POLITICS AS USUAL

It was really heartwarming, seeing that picture of John Boehner and other key Republicans in shirt sleeves with a background of a lumberyard---really the common touch, you know..."We're going to roll up our shirt sleeves and really get down to work for all Americans!"

What nonsense. This kind of political posturing makes me ill, it is so phony and staged. I was simply shocked that John Boehner took time away from the tanning booth for this photo op!

Any way you cut it, this new Promise to America is sameold-sameold, simply packaged in a new wrapping. Cut the spending, undo the health plan, keep the Bush tax cuts for all (including the very rich). It was long on promises, short on specifics on how to do.

With Medicare, Defense and Social Security among the major expenditures, how do you make major cuts? As for the health plan, why throw the baby out with the bath water? Is every provision of health care wrong? Shouldn't revisions to the current plan make more sense? Wouldn't it make sense to form a bipartisan committee to study, analyze and make recommendations for an improved plan? Oh no, bipartisanship is a dinosaur of a word buried in the ancient past.

I'm still catching up with the American political scene after three months in U.K. I understand while I was away it was declared in a cover article in Forbes that Obama was a neo-colonial Socialist/Commie influenced by his Kenyan father who died umpteen years ago. I swear to God: what are they smoking these days?

The more things change, the more they are the same...