Americans are traveling to India, Singapore and Thailand to get low-cost surgery.
Scientists say global climate change already has changed the oceans.
America has a growing food crisis.
We’re still taking measure of how badly the Bush Administration ran the country into the ground.
The Senate room most likely to hold the Sotomayor hearings has been blessed with prayer and oil.
What a country.
4 Comments 
A few months ago, I forwarded this article to some friends. It’s from The Agonist, called The Lost Decade:
The period from 2000 to 2008 will likely be viewed as the lost decade and I have already seen numerous references that the Bush years were lost years.
Obama has said as much in two speeches I have seen.
A tremendous surplus was squandered and lost into ever deepening deficits, tax cuts were given to the rich who lost it all in hedge funds that did nothing but move paper around. Innovation was actively shut down. The telephony advances were destroyed for ATT to hold their hegemony, internet 2 was stopped by the Bush administration, stem cell research was shut down, basic science research was gutted. Capital was shifted from research and innovation to building stick houses, and not even with any efficiency standards. Thrown up as they have been the last fifty years. I can’t think of a worse use of capital. We flushed a trillion dollars down the Iraq toilet, and managed to destroy countless families both here and abroad in the process. CAFE standards were gutted which stopped all innovation in the auto sector and led to the highest gas prices since the late 1970′s. The US became a nation that tortures and kidnaps, that taps phones and cowers in fear and self doubt, that hid information, and let religious fanatics make science and policy decisions. It was lost, all lost. The lost decade. It is like we wasted ten years. Can you identify a single major innovation? Everything was status quo, incurious, how can we be surprised in the absence of any future thinking that we wallowed in a decade of nothing.
The period from 2000 to 2008 will likely be viewed as the lost decade….
It’s worse than having simply lost eight years. We didn’t stand still; we went backward. In race relations, for example, Our society has become more like it was the 1920s. In women’s rights, the 1950s. In matters of church and state, whatever the hell decade Father Coughlin was screaming hatred into a radio mike. In wealth distribution and immigration issues, the 1890s. In some very impoartant ways, we’ve lost an entire century!
Speaking of priests, I see a “slip and fall” lawsuit or two in Anointin’ Rev. Rob’s future, if he doesn’t knock it off with the holy oil.
Those 8 years will cost us dearly, never to be recouped.
But it’s not just those 8 years. It’s been since Reagan, if not Nixon, that we’ve regressed. The past 8 years have brought into focus the bitter divisions that have split our country.
Slavery was slavery, a truly horrible institution that divided our country for decades – but the civil war that was fought over it was also about progress vs. the status quo. And slavery was also a metaphor for growth beyond manual labor and agrarianism.
Right now, the forces of regression/repression are growing more and more desperate. They had a taste of some power over the past 8 years, and want it to grow, not to recede. And so, what do we have now: Killing doctor’s, praying for the death of our President, and hoping that GM and the country fail.
We are in the middle of a civil war right now. And we had better win.
If only they knew how anointing oil was supposed to be made…
Jun 10, 2009 
