Aug 16 2009

Guess who wants to be re-elected? UPDATE: Backing away from backing away

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 4:25 pm

W.H. backs away from public option

President Barack Obama and his top aides are signaling that they’re prepared to drop a government insurance option from a final health-reform deal if that’s what’s needed to strike a compromise on Obama’s top legislative priority.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Sunday that the public option was “not the essential element” of the overhaul. A day earlier, Obama downplayed the public option during a Colorado town hall meeting, saying it was “just one sliver” of the debate.

He even chided Democratic supporters and Republican critics for becoming “so fixated on this that they forget everything else”, a dig at some liberals in his own party who have made the public option the main rallying cry of the health reform debate.

UPDATE: And it seems the White House is NOW backing away from having backed away from the public option. This whole thing appears to be one of those “trial balloons” the White House sends up just to see how much outrage it generates among the leftier supporters of the public option, in an attempt to calibrate the political cost of jettisoning the public option. The president’s “druthers” are clear…. and he’s trying to find out now what he can sell, so he can claim that he did SOMETHING.

Even being outspent five to one by some measures, the anti-nationalized-health-care public opinion is growing, both in numbers and commitment. Let’s hope it’s enough to stop this pig in a poke.

Aug 16 2009

President Obama, meet Rev. J. Wright

Category: church,Democrat,government,Republican,theology — harmonicminer @ 9:11 am

No, no, no, I meant the OTHER Rev. J. Wright, Rev. Joe Wright, who prayed this prayer to open a session of the Kansas legislature in 1996. Wrongly attributed in a circulating email to Billy Graham, this appears to have been borrowed from a 1995 Kentucky Prayer Breakfast, where it was prayed by Bob Russell.

Heavenly Father,
We come before you today to ask your forgiveness and seek your direction and guidance.
We know your Word says, “Woe to those who call evil good,” but that’s exactly what we’ve done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.
We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word and called it moral pluralism.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multi-culturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.
We have abused power and called it political savvy.
We have coveted our neighbors’ possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us O God and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by you, to govern this great state.
Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will.
I ask it in the name of your son, the living Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

It would, of course, be lovely to hope that such a prayer might ever have been prayed Rev. Jeremiah Wright, not just Rev. Joe Wright.

What’s sad is that this is not a partisan prayer.  Some of the items in it might easily be applied to the Right as well as the Left.  But in it’s Kansas legislature appearance, it was Democrats who got up and walked out.

Alas.