An Open Letter to President Obama

August 29th, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I first donated to your Presidential campaign before you officially announced your candidacy. Then I donated more money to your campaign and began donating my time and energy to help you win the Democratic nomination. Once you secured the nomination, I donated more money and more time. I made cold calls and organized my neighbors in my home for phone banks and canvasses. I made it my charge to ensure that you got as many votes as possible in my community. And on election day, when all of that work paid off, I was proud of what we accomplished.

I did all of this because I saw in you, from the first time I heard you speak in 2004, a stalwart politician who was not afraid to follow his convictions. I saw in you intelligence, fortitude, wisdom and passion; one who held the capacity to pull our great nation together behind common causes and restore a sense of purpose to the American ideal that has eroded over the past forty years.

Unfortunately, that great promise is not being fulfilled now that you are in the Oval office. You seem far too concerned with bringing everyone along and building a consensus for every issue. Trying to find a compromise is a laudable goal, but no great compromise has ever surfaced when one party enters the talks saying “these are the things I am willing to give up.” We elected you because we thought you had a vision for the future. We elected you because we thought you were going to change the political discourse in Washington. We elected you because you inspired in us a call to a good greater than our individual desires.

Much of the work you have done these past seven months has been good, but far too much of it has been mediocre. Far too much of it has felt like “politics as usual.” The pressures on you within your office must be incredible and I am sure you are being hit from every side, especially from huge corporate interests. I don't think it's easy being the President, but we didn't elect you because we didn't feel that you were up to the task.

So much of the discourse these past few months has been mired in name calling and innuendo. Too much of our media has been fixated on lies and half truths and the American people are caught in the middle uncertain what it means to them. You are the President of the United States. You need to use your office to provide direction. You must lead. If you don't, then you will be lead by someone else, be it Congress, your political rivals, or the special interests who flood Washington to protect their money. While I can not believe the level of vitriol being directed at you from all directions, your lack of leadership has allowed it to become distracting.

You need to stop trying to be so nice. Sometimes the American people need to be drug along kicking and screaming before they recognize what is good for them. We are an industrious people. We are a proud people, but we are also a people resistant to change. We like things the way they are. It is only after we are on the other side of an issue that we say “look how good things are now!” Every major policy change in American history has come about against the will of the people. From Slavery, to Women's voting rights, to Civil Rights, to Medicare, our country has been pulled along grudgingly. So too must you lead this nation. If you lead, people will follow, even many that don't like you.

During your acceptance speech for the Democratic Party nomination, you said “we love this country too much to let the next four years look just like the last eight.” Yet, in some regards, I fear that is where we are headed: escalation of the war in Afghanistan, rising deficits, and a Federal government being lead along by corporate interests. You have proposed some good legislation, but then you have stepped aside and allowed Congress to rip it to pieces and fill it full of pork.

Here, less than a year from election and you seem more concerned with winning the next election than leading this nation out of these difficult times. Will you be unpopular? There is no doubt, but in leading you will gain respect and over time you may just win the nation over. I would rather see you fail trying than to win by a margin.

In terms of the healthcare debate. You must reshape it. You must go back to the beginning and start again. When I heard you say a while back that a single payer option was unfeasible because we would have to start from the ground up, I was in disbelief. THAT is the very thing we need to do: start from scratch. Is there the political will for it? Most likely not. I'm sure that the amount of money being thrown at Congress to kill such a radical idea would quickly double from current levels from the insurance industry, but we can not solve the healthcare crisis with baby steps. We can not achieve true parity of care without destroying the current system. You must be bold in this regard, otherwise, by the time any legislation comes out of Congress it will be so watered down as to be a band-aid on a severed jugular.

Stop trying to make this a detailed policy debate. Simplify the argument: Medicare for All. That is the goal. Medicare for all. See who you want when you want and the bill goes to the government. It is simple and easy to understand. Just think of what a boon this would be for businesses. Over night they have extra capital to invest in new technologies, innovation and more jobs. People that had wanted to start their own businesses but were afraid to be without medical coverage would suddenly take that leap. Better than any tax break, this would invigorate our economy and make our citizens healthier, but we can only get there if you lead us. Stop trying to bring everyone together. Lead. Show us what we must do and we will make it happen, because until you lead us, you will be lead.

Respectfully,

Eric

Brrr ... it's chilly around here.

I had been thinking about giving up this blog. In fact, I was thinking about dumping the site all together earlier today. Then a friend complained on facebook about HR 2454 and I started looking into what all the fuss was about. Thomas.gov seems to be having issues this evening, so I was unable to find the text of the bill. Every time I tried to find factual information -- you know, someone just telling me what was in the bill -- I kept running into sites that were pushing their point of view (I would never do that! ;)

After reading a few left leaners who felt the bill did not go far enough, I stumbled upon Rush Limbaugh's site where he has the transcript from his show today. I thought, well, I've read a few on the left, let's read what Rush has to say, maybe I can get a few facts.

In the third sentence. He said "This is so unnecessary, there isn't any global warming."

I read it several times to make sure I had read it correctly. "There isn't any global warming."

I thought the only people who still believed that were living in a cave somewhere. Perhaps Rush was trying to be rhetorical. I read on. Here are some excerpts:

• There ought to be no Republicans on the fence on this. This is another one of these premises where we say: no you won't. We don't debate it. We don't say, okay, we're going to do global warming legislation. Fine, well, here's our idea. Our idea on global warming legislation is that there isn't any global warming. Sunspot activity is way, way down. I've got a NASA website series of photos to show you from 2000 to 2009 how the sun's activity has slowed down. It is cooling off all over the planet.


• There is no global warming. Temperatures have not risen in the last nine years in an appreciable way and this legislation is not going to lower temperatures.


• I read about this in a lot of different places today. What I have here is a piece from the Competitive Enterprise Institute which summarizes it pretty well. They are making public an internal study on climate science, which was suppressed by the EPA and Lisa Jackson. "Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide." There's a defector, there's somebody in the EPA who put together a report: Wait a minute, temperatures are not rising. We can't prove that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. He cited evidence from around the country; he cited scientific data. By the way, the consensus on climate science that you've always heard about on global warming, it's falling apart. It's falling apart. Scientists from Australia and two or three other countries have defected from the so-called consensus. That's what this guy's report was about. They told him to shut up. They suppressed his report and they said don't you dare talk about it. They fired him. They said don't you dare talk to anybody about this.


• More and more Australian politicians are being convinced now that the human contribution to climate change, global warming, be it cooler or warmer, is something you can't factor. We don't have that kind of power. So as the global warming debate climate is shifting, the backlash has fallen on Australia and Europe and Japan. The consensus has broken down. The scientists and politicians in those countries are taking a second look and saying: Wait a minute, we don't see any evidence here that man's causing any of this, and we don't see any evidence that there's any warming going on.


• Now, this is not being reported widely in the United States, but it's happening in Australia and Japan and Europe. It's happening there and the reason it's not being reported here is because, of course, our star is Al Gore and the United Nations. The media goes out and they smear any dissenters. After listing scientists from all over the world who are skeptical of manmade global warming, Kimberley Strassel writes this: "The collapse of the 'consensus' has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon," and they're deciding around the world they don't have the desire and it makes no sense to put even more stress on their economies to reduce carbon when there's no evidence that more carbon is harming anything, bottom line.

There are so many problems here, it's almost hard to know where to begin. There are also a great many digs at Obama, things like Obama is purposely setting out to "destroy the US economy," etc, but I am going to limit this to the climate change issue.

Setting aside for the moment whether or not this bill is good, bad, or indifferent, let's just drill down and talk about climate change. Rush, citing Kimberley Strassel from her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal says that "there isn't any global warming." Strassel in her piece says "The collapse of the 'consensus' has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02."

Neither Rush nor Strassel provide sources for the climate data.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminsitration "seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001." Here is their report on global warming.

Well, maybe the Obama administration had someone there cook the numbers, how about the NASA Goodard Institute for Space Studies: "Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000"

Whew! We ARE getting cooler! Oh, wait a second ... they also said "In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880...The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008."

Shit. Obama got to them too.

Well, let's see what the scientists at the UK Met Office have to say: "...the global mean temperature for 2008 is 14.3 °C, making it the tenth warmest year on a record that dates back to 1850 ... The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990–1999."

The conspiracy is global!

Well, I did manage to find one group that claims our current warm years are just part of the cycle ... Harris-Mann Climatology. Here is their cool little graph:

I'd really like to see more on this data. How exactly do you record a temperature centuries after it occurred? Looking at this chart ... shit, we have NOTHING to worry about. I am so relieved.

UPDATE: I did just find this research where they used an ice core dating back to 1250 and were able to extrapolate temperature data from the core data. They found that solar activity can NOT explain the current increase in temperature.

When will prohibition end?

I was surfing the net recently, looking for some information on craft distilleries here in Oregon and discovered that the OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission) has their own blog! Isn't that lovely. I suppose the OLCC feels it necessary, here in the 21st century, to get their propaganda out to the masses.

For the record, the OLCC was created in 1933, mere days after the end of prohibition to control the distribution and consumption of alcohol in Oregon. Today, if one wants to buy a bottle of liquor, one has to go to one of the state controlled liquor stores. Which is to say that the prices are "fixed." Instead of a tax, we have price fixing to keep our consumption down.

I know that folks have been trying to get rid of the OLCC for a very long time. In view of the recent economic distress in our state, shouldn't the state start trimming unnecessary programs and agencies? We should begin with the OLCC.

Oh sure, there will be the loss of jobs for the 243 state liquor agents (store operators) and their employees, but those same folks can easily get or create jobs at any of the grocery stores that would start selling liquor. Some will argue that the OLCC turns a profit and that eliminating the agency will produce even larger budget deficits, but wouldn't the same profit exist on a liquor tax that would be implemented in lieu of the state "control?" Collecting taxes is far more "profitable" than running your own business. You get the bulk of the profit with little of the expense.

The OLCC would still exist in some form. They would need to maintain enforcement, for example, but it is high time we ended prohibition in this state for good. There is some talk in the legislature of privatizing the OLCC, which is a ridiculous idea. Keep the enforcement and tax collection wings and dump all the rest.

There are a few other blogs that are quite entertaining about the OLCC. Check out Things About Portland that Suck and Liquidity Preference.

No more blogging?

I am considering ending this blog. That's right. After nearly six years of sporadic posts, I think this little experiment has reached its end. It is not that I don't have anything to write. On the contrary, I think I have more to say now than ever, but this blog is not the place for those expressions.

Since my very first post in 2003, I have been amazed that anyone would read what I wrote, let alone find some value in it, and while I have enjoyed much of what I created here, I rarely drew much pleasure in the finished work. When I write plays or stories, they take on a life of their own and I can stand back and admire them. They exist in and of themselves. I have never felt the same about anything I have written here.

I will take a few more months before I make my final decision. Once I do, however, and if I choose to end this blog, I will take it down entirely. I could let it just sit here, as I have seen other blogs remain in perpetuity unchanged, but know that I would feel better about killing it. I may save the blogs on some disc somewhere, but kilgore.blogspot.com would cease to exist for me.

I will mull this over and sometime this summer make a final decision. If you have strong opinions about it... well, you know what to do.

Why don't you write any more?

One of the most common questions I get from people I have not communicated with in a while, be it a month, year, or decade is "are you writing?" and I always get this slight pit in my stomach and shift my weight left and right and touch my nose and say in a meek voice "not really," or "no," or "not as much as I should," or "sadly, no, not right now," as if I will be writing soon. Tomorrow, or the next day. It's just around the corner. Then. Then. Yes, I will be writing.

But the sad fact is that, no, I am not writing. There. I've said it. I - am - not -writing.

Well ... I am writing this, you might say. In fact, one might argue that I write more every day on-line than I ever did before the internet, but it is not the same, and I have been asking myself why it is not the same. That question keeps coming back to me. It haunts me.

You see, while I am not writing, I think of writing constantly. It lives within me and my brain is always working on that unfinished novel and that unfinished play. Yeah, that one. You know what I'm talking about. That play that has remained half or one third finished since 1994. And that is roughly how long it has been since I've written much of anything. 15 years. I did write the first draft of a novel four years ago and have been vowing to rewrite it ever since, but aside from that, I have only written one short play during my workshop several years ago and nothing else to speak of. A bad poem maybe.

So I continue to blog now and again, incoherently, and I write email upon email, and update my status on facebook and chat with my friends with whom I've had no contact in years. It's fast. Immediate. Easy. The internet has truly shortened the width of the world. This was never more evident to me than when I had a video call with an old friend who lives in Ireland just a couple of days ago. Only a few months ago I did not know where she was, and now I can see her and talk to her as if I was sitting there with her. Well, almost.

For all of these reasons, and more (like being able to work from home,) I am thankful for the internet, but then I got to thinking, I kept asking, why haven't I been writing? Why did I stop writing in 1994 or 1995? What changed? And there it was, as evident as my last facebook status update: I don't write as much now because I don't write as much.

But, by writing, I mean the physical act of taking pen to paper. Prior to 1993, or thereabouts, I was almost constantly writing letters to one person or another. It was nearly a daily occurrence. And while one can say that I write more every day now, the quality of that writing is wholly different from the writing I used to commit to paper.

While the internet has given way to free, immediate communication, it has also shortened our thoughts: made them less concentrated, less fluid.

In the days when I would write to people with pen and paper, it took time. It was an event. I had to set aside a little time and collect my thoughts, and as I scribbled down my messages, I felt a connection to the person I was writing.

When my letter arrived, part of me arrived along with it. They could see my imperfect penmanship. They could see where I scribbled out words and sentences and wrote over the top of them. They could see my thoughts in a way.

Who doesn't recall the delight of receiving a letter in the mail. Ripping open the envelope and sitting down to take the time to read, or sometimes just standing there in the doorway pouring over the pages, knowing that this person you care for touched this paper. Catching a scent of them. Seeing them in the penmanship.

I remember how I often read a letter again and again. I saved them in a shoebox. I would go back to them. Cherish them.

Oh yes, I have years worth of emails. I could go back to them, and occasionally I do, if there is some bit of information I am searching for ... "Click. Search messages for 'XYZ.' Message found." It's cold and impersonal. It's just data. But searching through old letters takes you back to that very moment because it was isolated. You were not reading that letter while you read ten other letters. The train of thought was not interrupted one hundred times with bits of one hundred other letters. It was self contained and important in that time it took to sit down with a cup of coffee and read.

And so, I find myself longing to write letters with pen and paper. To fold up the pages and stuff them in an envelope. Write out the address. Affix a stamp and walk it to the postage box. I can not recall the last time I did that.

So, if days or months from now you go out to collect your pile of advertisements and bills from the mailbox, don't be surprised if you find a good ol' letter from me, written in my distinct scrawl. Open it up, take some time to read, and maybe you will be moved to pick up a pen and write a letter of your own that takes days to reach its destination. Not all things need to move so quickly in this world. We need to remember that.

Turn off the TV! I'm trying to drive!

Perhaps it is that I was awakened by the television at 2:30 this morning and was unable to go back to sleep until after 4 -- Becky likes to fall asleep with the TV on, but I would prefer that there be no TV in the bedroom -- Or maybe it was that I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 this afternoon and am hyper-sensitive to TV and Radio taking over our lives, but whatever the case, as I was taking the girls to their choir concert this evening, I found myself transfixed as I entered the freeway by Dora the Explorer dancing happily across the six inch screen in the ceiling of the mini-van in front of me.

At first I was thinking, "Are your children really that short on attention or you so easily distracted that they have to watch Dora during the five minute drive between your house and the grocery store?" And after almost a minute of staring at that tiny little screen in front of me, completely sucked in to the bright colors and cute little dancing monkey, I realized, "MY GOD! I am watching Dora the Explorer in the car in front of me and I am merging onto the freeway! We are all going to DIE"

I am so sick of television right now. We have two TV's in our house, four if you count the two downstairs in my mother-in-law's house. In any given week, I watch approximately three hours and seventeen minutes of TV: 40 minutes each for Survivor and the Amazing Race (although I am usually doing something else during one or both programs, so I am kind of half watching, isn't TiVo grand?) 25 minutes for The United States of Tara, or Californication when it's on, 55 minutes of Bill Maher, and 37 minutes of 60 Minutes ... hmmm, I think I'm getting ripped off on that one. I do also occasionally turn on Charlie Rose while I am working, so let's add on another couple of hours there, and during Cycling season I turn on whatever race is on that Sunday and usually fall asleep after twenty minutes and then wake up just as they are coming in for the bunch sprint, so there's another half an hour, and I suppose we could add a couple hours for the Friday night movie I watch with the children, though I am usually not at all interested and read while they watch and make popcorn etc. So that brings me up to 7 hours and 47 minutes per week in front of one or more of my televisions or just over an hour per day.

The average American apparently watches over 4 hours of television every day! Who the hell has time for that? How exactly do people fit in that much television unless they are watching the TV in the car in front of them?

Damn. I think they need to make those screens bigger so I don't have to tailgate.

Recovery Act of 2009

When I had a little down time last week, I read through the recovery Act as originally proposed to congress. I was trying to get a handle on what the act was trying to do and why there was resistance to it. I came away with the notion that people were opposed to it on the basis of the large amounts of spending within the bill. There were items that some people were objecting to, but over-all, the act seemed rather straight forward in its aim: to infuse money into our economy through infrastructure improvements, development and research, especially in the area of renewable energy.

One of the provisions I found most interesting was the creation of a web site to track the progress of the spending: www.recovery.gov Last week, the site was just an empty shell, but today there is already a message from President Obama and links to the various areas of spending and tax relief. It will be interesting to watch this over time and see how this money is spent.

This is a marvelous use of the web to create an easily accessible level of transparency to our government. I had to wade through the whole bill, adding up figures on the side to see where the money was going ... this site does that for you.