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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (40280)	8/5/2007 1:58:03 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 541556

I don't want to come off as an advocate of rail-I took it back in the 80's, because I have fear of planes, but the service was so bad I realized I couldn't afford to go by rail, so I got an anti-anxiety prescription for flying. But it seems silly to me that we waste money on a system we choose to run in an inferior way- thus assuring it will never have adequate passengers. Were it reliable, I am sure it would be patronized- I know a lot of people who would like to take trains, but they just can't deal with the service. I would like to see government make some of these tough infrastructure choices. I would like to see them imagine what our country will look like in 10 years, and try to head off the coming problems. But I don't see that happening. And I don't see either side really tackling it. I was just talking to mom-in-law today, so this is all really fresh in my mind. My position is that both parties are full of people in thrall to corporations, who do not care about people like you and me, because we don't pay them the money they need to get elected. The corporations (who do count, because they pay the big bucks to count) are looking out for their own interests, and those interests may conflict with the interests of the US as a country. I was just talking about breastfeeding today on another thread. People on that thread were upset because NY was mandating that breastfeeding be number one at the public hospitals- and that bottles be only available if the patients ask. How does this relate to government? Well the WIC program supplies a huge amount of formula in this country- and the mechanism by which they do it is to give vouchers to mothers, who then use the vouchers, and after they do, the formula corporations refund 85% of the money to WIC- so the more women who use the vouchers, the bigger the WIC program gets, since it gets a tremendous amount of funding from the rebates the formula makers send it via the voucher program. Interesting, isn't it? And that's on top of the fact that breastfeeding helps public health by reducing the chance of childhood obesity, allergies, illness, and makes mothers healthier- and probably reduces the risk of breast cancer, as well as saving moms a LOT of money. Here's a government program (WIC)that gets bigger on the back of poor decisions made by nursing mothers. Talk about a problem. And government is full of problems like this. I wish there was an honest desire on the part of someone to stop this sort of foolishness- but since all our government officials are owned by some corporation (or many) I don't see sanity coming any time soon.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (40280)	8/5/2007 2:17:30 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 541556

Listening to the republican debate this morning offered not a glimpse of help for the American public. It is all about lowering taxes - MORE - and terrorism. Lowering taxes has been the "program" of the self-proclaimed "party of ideas" since Ronald Reagan. Forget any nuance. Forget any sense of responsibility of the government toward pepole. No--it's all about "individual responsibility." Protection of property and contract. The sanctity of the marketplace in every endeavor. End of story.