Dream Anyway

It seems there is never enough time. Not enough time in the day to do all the things we should do. Not enough time to be with the people who mean the most to us. Not enough time to cover all the stories we want to either. Sometimes, it seems there's barely enough time to sleep, let alone dream.

That said, we're purposely taking the time today - a bit more than last Friday - to focus one more time upon the significance of today, and the incredible event that happened fifty years ago. August 28, 1963 was the day when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in American history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

That we're taking a solemn break today won't matter to the neo-cons and chickenhawks, who will still be screaming for President Obama to go to war in Syria. The debt ceiling disaster will still loom, as will a potentially catastrophic nomination for Fed Chairman by the President. Massive problems like the relatively new Republican-backed voter suppression laws will still be snapping at our nation's heels, too.

Today, every American should be taking the time to look at where we were fifty years ago, and where we are today.

As President Obama said yesterday to nationally syndicated radio host Tom Joyner and co-host Sybil Wilkes, Dr. King would likely be amazed at all the progress America has made in the last fifty years. To start with, our President is now an African American man - technically of mixed race - an idea that was unfathomable fifty years ago.

The technological progress we've made has been stunning too - even if the nation's newspaper of record has been hacked twice in less than a months' time. Dr. King would likely be surprised at what has happened to both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the last fifty years too.

He would also likely be both saddened and encouraged. Saddened by the fact that fifty years later the economic gap between blacks and whites persists, racial inequality is still so prevalent, and the simple right to vote is under renewed attack. Encouraged by the new civil rights movement and labor rights movements that are emerging around the nation.

The speech Dr. King gave, after all, was at the "March for Jobs and Freedom."

As we noted last Friday, Americans know that we haven't yet achieved King's dream. But that doesn't mean we've given up. John Lewis, an activist King knew well back in '63 is a Democratic Congressman now, still fighting for civil rights, like the right to vote. Republicans like Rep. James Sensenbrenner are also fighting alongside Rep. Lewis, just as some whites stood with African Americans on the mall that day fifty years ago.

In many different addresses throughout his lifetime, Martin Luther King Jr. reminded all of us to keep following the words of our founding fathers, to keep working towards a more perfect union.

We still agree with him wholeheartedly, fifty years later.

Life expands to fill the time every one of us is given. Make a difference with the time you have.

The Heat Is On

Life is often about expectations, and at the end of August in the Midwest, we usually expect it to be hot. The scorching heat wave now covering the Great Plains is certain to push temperatures into the triple digits throughout the region all week long -  a sure sign you'll hear someone talk longingly of the Farmer's Almanac forecast for this winter that predicts a frigid and snowy season ahead.

As ridiculously hot as the weather in the Plains region feels this week, we also expect that the relative temperature for President Obama on the topic of Syria is multiple degrees hotter than anything Midwesterners are feeling.

As the latest Reuters/Ipsos Poll confirms, Americans are cool to the idea of intervening in Syria right now. They actually like Congress right now more than the thought of getting involved in any kind of conflict. That makes President Obama's job that much harder to decide what - if anything - the U.S. may be able to do, in light of the 'moral obscenity' of the chemical gas attack that happened in Syria this past week.

Secretary of State John Kerry gave a brief address on Monday afternoon where he did note that - after U.N. inspectors had visited the site - it's undeniable that a poison gas attack has killed hundreds of Syrians.

What most media outlets and many pundits failed to pick up on was that Kerry did not explicitly say the Assad regime was responsible for killing hundreds of Syrians with chemical or nerve gas.

The fact is, we don't know if Assad's forces fired the chemical weapons, or if the rebels themselves used the chemical weapons on their own people, in an attempt to draw the United States into the Syrian conflict, to help them take down Assad. Don't think strange actions like that are impossible. Newly declassified CIA files that prove the during the Reagan era, America actually helped Saddam Hussein to gas his own people.

It's also not like Middle Eastern political relationships are easy. As Max Fisher at the Washington Post, and the Egyptian blogger The Big Pharaoh pointed out in their fantastic relational chart on Monday, Middle Eastern political alliances are anything but simple or easy to understand.

Still, what Joshua Holland, writing at Moyers & Company, also made clear is what anyone with any sense of the region already understands. While pundits on all sides - both in America and abroad - are screaming that somebody, ANYBODY, needs to take some immediate action to stop the carnage in Syria, they aren't the ones who would be on that Syrian battlefield. The pundits also aren't the ones that would have to deal with any political fallout.

Further, as anyone who studies the chart from Fisher and The Big Pharaoh can see, there is very little upside for any of the three biggest powers on the chart - the U.S., Russia, and Iran - to intervene in Syria. In fact, any intervention is almost all downside for any of the three major players - which means no matter how loud the pundits scream, there isn't likely to be any serious, sustained action to change the situation from the outside anytime soon, by the U.S., Russia, or Iran.

Think of it like the heatwave hitting the Midwest; Right now, there are people screaming about conditions that are inarguably bad. But what people are saying they want so very much, right now - whether it's the icy chill of winter or a serious military strike by the U.S. - isn't what they're going to want in six months, or even this time next year.

Presidents must act carefully so as not to make conditions worse for those who follow behind them in the future. Unfortunately for President Obama, it's almost certain that at least some of the heat he's feeling now was caused by his predecessors.

Unfortunately, the political forecast for him doesn't look to be cooling off anytime soon.

Dressed In Distress

Last Friday, we noted we didn't have time to fully cover what Eugene Robinson called the GOP's continued fantasyland behavior on Obamacare, or the simple fact as Jonathan Bernstein puts it that there won't be any GOP alternative to Obamacare because they don't have ANY plan to replace it. We've got time now, though.

We'd originally planned on addressing other issues today, since the GOP's failed rhetoric on Obamacare has already been addressed by everyone from Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein on the left, to Juan Williams,  Newt Gingrich, and the conservative-leaning Rand Corporation on the right. In other words, people who have a great deal of experience on issues like health care and federal policy making.

However, after an embarrassingly slanted op-ed piece by Senator Deb Fischer was published in a newspaper in her home state over the weekend, filed with outright lies and misinformation, we felt it was our duty to point out her mistakes. After all, on the issue of Obamacare, the Republican Party currently resembles no one so much as the foolish swindlers in the iconic children's story, "The Emperor's New Clothes." Apparently, they've even swindled one of their own in Fischer.

We won't belabor Sen. Fischer's significant inexperience in federal health care policy, or in policy making at the Federal level, or that the piece bearing her name makes a mockery of its own headline. We won't even ding Fischer on the fact that her opinion piece has all the hallmarks of being written mostly by her staff, who were obviously cribbing off talking points from the Heritage Foundation, or stealing talking points from articles at The Hill.

We'll simply note the real facts, and let Fischer's ridiculous rhetoric lie, just as she did.

First, no one forced the small business owner that Sen. Fischer quotes in her piece to hire an outside consultant. There are many organizations that have broken down the health care law into easily understandable pieces and made that info available for free, online - including the government's own Healthcare.gov. The only way Sen. Fischer's small franchisee will be assessed a penalty is if the business owner picks unaffordable plans for her workers. That would force those workers onto the exchange, where they will get a subsidy, paid for in part by the penalty to their employer.

Secondly, Fischer and her staff appear to have been purposely lying and confusing numbers regarding the costs of premiums. The non-partisan CBO estimated the impact on premiums - but not the numbers Fischer was quoting. In fact, the premium increases Fischer cited actually all happened PRIOR to the ACA kicking in - meaning private insurance companies were raising the premiums on their own, OUTSIDE of the law over the past few years, in order to pad their own pockets before they're forced to give affordable coverage.

Small businesses, by the way, are NOT, in fact moving to part-time work staffs or dropping coverage. As Jonathan Cohn cited on Friday, that UPS decided to drop spousal coverage is a business decision that many companies are making today, since most spouses today work and can get coverage on their own.

Further, as the Rand Corporation pointed out, the delay in full implementation of the employer mandate will not have any serious effects in the short term. In fact, the delay in full implementation is specifically in part because people like Fischer have been spreading lies, fear, and misinformation - making the clear implementation of the law that much more difficult.

Finally, Fischer's point that she is committed to "scrapping the ACA and replacing it" with some amorphous Republican plan is the biggest lie of all. The Republican Party has had FIVE YEARS to come up with something - ANYTHING - different. As even Newt Gingrich admitted this month, the Republican Party has NO REPLACEMENT PLAN. None.

That those who paid Fischer's way to DC are now terrified that Nebraskans will see the freshman Republican Senator has no policy clothing of her own is obvious, made ever more clear by the words they shoved under her byline this weekend.

That any Senator would allow themselves to be made a fool of by the special interests that bought them and brought them to Washington is a failure in judgment we simply can't see as anything but incompetent.