Sometimes the only action you can take to prove you mean business, is to take no action and do no business at all.  Thursday October 29, 2009 is an opportunity to demonstrate that we are not satisfied with the current state of affairs.  We want the changes that are desperately needed if we are to survive as a republic.

We need to end our participation in Bush’s terror wars.  The violence in Afghanistan is intensifying, with October proving to be the deadliest month since Bush’s invasion in 2001.  How is it possible that the Obama Administration is seriously considering adding more bodies to that futile fight?  What is the goal?  Raisin Brain would never give a direct answer to the often asked question for a clearly-defined objective in Afghanistan.  Now that the puppet Karzai government is in place (and his brother possibly on the CIA payroll), why are we still there?

How much longer before we realize that simply throwing our troops into that slaughterhouse is accomplishing nothing, except creating more innocent dead Americans and Afghans, increased Taliban control, and a growing hatred and mistrust of the American occupiers?  Given the known historical fact that no foreign nation has ever – in recorded history – successfully conquered that nation, why in the world are we still there?  Isn’t that the very definition of insanity – taking the same action over and over and expecting a different result?

It’s not unlike the ridiculous debate over meaningful health insurance reform.  Is there honestly a thinking person anywhere in America who believes the current system is not seriously broken?  That every other industrialized nation in the world has it backward, but we’ve got it right?  That’s it’s okay for private insurance and pharmaceutical companies to deny (often life-saving) medical treatment and needed medications because a patient is too poor to afford it, while their profits increase to obscene levels annually? Is that what’s best for Americans?  Really?

Again, what is to be debated here?  As with the history of Afghanistan, the state of health care in America vs. health care around the world is an established fact.  Numbers don’t lie.  We have the most wasteful, costliest system – in terms of taxpayer dollars and lives lost – in the industrialized world.  Why is there any question about that?  Why did President Obama abandon single-payer almost as soon as the legislation was proposed?  Why now is a public option such a bone of contention?  There’s not an American alive – outside the wacko Libertarian fringes – that would dismantle Medicare, so why not extend it to everyone?

Uh oh, I think I just heard Rep. Michelle Bachmann reach for a razor blade . . . and Glenn Beck is pulling out the Vicks Vap-o-rub . . .

Change.  Such a simple word, so full of hope and promise.  Right now, we need less noun, more verb.

Join the national strike, as we are at the Malloy Show, and demonstrate in this small way that we expect and desperately need what we were promised, what we demand.