I know some of my blog posts can get a little heated. I get down on myself sometimes, and I think “Why can’t I be civil, not so nasty”? I thought about it, and I think that what really gets my goat is bullying. People doing unto others because they can. As if to say,”I know I’m doing wrong, but I don’t care. Try to stop me”. That is what gets me so riled up about this national health care partisan war. Also the voting rights war. White, Republican state legislators are trying, and in some cases succeeding, in passing Jim Crow-type laws designed to limit the black vote. They will tell you otherwise, maybe naming some outlier state or somebody who supposedly said something, but it is all smoke and mirrors. They are trying to disenfranchise African-American voters, with an eye on dishonestly “winning” the presidency.

Now I will discuss Black Lives Matter. That movement was born of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and has been stoked by other officer-involved shootings and other conflicts involving blacks, usually men, but there have been some women. Some of those were clearly deliberate murder on the part of the officer(s). Others, it isn’t so clear. People believe what they want to believe. On both sides, officer and citizen.

So, with the power of numbers, and the leveraging of social media, we have Black Lives Matter. I understand that yesterday, the day before Christmas, they disrupted traffic at the airport in Minneapolis, as well as the Mall of America. There were some arrests. That was expected, and that won’t stop them. What I don’t like is the way they are victimizing people, in some cases other black people, who had nothing to do with their problem. I guess it’s the idea of collateral damage. You do what you have to do to get results, and if innocent people get hurt along the way, it’s okay.

See, they don’t have a problem dealing with police in this circumstance. They know that the police know they are being watched and recorded, and won’t hurt them. Neither will the average Joe or Jane. What I would like to see is for them to try to disrupt an outlaw motorcycle club run, say some kind of benefit run or whatever where a chapter has an organized ride. They would be beaten and stomped. So of course you won’t see anything like that.

Dylann Roof, when he killed those peaceful churchgoers in Charleston, said that his intent was to start a race war. BLM was already up and running before that shooting. But he doesn’t sound so crazy now, does he? Not when you have masses of mostly very young people deliberately inflaming racial tensions. To what end? What do they think they are accomplishing? I will bet you that, when these people get older, they will look back on this episode in their lives with some embarrassment. You might even see some blogs or magazine articles, with the heading “I Was a BLM Protestor”.

I would like to make some observations about the state of health care in the United States. We are dead last among the developed countries http://time.com/2888403/u-s-health-care-ranked-worst-in-the-developed-world/. Our health care system is broken. President Barack Obama took an enormous gamble during his first term by implementing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) over the scorched-earth opposition of the Republican Party. He rammed it through with Democratic majorities in both houses. He jammed it right up their nose. It was the only way it could have possibly been done.

Bill Clinton tried to get health care reform passed, with the help of Hillary, back in 1993.. This is an excerpt of a speech he gave to a joint session of Congress in 1993: “Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans—most of them working people and their little children—have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on Earth.”

This is the background against which President Obama rammed his health care plan through. What an example of courage. Obamacare was a good part of the reason why Democrats lost so many seats in Congress in 2010. President Obama is derided by the right wing as being weak and ineffective. Along with presiding over the assassination of Osama bin Laden, this health care plan was one of the most manly things he has done in office. Rather than being weak, he took a steamroller, shifted into first gear, and said “let’s roll”. He rode over those silly Republicans like the sheep that they are. He made them call him daddy.

Now that they have been defeated, do they accept defeat like honorable men (and women)? Of course not. The Republicans are trying every trick in the book to get rid of the ACA. Their snakelike Cuban senators Cruz and Rubio are trying to stab the President and the American public in the back. If they had a better plan, that would be one thing. But they have nothing. Just rigid ideology and idiocy. Ben Carson compared the ACA to slavery. Huh? That makes no sense. Getting people the health care that they need is the same thing as kidnapping people and forcing them to work without pay? I can’t believe it. And Senator Rafael Cruz reads “Green Eggs and Ham” during a filibuster, which ultimately succeeded in shutting the government down for 13 days and costing the taxpayers 4 billion dollars.

We have divided government. The social issues, to me, are secondary. The health care issue is life and death for many American citizens. We need to get these sons of devils out of office and get some honorable people in there who are willing to do the honorable people’s business, not bow and scrape and kiss the ring of the top 1%.

I came across a web article from December of last year by a gentleman named Allen Clifton. He is the operator of a website called forwardprogressives.com. The post is titled “Why I’ve Decided to Stop Calling Myself a Liberal”. That certainly piqued my curiosity, so I read further. This is the link: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/ive-decided-stop-calling-liberal/

I have come to the conclusion that the left side of the political spectrum, while not as egregious as the right, has its own problems. It feels to me as though, if I don’t buy the whole agenda, I’m a traitor, closet conservative, racist, etc. I have a couple of pet peeves. One is gay marriage. I believe that the only reason gay marriage has succeeded is because of political clout. There are a lot of homosexuals, and they can swing considerable weight. So the politicians are intimidated and cowered. I might add that there are those who are very sincere. The problem I have is that, if we are going to allow homosexuals to marry, why stop there? What is immoral about bigamy? Or polygamy? Or incest? Yes, I know about the possibility of genetic abnormalities in an incestuous pregnancy. As long as the people involved are consenting adults of sound mind acting on their own free will, why the hell not? Why do we single out one sexual minority and give them the marriage license and then deny others? Why, because it is politically expedient. I would say that, either allow all sexual combinations to marry, or just limit marriage to what it has always been, and allow the rest civil unions with all the benefits, state and federal, of marriage. That way, you’re not screwing anybody and you are reserving marriage for traditional families, the way it has been for centuries.

Then of course, drum roll….you have Black Lives Matter. I have to say right off that the idea behind it is valid. There are and have been too many instances of police misconduct involving blacks. I just would like to say that the seed of the whole movement is a fraud. When you talk to a liberal, all they will want to call the Ferguson incident is murder. The truth of the matter, and you can find it here:https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/03/16/lesson-learned-from-the-shooting-of-michael-brown/ I have been watching MSNBC for several years. It is now in transition from being a liberal news outlet to a straight, slightly left news outlet, prominently featuring the Republican-accommodator Chuck Todd and the fallen-from-grace newsreader Brian Williams. But back a couple of years ago, you could see each and every show host virtually foaming at the mouth regarding the “murder” in Ferguson. And then there is an even earlier tragic shooting, that of Trayvon Martin at the hands of the half-Hispanic vigilante neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. Now, it is true that he should not have been armed, and should not have followed Trayvon through the neighborhood. But there was evidence presented that Zimmerman may well have been in the process of having his head bashed against the pavement, an action that could have killed him. If that was true, and it was not disproved, then Zimmerman had every right to shoot in self-defense. In other words, the incident’s genesis was his fault, but it may have evolved into a life-or-death situation for him. Agenda-driven liberals don’t want to be troubled with details that would spoil their narrative, any more than agenda-driven conservatives do.

I know that there are problems of long-standing between blacks and law enforcement. And I’m aware of the long history of disparagement of homosexuals. What I want to stake my political life on is that agenda-driven politics on either side is a loser, and, if a movement wants to have credibility and effectiveness, it needs to be based on the truth. And it needs not to be antagonistic and bullying to people who are not in the arena and who are just going about their business and trying to live and work.