Coffee Cup Half Moons

This is a cause that I have come up with, and I think it a noble one.  Get more details on the Facebook group page, but the jist is:

U.S. taxpayer dollars should never allow a U.S. official (Representative, Senator, President, judge, or anyone else whose salary is paid by public taxes) to make MORE than the salary for his/her position.

Example: If a Senator’s 2009 salary is $174k, but he/she made $80k on a real estate deal in 2009, they would only be allowed to keep $94k in wages from the federal government.

President Obama said in his State of the Union speech last night:

Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.

I think my idea is a very simple way for him and for Congress (and others) to demonstrate that.  Check it out.

You know I’m really not for meddling with the system at all, but basically that video says “America can’t do it because England and Canada did it, and it doesn’t work, and there’s no way we could do it better.”

It also, in lieu of building a socialized medical system, justifies charging patients $5 for an aspirin because they need that money for innovations to improve trauma technology availability, cancer treatments, MRIs, etc.

So basically, the costs of all those innovations get distributed among everyone, even people not using it.

How is that not already a socialized system? So can’t America, the land of great innovation do it better? If not … well that’s a sad forecast.

I mean would a single payer system with incentives not solve the problem too? The title of this video is hardly accurate …

The video talks about how Obama purportedly is building a single payer system (this is purely conjecture), then it goes on to conclude that such a single payer system couldn’t work because Canada and England can’t make it work. It “destroys/pulverizes/crushes” a theoretical Obama “‘health care’ plan” that doesn’t even exist on the grounds that there’s no way America could implement a system better than Canada or England …

Beautiful.

Given that I’ve finally got the forum to publicly mention the point, does anyone else find it somewhat ironic that the first “African American” President of the United States is half white?

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about race.  I may have racist tendencies, but they are unintentional, and I make an effort to extend my philosophies beyond them when I notice them.  That being said, why is it that the offspring of a white parent and a black parent is considered black?

Calling Barack Obama the first “African American” or “black” President is just a testament to how far we have NOT come as a country and as a society.  We see the offspring of a white parent and a black parent as black.  We don’t see that offspring as white — evidently black alters white and not the other way around.

So, I say Barack Obama is the 44th white President as much as he is the 1st black, and that is an absolute fact.  One may point out that he DOES actually look different.  Clearly, his skin is a different color than a white person’s.  It’s natural to notice the difference.

Ok fine, so he IS the first black President.  He obviously looks different than the previous Presidents.  Then again, as it turns out, Bill Clinton looks strikingly different from Harry Truman and Benjamin Harrison, and I’ve never read about how Abraham Lincoln liberated the world by being the tallest US President elected.

Someone who isn’t racist would see something amazing in Barack Obama’s skin color no sooner than in Ronald Reagan’s ears.  Genetics, ethnicity, appearance:  these should ideally be a footnote to the perspective of the individual.

It is without question a great step for a black American to become President given the level of open, blatant racism that existed even 40 years ago.  That being said, we’re still considering Barack Obama black even though he’s technically genetically half black.  We’re not considering him white, although we could do so just as accurately.  In this case, would we still proclaim a social victory?

Summary:  Obama’s skin color alone means nothing, so it’s his achievement as a black American that is noteworthy, but he is only a black American because we’re racist enough to call him black and not white.  Ultimately, from this author’s point of view, a person’s race is nothing more than a feature, but as a society we still give weight to it beyond other physical attributes.  That still makes us racist.

Someday, ideally, we will elect a <insert_distinct_minority_here> President and barely care about the adjectives.  It will be then that we will have truly overcome such bigotry.