Jobs, Executions, Gaza's Children

Obama presented a 450 billion dollar job plan in his address to the special session of Congress.  Preliminary estimates are that the American Jobs Act could put as many as 1 million Americans back to work - particularly because of the infrastructure rebuilding.  Robert Reich in a PBS interview noted that this is a "two-fer" - our roads and schools can use the rebuilding and with Treasury notes at 2% there has never been a better time to rebuild.  As expected, Republicans have begun criticizing the parts of it that are not direct tax breaks.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out - it may be too much to ask that Republicans put country ahead of party and ideology.  After all, if nothing happens and the job situation does not improve, Obama will be out of a job after 2012.  And that, as Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader in the Senate, has famously stated, is his primary goal. 

Who would be elected if Obama is thrown out of office?  The Republican front-runner is Rick Perry, another Governor from Texas.  This guy is Bush on steroids - at least Bush talked about "compassionate conservatism" in his first campaign; Perry blames the dismal performance of Texas' public schools on the fact that they share a border with Mexico.  His state has the highest rate of hunger in the country and he wants to dismantle Social Security.  More disturbingly, at the first Republican Presidential candidates' debate, the Republican audience erupted in cheers when the commentator mentioned the 234 executions under the Perry regime - the most of any modern governor.  This is one sick political party.  It's time the United States joined the rest of the civilized world and abolished the death penalty.  Sadly, though, a nation gets the government it deserves.  Let's just hope Texas secedes before 2012 as Perry mentioned as a possibility in a 2009 address to the Tea Party.

Finally, a sad note on freedom of speech...the Oakland Museum of Children's Art decided to cancel its planned exhibition of drawings by Palestinian children documenting their experiences during the 2008-2009 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.  1400 people, the vast majority civilians including 300 children, were slaughtered in the Israeli invasion at the end of the Bush presidency.