What happened in Liberal Massachusetts is no different than what happened in the Conservative 23rd District in upstate New York with the election of a Democratic candidate there for Congress, reversing some 100 years of election history in that district. In each case you have voters, mainly lead by independents, reversing long established voting patterns and sending a message to Washington. These are the true comparisons to be made, not the elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey which pivoted around local issues and political personalities. Voters are angry, desperate and disillusioned with Washington. They want change, not the same status quo that brought us to this point.

The voters are anger not about the policies of Obama, but the gridlock in Washington that’s making change impossible. And they are angry with Democrats because the people gave them more political power in Washington than at any other time in the past forty years and they are squandering this unique opportunity, being inept and spineless to effectively govern. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that reverses 100 years of precedence limiting corporate contributions in political elections, this moment may be the last great chance that the people have to gain back their government — before corporate and special interests, foreign and domestic, completely take over our country. This is a pivotal moment. The stakes are high and President Obama may be the last President to speak for the people. When the Health Care Bill is explained to voters point by point, they are overwhelmingly supportive. Their anger has more to do with process than with policy, contrary to all the Republican spin masters and conservative pundits.

Republicans argue that Obama and the Democrats in Congress have been too partisan. But let’s look at the record. Let’s consider how Democratic presidents fared with Republican Congresses, and how Republican presidents fared with Democratic Congresses. During the Reagan/Bush years when Congress was controlled by Democrats, both Presidents received meaningful cooperation in finding common ground to pursue the Administration’s agenda, as politically and ideologically difficult that was for many liberals. Even with the 8 years of George W. Bush, there was considerable Democratic support passing Bush’s huge tax-cuts for the rich, eliminating the Clinton budget surpluses, and giving political backing in an effort of national unity for the Bush/Cheney War in Iraq.

Compare this with Clinton and the Gingrich Republican Congress. Not a single Republican voted for the Clinton Economic Plan, and in the Senate the Plan only passed with VP Gore’s tie breaker! We heard the same fear mongering from Republicans then as well, arguing that the Clinton Economic Plan will ruin the country. Instead it ushered in the greatest economic growth in American History and produced some 22 million jobs in eight years! With the Republican Congress of Newt Gingrich we saw Government shutdowns, endless hearings aimed to embarrass the Democratic President and so limit his effectiveness as President, and even the Impeachment and Trail of President Clinton over an affair with Monica. The same pattern of Republican Obstructionism can be seen now with President Obama. There has not been a single Republican vote, Senate or House, for any of President Obama’s initiatives. Not the Recovery Act, not the Health Care Reform Bills, not the Green Energy Bill, nothing! Zero! No support! Just blame and spin that Obama and the Democrats are too partisan!

Republicans may have overplayed their political hand, however! With the lose of a super-majority in the Senate, and continued Republican Obstructionism, the Democrats may have no option now than ‘go it alone’, invoking the Senate Reconciliation process that requires only a simple majority of 51 votes to pass Obama’s Program. Democrats can and must pass real Health Care Reform that voters wanted when they voted for Obama. Not the watered down compromised bill that in effect sets the status quo interests in stone. Obama and the Democrats must produce! Otherwise they are politically done for. They will lose the left and they will be ridiculed by the right, while the independent center will become more cynical, more disillusioned, more apathetic. Losing Kennedy’s seat may be a blessing in disguise. It frees the democrats to be Democrat!

Republicans will paint this election result as a total repudiation of the Health Care Reform Bill and the “Obama Agenda” that is taking the country they claim in the wrong direction and people don’t like it and are angry. And Democrats will point to a flawed campaign by Martha Coakley and repeat Speaker Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “all politics is local”. It’s not the Democratic Party that failed, it’s the Democratic candidate. Just as Democratic candidates failed in New Jersey and Virginia last November. They will point to the ‘personal popularity’ of President Obama and make references to historical mid-term election loses by the Party in Power.

But it’s hard to sugar-coat this defeat. We are already seeing democrats scrambling for cover and the Democratic Party imploding. With the yet to be passed Health Care Bill, such disarray within the House and Senate Democrats is disheartening and defeatist. Passing the Bill is going to be a great political challenge for the Democrats. Senator Jim Webb, who I respect tremendously, already declared that all efforts to pass the Health Care Reform Bill should seize until Scott Brown is sworn in. Clearly Sen. Webb sees his own political fortunes affected by this election in a conservative state like Virginia and wants to get in front of this issue before the tide shift drowns him. And he is not the only one. We already have Democratic Senators Dodd and Dorgan not seeking re-election seeing their poll numbers drop.

Facing danger, the natural instinct is to ‘fight or flee’. Republicans after the election of Obama stood together and fought the political fight of their lives. It remains to be seen how the Democratic Party will react to this equally perilous election of Scott Brown. Will they ‘fight for’ or will they ‘flee from’ their convictions. If their recent track record is any indication, my fear is that they will ‘flee’ in the arms of Conservative Ideology. That will be a great mistake! History is shaped as much by great events as by our response to these cataclysmic events. How we respond depends on how we see the underlying causes to such events. Just a short year ago common people and the majority of independent voters came out in unprecedented numbers to vote for the ‘change we can believe’. Obama won Massachusetts by a margin of 27 points. In national elections Massachusetts consistently voted Democratic. The state has been a bastion of democratic values forever, it seems. How could these same people now don’t see the same need for change as they did just a year ago?

The election of Scott Brown can only be a reflection of the great anger and disappointment that the people feel with the Presidency of Obama and with the conditions and uncertainty they feel daily in their lives. To say that the people rejected “Obama’s Agenda” of change after voting for exactly that change just a year ago turns political logic on its head! Closer to the truth is that Obama has not lived up to the change that he promised as a candidate, and people are angry, disillusioned and confused. They see a continuation of the Bush years! And they had it with politicians and want to send a message.

People are angry about Washington’s bailout of Wall Street while they suffer through the worst economic times since the Great Depression. They are angry about the obscene bonuses and compensation that Bank CEOs get, even as the rest of the ‘real economy’ is in a ditch. They see Obama’s policies addressing these economic problems as nothing more than a continuation of the Bush years. The TARP bailout started with President Bush and picked up and continued now by President Obama. They see large corporations like GE and AIG being bailed out, adding hundreds of billions of federal debt that their children will have to carry for generations. And they see an unending military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan now perpetuated by no other than Obama himself. So, these good people of Massachusetts say to themselves, “what has changed?” With their vote yesterday they answer “Nothing has changed!”

By spending a fraction of the cost of wars (let alone thousands of lives lost) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and who knows where else, we can secure our borders, protect our shipping ports, airports and critical infrastructure from terrorism. But for Senator Joe Lieberman and others, doing everything physically possible to protect the nation against terrorism is not enough. Instead we are admonished and warned by these armchair warriors that we must collectively think, breath and talk of War with a common enemy: Islamic Terrorism. These war hawks will connect all dots to this same one Enemy, no matter what the alternatives. Their actions and War talk only legitimize Islamic radicals, validate their cause and make them stronger, not weaker. Sen. Lieberman wants to put thoughts in our minds and  words in the mouth of our President, and we must not let him.

Why is War talk so important to Lieberman and others like him? Because War defines an Enemy. It sharply draws the lines between Us and Them. It’s speech calculated to divide and conquer. It stirs our national instincts and often obscures Truth and Reason. It makes people fearful and so easier to mainpulate and control. It allows government excesses and restricts our rights (as with the Patriot Act). War talk inflames our passions, setting one group of people against another, and makes killing and destruction honorable, patriotic and Godly! And War talk does this on both sides of the great divide, making War that much more probable and justifiable. For all the ‘good’ we did, we now have more, not less, anti-American attitudes rising among the Islamic world, especially among the well to do educated classes that understand what is going on. Furthermore, all this is very much part of the War talk geo-political calculations made in our name. These hawks through their actions and policies have created our Enemy! Lieberman’s War talk politics is driving America (and the World) to Destruction.

The two recent terrorist acts within our borders (at Ft Hood and in a Little Rock recruiting station) were carried out by our very own citizens. As deplorable as these acts are, these are not “piercing of our defenses by the Enemy”, as Sen. Lieberman described them (and would like us to think) on Sunday’s CNN State of the Union news program. Would Lieberman describe Timothy McVeigh’s bombing that killed some 300 people in Oklahoma City, as having pierced our National Defenses? But it suites his agenda and world view to so describe the Ft. Hood shooting and the failed Detroit bombing as the Enemy piercing our National Defenses. It reinforces his War talk and gives the policies he promotes greater political weight.

We are far more directly threatened by our crumbling economy and frayed social fabric, our disfunctional schools and disappearing factories, our many more school shootings, work place and domestic violence, desperate acts of survival by our own homeless citizens, than by one lone Nigerian boy with powder explosives sewn in his jock strap, setting himself on fire in a misguided and clumsy attempt to detonate a bomb over Detroit – a bomb that has to first be set afire in order to detonate (much like Richard Reid’s shoe explosives). If that’s the threat we face from Al Qaeda, than we have nothing to fear but Lieberman’s ‘War talk’ fear itself!

America is weaker as a nation now than before 9/11 thanks to the War talk and actions of Lieberman, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. Their miscalculation that this is the right historical moment for the ascendency of their world vision is dragging America and our friends down a dark hole and uncertain future. And countries like China and Iran stand to gain most from our misadventures. We must not put all our national eggs in Lieberman’s basket case and call it War!

The “mandate to buy” may be the “poison pill” in the Bill. Without a doubt this provision will be challenged in the courts. And if the conservative Supreme Court decides this mandate to be unconstitutional, than the whole thing badly unravels! That will be the end of not only the latest attempt for health care reform, but the Presidency of Obama. So the question is, “who put this pill in the Bill? What compromise deal was struck with whom?” I am suspicious and see the underhanded influence of special interests and fanatical opponents of the ‘democratic agenda’ working in surreptitious and Machiavellian ways to keep hold on real Power (not the power that Democrats think they now have!). Democrats as usual lack the political sophistication and canny to uncover such orchestrated and elaborate political plots.

If the opponents of Health Care Reform spend many hundreds of millions in advertisements, lobbying efforts, political organizing and influence buying up to the very day of the Bill’s passage, what makes anyone think that they would then quietly recede in the background and adjust to the new realities? Entrenched Power has layers and layers of fortifications constructed over decades of  territorial control to engage their opponents at different stages with new tactics. If ‘plan A’ fails, there is always plan B and C and even D. The “mandate to buy” in the Bill may be their ‘plan F’ to undo Health Care Reform. And at the same time help their Republican operatives back into Government Power.

So what would make the current Health Care Reform Bill constitutional? It may not be constitutional to “mandate to buy”, but it certainly is constitutional to collect taxes! To make the Health Care Bill constitutional we need to create real change in our Health Care System. We need to have a universal coverage Medicare for All System where government collects taxes (not “mandates to buy”) to pay for health care while private markets provide that care. It’s simple, it’s constitutional and it’s already in place. Halfway measures to appease political opponents only gives the opponents more opportunity and ammunition to kill the Bill!

Wall Street bankers took our money and once again are gambling with our lives. Instead of making loans to homeowners and small businesses to get our economy moving again, they are back to playing the same risky and reckless investment games. Our billions to them are now once again fueling another Stock Market bubble, with rising paper gains that add nothing to the ‘real economy’. The near linear rise in the Dow since last March, from 6500 to now near 10500, is a disturbing sign that the “ungodly hand of greed” is once again behind our unnatural economic cancer.

How could Wall Street be doing so well while Main Street and the Real Economy show no signs of sustainable growth? Very simply. The rise in the Dow only reflects our billions of bailout money to Wall Street which is now fueling the Stock Market bubble. Investment Bankers, like Train Robbers, are dividing the loot among themselves and their co-hoards, buying their loyalty (not talent) and calling it ‘fair compensation’. And this is our Great Disconnect! Wall Street and Main Street are on two divergent paths. The “trickle down theory” is not working (if it ever did!). The Wall Street gangs continue to give themselves billions of our money in bonuses, while the rest of the country is facing calamity of historic proportions. Can there be a Wall Street without Main Street? For the Gang of Wall strapped in their ‘golden parachutes’ this is a moot point.

In an attempt to diminish President Obama’s credibility with the people and to raise their mistrust in Government (the same Government that they ran for many decades) Republicans make the false comparison between Obama’s Social Secretary refusal to testify and Bush’s White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Political Adviser Karl Rove refusal to testify before Congressional committees over the appointments and firings of U.S. attorneys. Whereas the first isolated incident involved admittance to a social event at the White House, the circumstances with Rove, Miers, Gonzales and company involved a systematic orchestrated attempt to politicize government agencies through political appointments (and so Party loyalty) to non-political career positions. Whereas the first incident put our President at risk (exclusively the responsibility of the Secret Service), the subversion of our government to Party interests puts our Country at peril. These are not equivalent. This is a false comparison dripping with political spin.

It is so trite and so unprincipled that politicians would allow themselves to be political ‘hit men’, nothing more than hired guns doing the bidding of whoever funds their political campaigns and puts money in their pockets. Typically they look at politics as a career move and would work for that political party and special interest that will further their careers most. So you had in the past Democratic senators switching to the Republican Party (take Sen. Shelby of Alabama for example, or ex-Senator Coleman of Minnesota); or the other way, like Sen. Specter of Pa. going over to the Democratic Party just this year.

These politicians are very capable and talented people. They can do very well for themselves in so many other areas, be it business or academia or ngos (like what Pres. Clinton is doing with his Global Initiative or Vice Pres. Gore is doing with environmental issues). Why would politicians sell their souls and their integrity selling their votes to special interests and against the interest of the country? Shame on you, senators!

America needs more senators like Sen. Bennet of Colorado. And more I believe are emerging out of the ashes that Republican policies and Conservative Ideology reduced our country. In the same program I heard clear sensible arguments from Sen. Brown (D from Ohio) and Sen. Shaheen (D from New Hampshire). Their message resonates well with the American people, in spite of polls used by Republicans (like Sen. McConnell of Kentucky in the same program) to bolster their arguments.

Polls conducted by third parties, no matter how independent they claim to be, should be mistrusted. Big money and influence are behind all matters that affect government policy. The stakes are high and special interests will stop at nothing to keep their grip on power in Washington. Third party polls, as also some news networks, can be used to pressure politicians that the people are not with them. That they will lose their jobs in the next election.

There is only one poll that expresses the peoples will and need. And that is the convincing election of President Obama who promised to fix our broken Health Care System. Principled Senators like Bennet came to Washington to do the peoples business, not to just have a job. One more clear sign of the ‘change we can believe in’ with the election of Barack Obama.

It can be argued that this Panel is an independent group doing its job, without regards to timing and politics, overseeing our Health Care delivery system, looking at data objectively and making ‘best practice’ recommendations to be used by Government and Health Insurance Industry alike. This government panel, however, was appointed by a Republican President, George W. Bush. This is the same administration which, under the influence and direction of people like Karl Rove and Attorney General Gonzalez,  had politicised most every ‘independent’ government agency. We had our fill of seemingly independent regulators of our Banking System and Wall Street and Environmental Protection, and we know what happened there!  These so-called independent agencies eventually become an extension of the political party that appointed them and of the industries they regulate —  sharing personnel and often supported by them,  giving them legal and political cover to do with the public resources as they please. What’s most disturbing and dangerous is that this happens covertly under the public radar screen, giving these regulating agencies credibility they just don’t deserve. Their strategies are well-coordinated, often followed up by political news conferences aimed to reverberate the same theme and read from the same script — as we saw happen with Congresswoman Backmann and other GOP Representatives, the very day this announcement was made.

If there are conflict of interests, political interests  and Health Insurance money  behind this Panel’s new guidelines on mammogram screening ‘We the People’ need to know! We have laws on ‘Truth in Advertising’ for the products we buy on the public market. We also need laws on ‘Truth in Advocacy’ for the ideas we buy on the public airwaves as well.

Stray dogs always existed. This is not a ‘man made condition’, but a condition of Nature. Brits and Americans round up strays and put them in shelters. Although this puts strays out of sight, the problem does not go away. Just like the problem of crime does not go away by building more prisons and locking up more people! For every animal abuse  in Greece even greater abuses can be found in some dog shelters and in dog fighting farms in the US and UK. Conditions for strays in Greek city streets are much better than their neutering and caging and eventual euthanasia in most British and American dog shelters.

Greeks just deal with strays differently. Since ancient times Greeks believe in Nature, in Freedom and in Coexistence. Greek strays (like Greeks themselves) are free to roam in peaceful coexistence with their surroundings. Whereas these critics would see strays sleeping in the shady side of a city street offensive, I celebrate such sight and see in it ample evidence of the same spirit in modern Greeks as with their illustrious ancestors. Or don’t you believe there were strays in ancient Athens? Some even may have laid side by side with Socrates and Plato absorbing the wisdom these critics lack.

Republican spin-masters interpret these results as Obama’s policies being rejected by the people. That the people fear the changes Obama is seeking in solving the many problems created by prior Republican Administrations. That the people would rather go back to the ‘good old days’ of a country governed by Conservative Ideology the past thirty years. Such self-serving political tea leaf reading can only be as successful as the confusion, uncertainty and fear that people feel these days. And that’s what makes these political pronouncements dangerous. They feed on peoples fears and confusion, stoking political hot buttons for narrow special interests, taking us down the road of America’s demise. We must not let these misleading views take hold of our national consciousness.

The real story in yesterday’s election is the repudiation of Conservative Politics in the Congressional Election of the 23^rd District in Upstate New York. Republicans held this seat for more than one hundred and forty years! In this election you have a clear contest between Democratic policies as represented by President Obama and Conservative Ideology as represented by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, who actively campaigned for the Conservative candidate. This was an election for a member of Congress! This was a clear referendum of where the people stand on national and not local issues. And in this election Bill Owens the Democratic candidate won, with little campaigning at that.

Democrats across the country should take heart and see this victory as a clear signal that people want change. That going back to the same policies and the same people and the same solutions of the past thirty years that brought America to its economic knees is no longer an option. We must move forward with the kind of change that President Obama can only bring about. Not Socialism, but a functioning government that can serve the people and not the narrow special interests. America is strong only when its people are strong and secure. Obama understands that. Republicans can only spin this Truth with clever political curlicues.