ilovemylife: IT'S YOU - NOT ONLY THE CANDIDATE

Some would have us believe that the USA was founded upon Christian principles. If that is true, why is the Golden Rule not adhered to?
"Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you."

RESPONSIBILITY BELONGS TO THE VOTER

I was not politically tuned in very much until the last 11 years. Now, I am anxious because I see a country that is not tuned in. Just like I was until my 50s. Throughout my life, my intuitive perceptions have proven correct in my experiences. And my intuition and knowledge of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are strong and I am afraid of what is for me potentially a huge mistake. That mistake is another four years of the Republicans leading this country. Another four years of the secrecy, the lack of care for all of “We The People”, placing U.S. Supreme Court Justices in power of more conservatives with less balance of the whole picture, and less chance of holding accountable those who have broken the laws over the last (almost) 8 years. Justice and equality look less and less like the headline of the country's values and standards and just something to dress up in words that take the integrity away from what makes these words so powerful. Truth has been robbed. Intimidation, abuse of power and gaining power are the mainstay of our political house.

When I hear anyone say anything that rings with a capital T for Truth, I think, "Wow, some sanity". It is rare.

McCain and Palin physically affect me. A heavy feeling comes over me. I have barely been hanging on during Bush/Cheney and the really, really poor media touted as news. I am starved to hear intelligence come out of my President and Vice-President. I see that in Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I feel healthy when I hear them speak.

These catch words of "elite", "Reverend Wright", "most liberal", "muslim" that really are not inherently bad words but they are used as heaping negativity upon Barack Obama are fuel for depression.

Barack is said not to connect. Then why do people turn out in monumental numbers to see him live?

I hear people say that Barack has no stand on this issue or that issue, but when I ask the person who says that if they have done any work to find out Barack's stands. The answer is no.

I hear the pundits say what Barack isn't doing correctly to reach certain groups of people. Here, is what I say about that: It isn't all up to Barack. THE People have responsibilities to get more engaged, become a part of their participatory government and get educated. We are not educated. We don't know what our country is doing within our elected politician committees, in their offices and we are narcissists. On the whole, we have virtually no knowledge of the rest of the world. And that is wrong. Wrong. Barack Obama's philosophy is to lead but to be an intelligent leader by power through gaining respect by word and deed and not inflating respect by mighty force.

We act like we know-it-all. Forget what we say. We act like we are the only ones in the world who can say what is the right way or wrong way. The truth is that is just our opinion of ourselves. The rest of the world doesn't feel this way about us on the whole.

We can say that is doesn't matter what the other countries’ citizens think of us. But 9/11, Bush/Cheney’s reaction to 9/11 and our invasion into Iraq shows that the truth is that it does matter.

It is time for us to be a team player. We could be point guard. But even that requires that the other team members respect us on their terms. There is a song "I Can't Make You Love Me, If You Don't". It is true about our standing in the world. We can't shoot our way to being respected. For us to carry any weight in negotiating, we need to have citizens of the world respect us. And the Bush/Cheney administration has diminished the respect the USA has had in the past.

MEDIA FAILURE

Our media is a disaster. It doesn't report the news - it strives to feed our weaknesses. It chooses to entertain us. We get so very little news about the poor people of this country, the deep problems within our own borders. Importantly also, news from other countries and peoples of the world is direly unreported. It is a disaster. It is narcissism.

One example: I get my news about Darfur more from the activist lists that I am a member of or online. The newspapers in my area scarcely mention the five and a half year genocide in Darfur, Sudan. And the television coverage is so scant that it is still an unknown crisis to many of our citizens.

Here is an article that I read in my Newsweek magazine about an issue that has been neglected – cancer. Neglected by our government whose number one priority is to look out for “We The People”.

What the Next President Can Do

If a war were killing 565,000 Americans a year, you'd hear more than one or two references to it at the party conventions.

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:49 PM ET Sep 6, 2008

I'm a four-year cancer survivor, and when people inquire how I'm feeling nowadays I say "good" and sincerely thank them for asking. But some well-wishers respond awkwardly. One politician I know has me in his mental file under "cancer" and accompanies his hearty hello with "Glad you beat it!" As anyone who has had advanced cancer can tell you, this is understandable but unhelpful. It also reflects why politicians are still so out of touch about the disease.

At bottom, they don't want to face the truth, which is that they've failed to protect the lives of our citizens. If a war were killing 565,000 Americans a year (and none of our wars ever has), you'd hear more than one or two references to it at the party conventions. And we'd be doing better fighting it.

The fact is, most cancers remain incurable. Fewer than a half dozen cancer drugs show great results. So it's no wonder survivors get nervous during checkups for many years after diagnosis. The five-year survival marker used by doctors is statistically arbitrary and only partially reassuring.

Consider the case of John McCain. He underwent surgery in 2000 for stage IIa melanoma, a potential deadly skin cancer. The surgery found no dangerous spreading and McCain received no chemo or radiation. Good signs. He's been cancer-free for eight years, which is even better. But the statistics, however inexact, remain a bit unnerving. For those who stay cancer-free for five years, the probability of recurrence of stage IIa melanoma is 14 percent. The probability of death is 9 percent, which doesn't even include the many other diseases from which a 72-year-old man faces sharply increased risk of mortality. (And nearly a third of those who live past 70 will suffer some cognitive impairment.) This is why giving Gov. Sarah Palin a thorough media scrubbing isn't some left-wing media jihad. It's simple prudence.

McCain neither ignores nor emphasizes his cancer experience. He skipped a Lance Armstrong LIVESTRONG Cancer Forum in Iowa in 2007 but appeared with Armstrong in July in Columbus, Ohio, where he shared his melanoma history, advocated sunscreen and explained his Senate work pushing mammography. Press coverage was skimpy as usual (not enough conflict in cancer for reporters), in part because the event came during Barack Obama's trip abroad. So the media missed a good story about just how badly McCain wants to win this election.

In 1997, McCain was passionate on the subject of tobacco, which kills hundreds of thousands of Americans a year. He used his position on the Senate Commerce Committee to advance strong new regulation of the tobacco industry and a new federal tax on cigarettes of more than $1 a pack, with the proceeds going to smoking prevention and medical research. The bill passed the Senate but was killed in the GOP House. So presumably McCain will move on this if he's elected. Country first, right?

Well, no. McCain once angrily tossed Philip Morris lobbyist Charlie Black out of his office; today Black is one of his closest political advisers. To get nominated in the Republican Party—and to make his tax attacks on Obama stick—McCain feels he must oppose all new taxes, even one he once championed. His excuse is that he worries Congress would just use the money for other purposes, as so many state legislatures have. Instead of asserting that this would never be tolerated in a McCain presidency—that he would bring down his wrath on the wayward members of Congress—McCain punted on any new cigarette tax.

Until now, Obama has also been disappointing on cancer. While he often mentioned that his mother died in her early fifties of ovarian cancer, it was usually in the context of her having to worry about her insurance not fully covering treatment, a common problem. And though Obama won passage in Illinois of a law making insurers cover colorectal screenings, he missed both LIVESTRONG forums and didn't make cancer a campaign priority.

Then last Friday, on the day of the Stand Up to Cancer telethon, Obama finally stood up. He pledged to double funding over five years for the National Institutes of Health (which houses the National Cancer Institute), expand clinical trials, end discrimination by insurance companies against those who have had cancer (and thus can't change jobs) and improve coordination among federal agencies. McCain also used the occasion to address cancer on his Web site for the first time, but he's sketchier on the details and hasn't committed to big funding increases or any cancer initiatives beyond smoking-cessation programs.

Politicians have been slow on the cancer front partly because it's a downer, and partly because most don't seem to understand how perilous the research situation has become. It's not just that fewer than two in 10 applications for NIH grants are funded—down sharply under President Bush. It's that the wrong researchers often get the money, as Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has pointed out. The system, he writes, is "risk averse." Older researchers with old-boy-network contacts receive a disproportionate amount of the funding. Cech notes that younger, less-connected but more creative researchers, the ones most likely to find cures, are leaving medical research in droves because they can't get funded.

That's where Stand Up to Cancer comes in. The funds raised by all the celebrities will be what Jerome Groopman of the Harvard Medical School calls "catalytic money" devoted to highly innovative grants and to "dream teams" of doctors who work in collaboration rather than along parallel lines. For a disease that destroys families and costs the economy $200 billion annually in lost productivity, it's the least we can do.

The new president shouldn't promise that we'll cure cancer in 10 or 20 years. That's not realistic. But he must set plausible goals, like doubling survival time for major cancers. The War on Cancer that Richard Nixon declared in 1971 has been a failure. McCain or Obama can succeed if they get passionate about the havoc that cancer wreaks, make gutsy budget and tax decisions and resolve not to claim they've "beat it" when they haven't.

Source: www.newsweek.com/id/157575

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www.savedarfur.org

www.darfurolympics.org

GENOCIDE STOPS WITH US

Remember the Darfuri people

Silence Kills

Use Your Freedom to Speak Out Against Genocide

1-800-GENOCIDE

VOTE OBAMA AND BIDEN
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Nashua, New Hampshire

Primary Night
The first time I have volunteered in a Presidential campaign
I traveled to New Hampshire and volunteered
the last full week prior to the New Hampshire Primary

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