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This perfectly sums up what the whole problem is with our government today.

We’re at a big turning point in America.

We have plenty of money. America is not broke. It’s how we’ve chosen to spend it that is causing so many problems. We have a big disconnect on what economics works and what fails.

There is the Republican/Tea Party faction that wants spending cuts, no new taxes, lower the taxes we have, and stopping America from doing great things. They don’t even want to put enough into the country to keep it a civilized society.

There are the progressives who are willing to dream big, to win World War II, to put men on the moon, to build an international space station, to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, to build the interstate highway system, to create the best public school system in the world, and to build the modern infrastructure we enjoyed for three generations.

Our greatness was hijacked by the Reagan administration, when he refused to continue investing in this country, over-spent on defense, and tripled the national debt.

I want pre-Reagan (Carter) America back. I want our greatness back. I want America to do great things again. We have a choice. We can do better. Let’s choose a greater American future.

Technorati Tags: Lean Forward campaign 2011, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, TRMS

Not the mainstream polls taken recently. I just heard a piece on NPR where McConnell kept saying that the American people don’t want health reform, and if Democrats pass it, reform will hurt their election chances in November. Not true.

According to a March 10, 2010 Benenson Strategy Group report, a large majority of Americans want reform, and if anything, they believe reform doesn’t go far enough.

He also said that “forcing” the bill through reconciliation is unprecedented and it denies the “majority” in the Senate the right to vote on the bill. Last time I checked, 59 out of 100 votes is a big majority. If McConnell has such a problem with reconciliation, why did he vote yea on reconciliation bills 13 times in the past? There have been 21 reconciliation bills over about the past 30 years. Sixteen were Republican bills. It’s not an unprecedented procedure at all.

Me thinks he dost protest too much. I believe the Republicans are obstructing, lying and posturing so much because they realize if health care reform passes, their asses are grass in the coming November mid-term election, and Democrats and Independents are the lawn mower.

One GOP talking point is that the Democrats will be in big trouble and lose their majorities in the House and/or Senate. Why would they give this legislation so much time and energy? Since when did the GOP care how the Democrats will do in an upcoming election as long as it’s worse than GOP candidates? It’s because they are terrified at how much passing health reform will boost Democrats in the mid-term election. If they believed their own rhetoric, they would get out of the way and let health reform pass, and reap the benefits of extremely poor Democratic policy.

Another talking point is health care reform will increase the budget deficit substantially. Also not true. According to the CBO, it will decrease the budget deficit substantially:

This bill isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I would like to see a lot of changes, and I believe over time, all the fixes, including a public option or single-payer system, will become part of the legislation. The problems will be fixed as needed in the future just like Medicare has been amended since it first passed. One thing is certain. Doing nothing is not an option.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: budget reconciliation, federal budget, health care reform, public opinion on health care reform, Senate health reform bill of 2009

Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species and the man who discovered evolution and wrote the scientific doctrine of it, was extremely torn between his faith and love for his wife and the factual science he learned from his many years of study of the data and samples he collected on his 5 year journey on the HMS Beagle. He didn’t publish his book until after his wife’s death because she believed fundamentally in the Bible stories of creation, and they were the underpinnings of her faith.

We now know that evolution is more than a theory and has been studied thoroughly for more than 150 years. In 150 years, no one has found any defensible evidence that disproves Darwin’s theory of evolution. People have attempted to make up evidence, but none has been found using the scientific method.

No one bought “Creation” to distribute and show in U.S. theaters because they thought there might be right-wing backlash? Schools take backlash for teaching evolution all the time. Theaters can’t risk a little backlash, even in progressive cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA? Wussies. Since when did the art world become noncontroversial?

Rachel’s point is a vitally important one. What does this attitude mean for the U.S. long-term? Has America decided facts are no longer important? The Republicans surely seem to have decided that over the past 8-9 years. By deciding that the study of facts and rational thought are not important, where will that lead the country 20-30 years from now? Will there once again be only 4 elements instead of 118? Will medicine devolve into the study of the humors (blood, bile, phlegm) again? This fact-free attitude scares me, too.

But it doesn’t scare me too much because the people who spout the vitriol about Darwin and evolution being the truth are a very noisy, but rather small minority of Americans. The problem is we have a silent majority. The majority needs to stand up, shout out the facts and drown out the wing-nuts once in a while. The loud minority seems to live within their own little world so much that they don’t know a much bigger world that vastly outnumbers them is out here.

I don’t believe that the majority of mainstream Americans disregard facts. A fair number of Americans either don’t believe evolution is the factual explanation or aren’t sure. If you add those two groups together, the result is larger than the number who believe it is the truth, making them the minority. But most of the people who aren’t sure say so because they haven’t studied biology and admit they aren’t sure because they don’t know the facts.

I don’t believe there will be fewer scientists in the future, there will probably be more. Schools today focus a lot harder on teaching 4 maths and 4 sciences in high school, algebra 1 & 2, geometry, advanced math, physical science, biology, chemistry and physics. Four English classes are also required now. In my generation, 1-2 sciences, 2 maths and 3 English courses were required if you weren’t college bound. Most students today are college bound, even if it’s a 2-year associate degree from a community college. Colleges are still filling up with young minds desiring lots of facts and hard, rational thought.

Even Catholic schools today teach evolution as the facts in biology and leave Biblical creation in religion class. Some southern Baptist preachers have stopped insisting the Bible’s creation stories are facts. They are stories that were told to primitive, semi-nomadic people to explain things they couldn’t understand. What do we do when we don’t understand something? We either ignore it or we make up stories to tell ourselves that make some sort of sense to us.

Understanding the real mechanisms (processes) of how the universe came to be, understanding the human body and modern medicine, and understanding and delving deeper into chemistry and physics in no way means one can’t still have deep faith in God. As a scientist myself, I believe God is much bigger, more complex and much harder to fathom than He was before modern science. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. Personally, I believe God created the big bang and evolution. I never bought the “poof” theory of the Bible creation stories. Nothing on this planet or in the universe that we have studied happens without a process.

But going as far as not showing a movie in the U.S. about the writer of the Theory of Evolution and his dilemma between his faith and the facts he couldn’t ignore? Ridiculous!

Hopefully, “Creation” will be available for rent or purchase on DVD…

Technorati Tags: choosing to ignore facts, Creation the movie, creationism v evolution, Darwin, facts v fact-freedom