Welcome

Dear Friends,

As I begin this blog, I want to give you some background. I am a liberal and proud of it.

I was an early supporter of now President Obama when he ran for the US Senate from Illinois. I was also an early supporter of his bid for the Presidency. I actually believed that he would fight to change the way that Congress and the Executive Branch do things in Washington. I was already fed up with the establishment Democrats that seem far more interested in raising money and maintaining their power and jobs than in doing what is best for the country and the world. I did not know if President Obama would be able to change Washington, but I really thought that he would try. I also thought that he would rapidly change many of the most egregious policies of President Bush.

Alas, I have been sorely disappointed by President Obama's first year in office. I know the mess that he inherited from President Bush was enormous and covered everything--an atmosphere of fear and greed, two useless and unwinnable wars, illegal black hole prisons where torture was encouraged, a military spread too thin and relying on rogue and greedy contractors, our image in the world shattered, our civil rights in tatters, a Supreme Court with a pseudo-conservative agenda, the worst economy in almost a century, regulations from anti-trust to banking to environmental to consumer protection all but eliminated, big corporations and lobbyists running everything, etc. The list is quite scary when you think about it. However, President Obama's failure to try to make changes cannot be excused by the fact that he faced an almost limitless number of problems and a Republican Party whose only goal was to oppose anything that Obama proposed.

You can't expect to change the way the Executive Branch interacts with Congress, if you appoint Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.

You can't expect to change Wall Street and the economy, if you have Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke in charge and continue to take millions of dollars from large banks and big corporations.

You can't expect to get real health reform, if you start by taking real reforms like single payer universal coverage off the table before you even begin and continue to take millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies and health insurers.

You can't expect to put people back to work, if you don't have a massive government works program that fixes and updates our country's pitiful infrastructure and you keep talking about reducing the deficit and don't raise taxes on the rich.

You can't expect to restore our civil rights and the rule of law, if you don't hold the individuals in the Bush Administration accountable for torture and other war crimes and violations of laws.

Again the list goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I know that our country and the world are better off now than we were under President Bush, but that cannot be the standard.

Since there are so many things going on and since the mainstream press really doesn't extensively cover much other than sex scandals and late night TV host wars, we need to be sure that we hold President Obama and the Democrats accountable. They need to be forced to honor their campaign promises (whatever happened to closing Guantanamo and ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell, just to name a couple). Almost every day, I read something about the Obama Administration continuing a Bush Administration policy or moving its position or policy to the right. We need to be aware of all of these departures from the promises that candidate Obama made while campaigning, and we need to act to hold the Obama Administration and the Democrats accountable. My goal with this blog is to chronicle how President Obama and the Democrats (hence how we as a country) are doing at bringing our country back to a community that cares for and respects all people and that believes in and strives for legal and social justice.

So as an example, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a story this morning headlined "No visa, no show for foreign performers". here Three actors from Australia that were to be featured in a play at the Children's Theater in Minneapolis were denied visas and hence could not come to the United States to perform. Cultural exchanges are one of the best ways to promote understanding and bridge cultural divides. So what is the Obama Administration doing.

"What has been happening is what immigration lawyers refer to as 'a culture of no,'" said attorney Laura Danielson, who chairs the immigration department at Fredrikson & Byron. "The attitude is that it's easier to deny something than to approve something that you might be called on later."

Isolation is no way to improve the world. What kind of message does it send to the world and to our children when our government denies artists the right to come to this country to show or perform their art? This attitude that denies visas is not hard to change and would not take more than a minute or two of the President's time. In fact, if President Obama is being clear with his staff that we want to engage with the world and all that it has to offer us, and that we are no longer to base decisions on fear of others, then these visas would have been approved in the first place. I am afraid that the President has not made it clear that change has come to Washington.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal