President Re-Election Does the Vision Thing: A Play in One Utopian Act.

(Note: This is an oldie but, considering the way the ObamaNation is talking about rationing health care, it seems even more relevant today than in February. Hope you enjoy it!)

No, You Cannot. Have a Nice Day!

THE SCENE: A five-star hotel suite somewhere in America. (What – you thought he’d actually be at home, doing his job?) PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA and FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA are sitting at a linen-covered table set with heavy silverware and a pink rosebud in a crystal jar, sipping coffee and discussing the challenges and benefits of Presidenting. A four-poster bed can be seen slightly behind and to the left of where the Obamas are sitting.

MICHELLE: Well, I think things are going great, Barack. You haven’t had a Cabinet appointment scandal in a couple of days, and everyone seems to be getting used to the whole idea of spending hundreds of billions to fix Bush’s mess. Plus, your speeches are still killing!

OBAMA: Yeah, and I have all this cool stuff that shows I’m the President! Air Force One. A nifty jacket. The White House. Man, this job rules! But there’s one thing that’s getting me down.

MICHELLE: Listen, Barack, if it’s that whole smoking in the house thing again, I TOLD you -

OBAMA: Nah, nah, it’s not about that. This is something even MORE serious. (standing up and pacing) People are accusing me of thinking small on health care just because my entire plan consists of computerizing medical records! I mean, what do they want, single-payer health care or something? I never, EVER said I was going to do anything like that!

MICHELLE (watching him, sighing sympathetically): Yeah, honey, I know. Where do they get these stupid ideas about you?

OBAMA (lying on the bed, hands behind his head): I honestly don’t know. Maybe Axelrod told some of his operatives to spread that nonsense – I just gave up on keeping track of all the things he was promising my fans in the blogosphere. (pats the space next to him on the bed to indicate MICHELLE should come lie down beside him)

MICHELLE (crossing to the bed and lying down): So, is that it? You’re catching flack from a bunch of keyboard commandos over health care? Sounds pretty small-time to me. (suddenly worried) Unless – the health insurance companies aren’t threatening to withhold funding for 2012, are they?

OBAMA (laughing): Of course not! No worries there. They couldn’t be happier that I won. (sobering up) No, the real problem is that I’m being accused of not having a vision for this country. Can you believe that? Don’t they know that this medical records idea is just a small step along the way to a better, brighter, more efficient O-merica? Here, let me show you my vision…

Tidbits: Updated with Breaking News!

Obama: Cambridge police acted ’stupidly’

After spending most of an hour patiently reiterating his arguments for changing the health insurance system, President Barack Obama turned his press conference sharply toward an iconic moment in American race relations: The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. earlier this week by the Cambridge Police.

Gates was arrested for allegedly disorderly conduct — a charge that was quickly dropped — after a confrontation with a police officer inside his own home. Though some facts of the case are still in dispute, Obama showed little doubt about who had been wronged.

“I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two that he Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama said in response to a question from the Chicago Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet.

Gates, Obama allowed, “is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all the facts.”

Grassley wants 80 votes in Senate for final health bill

The final healthcare reform bill to make its way out of the Senate should have as many as 80 members voting for passage, one of the lead Republican negotiators of the health package said Wednesday.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said it’s his preference to see the vast majority of his colleagues on board with a final healthcare bill.

“It ought to be from 80 people in the center of the Senate, I would think,” Grassley said during a news conference with Iowa reporters.

That type of support would far exceed the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster of the bill.

After lawsuite, White House discloses visits by health industry executives

Faced with a lawsuit from a government watchdog group, the Obama Administration tonight released a list of visits health care industry executives made to the White House since January.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning good-government group, filed a lawsuit today against the Department of Homeland Security after the Secret Service turned down its request for the White House visitor records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In a letter to CREW’s chief counsel, Anne Weismann, White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig said that “given the compelling public interest in the health care debate and the president’s goal of increasing transparency in government,” the administration went back and reviewed the visitors records related to the group’s request.

Craig wrote that Obama “has decided to exercise his discretion” and release the dates of private, unpublicized visits by 14 health care industry executives including PhRMA’s Billy Tauzin and Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive officer of America’s Health Insurance Plans.

Many of the health care industry executives included in the logs were present for a publicized meeting with Obama on May 11 at the White House.

Parents of ‘ex-gay’ student threaten lawsuits

The parents of a US student who is thought to be in ‘ex-gay’ therapy have threatened legal action over a website set up to find him, his boyfriend has said.

Bryce Faulkner, 23, is believed to be at an Exodus International ministry in Florida after his parents discovered he was gay.

His friends have said he had no choice as his parents took away his phone, his car and his money.

His boyfriend Trarvis Swanson, 24, and gay rights activist Reverend Brett Harris have set up a website urging people to help find him.

BREAKING – 10-Year-Old Operation “Bid Rig” Nails Government Officials and Religious Leaders in Wide-Ranging Corruption Scandal

The mayors of two New Jersey cities and a current and former state legislator were among more than two dozen people arrested Thursday in a sweeping corruption investigation.

Among about 30 people arrested Thursday were Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, former Jersey City Council President L. Harvey Smith and state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt.

Van Pelt is accused of accepting $10,000 from a cooperating government witness posing as a developer who sought help in getting permits for a project in Ocean County.

Smith, a former state Assemblyman and Jersey City mayoral candidate who served four years as the city’s council president, and several other current and former Jersey City public officials also are accused of accepting money to help the fake developer gain permits and approvals.

“The scope of the bust is enormous and any time you have this many people collared at one time the next question is: is anyone now going to rat out anyone else, provided that there was illegal conduct here,” said CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. “I am sure the feds now will try to see if they can build stronger cases against some using the testimony of others.”

I am watching this on TeeVee now; the number of arrests is up to 44. The investigating officials are saying that New Jersey is one of the most corrupt, if not the most corrupt, states in the Union. Holy Moly!

Morning Widdershins: ……IS HE OR ISN’T HE?

It's a Conspiracy!

Not one for conspiracies, I have no idea what these people who are screaming about Obama’s birth certificate are talking about. The debate is still raging out there among some who see a nefarious reason why the actual birth certificate has not been produced, merely a photocopied form attesting that he was born in Hawaii in 1961. The fact that his mother was an American citizen of time his birth should be proof enough of his legitimacy, but that argument does not hold sway over the doubters. From their standpoint, he is illegal and the truth needs to be” flushed out” so that we can send him packing to that country or planet of birth from whence he came!

This is all such a diversion. I have no idea why the original birth certificate may not have surfaced. I have a funny feeling that it may disclose that his parents were perhaps not legally wed which would contradict what he wrote about that in his autobiography. The fact that his father was already wed to a woman in Kenya at the time he took up studies in the U.S. may very well have prevented an actual marriage to take place, but either way I could care less if they were married or not. It is not a reflection on him by any means.

This issue reminds me of the days when Bill Clinton had to fend off the charges of Whitewater along with claims of drug dealing and murder while in Arkansas. Hillary too was accused of murder with the suicide of Vince Foster and was labeled sinister for cases she handled while employed at the Rose Law firm. Just keep repeating these odious claims long enough and there will be some only too happy to buy in. I thought this topic had died out last year but I have seen it slowly resurrected in the past few weeks which leads me to question if this is just not another tactic to focus our attention in another direction.

So much has been written about the death of JFK with accompanying conspiracies abounding and the rejection of the report issued by the Warren Commission. The refusal to credit a lone gunman with perfect aim was not enough to satisfy those who felt the assassination had to have been planned by a contingent of odious players. The only answer I would offer is that I am sure the Kennedy family would not have let the matter rest without seeking to get to the bottom of a conspiracy if they felt there was something of merit there. There wasn’t. Lee Harvey Oswald, a little nobody with few prospects in sight, pulled the trigger and another page was added to our history books.
America loves its conspiracy theories as much as they loved the X-Files. Plain facts get lost when an appearance that “something is afoot” makes its debut. It sharpens the imagination and allows our minds to roam the halls of “what if?”. Sometimes events are nothing more than what they appear to be.