bradley opened his mouth and complained about how awful the fans and the city were treating him . . . and it got so bad that he was suspended and sent home almost a full month before the end of the season. [That he's had similar problems everywhere he's played should lead him to realize something, to wit: it's him, not the fans. He doesn't seem to have that kind of self-awareness, however.--Ed.]

And Mark DeRosa, traded into the American League (to Cleveland) so he wouldn't compete directly against the Cubs, got traded again. To St. Louis. Where he wound up playing directly against the Cubs after all. He is now an important part of the Cardinals' unpredicted rise to the NL Central title, which they clinched last night.

As September proceeded, and the Cardinals' "magic number" to clinch the division title shrank, several strange things happened. The Cubs started playing the way we fans knew they could, and they got back to several games over .500 (as I write this). St. Louis started playing a bit erratically, and lost some games the Cardinals should have won. The Cardinals' "magic number" to clinch hovered at "1" for several days. What that "magic number" means is that any combination of 1 win by the Cardinals OR one loss by the Cubs would make it mathematically impossible, even if the Cubs won all the rest of their remaining games, for the Cubs to wrest the title from the Cardinals.

Seeing a "magic number" hover for days at "1" is something I do not remember ever experiencing before. In my heart of hearts, knowing it was totally silly, I yet began to let a little hope for the impossible take root. Could the Cubs do it? Could they really win all their remaining games? That half of the equation seemed eminently possible. But would the Cardinals in turn lose ALL their remaining games? Not bloody likely. They're too good. And even if the Cards did, there'd still have to be a one-game playoff for the division title.

But as the Cards proved last night in coming from behind to beat the Colorado Rockies 6-3 and thus clinch the NL Central crown, they were in fact too good to let the title slip away. No matter that the Cubs earlier yesterday had beaten the San Francisco Giants.

Still, it kept the NL Central division race interesting a lot later into September than I'd have predicted (had anyone asked) back in August. What does all this has to do with time passing? Once again it comes back to anticipation. The hoped for, no matter how unlikely, can make our perception of the speed of time's passing slow down. In this case, unlike the case of the Huskers football team, however, it was not because of a rush to get beyond a prior insult or injury, but because of how good it felt to have a germ of hope springing to life inside.

What's even odder is that now that that hope has died, its death doesn't seem to hurt as much as its lack of existence at all, back in August, pained me. I wonder how the Cubs players themselves feel about the events of September, 2009. I suspect that they'd given up on any realistic chance to win the NL Central back around Labor Day, which is about when they started playing better again. For even though this year's team is not responsible for the Cubs' lack of a World Series title for more than 100 years, that century must weigh on them. They know their fans have come to expect a winner, and they [except for Milton Bradley, that is--Ed.] want to be that winner. This desire doubtless is reinforced every time the litany of all the close calls and missed opportunities ever since 1984 is replayed.

What the Cubs need to do as a team is learn a little Zen. They must embrace the burden by letting it go. To focus and concentrate on the big goal while not thinking about it during each at bat and each defensive play. To play to their capabilities without forcing them, without feeling obligated to carry around those 100-plus years of expectations. They have to feel the pressure, but not feel it; they must channel it to enhance their moment-to-moment performance, not let it swamp and thus overwhelm their thinking. I know from my own participation in various organized sports that this is the hardest thing to do and yet it is the only thing that separates champions from also-rans.

And I am taking some comfort in the Cubs' performance these past few weeks. Almost to the second they knew realistic pressure was off, they began playing like the winners they can be. I just hope they can internalize that during the off-season, and come back in 2010 to play the way it says they should "on paper." Just don't let them read it!

Honest Questions

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While contemplating several news items of interest over the past two weeks, and in between attending multiple doctors' appointments, I have been trying to formulate several questions to which I would like self-styled conservatives to answer. Not in a spirit of combativeness, but in a spirit of honest inquiry.

I'll admit it: I am not alone in being quick to the mark, and making assumptions about other people's goals, motives, and aspirations--it's a normal human analytical shorthand. We all do it. But I am trying hard to gain some understanding here, some genuine understanding. I hope it results in civil, and civic-minded, conversation. Maybe if we all worked a little harder at trying to understand viewpoints that are not normally our own, we could actually begin to resolve some of the most contentious issues of the day. That is all I'm trying to get at with the things I am about to ask. Honest!

I should also note: this post is a work-in-progress. I am going to refine and add detail as time and energy allow. Please revisit it periodically. I'll make a note to myself to add a comment whenever I add to the body, as a way of flagging the additional content I will have included.

Question the first: Why are for-profit companies presumed to be better at almost everything than is government? Government must be good at some things, or else there'd be no reason for it to exist at all. For-profit companies exist to benefit their owners--that, by definition, is the meaning of "for-profit." While they provide goods and services that people want and need, they do not exist for the good of those people. They exist to make profit--to take in more than they give out--again, all for the benefit of their owners.

In an ideal world, this trade is a "win-win." People get the goods and services they want and need for a price they are willing to pay; the company gets more in terms of value than it gives, thus fulfilling its "for-profit" status, and also stays in business because it keeps making profit, thus incidentally continuing to provide what people want and need.

This is not an ideal world, however. Too often, people have needs; not just "wants," or "nice-to-haves," but genuine "needs," or "must-haves." [Think "I will literally die without obtaining the benefits of this good or service."--Ed.] Too often, these needs are beyond their means to obtain.

Please note: I am not talking about big houses and fancy cars. I am talking about the things most basic to modern life: food, shelter, physical safety and security, medical care, meaningful work, transportation. Perhaps you disagree, especially about the last two items. However, please consider: we are living in the 21st century, not the 17th. It is literally impossible for everyone on the planet to be 100% self-sustaining. Technology has made it so. We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. People must work to get the money to exchange for the goods and services they cannot provide by themselves for themselves. And in these days, where one works and where one lives are not typically within reasonable walking distance of one another.

Please also note that I am not talking strictly about money. People's time and energy have value, too--value that must be included in any calculations about whether any particular good or service is worth its asking price.

I also included medical care in the "needs," not "wants," category because I know from personal experience that without good health, it is impossible to do the work required to earn the money that will pay for the other goods and services we do not just want, but truly need, just to stay alive.

So to refine my first question, let me ask it this way: why are so many people not just willing, but seemingly eager, to entrust their health care decisions to companies whose very reason for being requires them to take in more money than they pay out--to put it bluntly, to accept your premiums but deny your claims? Health IS life. I've said that before. And since life is the most fundamental of our unalienable rights, and health care literally promotes, preserves, and protects life, isn't running our health care system on a for-profit basis simply wrong? Why not have a not-for-profit system of health care, where decisions are made based on their merits, and there are objective, written standards that can be consulted--and an impartial decision-maker to use those standards to resolve disputes about care . . . instead of an anonymous corporate employee whose own job depends on increasing his employer's profit margins?

I really just don't get it. I would hope someone would explain it to me. But please, not with references to non-existent government "death panels." Private, for-profit insurers are operating those now. [Which leads me to a tangential question to wit: Have you ever noticed how quickly many people who do bad things are to accuse their opponents of doing the same bad things that they, themselves, are already doing? It is an effective way of distracting attention from the real issues.--Ed.]

Hence my question the second: Whence comes this presumption that "government" equals "bad"? I do not deny for a second that government screws things up. All that government consists of is a lot of people, and none of us is perfect. However, I do deny that government is some evil, alien entity that exists to suck the life and freedom out of the people. In this country, the government IS the people. Isn't that still taught in elementary school civics classes? And if not, why not?

Let me point out that the only time government doesn't work is when you put people in charge of the government who say they don't believe in government. After all, they have a vested interest in proving their point. For just one example, contrast the lack of effective response to Hurricane Katrina to, oh, say, the US space program in the sixties. Large parts of New Orleans STILL haven't been rebuilt, 5 years later . . . and yet we went from not even having put one human being into orbit to landing two of them on the moon, and bringing them home safely, in about 8 years. Furthermore, we already have the technology we need to rebuild New Orleans, whereas we had to create everything for the moon shots from scratch.

Also, have you ever wondered why our national infrastructure seems to be falling apart of late? Here's why: between 15 and 20 years ago, the Reagan Administration removed infrastructure maintenance funding from all federal budgets. It made that administration's budget numbers look better, and the price wouldn't have to be paid till decades later, long after its architects [and I use that term loosely--Ed.] have moved on--and we're reaping those rotten fruits now. I keep thinking of the old Fram oil filter commercials--ironically, also dating from the Reagan era. Fram turned the higher retail price of its oil filters into a positive by reminding people that they could spend a bit more up front, to get a Fram filter . . . or they could wait, and have to cover the cost of a total engine rebuild when their less-expensive, and thus presumably lesser-quality, filters did not do the job. As the mechanic in the Fram commercials said, "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later." Well, as far as our infrastructure goes, it's now "later." And we can thank the Reagan administration for that.

This is the same reason I do not understand why certain members of Congress claim to be so worried about the expenses associated with certain new legislative proposals, such as health care reform ans switching us over to more environmentally-friendly energy production. YES, it's all expensive. But the longer we wait, the more expensive it's going to become. The only things delay will do are (1) increase the costs to us when we finally have no choice but to change, and (2) keep those costs coming out of the pockets of those least able to afford them, instead of making everyone pay a fair share for the societal benefits that changing now will give us all.

Part of living in a civil, civilized society, is that we ALL have not just rights, but responsibilities to one another. Some people have forgotten this. They are fighting against returning tax code rates even to their levels during the Reagan Administration . . . rates that were (to that point) the most favorable the rich had seen in many decades. I do not understand why so many people who are being hurt financially by these attempts to disable the government go along with them. I've heard some say that to do otherwise would endanger all our precious freedoms, which sounds good--but since when is "freedom" the same thing as "irresponsibility"? You wouldn't be able to make your fortunes without taking advantage of all the things government provides us all--from transportation systems to coinage to physical safety. Everyone who gets the benefits should cover their fair share of the costs. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once pointed out, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." I really do not get why so many people do not get that, and I wish someone would make a serious attempt to explain it to me.

Question the third: why isn't everyone totally appalled by the dramatic increase in hateful behavior, threats, name-calling, baseless accusations, and--let's face it--racially-biased crap spewing out of the mouths of some people in this country? I am willing to bet that a lot of the people doing and saying the hateful things consider themselves to be good Christians. I would like to understand why they think their expressions of hate do not contradict their religious beliefs. Do they honestly think that Jesus would agree with them? If so, what Bible are they reading? I do not get it, but I'm willing to at least try to understand. I really do hope someone tries to explain these things to me. As long as anyone who disagrees with me is willing to engage in civil discussion, so am I. Please, help me understand "where you're coming from."

Overshadowed In Yesterday's News

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I watched the president's speech last night. It was excellent. I'm glad he's showing the leadership backbone that those of us who voted overwhelmingly for him expected of him. But there was another story in yesterday's news, overshadowed by the speech, that could result in as much devastation to this country as failing to enact real health care reform assuredly will do.

The Supreme Court, meeting nearly a month before its official opening date of the first Monday in October, yesterday heard arguments in a case that may well result in the overturning of a near-century's worth of election campaign finance laws. Some corporations want to use corporate money to pay for partisan campaign ads. The legal argument is that restrictions on corporate and union campaign spending are illegal and unconstitutional infringement of First Amendment rights.

I almost laughed when I first heard this, for two reasons: (1) unions have lots of money, but not nearly as much as corporations; (2) more seriously, the Supreme Court itself has, since at least the mid-1930s, consistently recognized that corporations do not have the all same rights as do individuals under our Constitution and laws.

Then I realized that the forces of reaction, those who despise the New Deal and all it (and every subsequent advance in civil and real individual rights) means, are not going to try to stop dragging us backwards, to the days where money and privilege meant you got all the benefits of government and civil society without having to share any of the responsibilities that are literally the other side of the coin of being a member of that civil society.

It's called the social contract, people. And it galls me no end that the most strident preachers of "individual responsibility" are the ones who mean "for everyone else" but not for them. As if their money somehow makes them exempt from paying their fair share for the costs of building and maintaining the roads and infrastructure of this country, paying for the military and other mechanisms that allow our country to exist.

This is really sad. There is no First Amendment interest at stake here, period. Corporations are not people. Corporations do not cast ballots in our primaries and general elections. They are business entities. Our government was not created "of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation." The rights contemplated by our Founding Fathers were the rights pertaining to free and unfettered political discourse. Business/commercial speech has never had as much protection under the First Amendment as your or my right to say "the president is a doofus." That's why the government has the authority to keep cigarette ads off TV, for example. And that's why campaign finance laws have never been questioned or successfully challenged in our courts--until, scarily, possibly now.

Americans by and large believe in fair play. That's one of the major reasons the Founders were so adamant about protecting the free expression of opinions in "the marketplace of ideas." Our Founders considered that the best ideas would rise to the top, and bad ideas would sink, and eventually disappear, based on those ideas' own merits. But the infusion of corporate money tilts that playing field, skews it to the point that's it's no longer even close to being level--or fair. People will not be able to tell whether an idea is good and popular because of its merits or because the money behind it has artificially inflated its presence. It's exactly the same reason we decry the presence of steroids in baseball. There's no way to tell whether all the home run and other records were the product of genuine athletic prowess or of artificially-inflated strength.

And the solution, as with steroids, is to keep the corporate money out. If you doubt the skewing effects of the presence of "tons o' dough," consider Fox News. Rupert Murdoch has said flat out that his goal was to promulgate HIS political agenda. Judging from the number of people who buy the crap his "news"papers and TV networks spew, his money is having its intended effect. Also look at all the insanity spit out by the crazy people at the town hall meetings last month. They got attention all out of proportion to their numbers because the opponents of health care reform put their money behind getting those people into position to cause as much disruption as possible. They didn't even hide it--they were wearing polo shirts sporting their insurance company logos as they chaperoned the buses and shepherded the people on them into the meetings.

Yet there is a real chance that, by the slimmest 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court could undo all the good that nearly a century's worth of campaign finance regulations have done. That possibility terrifies me. The amount of noise one can afford to make will drown out the meritorious ideas which do not have rich special-interests behind them. I fear that we are going to forget [presuming many of us ever knew--Ed.] that money does not flow to ideas because of those ideas' merits; money flows to ideas because of the self-interest of those who have the money.

Money is not merit; money is power. And power corrupts. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the presence of money is the corrupter of all political discourse.

Is This What Obama Is Really Up To?

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I have struggled, mightily (for the past several weeks especially), to figure out why the heck President Obama is being so passive about his stated goal of passing real health care reform to fulfill a promise he made to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Even more, I've tried to figure out why the heck the president has backpedalled so much on all the other major promises we thought he made during last year's election campaign. The Justice Department is going to investigate not the people who violated our Constitution and laws by authorizing the use of torture and other crimes--it's going to investigate ONLY those who violated even the illegally-relaxed standards the Bush Administration put in place to begin with.

Even though he got the total dollar amount he said he wanted in the economic stimulus bill, Obama allowed 40% of that total to be calculated by tax cuts--cuts that are much more responsible for the truly horrific deficit numbers we're facing than would be anything engendered by passing health care reform which includes the public option.

Obama said he was going to get us out of Iraq and close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities by the end of this year--and he's trying, but the process has been slower and less comprehensive than expected. He said he was going to undo the previous administration's excessive claims of executive power, but his administration has been, to date, just as secretive and arrogant as his predecessor's in terms of not releasing White House visitors' lists, using executive signing statements, and arguing FOR Bush administration positions in legal suits brought against the government for violations of the Constitution and laws of this land.

The president is maintaining his stand that the Afghanistan war is the necessary one, which he will prosecute to a successful conclusion . . . even though many experts are now saying that our initial reasons for that war [getting Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida, for example--Ed.], while correct at the time, have been rendered moot by events, and that maybe it's time to pull out . . . instead of doing an Afghan version of the Iraq War surge, which seems to be his current intention.

None of it has made sense to me, especially given my impression that President Obama has a tremendous grasp of politics as "the art of the possible." In every instance I've cited, he's settling for much less than what's possible. He has tried to hang this on the desire to change the way things work in Washington, to promote real bipartisanship. The problem with that notion, however, is that the other side has to be willing to play--and so far, the GOP has not only been not willing to play, it's decided that naked political advantage is more important than what's really in the best interests of the country, which is paralyzing the process even more than it had been before Obama was inaugurated.

But I think I finally figured it out. Now that Ted Kennedy has been laid to rest along side his brothers Bobby and John, Obama's policy backpedalling and missteps have got all three of them rolling over in their graves--at so many RPMs that all Obama has to do is hook up 3 sets of jumper cables from Arlington National Cemetery to the nation's power grid, and: Lo! Behold! Our nation's energy crisis has been solved . . . for free!

I usually agree that any bill or other governmental action that disappoints the extremists on both ends will, as a rule, succeed. By definition, it has found the middle ground, that vast, blessed area wherein most of us live. However, the preceding 8 years tilted things so far to the far right that just getting back to the center is going to keep things tilted too far over to the right. [You want proof? GOP legislators are trying to undo Reagan-era laws and regulations because even they are "too restrictive"--Ed.]

Count me among the incredibly disappointed in the behavior of the Obama administration to date. I still think it's a far sight better than anything the GOP has to offer, but that, too, will be rendered moot if the GOP manages to prove that outright lies, when shouted often and loud enough, still control the terms of the debate. It's time for this administration to start fighting fire with fire. Obama so far has been acting like most of us are educated and intelligent and will do the right thing . . . but the ones with their hands on the real money in this country, the ones who don't want to give up even one penny for the greater good, have discovered that they can exploit the fears and hatreds of just enough of us to stymie the rest of us.

Unless, of course, the president starts showing some real leadership. Bill Maher was right--as much as he hates Dubya's policies, he admires Dubya's backbone and single-minded purpose in sticking with his plans no matter what anyone else said. Obama needs to show some more of that to be the leader those of us who voted for him hoped for and expected that he would be.