Spintested: 06/27/12

Why the Supreme Court Will Uphold the Constitutionality of Obamacare

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Shorter version:

The insurance and pharmaceutical industries make out like bandits with ACA. If ACA were repealed or struck down and Republicans prevail in the 2012 elections, they will put the same legislation through but call it something else so as to confuse and try to trick their constituents -- That will be their gift to Big Insurance and PhRma.

If the Supreme Court strikes ACA down because of the mandate, then Republicans would have a hard time coming back with the same but differently titled legislation.

All 3 branches of government are bought and paid for.
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Russ Feingold, Citizens United Foe, Blasts Supreme Court As 'Arm Of Corporate America'

Feingold didn't retire from the Senate; he lost his bid for reelection in 2010.
About Campaign Finance
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Supreme Court Health Care Decision Will Define The Future Of The American Health Care System

Ever heard of Medicare? How about the VA?

The government is able to do, has been doing, administration of these programs for years, brilliantly, and at a fraction of what the for-profit insurance industry has been doing it. Our money needs to go for actual treatment of patients and not towards the 3rd, 4th and 5th vacation homes of CEOs.
About Barack Obama
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Supreme Court Health Care Decision Will Define The Future Of The American Health Care System

In Europe they have universal coverage, and the insurance co's there still manage to turn tidy a profit, as do the medical folks. And the CEO's of their companies make far less than ours do as well. Are we saying that here in America with all of our exceptionalism, that we can't do at least as good a job?

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Meet The New 1%: - Healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay. One example is Joel Gemunder, CEO Omnicare, who had a total pay package in 2010 worth $98 million.

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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

The truth is that most Democrats in Congress have made honest efforts to help the middle-class

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That hasn't been true for about 30 years. But let's, for argument's sake, say that it is. That they're not corrupt, not also switchbacking between lobbying and government, but are inept. Then you would have to admit that they're ineffectual against Republicans and aren't up to the task.

Democratic voters have mistakenly believed that Obama and Democrats want what they want. The DLC-controlled DemocraticParty gives lip service to all populist issues (like jobs, civil rights protections, restoring habeas corpus, ending the wars, public healthcare, WallStreet reform, environmental and energy issues, etc.).

And talk of Democratic politicians having no spines are greatly exaggerated, just like Obama's timidity is myth: He's plenty tough when it comes to standing up to the Democratic base.

If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush and Rove were just more ruthless in doing what politicians and the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer, never back away, you'll wear the opposition down.

Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish Clinton's machine (to get the nomination) and the oldest, most experienced politicians in US history (including the RoveMachine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching BushCheney off the table, have us still reelecting them, not marching on Washington with torches and pitchforks?

Obama and Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.

The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them despite their failure to achieve our alleged shared objectives.

Getting Democratic voters (and Obama's 'most ardent supporters') to understand that Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

DLC-Democrats and Republicans like to foster the fallacy that there is an extreme or far left faction within the Democrati Party. There are no extremes or far left in the DemocraticParty. They left long ago, and can be found bombing animal testing labs and burning down suburban subdivision sites being built on land where ancient forest have been clear cut. If they vote at all anymore, it's as Independents and rarely for Democrats.

The fact is, real Democratic policies aren't that hard to sell to Americans.

When most Americans want Medicare and other government programs which they've benefitted from to continue and teabaggers shout "No government control of healthcare; Get your hands off my Medicare", the answer is EDUCATION.

When informed of the issues, most Americans agree with liberal policies. Neither they (nor I) would characterize themselves as far-anything or extreme, but mainstream. For example, nobody likes the idea of abortion, but most Americans do not want the government involved if they find themselves in the predicament of an unwanted pregnancy. And if you frame it as, "You like to kill babies?!?! ?!?!", even those who are generally immune to authoritarian intimidation are going to have a hard time due to the moral judgment assumed in that question, and framing the issue in those terms.

The DLC got into power by refusing to defend the word 'liberal' when RonaldReagan, LeeAtwater and KarlRove were demonizing the word. Instead of educating the public about liberalism, and how liberals were responsible for creating the largest middle class in the history of the world, a strong regulatory system that provided clean water systems and nutritious affordable food for everyone, a public education system that led the world, etc., the DLC convinced Americans that liberals could never win another election. The DLC attributed to ideology what is more accurately explained by lousy campaigns outgunned by election dirty tricks and fraud.

If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush and Rove were just more ruthless doing what politicians had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer and never back away, you will wear the opposition down.

But Obama only does that to progressives.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

Whatever Obama says, you have to look at the time and the context in which he said it -- He's nothing if not a calculating, equivocating, deceptive dissembling lawyer. His supporters assume intent and meaning to his words that just isn't there.

The media and our campaign system isn't set up to test the vetting that's being done by the pro-corporate party (Democratublicans). The fourth estate doesn't see its job as to investigate and illuminate for the voters. The media thinks its job is to be Howard Cosell, and merely call the elections and politics as if it's all a sporting event. So if a Democratic candidate isn't doing the investigating of his Republican opponent (and vice versa), then the press thinks it's the Democrat's fault if he loses. I think elections belong to the American people, and we rely on the media to get us the facts. If the parties aren't going to expose these candidates, and the media won't, we're doomed. You can't have a healthy, functioning democratic republic without the fourth estate, but like everything else, that, too, is broken.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

I take issue with that. Those who believed Obama was a liberal were given much help by Obama and the media (as recently as yesterday, I heard him referred to as "liberal" and "progressive" by anchors on MSNBC and CNN).

The shorthanding we do with these labels doesn't help. You consider him to be "a moderate", which means different things to different people, depending on where they're standing themselves. "Privately, Obama describes himself as a Blue Dog Democrat." Do you consider Blue Dogs to be moderates? I don't.

About his own political appeal, Obama has said, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama got into office by misleading Democratic voters. He ran to the left of Hillary Clinton. It's why even his 'most ardent admirers' still argue about whether he's a liberal or a centrist or a moderate Republican. He convinced centrists that he was a centrist. He convinced liberals he was a liberal posing as a centrist.

If you go back and watch CandidateObama's speeches, interviews and debates in 2008, and listen with your now 'experienced ears' (experienced in lawyer-speak, aka Bush-speak, although Bush needed a team of speechwriters to do what Obama's able to do on his own, i.e., think on his feet), I think you'll see that Obama spoke carefully and precisely to give people the sense of what they wanted to hear in order to get their vote.

Back in early 2008, when Candidate Obama talked about admiring Reagan and what he wanted to emulate about him, "I think RonaldReagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, RichardNixon did not and in a way that BillClinton did not", do you seriously believe that he was saying that he wanted to go even farther right of the BushCheney administration he was coming in after?

Obama's nothing but a politician, and I mean that in the worst sense of the word. In the 'used car salesman' sense. It turns out that doing what's right for transnational corporations is what Obama is about, and trying to sell it as good for Americans is what he does afterwards. He's the epitome of the 1950s Republican, "What's good for GM is good for America." He did a snow job on everybody.
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Health Care Law: Supreme Court Decision Looming

Don't put words in my mouth.

Hospitals can't refuse to treat people who show up in their emergency rooms because of government regulations - EMTALA.

Did you really need it spelled out for you that I was talking about emergent care? That hospital emergency departments aren't really intended for or set up to handle non-emergent patient care?
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Health Care Law: Supreme Court Decision Looming

Of course they're in business to make money - that's the reason you go into business.

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It's one thing to make a living, and quite another to make a killing.

When it comes to the practices of the for-profit health insurance industry (and even the non-profits), 'making a killing' becomes literal.

So we come now full circle, to my original comment, that like firefighting and policing, health care should not be for-profit. And we should repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act’s exemption from antitrust law for insurers.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

The real problem is that Big Money/Big Business controls the political process, which includes high-priced propaganda campaigns that spin policy and candidates as things they're not. Corporations have been able to control politicians, candidates, the primary process, so that populist candidates can't get a seat at the table.

Our problems (bought politicians, pro-corporate/anti-populist policies and legislation) didn't just spring up with the USSC decision in Citizens' United. Our problems can be traced back directly to Buckley vs. Valeo (1976), when the USSC declared that money is speech. Heap onto that Democrats letting conservatives take over the airwaves to the exclusion of liberal perspectives by not reinstating the Fairness Doctrine after Reagan and Clinton's Telecommunications' Act of 1996 that enabled the consolidation of media (not to mention the destruction of our public education system by BOTH parties).

Changing all that, getting money out of elections, getting corporations out of government, ending corporate personhood, etc., isn't on either party's agenda.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

It's way past time to get the DLC-Democrats out of office, out of the Democratic Party, and put real Democrats in. That's what we thought we were doing when we put Obama in over Hillary Clinton. But in came Obama who put the Clinton team into the White House, and not one liberal in his administration. He actually kept liberals neutralized for close to a year, with vague promises and nomination paralysis (waiting to be confirmed, where they weren't free to speak out about his Republican-ways. No recess appointments, just half-hearted excuses.

Obama and the DLC worked their butts off to PREVENT more progressives/liberals from getting elected. Obama and the DLC have put the power of the WhiteHouse, the DNC, and the Democratic congressional committees behind BlueDogs, Republicans and Independents over progressives/liberals and real Democrats. Some, but not all, examples:

BlueDog BlancheLincoln over progressive Democrat Lt. Governor BillHalter.

Republican-turned-Independent ArlenSpecter over progressive Democrat JoeSestak.

Republican-turned-Independent LincolnChaffee over Democrat FrankCaprio (which, in turn, was an effective endorsement of the Republican JohnLoughlin over Democrat DavidCicilline for the congressional seat Democrat PatrickKennedy retired from, and all of the other seats up for grab in RhodeIsland).

Republican-turned-Independent CharlieCrist over liberal Democrat KendrickMeek.

Obama supports voting third parties, even when it risks Democratic turnout.

Republicans, with the smallest minority, have managed to thwart Democrats, who've had the greatest majority in decades. You would think that with Republicans controlling the House, Democrats would've turned the tables and thwarted Republicans' continuing legislation like Bush's tax cuts for the rich? Are Democrats just stupld?

Obama never pressured BenNelson (or BlancheLincoln, or any BlueDog). The Democratic leadership could've taken away committee chairs (BlancheLincoln's, too) of members in their caucus that filibustered a PublicOption for healthcare. They didn't.

The DNC could've taken away reelection funds. They didn't.

Reid could've actually forced Republicans and turncoat Democratic senators to filibuster. He didn't (and doesn't).

The ProgressiveCaucus could have kept their pledge about not voting for a bill that didn't include a robust PublicOption. They didn't.

Obama DID unleash the attack dogs to go after HowardDean when Dean said it was a lousy bill. Dean was then forced to get back into line. Obama went after Kucinich, the last remaining holdout on the ProgressiveCaucus, for threatening to vote no on the healthcare bill, and we all know how that ended.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

Democratic voters been voting for Republicans-in-Democrats'-clothing for 20 years now. It's always imperative that "Republicans can't get the seat/White House", and "we'll work to purge these people from the party", or "next time we'll not vote for another DLCer; just let [today's DINO du jour] get in, to warm the seat". I've been hearing this for more than 20 years, and the only change is for the worse.

In politics, in life, there really is only now. Each day that conditions remain the same or further declines (Obama has advanced BushCheney positions that should have you marching on Washington ), a sort of stare decisis sets in, making it more difficult (if not impossible ) to turn around. We have become the proverbial boiled frogs; there's a generation that's been born and doesn't know about life pre-9/11 and 4th amendment protections.

No, putting Obama back in the White House is not the answer.

We on the left have been doing it your way, the DLC's way, for over 20 years and the government and the Democratic Party keeps moving farther to the right. That's because your way is to cave, to lie to the American people and put Republicans-in-Democrats'-clothing into office. At the rate this is going, Republicans won't have to bother getting elected, or certainly not in any great numbers because Democrats are doing their work for them. Republicans won't bother having to overturn Roe, for example, for why bother outlawing abortion when Democrats have helped Republicans make it virtually impossible to obtain one?

If you and I are on the same side, as you insist, and want real Democratic policies, and going about getting them your way (protecting Obama, reelecting DLC Democrats) is getting Republican policies and NOT Democratic policies, when do you realize that maybe you don't know what you're talking about?

When do you realize that you've become that classic definition for 'insan!ty' ("Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results")?

Do you ever realize it?
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

During the Bush years, Democrats said if the People wanted change, they had to put Democrats in the majority in Congress. So in 2006, we did.

Nothing changed.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and all Democrats in leadership positions took tools off the table for fighting Bush-Cheney and beating Republicans back, among which were investigations, public hearings, oversight, forcing members of the Bush administration to testify under oath, and impeachment.

They said, "You have to give us more Democrats -- 60 in the Senate".

In 2008, we did. We gave them 60 for the Democratic Caucus. And, we gave them the White House.

Obama came into office with the wind at his back. More people voted for him, a black man in good old r@c!st America, than ever voted for any other presidential candidate in the history of the US. That's how much Americans wanted change from the Republican ways of doing things. Voters did it because of Obama's ability to persuade, that he was going to change the system, end the corporatocracy, lobbyism in government -- Obama was going to be the People's president, not a corporate tool.

And no sooner did Obama get elected than he slammed the brakes on the momentum of his election and a filibuster-proof Senate (tentative yet, with 2 senators, Kennedy and Byrd, at death's door), Obama did a 180-degree turn on his promises and slowed everything down. To "work in a bipartisan manner with Republicans", after Republicans had already announced they were going to block everything Democrats wanted to do, vote no on everything, in lockstep.

Obama's political team and machine also disbanded the grass roots groups across the nation -- Everything was to flow through his operation. This was a dead giveaway that the last thing these politicians want is an active populist movement.

Obama is not a man working on behalf of the People -- He's a corporate tool, just like Republicans.

Since Obama has gotten into office, he's continued most of Bush's policies & his 'accomplishments' are being spun as "reform" when, in fact, they're Republican in nature.

There could be 100 "progressives" in the Senate and 435 in the House, and they and Obama would still find a way to deliver to corporations instead of the People. And then try to blame it on Republicans.

Worst of all, we're stuck with marshmallow-fluff-brained voters, who soak up the most ridiculous excuses, like "Republicans won't let us do it!", when, in fact, Obama and Democrats don't even try. Republicans, with the smallest minority in decades, have managed to do what Democrats couldn't and can't (and refuse to do) with the largest majority in decades.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

And about the Affordable Care Act:

Having health insurance ≠ medical treatment.

Obama's healthcare legislation doesn't control costs and doesn't deliver medical treatment to everyone (not even those who think they're going to get it). ACA Unlikely to Stem Medical Bankruptcies

People who voted for Obama and Democrats voted to get affordable, quality medical treatment. That was NOT a vote to protect and further enrich the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Voters did NOT send Obama and Democrats into power to entrench the insurance industry as the gatekeepers to being able to get medical treatment. Voters did NOT send Obama and Democrats to Washington to continue tying insurance benefits to their employment.

Yet that is precisely what Obama and the DLC-controlled Democrats did.

Meet The New 1%: - Healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay. One example is Joel Gemunder, CEO Omnicare, who had a total pay package in 2010 worth $98 million.

Obama's healthcare legislation is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the health insurance industry. It is one of the most corrupt pieces of legislation ever enacted by our government.

The health insurance industry provides no real service. All it does is take money out of the system. It's nothing more than a blood-sucking middleman.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

Obama didn't repeal DADT; Congress did.

Obama actually IMPEDED repeal.

Obama and Democrats didn't do everything in their power to end it. Not after the House had fallen to Republican control, and certainly not before the 2010 midterms or when Obama came into power on 1/20/09 and Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

Right before the midterms I asked commenters here if they thought Democrats would be as effective at obstructing Republicans as the Republicans as the minority party have been these past 4 years at obstructing Democrats.

Obama's been giving silent assent and aid to Republicans by not taking to the bully pulpit over this and all issues. Obama could certainly sign a stop-loss order (read my previous comments here and here before the standard knee-j3rk response about a new president overturning it).

As AxelDC said:

This was an obvious case for reconciliation. The bill is the DoD budget, and reconcilliation is to avoid filibusters on budget issues. The House overwhelmingly passed it, the Senate had 57 votes, and Reid and Obama refused to push it through.

What about a stop-loss order on Day 1? Obama has that authority and Congress would have to override him.

Instead, he thought he would be too clever by half and predictibly fail in the Senate and hope the public would punish Republicans for it. Didn't quite work out that way did it? Either pass it in reconciliation in December or the courts will have to do what Obama refuses to do.

The audacity of campaigning, the timidity of governing.

Back in November, 2010, Joe Lieberman leaked that 3 Republicans might sign onto repealing DADT if the process was "fair", i.e., if Republicans could add amendments onto the defense budget bill, among other things. I think this is the deal, agreeing to the Bush-Cheney 'Long War', continuing to kick the can down the road for ending these wars, is what Obama agreed to to get 3 Republicans to consider voting to repeal DADT. I think Obama's looking for cover, to hide behind Republicans, for his deceit about not fulfilling his promise to end these wars.

Obama and Democrats didn't need 60 -- They could've put the repeal of DADT in the defense budget bill and passed it through reconciliation. 50 + Biden.

After it did pass, Obama could've signed an executive order (stop-loss), that would have stopped discharged while the Pentagon "studied" it, but he refused.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

Nothing really has been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend is continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010:

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Women make up half of the American workforce, and in two-thirds of American families, the mother is the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner. But they make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, though the size of each state’s wage gap varies. While the gap continues to close in places like Washington, D.C., where women make 91.8 percent of men’s earnings, it is growing in others, like Wyoming, where women’s earnings dropped from 65.5 percent of men’s in 2009 to just 63.8 percent in 2010.

Because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.

In November 2010, Senate Republicans killed efforts to close the pay gap when they unanimously voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have updated the Equal Pay Act, closed many of its loopholes, and strengthened incentives to prevent pay discrimination.

Now that's an election issue that Democrats could run on if they were such fighters for women's rights, don't you think?
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

There was another bill out there that would not only have made the technical fix of Ledbetter, but updated the Equal Pay Act of 1963, closed loopholes and made a much bigger difference in closing the pay gap. There was no reason why the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act could not have been combined with the Paycheck Fairness Act back at the beginning of the first term, in 2009. But while the bill passed the House quickly, Democrats in the Senate didn’t get around to taking up the Paycheck Fairness Act until the lame duck session of 2010, and it predictably failed 58-41, with all Republicans opposing. There’s obviously no guarantee that the Paycheck Fairness Act could have passed earlier in the term. But it’s plausible to argue that leveraging Lilly Ledbetter, which was a campaign issue, into a real advance on equal pay could have paid off. As it is, the Senate quickly got filibustered with little fanfare in the lame duck.

The point is there were other options. But the legislation that could have made a difference was left behind. And it severely damages the credibility of the Administration and its allies to keep waving the bloody shirt of Lilly Ledbetter when it actually did pretty much nothing for the larger cause of equal pay and equal work.

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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

Lily Ledbetter has been at the top of Obama's 'most ardent supporters' lists of his "accomplishments" and has gone unchallenged because to explain the ridiculousness of it as an "Obama accomplishment" can't be done in a 10-word sound byte.

To begin with, claiming Lily Ledbetter as Obama's achievement is like the driver of the winning car in this year's Le Mans race (Mike Rockenfeller) picking up a hitch-hiking Obama right before he crossed the finish line and saying Obama won the Le Mans. It's even more deceitful than that, for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke. But even that doesn't quite explain it.

Obama and Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:

By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislation, the problem the legislation is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislation would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressional efforts. Or, something else.

With Lily Ledbetter, it took 45 years to have the legislature address a problem (statute of limitations for filing equal pay discrimination lawsuits in the Civil Rights Act of 1964) in what never should've been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964. Lily Ledbetter really had nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimination". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For the filing of an equal-pay lawsuit.

And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half. It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress (because it would have meant more money paid out from corporations to women, and Democrats work for corporations just as Republicans do).

If you want to tout passage of Lily Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediately with legislation for transparency in pay. Being able to find out what everyone else is getting paid. It's a joke without it. It's like taking you to a Michelin star restaurant, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in your face, but not letting you eat anything at all.

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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

How many more enemies are being made for American citizens through Obama's drone killings of civilians across the globe?

Democratic voters didn't put Obama into the White House to militarize and indemnify the CIA, or continue the neocon wars on behalf of transnational corporations, yet that's precisely what's going on.
The mission in Afghanistan wasn't to wipe out the Taliban. Congress didn't authorize either Bush or Obama to do that. You seem to be using 'Taliban' interchangeably with Al Qaeda -- Huge mistake. Only a neocon or a neolib would boast of Obama's "escalating" the war in Afghanistan. The truth of our failure in "exporting democracy" to Afghanistan is here.

The troops aren't withdrawn from Iraq, nor will they all be. In addition to the thousands of mercenaries remaining there, there are thousands more being left to "protect" an 'embassy' (a CIA fortress) the size of Vatican City in the center of Baghdad.
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

The official objective has been kept from the American people:

"The war in Iraq was very very clearly about oil, as was the war in Afghanistan. The oil pipeline that was planned (in Afghanistan), the best security for that was an occupation."

"If you map the proposed pipeline route across Afghanistan and you look at our bases? Matches perfectly. Our bases are there to solve a problem that the Taliban couldn't solve. Taliban couldn't provide security in that part of Afghanistan -- Well now that's where our bases are. So, does that have to do with Osama Bin Laden? It has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. It has everything to do with the longer plan, in this case a strategy which I wouldn't necessarily call neoconservative, however it fits perfectly in with the neoconservative ideology which says, 'If you have military force and you need something from a weaker country, then you need to deploy that force and take what you need because your country's needs are paramount'. It's the whole idea of unilateralism, of using force to achieve your aims."

-Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose assignments included a variety of roles for the National Security Agency and who spent her last 4 1/2 years working at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxI3rSLDO8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII

Not long ago, Rachel Maddow walked the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of Afghanistan with RIchard Engel to see what exporting US-style democracy means, and what US nation-building actually builds. Watch this to see where are our tax dollars going, and learn how we are not "nation-building", not making us safer, and not helping the Afghans or building their nation at all (or a democracy). Learn how this has all been just a huge rip-off of the American people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5BHnN__5M
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Romney Campaign Boxes Itself In On Outsourcing, Offshoring Debate

We're not out of Iraq (just as we're not leaving Afghanistan*). That cutback in troops by the Pentagon doesn't apply to State.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/world/middleeast/iraq-is-angered-by-us-drones-patrolling-its-skies.html

In addition to some 5,000 private security contractors now protecting the embassy’s 11,000-person staff, Iraq is rife with American-paid contractors, mercenaries, and is a war zone, with the dead piling up day in and day out.

Whenever there's been a cutback in the number of troops, there's been an increase in the number of mercenaries hired and paid for with US taxpayer dollars.

What's the objective, how is the military going about achieving it, and where are our tax dollars going?

* We're not leaving Afghanistan: The 10-year strategic partnership agreement that Obama and Karzai signed commits the US-- its troops and billions more dollars -- to Afghanistan for the indefinite future.

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