Only Video Games Have Cheat Codes and Reset

In the blog When is this all going to be over?...., the author states "What steps are we taking to safely remove troops from U.S. military bases in foreign countries," inferring that the decision to remove troops from the Middle East should be occurring now. Everybody is in favor of removing the troops and sending them all home to American soil, but the circumstances and consequences will not allow that to be a feasible option at this point in time. Congress issued the Bush Administration the Authorization for Use of Military Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 which allowed the Bush Administration to send the Military to occupy Iraq and search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction" from supposedly known intelligence. As well as, at the same time to investigate Al Qaeda due to the 9/11 attack. The Bush Administration then ordered the Military to destroy and then rebuild the Iraqi government as a Democracy. The fall of the Iraqi government came with the fall of Saddam Husseim, it is the rebuilding that is delicate and requires time. If the Military were to pull out of the Middle East this very moment, the chaos of not having a government now would breed the opportunity for more terroristic behavior/actions. Removing the troops now would exacerbate what the Military had originally planned, end terrorism by ending Al Qaeda.

Feeling All the Effects

The Bush Administration has left Americans with more than just a war to resolve and a bad after-taste. According to Kim Krisberg. President's 2009 Budget Plan Would Set Health Programs Back. www.apha.org. March 2008., in 2007 Bush proposed and passed a budget plan that involved massive reduction in funding for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). As of 2009, the CDC's funding will take a massive cut of $412 million. A large portion of this funding would have gone towards helping in preventative care, such as for annual illnesses and HIV/AIDS.

The CDC gets most of the money used for research from Grants, about 85%. The money received from grants must be divided amongst current, relevant studies going on in America. The money is primarily used for statistics, research studies, and informative prevention. Now having to deal with a large funding reduction, the CDC may be faced with compromising progressive work in research. The research field for HIV/AIDS has been affected by the lack of funding. According to Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. CDC Needs Increased Funding For HIV Prevention Efforts, Advocates Say. www.thebody.com. May 13, 2008., the funding received from the government provides enough money for upkeep of HIV activity but not enough for monitoring of HIV. In other words, the new cases of HIV to the CDC are unknown and rising, particularly in people under 25. This is due to the lack of preventative information available, for awareness and safety, the CDC makes public with the knowledge of fairly accurate, current statistics on HIV/AIDS activity.

The CDC also provides funding, received from grants, for current studies on the condition of food. The CDC's studies can help the food industry by providing insight on possible food contamination, such as salmonella or ecoli. This information saves a lot of money for the food companies in call-backs and saves a lot of money in patient care. Research studies also help in alertness with annual illnesses such as the current Swine Flu epidemic. By increasing the funding for the CDC to at least what it once was would be a tremendous help for the Health Care fight in America.

Captital Punishment, a Pseudo-solution

The blog Warning: We Must Save Innocent Lives posits that "The death penalty helps prevent future crime a murder has been deterred from committing more crimes when he is executed." This conclusion was made using data gathered by the Gallup Poll, which is emotionally stemmed fluxuating opinions, and a study more than 20 years old that arbitrarily claims for every execution 18 murders are deterred.
The statement made by the author, "The death penalty prevents murders from murdering again and saves innocent lives and we must choose the option that saves innocent lives," is misleading and no way to be proven. I do agree with the fact that if someone were to be executed they would not be able to murder anybody due to the fact that they would cease to exist, but the claim to know their future intentions is far fetched. There is no way to be sure that someone will take another life again and there is no way to be certain that by executing someone you are saving an "innocent" life. With this idea all one would be achieving is deterring the possibility of one person committing a murder crime.
In the blog Warning: We Must Save Innocent Lives the claim was made that "the death penalty helps prevent future crime." According to www.disastercenter.com/crime/, the statistics do not support this conclusion. This website includes statistics from the year 2007. In 2007 from the 36 states that do enforce the death penalty the average number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants was about 6.2. In 2007 from the 14 states that do not enforce the death penalty the average number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants was about 3.1. According to these statistics capital punishment has very little or no effect as a deterrent.
However, I do agree with the author that feeding the system money for long-term imprisonment is not an effective enough way to deal with murder crimes as a deterrent. I believe there are other successful methods as a means of deterrence such as organizing neighborhood watches and after-school programs for young teens and young adults. Methods of prevention prove to have more effective outcomes than dealing with problems as they come.
Justifiable murders, capital punishment, is not the answer to dealing with murder crimes. All it may do is serve as an irrational quick-fix for the victims unfortunately going through a tragedy.

The Panacea

A timeless, possibly effortless, issue that sparks relevance within the fields of medicine, politics and the economy, and one that President Obama cannot seem to avoid at the moment, is the decriminalization of marijuana. At this point in time, I feel that this argument can be looked upon and solved with the method of choosing between the lesser of two evils. One being to make marijuana a criminal offense and in doing so, inducing the crime rate by possession or drug violence. The other being to legalize as well as place extreme regulations on marijuana usage and possibly see an incline in traffic accidents or other accidents due to reasons assumed to be the cause of increased usage. Both methods have the intention of protecting society from possible harm thought to be associated with the usage of marijuana. Our government currently is in favor of the first option. I am in favor of the latter option.

I feel the medical community would benefit tremendously from the use of marijuana in the treatment process to ease the negative effects of certain ailments, such as cancers. Many patients undergoing chemotherapy as treatment for cancer can experience lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, insomnia, and/or pain. All of these symptoms can make not only the experience more sufferable, but can have the effect of prolonging the healing process. Medicinal marijuana can be specifically engineered to combat all these negative effects.
Dalene Entenmann. Medical marijuana pot pill approved for chemotherapy. The Cancer Blog. May 16, 2006.

I feel that punishing the offenders of marijuana crimes is unnecessarily costly to the government as well as tax payers. The amount of people in American society that partake in marijuana activities has overwhelmingly increased in just 15 years. We know this by the amount of arrests due to marijuana offenses that occurred within 1991 (288,000 arrests), compared to the arrests that happened in 2006 (830,000 arrests). Either Americans became apathetic and conspicuous with their illegal engagements or more of society is now accepting and embracing marijuana. With every arrest money is spent for the police officers' time patrolling, money is spent when processing and booking an offender, money is spent to maintain an offender in jail, and money is spent in an effort to stop the trafficking and using marijuana (the War on Drugs).Paul Armentano. 20 Million Arrests, and Counting. In These Times. September 25, 2008. The campaign for "War on Drugs" has never really been a successful one, only ongoing. In decriminalizing marijuana and placing strict regulations on the possession and/or usage of marijuana not only will the government have more control than they ever have before or will on the movement of marijuana within American society, but the government can make a sufficient amount of money by placing a tax on marijuana similar to the tax on alcohol.

Politics Can Wait, This is Blogging

Located in the Real Clear Politics blog, the headlining article, "More Non Journalism From Huffpo," Tom Bevan. More Non Journalism From Huffpo. Real Clear Politics Blog. March 27, 2009. is attempting to expose the Huffington Post for being a website that lacks professional journalistic skills required to determine level of importance within the forever active world of politics. The author of this blog, Tom Bevan, references a specific writer from the Huffington Post, Ryan Grim, of having two articles that fall short of the political mark. Not only does this author think Grim fails to speak about big news in politics, but that Grim distorts his information when covering stories.

The author shares an example of one of Grim's articles that discuss the context of a debate over a budget idea between two senators. The main idea of Grim's article was driven by a comment made by Sen. Grassley of Iowa directed towards Sen. Conrad of North Dakota. Grim wrote about the comment as if Sen. Grassley was inappropriately talking about Sen. Conrad's wife during a public debate. In fact, Tom Bevan, shows the origin of this comment and claims Grim misunderstood the context of the comment. Tom Bevan expresses that the Huffington Post can only find time to write about tabloid-like articles to captivate an audience. He posits, "It's not like it was a terribly slow news day, either...I guess those subjects just aren't "sexy" enough for the Huffington Post."

I feel Tom Bevan could not be more hypocritical. With such an eventful day in politics, Bevan can still find time and space to talk badly about the journalism at Huffington Post. Not only is Bevan displaying hypocrisy as he is presenting his article, but I feel he is also doing a poor job of bringing down Ryan Grim's ability to write about politics. One of the examples Bevan uses to breakdown Grim's journalism is the exposing of Eric Cantor's whereabouts during President Obama's presser. Bevan makes the comment, "as if members of Congress have some Constitutional obligation to watch the president in prime time." Well as an important representative of the Republican Party acting as the Minority Whip, I agree with Grim that Eric Cantor being at a Britany Spears concert instead of Obama's presser is political news. However, Bevan's choice of journalism to talk badly about another political blog website has no place in political news, let alone as a headliner.

A Bias Opinion Gone Wrong

This article of opinion, An Inconvenient Tax, is referring to President Obama's speech to Joint Session of Congress on February 24th, 2009. The author makes an argument that Obama has placed a veil of illusion over his speech to deceive or distract the public of foreseen tax revenues by stating "95% of working families will not see taxes rise, "not a single dime," the author quotes Obama. The author's focus is on "climate revenues," that can be found in Obama's White House Budget plan. The author posits, "his own budget reveals that taxes will rise for 100% of everyone for the sake of global warming.....White House discloses that it expects $78.7 billion in new tax revenue in 2012 from its cap-and-trade program. The pot of cash grows to $237 billion through 2014, and at least $646 billion through 2019." He goes on to state that this is a tax that the government neglects to mention along with the new plan to keep the jobs available and create more jobs or claim this to even be a "tax." An Inconvenient Tax. The Wall Street Journal. February 27th, 2009.

After reading Obama's speech I feel the author of An Inconvenient Tax was motivated enough to search for anything that might contradict President Obama's ideas for appropriately dealing with this economic crisis. It would seem as if the author's motive stems from difference in ideologies. However, I believe this author to be applying Obama's immediate, short-term responses to economic crisis too far into the future than Obama's budget planned, possibly after crisis is maintained. Obama says in his speech "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90% of these jobs will be in the private sector-." This speech is referring to what this plan will do for working families in America over the next two years, 2009-2010 & 2010-2011. The author of An Inconvenient Tax lists projected tax revenues of Cap and Trade that begin in 2012-2013. Remarks of President Barack Obama. Thewhitehouse.gov. February 24th, 2009.

An Article for Optimism

The article, "What the $787b stimulus would do for consumers," examines what the stimulus package will offer to consumers and how consumers as well as the economy will be affected. The economists made predictions of how effective the stimulus will be for consumers, more specifically unemployed to low-middle income citizens, based on statistics from similar, past situations. As you can tell from the author's statement, "The bankers are getting their bailouts. Now it's your turn," he believes the outlook to be desirable for both sides, the consumer and economy. Robert Gavin & Erin Ailworth. What the 787b Stimulus Would Do For Consumers. Boston.com. The Boston Globe. February 13, 2009.

I believe the content within the article WAS worth reading when it was first proposed by Bank CEO John Allison in September 2008 as a better, more effective idea than proceeding with bank bailouts. Adam Brandon. Bank CEO Explains Why Bailout is a Bad Idea. Freedomworks.org. September 24, 2008. (example Key Points (found in CEO's letter), paragraph 5)