Actually, we prefer to call them "traffic calming devices". It sounds ever so much more correct, politically speaking.
Dang! The Teleprompter-In-Chief just can't catch a break, here. Going in, he thought it'd be easy: give a few uplifiting speeches; watch the lemmings fall into line. It's just not working out that way.
The Holy Grail of his union bosses isn't going to happen. Now that Sen. Arlen Specter has firmly committed against card-check, which would abolish the secret ballot in unionization efforts, Republicans have enough folks on board to kill it by talking it to death. Even worse, around 15 Democrats - Democrats! - have expressed concerns regarding the concept. When even Democrats can't get behind abolishing the secret ballot, you've got a real stinker on your hands.
Cap-and-trade is also dead. Kent Conrad, who heads the Senate Budget Committee, isn't going to go there.
The Teleprompter-In-Chief may have the audacity of hope, but that's run into hard reality, and reality usually wins. The best that he can hope for at this point involves smaller victories. It's likely that a modified version of his plan to soak the "rich" with punitive levels of taxation for having the audacity of success will go into effect. He may get some degree of nationalized health care, although to what degree, if any, remains uncertain.
The health care delivery systems in the USA are so diversified that attempting to tie them all together would be akin to cat-herding. More likely would be an attempt to unify hospital standards, communications, and other systems along the lines of the Illinois state trauma system. While that approach has been effective in Illinois, the question of translation to a nationwide scale remains.
Clearly, Obama and his cohorts want to bring socialism to America because they believe that it has worked so well in Europe. While its efficacy in European countries is still open to debate, one salient fact which Obama and his supporters appear to have overlooked involves scaling. European countries are small; America isn't. Most European countries, by virtue of their odd mix of parliamentary and reverence for monarchy, bear little resemblance to the representative absolutism of the USA.
The closest we come to reverence for monarchy is the bizarre fascination held by many in regard to the Kennedy family of politicians. Aside from that, the makeup of the USA differs quite significantly from that of the European countries.
These little issues aren't going to go away, and they represent yet another traffic calming feature along the road to American socialism.
