Care to participate? Here's a listing of some of the activities taking place at a GOP Congressional office near you:
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2011, 12:00 PM Where Are the Jobs - 6 miles away
Senator Rubio's Tampa office
58 registered participant(s) (100 maximum)
3802 Spectrum Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33612
Hosted by Christopher Radulich
Description We need to keep the pressure up on jobs. We need to express our outrage over repeating the past and destroying jobs by cutting the budget.
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2011, 4:00 PM Besiege Bilirakis - 19 miles away
Rep Bilirakis' Palm Harbor Office
54 registered participant(s) (100 maximum)
35111 US Hwy 19 N
Palm Harbor, FL 34684
Directions: Coming from the north, go past Alderman. It is on the left (east) side of the road.
Coming from the south, go past Nebraska and it is on the right (east) side of the road just before you get to Alderman.
Hosted by ali golji
Description We are gathering at Representative Gus Bilirakis' Palm Harbor Office to let him know we want more jobs & fewer benefits for the wealthiest Americans and corporations.
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2011, 10:30 AM Where Are the Jobs—Bring Back the CCC! - 24 miles away
Seminole Office of Rep. Bill Young
32 registered participant(s) (50 maximum)
9210 113th Street
Seminole, FL 33772
Directions: For directions Google Maps location: http://tinyurl.com/3tyf4gh Or Phone: (727) 394-6950.
Hosted by Jay D Alexander
Description Visit the Honorable Bill Young to discuss with him or his aide the plight of Americans suffering from underemployment and unemployment. We will also separately deliver signed petitions calling for him to co-sponsor HR 494 to re-establish the United States Civilian Conservation Corps for job creation.
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2011, 3:00 PM Where Are The Jobs - 40 miles away
Brooksville Spring Hill Drive and Airpark Blvd
32 registered participant(s) (100 maximum)
16224 Spring Hill Drive
Brooksville, FL 34604
Directions: Take 589 to Spring Hill Drive, go east 1.1 miles. Target is on the right in a small strip mall.
Meanwhile, you did read Dr. Drew's prescription on Obama on Sunday, didn't you? I do urge you to check it out. This is just a taste of a scathing rebuke from the left on our President, from the author of The Political Brain:
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting around 800,000 immigrants in two years, a pace faster than nearly any other period in American history.
THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.
As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.
The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
Just as insightful in some cases are some of the comments made by readers of the piece, which, if you have a few moments, I urge you to review.
