We were also told for that to happen, as a first step, the House of Representatives had to pass the Senate version of the bill as it currently exists. This is the version that the Senate passed with 60 Democrat votes last Christmas eve that included some extortion-vote buying (Nebraska, Louisiana and Florida) . This bill differs substantially from the House version passed in November 2009. By passing the Senate version in the House, a merging of the two bills could then be undertaken and only then would ’reconciliation’ come into the picture, meaning, the Senate could pass the merged version with only 51 votes instead of the required 60 votes.

            This was all a smoke screen. When the House of Representatives passes the current Senate bill, it can be send to the President and with his signature, this bill becomes the law of the land!

            Then to work on a merging bill would be up to the discretion of the Democrat House and Senate leadership and it could very well be that they decided not to do so right away but to put it off indefinitely. The President could claim victory and America would have government-run healthcare against the will of a majority of the American people! The people’s will to be damned!

            Now you might call this fear mongering on our part but we have seen for over a year the fanaticism on the part of the Democrats to push healthcare reform into law and we believe that they do not care at this time about anything else anymore. They do not care if they lose their majorities in the House and the Senate in November, they do not care if they literally screwed their own Democrat House members who believed them that there would be a time for merging the bills and they most definitely do not care what the American people in a solid majority believe and think about this massive overhaul of the American healthcare system.

            The only thing standing between this becoming reality is the final vote in the House of Representatives and the President has urged House leaders to get this done by March 18, 2010. We can safely assume that there are not enough votes today to pass this bill, otherwise, the vote would take place today! It will remain to be seen if enough votes for passage can be collected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team by March 18 or any other date shortly thereafter. And who knows what behind closed-doors deals are being cut at this time in order to get the required votes? The only thing certain is that they will stop at nothing to get those votes to pass this bill!

            At this time, all we can do is hope and pray that there will be enough rational thinking Democrats in the House who recognize the will of the people as more important than the agenda driven attempt to pass this bill by the Democrats. Common Sense University hopes that there are enough such Democrat Representatives who will vote NO and therefore allow this bill to fail. The Republicans cannot do anything effectively by themselves, they are the minority!

            We here at Common Sense University believe that he, the President initiated this for basically two reasons: First, he wanted to keep a campaign promise that healthcare reform discussions and debates would be televised on CSPAN and secondly, he probably wanted to prove to America that the Republicans were really the party of ’NO’ without any concrete ideas and suggestions. We submit that this is our opinion but we do not think that we were far away from the truth. What happened in reality on February 25 was a seven hour televised civilized discussion seminar attended by approximately forty leaders of Congress and the President and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sibelius.

            It proved, if nothing else, two things: The President knows how to conduct a meeting and the Republicans showed that they – instead of just being a group of Naysayers to healthcare reform – had in fact some concrete and rational proposals of their own. This had simply not been known before to the general public because the liberal mainstream media had ignored that. In terms of time, the President spoke longer than all Republican speakers combined and the Democrats had a chance to make their cases for their healthcare reform bills. While the Republicans talked issues and came forth with a number of well thought out proposals, the Democrats mostly concentrated on sob stories of how some of their constituents suffered. The funniest one being stated by Democrat Congresswoman Louise Slaughter from New York who claimed that one of her constituents could not afford dental care and had to wear her dead sisters dentures.

            After seven hours, the meeting adjourned and nothing had changed! The President then gave another speech last week Wednesday and re-iterated his strong desire and the need for passing his healthcare reform legislation. He wants to get it done before Easter now. The funny thing is, while he said that some Republican proposals had been incorporated in his bill, in reality he does not have a bill, he never had one. The pieces of legislation so far were all generated in Congress. And so, let’s look at them by using a visual prop:

            From what we understand, the proposed healthcare reform legislation amount to somewhat around 2700 pages of text. We suggest to you, next time you visit Staples or Office Depot take five or six reams of paper and stack them on top of one another. Now picture in your mind that they are all filled up with law text. This pile of paper is what the Democrats in Congress and the President are proposing in order to revise healthcare reform for America! We do not know about you but to us here at Common Sense University, this is very, very scary!

            We do not think that we are in the minority when we feel this way and maybe this is part of the reason why a strong majority of Americans are against this type of healthcare overhaul. They really do not understand what is in it and what change it will bring to them personally. And why is the President pushing so hard to pass this now in the next few weeks? Because he knows that this is his only chance to force this massive reform upon us and that is very devious and even shameful! Based on the vast differences between Barack Obama’s campaign promises and current reality as he is now President, we are beginning to doubt just about every word he says and we have lost our trust in him some time ago. We sincerely hope that this current monstrosity called healthcare reform will fail in Congress and never gets to the President’s desk for his signature.

            McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt was the big man in this campaign and he dictated what would happen during joint appearance campaign events up until the end when he had somebody tell Sarah Palin on Election night in Arizona that she, Palin, was not to make a statement that evening and that her husband and children were not to be on stage with John McCain (as he gave his consolation speech). As it turned out, Todd Palin was on stage but not her children. Another issue was the billing by the McCain campaign of $50,000 to Sarah Palin for the ’vetting process’ expenses incurred during 2008 (prior to her nomination by McCain). Palin was told that she would not have had to pay this had they won the election (see page 363 of her book).   

            John McCain father and grandfather had been Admirals in the United States Navy and he chose to follow in their footsteps, his military career was excellent and he is mostly known for his heroic behavior during his six years of captivity in Vietnam as a POW. He will be forever a hero in this regard in America’s history! But in the early 1980’s, McCain began another career as a politician, first as U.S. Representative in Congress and then as U.S. Senator from Arizona, a title he still holds today. His political career was one of mixed results, he considered himself a maverick and he did things that were not always in accordance with party affiliation and conservative principles. We do not want to get into that here but instead just focus on his failed presidential bid.

            We believe that he recognized in the summer of that year that his support among conservatives was weak and he could not totally count on their votes (due to his many flip-flops on conservative policies over the years). So he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate and it was an excellent choice because probably millions of conservative voters pulled the lever for his ticket because of her and not him. We here at Common Sense University are convinced that without Sarah Palin he would have lost the election to President Obama in a landslide similar to the gigantic loss that his Senatorial predecessor Barry Goldwater suffered in 1964 against Lyndon Johnson.

            But his conduct during the campaign in connection with the way his running mate was ‘handled’ and treated by his paid campaign staffers makes us shudder. He, John McCain picked her and it was his duty to protect her from the shenanigans she had to suffer at the hands of his own team and then at the end to even allow the ‘campaign’ to collect the fifty thousand dollars from her for pre-nomination ‘vetting’ expenses is just incredulous and morally wrong. This is not the way a “hero” handles his affairs but it is shameful to the highest degree. We would call this ’wussy’ and cowardly by McCain! How could he let this happen? Or did he just walk away from his own campaign on November 6, 2008? In our opinion, John McCain was a hero a very long time ago and he is no longer a hero. Heros do not act this way and do not let things like this happen, period!  In fact, John McCain should be ashamed of himself and enjoy his remaining years in retirement.

While George Washington was not a signer of the declaration of Independence, he was a delegate from Virginia and was called to preside over the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia until the final draft of the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787 and subsequently ratified by nine States by June 21, of the following year.

            In honor of his birthday today, we would like pursue a hypothetical in that we would assume, George Washington could be back for a short period of time and look things over. This would be followed up by a couple of questions to him such as:

• Mr. President, how do you like today’s acceptance of the separation of church and state in that no prayer is allowed in schools and no money can be allocated to religious causes?
• Mr. President, how do you like the U.S. Government owning two American car companies?
• Mr. President, do you think that the U.S. Government should provide health insurance for all Americans who can not afford to pay for it?
• Mr. President, do you think it is alright for the U.S. Government to run up trillion dollar deficits every year for social programs as we have them today?
• Mr. President, do you think that the U.S. Government should pass laws to tax its citizenry for contributing to Global Warming?
• Mr. President, what do you think of the 535 men and women in Congress and how they are serving the country and how well they are representing us, the people of the United States?

            Would it not be nice to find out the answers to the above questions from the very first President of the United States? We think, fortunately we never will but – aside from the technological advances since his days (cars, trains, airplanes, radio and television to name just a few) – he would probably be hugely astounded what he would learn about life today and wonder if the Constitution of this country was still in existence and possibly substituted by something else or done away with altogether. We also think that he would call the men and women running this country to task over why they would think it proper to govern the way they are. He would probably read the Constitution and the first ten Amendments once more and ask more questions and be severely critical of what lawmakers had turned it into.

            We conclude this short trip into the land of the hypothetical with the only thing that we can say to our first President: Happy Birthday and many thanks for what you did for this great country of ours.

            When the announcement was made, we wondered: How can this be? On the one hand, we lose more jobs and send people to the unemployment line and yet the unemployment rate drops by three tenth of a percent. The given answer by the Department of labor was simple; they had enlarged the data base by 500,000 people who had not been included previously. When we heard that explanation, we simply wondered how this could possibly be true. After all, these statistics are being made public every month, in fact, some data is even being issued weekly. And now we are made to believe that this Department all of a sudden found out that they had underestimated the data base by a nice round figure. This is truly absurd! In fact it is even worse, this is a Department that has done these types of statistics for decades and now wants us to believe that a correction in the data base was required.

            But we think that there is much more to this story. President Barack Obama has politicized his entire administration and we should not be surprised that a directive came down from up high: Bring the number down to single digits! We understand that this would be vehemently denied by the administration but we smell a rat. It would not be the first time that somebody has been ‘cooking the books’ and was in fact, told to do so. And it will of course also not be the last time when this kind of action will be happening.

            The thing that is most galling to us here at Common Sense University is the lack of curiosity by the media. Is there nobody out there who wonders how this could truly have happened? How can one expand the data base by approximately one half a million points and therefore influence the results effectively by bringing a double digit rate into a single digit number and falsely indicating the beginning of a downward trend? How would it be if one journalist in America would ask him- or herself that, essentially saying ‘I will dig into this and want to fully understand the explanation given as to those half a million people added to the data base. Who are they? Where were they? Why were they not included previously? And who discovered this previous falsehood and now decided to correct the facts? We still have hope that there is such a curious person but only time will tell. We are patient and will keep on looking for that.

            Looking at this from a personal perspective. How would the IRS react if an individual underreported his income by thinking that not all income was taxable? We think we all know how they would react. They would charge the individual and slap severe fines and interest rates on top of it. Why does that only happen to the citizenry and not the government officials, after all, they work for us or are we wrong here?

            The final question we have is what will they do when unemployment rises in the country? Will they, the Department of Labor look for more ‘previously underreported people in the data base in order to facilitate a lower overall unemployment rate? Again, only time will tell and we will be watching! Yet the real question is: Can we trust the information we are getting from the Government?

            It should therefore be no wonder to rationally thinking people that besides buildings and other structures the country’s infrastructure nearly totally collapsed after the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12. Not only were roads destroyed, the utility infrastructure together with the country’s communications system went down and the main airport was underdeveloped and inadequately equipped to take the help flown in from all over the world. All medical facilities and hospital were either totally destroyed or require substantial repair.  The entire picture of Haiti is one of unbelievable despair and almost total hopelessness. As happens when catastrophes of this magnitude occur anywhere around the globe, the world wants to help and sends money, materiel things such as food items and other needed supplies or even rescue personnel and medical teams.

            To us here at ‘Common Sense University’ the old adage comes to mind: ‘Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ Why would we think this? It is very simple. If we just send money and needed supplies to Haiti, we are feeding them for a day, a week or a month which is not a desirable solution. The people will continue their lives as before once the situation is somewhat normalized and Haiti will remain the poorest nation in the western world.

            To us this appears to be a point in time where the lives of Haitians could not only be changed but permanently improved. The tasks to rebuild Haiti are incredibly huge and will take considerable time, several years to say the least. The country’s leadership should take this opportunity and coordinate with world leaders a massive re-building of this island nation. We think this should be a two-prong project. First, provide immediate help for the people in terms of minimal shelter and life sustaining provisions such as food, medical support, clean water, sanitation, electricity and so on but the second and larger program should be the re-building of the country to bring it to higher living standards as enjoyed by most western countries.

            This would mean master-planning of infrastructure construction, removal of earthquake damaged buildings and other structures including medical facilities. Not knowing what larger companies are existing in Haiti who could undertake such tasks, bring in firms from other countries as for instance Bechtel, Fluor or Parsons Corporations from the USA and allow them to bring in the management personnel required to undertake such work. But perform the actual work with locals! In other words, hire Haitians to do the physical work, they can learn the trades and earn money doing the rebuilding. This would help the local economy and provide higher living standards for them as well on a sustained level as Haiti could build the necessary tourism elements to vastly improve that industry which currently does not seem to even exist.

            Once these plans would become known, it would entice developers from countries around the world to build hotels and the associated facilities that exist in other country’s resorts. If Haiti has one thing going for itself, it is the climate and tourism could boom in just a few years. This could be a lasting solution for this scenically beautiful country and it would help lift the population out of its previous economic doldrums and current misery. That’s what we mean when we call for this golden opportunity: “Teaching them how to fish!”

            He skirted by and did not mention such issues that could have been negative: Closing Gitmo this January and transferring the trials for major terrorists such as Khaled Sheik Mohammed to New York City. Nor was the election of a Republican to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts mentioned, an election that at least for the time being stalled health care reform. He was smart enough to realize that one cannot defend the indefensible. And so, instead of recognizing that, he decided to skip over those things.

            But the one item that he owns all by himself since no other President has ever had the distasteful arrogance to do so, was his harsh critique of the United States Supreme Court while most members were present. He reprimanded and demeaned the Court for their recent decision to overturn certain campaign finance laws for its unconstitutionality of limiting free speech. He misstated the facts and got away with it. Obama asked Congress to draft a new law that would reverse the Court’s decision. Real class, Mr. President! The least we would expect from a supposed constitutional lawyer like Obama is to know the reality that there are three equal branches of the government: The Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branch! If anything, they are independent and not subservient to one another. The constitutional intent was and still is the separation of power in this country. But he, the President must think that he is above everybody and everything in America. Did the job as President go to his head? We begin to wonder. And is there nobody in the Administration who has the courage to tell him that he is just the head of one of the three branches and not America’s King, dictator, sole ruler or whatever he might want to be or thinks he already is. Barack Obama has no tolerance for dissent and he shows it by being sarcastic and even angry towards those that disagree with him.

            As before, the two people seated behind the President, Vice-President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, got their exercises that evening by jumping up every time when they thought he had made a statement worthy of applause. And of course, the Democrats in the room did the same thing. As he always seems to do, he impressed people with his oratory skills and pretty much got away with saying whatever he wanted to say, factual or not. He demanded that Congress present him with a jobs bill shortly, he also thought that health care reform should be pursued and he promised near the end that he would not quit, whatever that was supposed to mean. For the record: He has been elected to a four-year term of which just one quarter has passed. He will have another three years and whether or not he will get re-elected in 2012 will depend entirely on the voters of America.

            Common Sense University concludes that realities in our country will decide what is ahead of us, his current focus on job creation is good but his plan is as wrong as it can be. Governments cannot create jobs in the private sector; Obama’s petty attempts of doling out money here and there are not true job creators but nothing more than band-aid solutions for a much larger problem. The best economic stimulator has always been and always will be a reduction in taxes for individuals and companies. Since Obama and the Democrats do not believe that to be true, we forecast that unemployment will remain in the double digits for a long time to come and all the high rhetoric in the world will not change that. Unfortunately, Obama and the Democrats will be in charge for at least one year and the true tragedy for America’s future is the ever faster increasing debt to the nation. That is the sad reality we all have to live with.

            Last Tuesday night, his work coupled with his message paid off. He won the special election decidedly and will be the first Republican holding that seat since 1952. Ever since that year, a Kennedy (first former President Jack and then his younger brother Ted) had won elections, imagine that is altogether nearly 58 years. The rest of the country did not really expect that to happen, Massachusetts residents , ergo voters, had been known to be overwhelmingly liberal and progressive in their attitudes as reflected in their voting patterns.

            But what happened last Tuesday in that State was a political earthquake, one that was felt everywhere and there could be huge aftershocks right into this coming November when the mid-term elections will be held across America. As is typical for the political elites, one of the first things that happened since Tuesday was the search for whom and what to blame for this elections’ result. Some thought that Martha Coakley ran a terrible campaign and had too many gaffes, others blamed the White House for not being more supportive and some blamed the Democrat Party leadership for not playing a stronger role in this campaign.

            To us here at Common Sense University, they are all missing the point. The truth is that even in liberal Massachusetts, the people will not forever blindly follow the ambitions of a given Party, the Democrat Party in this case. Even in Massachusetts, the people had enough of the Obama agenda of bigger government, a total overhaul of national health care, unlimited deficit spending, wrong policies with regards of the economy and job creation and so on.

            Yes, that is precisely what happens and it is reassuring for us to see that the American people throughout the land still have enough common sense to correct course when an extreme agenda is pursued and they know how to do it with the simplest of methods: They simply do not re-elect people who are pursuing such an agenda! And it does not matter whether it is a left-wing or a right-wing agenda, anything extreme will eventually be rejected. This is for us the most important result of this election and it gives us confidence to think that America is and will always be an exceptional country. It is the land of the free and it should remain so!

            We cannot predict what the immediate consequences of Scott Brown’s election victory will be. Will he be the one deciding vote that will stop the current healthcare overhaul legislation by voting against it in the Senate? Will the Democrats from President Obama to the Democrat leadership in Congress recognize honestly that it was their agenda that was rejected in Massachusetts? Will these folks in Washington D.C. get a solid dose of reality and look at things more soberly, realistically and less fanatically instead of ideologically? Only time will tell but we believe whatever will be: This election should be a wake-up call for every single one of the elected representatives that they are first and foremost just that: Representatives of the people and that they should listen to the people who send them to Washington. There is hope for America again, the 2008 election results putting a Democrat in the White House and giving the Democrats huge pluralities in Congress have been corrected if not reversed in Massachusetts and it is in our opinion, good for the country as a whole!

            As we know, earthquakes normally bring harm to people and areas where they happen, but this kind of earthquake brings only good things to people, we like these kinds.

            And while the mystery fascinated people throughout the country, within days after this incident, women were going public with stories of having sexual relations with Tiger Woods during the past couple of years. Some of these women had tape recordings of evidence of their claims and within a very short week, about a dozen women claimed to have been intimate with this married man, Tiger Woods.

            Needless to say, that really turned on the rumor mills everywhere and coupled with Tiger’s limited statements to the media (including his self-imposed suspension of playing in upcoming golf tournaments), it was all factual, period! Tiger Woods, America’s sports idol was found to be a multiple wife-cheater and the stories kept on coming that his Swedish born wife, Elin, was about to file for a divorce demanding anywhere from 200 to 300 million dollars in settlement reimbursement from her husband.

            True or false, Tiger did the smartest thing he could do under the circumstances, he remained silent! The more disgusting story in all this so called scandal was the expediency by which everybody seemed to dump on Tiger Woods. He became the pun of late-night television shows and with that, the entire media felt compelled not to be left out and they tried their best to outdo others in speculating and rumor-mongering about Tiger Woods, the newly disgraced former super hero. The one exception being the professional golfers who mostly remained silent and did not join the game of “Tiger-bashing”. We respect them for that.

            We here at Common Sense University would not be truthful if we did not express our deeply felt sadness about this entire episode, but that is where it ends. We would never join the fray of all the others to judge him negatively and now make him out to be one of the worst villains in America. We here, as almost all of America, do not know any of the circumstances which brought about the alleged extra-marital affairs of which Tiger Woods is currently accused of. We say this because we do not know much about Elin, the former Swedish swimsuit model who met Tiger in 2001 when she was an au-pair girl for the children of Swedish pro-golfer Jesper Parnevik. They began dating and she became Mrs. Woods in October 2004. She gave birth to a daughter and a son in 2007 and 2009 respectively and turned 30 years old on January 1, 2010.

            Other than that, we do not know much about her, her personality or her being the wife of the world’s most successful golfer for the past years. With that, we also do not know anything about the circumstances that allegedly drove Tiger Woods to have extra-marital relationships, and we emphasize “allegedly!” Elin kept a low profile during those past years, she was not seen at many golf tournaments throughout the years and we do not know if that was by consent between the two of them or for other reasons. We, the general public really do not know much about her interests, hobbies and other such elements that round out a life of prominence. What do we know about their dialogues as spouses and their day to day lives? Nothing! Did she share his interests in all matters golf or was she more interested in decorating houses and the like? We do not want to speculate here but there could be a vast variety of reasons why Tiger developed a need for “comfort” with other women, assuming that that really occurred. We conclude that we do NOT know what kind of wife Elin was to Tiger!

            So then, let’s do what we owe them (and especially Tiger): Give them space and privacy, the future of them is theirs to decide, their children are very young and whatever the outcome of their decisions, it is theirs to make. We wish them both the best for the future and hope for the return of Tiger to the PGA golf circuit.

            We have to confess that we did not understand all this ‘stuff’ and simply were amazed at some of the findings as to the causes for this apparent financial meltdown. We did not and still do not understand the roles that Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae played in all this, after all, we are not bankers and do not pretend to be. We heard the various accusations against them and they all did not make a lot of sense. What bewildered us at the time was that the company AIG received huge amounts of money – 70 billion dollars of TARP money – and they then turned around and paid European banks and institutions huge amounts of money. Since this was all reported as facts, we accepted it as such in the hope that there would be eventually a complete reconciliation of the money – mind you, taxpayers’ money – by telling us what we got for it.

            But Common Sense University has not seen anything of the like, only bits and pieces come out ever so infrequently, all we know is, if we can believe these reports, that nearly 200 billion dollars of TARP money were never spent and are sitting somewhere. Now this is where our interests perk up again. How is that possible we ask? Think of this in simple terms, one we all can understand: Your son/daughter comes to you and confesses to have gotten into financial trouble and is in need of, let’s say, $50,000 immediately. If the money will not be given, the kid will have to file for bankruptcy and there will be other even more dire consequences. “And please, do not ask me for details, Dad” your son/daughter says to you. So, you do not like it at all but give him/her the money and the kid goes off. Over a year later, you inquire and find out that your offspring is ok again and guess what, has about $15,000 left over, money that was not needed. How would you feel about that? Should we not demand collectively as U.S. taxpayers to get some answers on the TARP money?

            How about answering the fundamental question: How many billions of dollars were lent to people who bought homes they could not afford? Or was it even in the trillions of dollars? We understand that the banks were pressured to relax standard (and well proven) lending criteria and procedures but that is not an answer that should satisfy us. Can we not demand to get some reliable summarized audit results from all the banks combined in our country that will tell us that ‘X’ amount of houses were purchased (and financed) by ‘X’ number of people and this all amounted to ‘X’ number of dollars?

            For whatever “Noble” reason this apparent experiment in social engineering was created  by these culprits who initiated and directed it, one cannot ignore the reality that it has been a humongous failure and it is generally accepted as such but that should not mean that we just shove it under the rug, or is it? The applecart is turned upside down when we are asked to accept that people without money can buy the same things as the people with money! We think it’s time to straighten that applecart right side up. Let’s hope that we will never see such atrocious experimentation in the future.