As I predicted, the Presidential campaigns have degenerated into name calling and the true issues seem of little importance. Now the focus is Barack Obama paling around with a domestic terrorist and McCain supporting the murderer of an abortion doctor.

"Drill Baby, Drill," even though it will have no real impact on oil supply.

"We must stop sending $700 billion a year to the extremist Middle East," even though the majority of our oil import dollars go to Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. Thank you so much for your caustic mediocracy, Gov. Palin.

Thank you so much, Karl Rove, for returning with your deceitful tactics to the backrooms of the McCain campaign (Rolling Stone, Oct 16, 08).

We might as well call in the dogs and have the election tomorrow, as there will be no further meaningful debate.

It is also time for me to retire this blog as I have run out of themes.

Over the last year I have tried to question the reasons why this country has encountered so many problems and fails to address even greater looming challenges. I have concluded the underlying causes are always the same—lack of comprehensive thinking, failure to take appropriate action, failure to compromise and accept difficult choices and selfishness.

The solutions are not difficult to understand. In general, it is a matter of returning to the tried-and-true answers and methods. For example: the mortgage crisis will not reoccur if home mortgages return to requiring a 20 percent downpayment, monthly payments of no more than 33 percent of gross income and no balloons.

Require balanced budgets and we will not be hostage to debt. It will mean more money for education than weapons, more civility than lawsuits. On and on, we know the answers, but we forgot to ask the questions.

The answers are not difficult, but when we fail to recognize or fail to act the impact compounds exponentially. Soon we have the current downward spiral of Wall Street wit... [Read More]

Our founding fathers believed that government was necessary because mankind could not always be trusted to make the right choices and some reasonable structured supervision was therefore required. How right they were as we watch the current megacrisis on Wall Street unfold.

Underregulated last year, the five largest financial banks, such as now defunct Lehman Brothers, took bonuses totaling $39 billion while shareholders received $74 billion in losses.

Combined with Wall Street greed and insufficient governmental regulation encouraged by President George W. Bush and Republicans like John McCain who supported his decisions 90 percent of the time, a financial perfect storm has occurred unlike any since the 1929 crash.

When the tickertape calms down the taxpayers will be left with at least a $700 billion bailout for their own money. Pathetic, but at least Bush spared us a sappy fireside chat and tell us "just to go out shopping.”

Unfortunately, under Bush we have witnessed other perfect storms where an unavoidable event, such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, has been made markedly worse by bad government action. Both of these stories are well known. While no president would have likely averted 9/11, most presidents would have made the assessment that the heart of terrorism was in Afghanistan and not in Iraq and concentrated our resources accordingly.

Katrina was another unavoidable disaster compounded by ineffectual government action from insufficient levees and an unprepared FEMA led by an unequipped Bush crony. I will never forget the surrealistic sight of Bush standing alone in a generator-lit church yard assuring New Orleans that all would be built better than ever. Deja vu the "Mission Accomplished" he prematurely pronounced on the Iraq war. Now, three years later, New Orleans still awaits restoration.

Are we doomed to perfect storms of unavoidable events, greed and corruption and ineffective government? Was Karl Marx right that... [Read More]

Political scientists believe that a slim majority of Americans are just to the conservative side of center in their political beliefs.

As the Republicans have been cast as conservative and the Democrats as liberal, it is therefore not surprising that since 1952 Republicans have been in the White House 36 years and the Democrats 20 years.

Even though no Republican could define what a is a liberal, the pejorative use of the term has been an effective negative branding tool for the Republicans (Talk of the Party, by Sharon Jarvis).

It is likewise quite difficult to define what is a conservative. Despite the fact that the English language has the most words of any language (more than five million, compared to 50,000 Chinese characters) we still have difficulty defining ourselves and objectively stating our beliefs.

It is remarkable that since 1952 we have gone to the moon, carry around Blackberries, do heart transplants, boil water in microwaves and blog on the Internet, yet we can not fully state who we are!

In an attempt to understand what is a Repbulican and a Democrat, I watched with fascination the recent CSPAN airing of the presidential nominee acceptance speeches since 1956.

I was able to watch Johnson, Humphrey, Ford, Bush I and Reagan. Unfortunately, I missed Eisenhower, but I pretty much know what Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Clinton and Bush II have said in their speeches.

It is amazing how constant the Party themes are. Barack Obama's acceptance speech was almost word for word from Lyndon Johnson, and John McCain's paralleled Gerald Ford's speech.

The constancy of messages was so striking that I recorded the most commonly words for both parties and compared them to the words employed by Obama/McCain in their speeches. Amazingly, the same words appeared time after time and although they may be difficult to define, these words must actually represent the  beliefs and goals of the respective parties.<... [Read More]

I watched most of the Republican National Convention intent on learning what John McCain would do if he and Gov. Sarah Palin were elected.

Unfortunately it was what was not said that was the most telling and predictive.

In order to be a successful president, John McCain will have to address and correct the actions of the Bush presidency. Yet, only once during his acceptance speech did John McCain mention President George W. Bush and even then the name Bush was not stated. Vice President Dick Cheney was never mentioned.

Amazing! It was as if the last eight years did not exist.

There was no mention of his inheriting the additional $3 trillion dollar debt incurred by Bush (yes, one "conservative"-minded Republican accounts for one-third of our entire national debt).

There was no mention of the nearly $700 billion spent on the war in Iraq and the fact that most Americans believe the war was a mistake. There was no mention of the fact that with our distraction in Iraq, al Queda now is in 60 countries, whereas on 9/11 they were only in four countries.

There was no mention of all the manufacturing jobs America has lost and left our economy in shambles under the unmentionable Republican president and Congress.

There was no mention of the $700 billion per year we send overseas for imported oil and the fact that Bush did nothing to curb energy use or help develop new energy sources. But one of McCain's responses now is to drill, drill, drill—which experts agree will result in a drop in the bucket.

Apart from what was not said at the Republican convention, it was equally important as to what could be seen at the convention. There was a sea of white faces—only 2 percent blacks this year.

By 2050 white people will be a minority. Because of the Republicans’ current policies and lack of inclusiveness, the Republican Party will not exist in 2050.

The outfit of Cindy McCain itself was pretty telling. She was well-bedec... [Read More]

The  Republican and Democratic presidential tickets have been selected. Each party is now busy packaging their candidates to be  most appealing to the voters.

Getting to know the candidates will become increasingly difficult as we are bombarded with Kodak moments, glorifying speeches and campaign promises and negative ads. Will the best candidates win, or will we end up with just the best wrapper? The voter must now pay attention, as the candidates will be inadvertently dropping clues  about who they really are.

Because of his maverick style of shooting from the hip and one-liners reflecting snap decisions, Sen. John McCain is already dropping important clues.

Very telling was Sen. McCain's response to Russia's recent invasion of Georgia. He said Russia should be booted out of the G-8 group of economically important nations. Putin's response to McCain was a lash of cold war rhetoric.

Are we really ready to restart the cold war? Russia has not yet matured enough and it behooves us to find a more productive way to discourage them from taking up the old rhetoric and posturing of the cold war. In the last eight years we have seen all too well the fruits of maverick diplomacy and the world is no longer impressed.

Another alarming clue from McCain was his choice for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin is a card-carrying member of the Flat Earth Society. Why would she have an amniocentesis if she was not going to act on the results? She has advocated Intelligent Design. Also, she has denied man's contribution to global warming and sees no problems for the polar bears swimming 60 miles off her coast with only slush to sit on.

Palin has preached abstinence and her 17-year-old unwed daughter is pregnant. Washington outsider and reformer? Frankly, Palin will need more than hockey sticks and a GPS to find the 21st century, let alone be a heartbeat away from becoming president. But it was McCain who selected her, and one ... [Read More]

The majority of people I talk to feel that neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama are the best presidential nominees their parties could select. This is a significant misjudgment, I believe, because in both cases, their life's experiences actually make them the strongest nominees since Dwight Eisenhower.

Take the life-defining POW experience of John McCain. A high percentage of the first American POWs in North Vietnam committed suicide because they felt they would or did betray their country by giving more than their name and service number to their captors.

In response to this needless loss of servicemen our military developed two POW training camps that focused on how to survive interrogation and captivity as a POW. In the late 1970s I had the opportunity to be the supervising physician at the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps POW training camp. Within 24 hours in the camp all the "prisoner" students were broken with waterboarding and other techniques.

It is frightening what can be done to the human spirit by torture. Those "prisoner" students who steadfastly defied the interrogation tactics were taken aside and counseled, as defiant POWs are executed. The teaching lesson for all was to give a little informantion to your captors when you could no longer stand a torture session.

That's how you survive being a POW.

Broken by torture, yes, but not defeated. Compound daily torture to John MCCain for more than five years and you start to understand the strength of the man. Break bones already broken. Deprive him of sleep. Waterboard. Starve so that only those who ate insects survived.

A definition that has never failed me is a "hero is a fool in the wrong place at the right time." It is not being a war hero that qualifies John McCain to be president, but rather what he did as a broken POW. He endured, made appropriate compromises to survive and cherished freedom and life. Few have been so tested and America will not go wrong standing... [Read More]

We are all concerned at the high price of gas and at the same time we know that we will eventually run out of oil.

John McCain, who is quickly losing my respect, and now President Bush, are advocating lifting the U.S. off-shore drilling ban with the belief that more digging will reduce prices and our problem of foreign oil dependence.

However, even with the Alaskan and off-shore oil, the U.S. has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Yet daily we account for 25 percent of the world's daily oil consumption.

Eighty-five percent of the available U.S. oil is leased to the oil companies, but 75 percent of these leased sites are not being drilled on because it is too expensive to do so. It’s not the oil companies who are clammoring for more leases, it’s the politicians.

For the past eight years the Bush policies have encouraged more drilling and that has not worked. Instead, the price has risen and we are held in a tighter oil hostage grip by foreign suppliers and speculators. Speculators only have to put down 6 percent to secure a price of future oil. They must not do much cringing when they fill up their SUVs.

More digging is really not going to help. The Law of Holes is that "when you are digging and not getting nowhere then quit digging." In Jared Diamond's Collapse, he explains that many past collapsed societies did so because they did not quit digging. Usually they were in an environment that had little resource reserve to call on when conditions worsened.

The Mayans in Mexico were very highly developed but they failed. They lived in a dry area and when it got drier they harvested wood and water further and further away until there was no more. They just kept digging. MaCain and Bush want to keep digging.

We are also digging another dry hole with corn-based ethanol as it takes more energy to produce than it yields and removes land needed for food production.

Whether we got here by intelligent design... [Read More]

In his 1919 book, The American Language, H.L. Mencken described 12,000 terms particular to American "English." These words grew out of the American experience of the frontier, cattle ranching and life on the Mississippi.

The horse was prominent in early U.S. history, so it is not surprising that a collection of our common words and sayings evolved out horse care, horsemanship and horse lore.

Though I am sure that horses would rather not be compared to politicians, it appears that politicians have a lot in common with horses and all the expressions we associate with horses.

One could say, for instance, that because of not paying attention to our nation's security, we "left the barn door open" and 9/11 occurred. And then, in his haste for the War on Terror, President Bush got the "horse ahead of the cart" by rushing into Iraq, instead of putting more energy into pursuing Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

You could say that the recent presidential primaries really released a "stampede" of horses. There was an old "plug" who came in first for the Republicans. If Hilary runs again she will be the "old grey mare." But certainly all the candidates were "chomping at the bit," had their "ears laid back," and were "stomping, bucking, snorting, swishing their tails, galloping and getting lathered up."

Mike Huckabee was the "dark horse." Another month and Clinton and Obama would have had a "photo finish." Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul were the "ringers" (a ringer is a male horse whose gelding did not quite work). And Fred Thompson was "foundered" while Tommy Thompson was the "first back to the barn."

There are notable Bush Administration officials who fall into the horse lexicon. Alberto Gonzales reminds me of "a Southbound rider on a Northbound horse." Secretary Rumsfeld reminds me of a "guy smiling and shaking your hand while pissing down your leg." Vice President Dick Cheney is a real  "horse trader"—just a tip: when he cocks his h... [Read More]