Sticking with my resolve to step away from observing the political process, I completely ignored the outside world from Saturday through Wednesday with the aid of three seasons of Deadwood. I am so happy I did it, although the unfinished story was so much more apparent when watched one episode after another. It felt like a really good book that I didn’t want to put down and in deed, rarely did.
The results of the primary election, especially in Southern California was satisfying to me, as I remain unconvinced about Barak Obama. I read two articles in the New York Times and on Maggie Mahar’s Healthbeat blog that make an excellent point regarding the Friedman column that talks about an MIT study that shows Hillary Clinton’s plan is better and more efficient than the Barak plan because she mandates that all Americans have a health plan. What got me was that Obama is saying that the young/healthy will get health insurance without a mandate, which is not bourn out by the facts, it is simply not true. It’s like saying that everyone will get a driver’s license even if it is not required by law. It shows that Obama is, 1) Unaware of people’s true nature in this regard or, 2) That he is pandering to his young following, who are among those that choose not to have health insurance, even if they can afford it. Clinton’s plan insists on a mandate as it decreases the cost for all that way. The young and healthy are mistaken to think that they don’t need health insurance of course, which is all the more reason to insist that they do- as well as for the community. Obama also wants to put more responsibility of payment on small businesses, putting more downward pressure on them in a recessionary time when customers are spending less.
My Mother tells me that Obama wants to raise the Capitol Gains Tax. She gets an important part of her limited fixed income from capitol gains, and she would have to sell her house to live. And I still can’t see him going toe to toe with the likes of Mushareef or Putin, and I can see her do it. She has faced down those that would have been happy to accuse her of murder, and did. She has been on the world stage for 30 years, and (I’m not kidding), she knows many of the wives of the world’s leaders as well as face time with the leaders themselves. Even if she wasn’t setting policy that eliminates a lot of valuable time spent assessing your peers for yourself.
