Author Archive
Take Action For Peace On Earth, Good Will To All
by Sam Osborne
To The Editor:
Peace on Earth and good will to all, by doing:
Our nation doing a better job of protecting the most innocent does not lessen the self-protective capacity of even the most self-centered who only fear for themselves above all others. Besides, if they are as self-reliant as they may wish to posture, nothing can stop them from effectively protecting themselves to the satisfaction of the heroic assessment of themselves. And the law will tell those that do not know what to do what they cannot do and they will like it or lump it.
The tragic shooting of the heroic firemen lured to their slaughter on Christmas eve is another event far beyond what has already occurred from the neglect fostered by NRA talking points fashioned of the obstructionist intent of their propaganda. The sad circumstance we face as a people is that time is too readily wasting for the speedy enough enactment of legislation to keep and remove guns from the possession of bad guys and thus we are likely not going to be able to avoid another of these tragedies.
Given the powers of the president, he may have to do as Lincoln did and issue stopgap executive orders to take action until needed legislation can be enacted. By the way, if one has not yet seen the movie “Lincoln,” it might be a good way to spend a bit time during this holiday celebration of the Prince of Peace.
Sam
A Nation Of Hope And Not Hostage
by Sam Osborne
To the editor,
After two years of trying to put the good work of the nation on hold for no other purpose than to destroy the presidency of the United States of America, haven’t members of a dwindling Republican Party stumbled across any capacity to grasp the futility and folly of their obstreperousness?
Given the interview comments made on last night’s 9/23/12 60 Minutes by the banner bearer of their defeatism, Mitt Romney, it appears that what is left of them at the bottom of the barrel are just waiting to be hauled off to the trash heap of history and discarded among a forgotten past’s bad ideas and worthless contraptions.
WE THE PEOPLE of this nation have rewarding work to do and in moments of reflection of what has and will be done there will also be a few occasions to look back in tribute and remembrance of the road traveled together with
this president and others who also served in troubled times of great achievement—maybe as far back as a previous one of the nation’s greatest, Abe Lincoln. This equally beleaguered servant of all the people ran for a second term in the White House referencing himself as candidate of the Union Party—well reflecting how our nation has and ever
will move on.
Ours is and will be a nation of hope and not hostage.
Sam
Tags: evil GOP, Mitt Romney, nation of hope, president obama, Romney on 60 Minutes | 
No Comments »
Friday Food Talk: Pink Slime For Holy Cow Week
To the editor,
This is all too much and I think that our gourmet governor of Iowa has displayed such a capacity for delivering delightfully embellished oneliners about pink slime that he should henceforth be known as Terrance O’Branstad, and that Holy Week forever more be Holy Cow Week.
Have you ever in your life had so much fun on the eve of Good Friday? As a faithful Irish Catholic, I want to tell you, O’B’s comments on “Lean (but not mean), Highly Textured Beef” eclipses every good story that I have ever heard at any wake that I have ever merrily attended—talk about a prodigious capacity to improve on the truth, would you believe it?
If himself is going to next go on Saturday Night Live to kiss the blarney stone, maybe the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame would let him borough to wear their leprechaun of mascot’s green outfit—he could put up his dukes and say, “I’m a fightin’ for pink slime.”
But, should the label say “Pink Slime” or “Lean, Finely Textured, Beef?”
If one has ever worked in or toured what use to be called a slaughter house, or just read Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel, The Jungle, he or she might think of some very descriptive names for what gets ground up and put into what needs to get well ammoniated before it is sent out to be consumed.
In pursuit of his own muckraking, our leading Iowa citizen says he wants a congressional inquiry into what prompted complaints about a meat product that some call “pink slime.”
And after the governor’s promotion of how much better PS is than prime meat (PM), it sounds like schools ought to throw out the ground beef and only feed the kids the filler—this ought to also help employment numbers in factories that make old-fashioned hamburger helper.
This promotion of PS over PM gives an imaginative conservative twist to “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
Throw out the baby and drink the bath water.
Sam
Is GOP Newspeak Destroying Our Democracy?
SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS, THUS SAY THE PIGS
“GOP subservient oinking cannot hide the fact that the amassment of more-and-more by fewer-and-fewer has destroyed jobs and increased unemployment.“
by Sam Osborne
It is time for We The People to reject the propaganda of right-wing politicians that serve the interests of those that have come to own the Republican Party and who have pocketed much of the green stuff that is red-ink debt to all Americans.
Though all individuals in this nation daily live and toil within homes and communities and not the halls of government, right-wing newspeak pretends that only a slice of a so-called “private sector” that has been economically blessed with the most will more fairly wield governing power for all than does our hard-fought-for and ensured government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
This is the Republican’s version of the “golden rule”—i.e. those that got the gold rule. On George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the edict of the dictatorial pigs would have read, “All within the private sector are equal but some are more equal than others.”
Sophistry issued to quell rightful objection to this piggish piracy charges that objectors should not engage in “class warfare.” Those that thus toady to the rape of the American people are as dismissive of justifiable concern for liberty and justice for all as was the queen of France at the dawn of their revolt that had been encouraged by the success of the American Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment. With a flick of her silk handkerchief Marie Antoinette said, “If they have no bread, let them eat cake.”
In our country, there was no bonfire into which all of the money that constitutes national debt was cast and burned; it went into the pockets of the fewer and increasingly fewer who have been stuffed full of wealth by Republican social engineering. For everyone else it is debt—the majority got the red ink and not the green loot. And GOP subservient oinking cannot hide the fact that the amassment of more-and-more by fewer-and-fewer has destroyed jobs and increased unemployment.
Now it is time to speak out and bring to an end any threat of return to the days of the plantation South when a plutocratic few “haves” contended that they were by God even entitled to own the lives of people. As with Abe Lincoln in the past, we too must now ensure that government of the people, by the people and for the people does not perish from the earth.
With an end to their entitlement of tax breaks, it is time for the privileged few who took the money that is debt to all others start paying it back.
Sam Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor, Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair, Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, appears on this blog occasionally.
Liquidating The American Dream
Liquidating the American Dream
The Obstructed View: Random Thoughts From An Idle Mind
by Sam Osborne
Re: Representative Wenthe Statehouse News 3-11-11
Dear Rep. Wenthe,
I will certainly support you in your effort to maintain what has become rusting and rotting infrastructure; however we also need to move forward into a new and better future. For the cost of this repair, a hundred mile of new electric powered rail tracks could be built, and the maintenance cost of these miles of steel ribbon would be much less than that of concrete highways.
This prompts me to think back to my youth, when Iowa and the nation were moving forward into a new era and not leaving any of us college kids behind—back then they just seemed like some more good days in which a kid’s folks assumed that their children would live even better than they were.
Now I think of them as the good old days when to go to college you did not need a loan or any help from mom and dad. And when you got out of college you had your choice of jobs, the older generation was not passing on a huge national debt to you, organized labor was helping “common” laborers move into a growing middle class, and things were made in the USA and sold all over the world.
Those great economic times started right after GIs came home from winning WW II and continued up until Ronald Reagan ran up the largest debt in the nation’s history, let the infrastructure go to rust and rot, and started busting unions. And Reagan’s debt and neglect were only exceeded by Georg W. Bush and Cheney.
Now the current crop of Republicans, with Gov. Branstad and Walker in the lead, want to finish the liquidation of the American Dream and run what is left off into the pockets of the folks that own them.
Sam Osborne
West Branch, Iowa
Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, appears on this blog occasionally.
Mr. President, Where Are We Going?
Mr. President, Where Are We Going?
The Obstructed View: Random Thoughts From An Idle Mind
by Sam Osborne
Nelson D. Schwartz, in Sunday's New York Times, wrote that job losses pose a threat to worldwide stability, and we in the United States are not exempt from the problem. Neither we nor other nations of the world have considered what it is all of us common folks are expected to do to make a living. How do WE THE PEOPLE engage in personally meaningful, financially rewarding, and culturally beneficial work?
The stimulus package that has just passed and will soon be signed into law, did not query the matter; it is a shoot-first-ask-later answer. At best, it may be enough to start towing the remains of a dying economic system off to the junkyard of things that have run their course, and to attempt to get the nation moving on into a sustainable American Dream that starts with learning, moves to working, and ends up in a place where we enjoy a quality of life that is worth living – this in place of the cancerously destructive mass consumption of people and resources in the production of landfill-destined things and in the squirreling of ill-gotten gains into Swiss bank accounts.
An emerging means for making a better and more fulfilling living is not your father’s economy, that of Adam Smith, or more of the Republicans' version of either.
Everything under the sun changes, economies included, and into history have gone food gathering and hunting, camping and trading, serfdom and servitude, mercantilism and craft/agrarian production, and industrial capitalism and the mass labor movement. Now fading into the past goes the current top-down, mass-consumption market that has ravenously eaten itself alive and discards onto the bone heap of waste no-repair appliances, the latest gadget and other junk, working people and various business owners, and now investors whose nest eggs have disappeared.
These savers are regularly discarded by means of a Ponzi scheme that used to be thought of as the financial market – a house of cards now full of ever improved financial “instruments” that gobble up loot, even that of government, and poop prolific piles of profitless paper.
To our rescue has come a man that knows how to get out in front of the parade, President Barack Obama. The march is well underway, the music is stirring, masses of people have left the curb and joined in the procession, and it may not be too long until someone yells from back of the line, Mr. President, where are we going?
Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.
Check this space every Tuesday for BFIA's weekly Health Care Reform Update by Dr. Alta Price. Tomorrow's topic: Mental Health Parity in Iowa
The Obstructed View ~ Education for Education's Sake
The Obstructed View ~ Education for Education's Sake
Random thoughts from an idle mind for the beginning of 2009
by Sam Osborne
Is education nothing more than a tool of economics, but without the bailout?
American workers have not lost their jobs to the well educated that work in sweat shops in low-standard-of-living lands. And, the idea that we are going to educate our way out of our current economic mess is pure myth.
We should run our schools as places that enrich the lives of our children and not as factories that turn out standardized parts to fit into business and industry. What will kids do with the gift of a good education? We better not have any idea – if we do, we have entered reductive times in which each generation is going to be no smarter then the dumb assed adults that are running the one that they inherited.
Our economic system is sick. Not because it is not running well, it is sick because it IS a terminal form of cancer that eats up our resources and our people in the production of things that are acquired and soon hauled off to the landfill to make room for more of the same. It is time to move to a rich culture based upon quality of life over the insane production of life consuming and environment polluting things.
It would be nice to see our government put money into education for our children’s sake. Pouring more into the greedy hands of those at the top of the economic pile will only increases the quagmire debt that has already been run up. Trickle-down economics has once again failed to produce what a mass-consumption market runs on, middle and working class consumers.
None of the businesses, which have been operated by the current crop of profiteers, folded because they were over taxed or because the huge pile of private capital dried up. The resources were skimmed off in huge bonuses and paper-profit Ponzi schemes. Yes it went somewhere, maybe into Swiss bank accounts.
The 700 billion dollar bailout (with more to come) is damning testament to the myth that economic elitists should not be heavily taxed because they will invest their great gains in creating good jobs for working Americans.
Class warfare? You bet and where is the nearest enlistment office to sign up – it would be great to serve in an outfit commanded by Michael Moore.
Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.
The Obstructed View by Sam Osborne
The Obstructed View
Random thoughts from an idle mind for the beginning of 2009
by Sam Osborne
I recently listened on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to an exchange between two legal scholars, Columbia University visiting Professor Charles Fried and Washington University Professor Jonathan Turely – the program, “The Legacy of Bush's 'War on Terror,” considered the justifiability of prosecuting Bush Administration members for authorizing the use of T….
I was frankly horrified by Fried’s cavalier dismissal of holding anyone accountable for the commission of T… in the name of We the People of the United States of America.
Fried’s dismissal could have come from some insanely excusatory dialogue given in a remake of the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg .”
From the original cinematic recounting of NAZI war crimes, best we remember some lines delivered by Spencer Tracy in portrayal of Chief Judge Dan Haywood:
“A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world – let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth…and the value of a single human being.”
Based upon what I heard Vice President Dick Cheney say in a public interview on television, there should be a formal investigation to determine if a crime of a prosecutable nature had been committed. If someone like Professor Fried knows more about this matter than I do, he should be called to testify as to what he knows that the general public does not.
For the sake of the rule of law throughout the world, this matter cannot be swept under the rug of convenience. Does Professor Fried neither know nor want to find out, or does he know and not care about what he knows?
Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.
Follow the inauguration as experienced by seven Iowans from Iowa City and Des Moines including BFIA editor Trish Nelson and Rapid Response coordinator Ellen Ballas. We'll be liveblogging right here on Blog for Iowa, providing day-by-day coverage starting Monday through Wednesday.
The Obstructed View: GOP, Bailout, Health Care, Death Penalty
The Obstructed View
Random thoughts from an idle mind for the beginning of 2009
by Sam Osborne
WILL THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FURTHER DISINTEGRATE, FADE TO THIRD-PARTY STATUS, AND EVENTUALLY ON INTO OBLIVION?
If it does,the party that replaces it will likely be positioned to the right of the Democratic Party and still reflect a Hamiltonian-Federalist preference and trust in the power of an economically positioned minority over the concerns democratically expressed by the elected representatives of a common citizenry.
In the past election, a dwindling number of progressive Republicans joined with the populist sentiment within the political center and voted with Democrats and liberals. The resultant GOP debacle struck their big tent and it may now be impossible for Abe Lincoln/Teddy Roosevelt Republicans to wrest it away from a religious right that is bent on setting it back up to hold revivals to bring the nation under control of that old-time religion.
CAN YOU BANK ON IT?
Yes, the money put into the hands of skimming capitalistic bankers is gone and they refuse to say where they are stuffing it – try looking into their Swiss bank accounts. When it is time for the “loan” money to be repaid to WE THE PEOPLE, the bankers are going to also be long gone from the banks that will no longer have the bucks to pay us back.
HOW SICK IS HEALTH CARE IN THIS COUNTRY?
Sick enough that it is time to cut the money-skimming health insurance industry out of siphoning resources away from the provision of health care and refocus decisions back to doctors and their patients.
Economic royalists that have controlled the policies of the Republican Party, have done serious damage to the nation: from the economy, to the environment, to middle and working-class income earners, to energy, and to health care.
This nation spends more on providing health care than any other nation in the world and gets less in return than do nations that provide universal health care. It is past time for this nation to adopt universal health care for all of our citizens and thus improve service and reduce financing costs.
We will continue to pay more for actual health care because of medical science’s continued capacity to enable doctors to do more. Back in Civil War days, little money was spent on aircraft carriers, reconstruction, heart transplants and reconstructive surgery. However, at Gettysburg, grave registration costs exceeded expenditures for medivac helicopter retrievals – Lincoln ’s speech was too short to commemoratively note the savings.
IS THE INTENTIONAL TAKING OF ANOTHER'S LIFE A GOOD IDEA?
States and nations that do not have the death penalty have lower homicide rates than do states and nations that have the death penalty.
Some people like the idea of people being killed for some reason that they find acceptable, and if one person can have their reason for killing, so will another.
Violence breeds violence and it starts and continues with one who is willing to cast the first or last stone. Currently it is not fashionable to be stoned.~
Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. His commentary, The Obstructed View, will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.
Iowa GOP Needs (more than a ) Sound Sound Byte
The Obstructed View
PATE’S Sound Sound Byte
by Sam Osborne
The Republican Party of Iowa Central Committee and a forum of 75 activists and officeholders from around the state have been listening to some ideas from six contenders that would like to succeed Stew Iverson as GOP state chair.
If one were to wish that the party continues its march into oblivion, best hope that they will be swayed by the absolutely neat on-message idea suggested by contender Paul Pate, a former Secretary of State and past mayor of Cedar Rapids . As Pate sees it, the debacle suffered in the last election can be attributed to nothing more than a failure in trash talk. Pate told the assembled faithful that “People are getting desensitized to it (the old Democrat tax and spend message) … What we have to do as a party is come up with that sound byte. That's what it comes down to: What is the sound byte for '09 and 2010?”
For internal and not external consideration, let me suggest a thought based upon words spoken by the first Republican to get elected to the presidency of the United States of America , Abraham Lincoln: “We were once the party that ensured ‘that government of the people, by they people and for the people would not perish from the earth.’”
Two thirds of the American people don’t care what the Republican Party wants people to think about Democrats, or about a sound byte that might set everyone thinking nice thoughts about Republicans. People care about their lives and the good state of the country in which they can enjoy the fruits of their labors.
If Republicans cannot get past their favorite mantras and self-centered outlook, like other parties that got hung up on themselves, the GOP will fade into oblivion. It was the Grand Old Party because Lincoln insisted in government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Republicans, the nation ain’t about you. Your me-me-me conservatism has bent back around to byte you in your retreating arses.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
Sam
Osborne, former college professor and business department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; former editorial writer and opinion page editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee. The Obstructed View will appear on these blog pages weekly, more or less.
- Cheating Determines Iowa’s Elections, Schultz Implies
- Cownie Unconvincing
- Too Many Little Elections?
- Like Iowa, Like Armenia
- Who Can Vote?
- Schultz Vindicated: Voter Fraud Proven!
- Schultz Raises Dead Voter Scare Again
- Repubs Stage Crime at NH Polls
- Wondering About GOP Caucus Count
- Judge Fires Voting Machine Investigators
