Bush Pulls Switcheroo - On Himself

Last August, President Bush issued bold and decisive rhetoric about Iran. As reported in The Guardian:

Mr Bush said Iran's nuclear programme would cast the Middle East "under a shadow of nuclear holocaust" and said the regime was the "the world's leading supporter of terrorism".

He followed that up in May with a speech in Israel in which he labeled as an appeaser anyone who wished to find a diplomatic solution to the problem of terrorism, and compared these unnamed people to the Nazi appeasers of World War II.



From the New York Times:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said, in a speech otherwise devoted to spotlighting Israel’s friendship with the United States.

“We have an obligation,” he continued, “to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

This all fit in very nicely with Bush's saber rattling over Iran ever since his infamous "Axis of Evil" speech. Imagine, then, my shock when I read that Bush had reversed his position and that, as The Guardian reported:

The US is planning to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years, a remarkable turnaround in policy by president George Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his time in office.

My first thought, of course, was that George Bush must be reading my blog, since just last month I pointed out why I felt that his hard-line stance toward Iran was the wrong way to go.

The true reason for Bush's about-face is difficult to pin down. He may be trying to salvage some sort of positive legacy in the Middle East, since his "roadmap to peace" led absolutely nowhere, and his wars are at this point not at all likely to succeed in the long term. Or he may truly be interested in negotiation with Iran for its own sake, to improve the prospects for peace in the region.

Whatever the motivation behind Bush turning into one of the appeasers that he lambasted only a couple months ago, since the alternative is a march to war, this is one Bush flip-flop that I can live with.
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McCain's Health Care Plan Makes Me Sick

There is an interesting tidbit in this Associated Press article about McCain's health care plan. First, there was this:

McCain would provide refundable tax credits of $2,500 for individuals, and $5,000 for families, for all those who buy health insurance.

This, in itself, is not all that interesting, except that what McCain is offering is a huge give-away of our tax dollars to the insurance industry disguised as a health care plan. Coincidentally, Obama is offering pretty much the same thing. The problem with these plans is that insurance does not equal health care.

It is the job of the insurace industry to make money off of policy holders. They do not make money by paying out claims. Therefore, every insurance company has an army of people whose sole purpose is to deny paying for medical expenses. I am not faulting the insurance companies for this; they figured out how to make tons of money by not providing the services they promise, so bully for them. My issue is with the notion that having the government pay for peoples' insurance is the solution to the problem. It is not; it is merely feeding the beast.

But perhaps that is an issue for another time.

In the AP article, there is also this:

Employer contributions toward health insurance would be treated as income, meaning workers would have to pay income taxes on it.

Hmm... Couple that with this quote from the Houston Chronicle:

Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks.

McCain's plan is to pay for health insurance credits by taxing workers for the amount that their employer contributes. According to the Chronicle, McCain's advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin states McCain's plan would raise "an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues."

So to sum up McCain's philosophy, we need to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; we need to reduce or eliminate taxes on corporations; but it's OK to raise taxes on hard-working Americans to the tune of 3.6 trillion dollars.

So to every non-millionaire conservative, I ask this: how do you reconcile voting for a candidate who states flat-out that he's going to raise your taxes?
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One Debate We All Lose

Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has announced that not only is he going to continue one of Bush’s most constitutionally questionable policies, the faith-based initiative, but he is actually going to expand the program. In fact, the New York Times reports that if Obama is elected, he “would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post.”

Is this the sort of “change” that we can expect from an Obama presidency? I am not naïve enough to expect a candidate to agree with me on every policy position, but this is one of the more offensive initiatives that Bush has brought us. Despite the arguments that church-based organizations are often able to provide services better and/or cheaper than their secular counterparts, the government should not be giving money to them. Bush’s faith-based initiative represents a crack in the wall separating church and state; as such it should be filled, not expanded. I feel that Obama is really letting me down on this one.

One silver lining of the Obama plan is that he has pledged to rescind Bush’s executive order that allows the church-based organizations receiving tax dollars to discriminate in their hiring and firing based upon a person’s religious beliefs. Predictably, some religious groups are out of their minds over this.

“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place,” said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Well, damn. And here I thought the reason the faith-based programs existed was to help people in need. Shows what I know.

For his part, Straight-talk McCain chimed in on the matter as well.

A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain “disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight.”

So McCain believes that not hiring someone because of their religious beliefs is okay. Do we really need laws protecting people from discriminatory hiring practices? If McCain is elected, maybe we can get rid of them and find out. You know, free market blah blah blah.

So who wins the great faith-based initiative debate? Nobody. The religious nuts come off as religious nuts; McCain comes off as clueless once more; and Obama shows himself to be a sellout. The real losers, though, are the American citizens. The separation of church and state is a cornerstone of our democracy, and it seems that no matter who we put in office, that separation will be a little narrower as a result.
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