Thursday Morning News

Hillary Clinton terms the Haitian catastrophe "biblical" in dimensions. Blood is running down drainage ditches. Families are camping outside in parks to avoid more collapsing of structures. There is no water or food available right now. Medical supplies were exhausted as of yesterday. There is an endless search for bodies as corpses are stacked at the side of the road waiting for families to claim them. President Obama promises the largest emergency humanitarian relief program in history. He's even managed to solicit the Chinese in helping. The degree of destruction is making aid work difficult and the destruction of a few minutes will take months, maybe years to clear. Once the preliminary work of identifying the injured and the dead is done and the food and water situation is stabilized, the greatest threat is an outbreak of disease. The Red Cross by mid-morning had raised $3 million from individual Americans. The California Nurses Union has mobilized its membership to assist emergency medical teams in Haiti. The first responders were from Fairfax, Virginia.

As President Obama said yesterday that we respond to such disasters because of common humanity. Well, some of us didn't feel that way. Pat Robertson, who once opined that 9-11 was God's punishment for our evils and Hurricane Katrina was a judgment on New Orleans support of gays, told his television audience that Haiti had made a pact with the Devil for its early independence and has been suffering ever since. Haiti's ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, responded on the Rachel Maddow Show by pointing out the the United States managed to secure the Louisiana Purchase because of Haiti's independence and that Simon Bolivar shipped to Latin America from his country to liberate the continent. So that others benefited from such a deal.

Rush Limbaugh reverted to his racist self--he seems to be more racist as the years go by. Rush wanted his viewers to know that Haitians produced nothing, nada, nada and that President Obama's response was solely to win support among light and dark colored minorities in this country. He pointed out that Obama responded instantly to this disaster--obviously a bad thing--while he waited 3 days to respond to the gonad bomber's laughable terrorist attempt. He followed up today to encourage people not to donate to Haitian relief because that's what your tax dollars are for. Fox News duly made the links between Obama's response on the gonad bomber and his immediate response on Haiti. It seems to me that Rush's racism is really a double dose here. First, he resents Barack "the Magic Negro" as President. Second, as someone who reportedly has sex vacations in the Dominican Republic, he has absorbed that country's racist attitudes toward its neighbors. By the way, I remember when Haiti produced all of the handstitched baseballs for Major League Baseball. Some of this has since moved to Costa Rica.

I don't seem to remember any antagonism toward the Pacific when American responded to the Tsunami. I don't recall the right saying we shouldn't help out the "slopes" or "gooks". Maybe there was another President then.

I caught part of the historic meeting of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin last night. Asked which founding father she liked the best, Palin said,"all of them". This meeting of the minds has never been seen since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

The left stopped bashing Obama for a few moments to help out on the Haiti issue. But before we are treated to the anniversary report cards of his presidency, let's try to be honest. Obama has passed (97%) more of his legislation than any President, including previous winner LBJ, in any year--not just first. He inherited an economy that had evaporated and was rapidly sinking into a real Great Depression. His stimulus package saved almost 2 million jobs. He brought science back to the White House and lifted the ban of stem cell research. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Bill, which ratified equal pay for equal work. He has appointed more gays than any President and was the first President to address the Human Rights Campaign and talk frankly about gay rights. He ended the practice of torture and is trying to close Gitmo over massive congressional opposition. He started the drawdown from Iraq. He appointed the first Hispanic Woman to the Supreme Court, despite opposition from the entire Republican party. He is on the brink of passing health care reform, the first President who would have succeded after every one else has failed for 75 years. He won the Nobel Peace Prize (primarily for being a black man who won the presidency in a racist country.). He provided the largest amount of funding to science and research in the history of the world. He is on the brink of getting the most extensive re-regulation of our economy since FDR. He has actually eliminated more leaders of Al Qaeda than his predecessor. He extended health reform to children as one of his first acts. he saved the American auto industry against the total opposition of the Republican party. He passed the largest middle class tax cut in American history. He has proposed a Consumer Protection Agency to protect Americans from credit card companies and mortgage dealers. And he has mobilized one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts for Haiti.

I'm sure I missed some. Yes, he has also escalated the war in Afghanistan. But he did create a plan, which Sec of Defense Gates admitted had been lacking for the last several years. In future posts, I'll visited the whole Afghanistan issue. Oh yes, I forgot President Obama is negotiating a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, with whom John McCain wanted to extend the Cold war.

Michael Gerson, the speechwriter for George W. Bush, claims that Obama's rhetoric is filled with platitudes and that he isn't inspiring---compared to what? Obama's great fault, in my opinion, is talking to Americans as if we are adults--we aren't. I appreciate the effort and now listen to him every time he speaks before it is a pleasure for me to listen to a smart, articulate President, who is not just spinning and hiding the truth. But I admit this could be a liability in the long-run.

But let's also have a report card on my former party, the Republicans. Nothing, nada, nada,zilch. So far the GOP has never owned up to the fact our economy collapsed under their watch. That the nation's deficit ballooned to $12 trillion under their watch. That the Iraq War was not paid for, despite Paul Wolfowitz' commitment it would be. That the Medicare B Plan saddled the country with trillions more in debt in the outgoing years. That the so-called war of terror was the most massive redistribution of wealth from the public to the private sector in the history of this country. It even surpassed the bank bailouts, the tax cuts for the rich, the suspension of the estate tax, etc. And, let's grade them on their stimulus plan--remember three interlinked zeros on a page; or their health reform plan--again three zeros interlinked on a page.

So when we grade Obama's first year, let's make sure we remember the alternative. We are not at war in Georgia as McCain wanted. We have a President who doesn't believe the economy is on "sound footing". We have a President and Vice President who don't believe children played with dinosaurs.