Owner of a Lonely Heart – Yes

Enough of politics, how about accessing another great rock song from the 1980s by a classic rock band. Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart was a great song from this period.   A hit from their 90125 album, it marked their return to rock status after their success in the early 1970s.  I can relate to many of the words in this song.  Again, many of today’s popular songs do not get to this level for me.  So, here is their classic MTV video on YouTube:

Empty – Gary Varvel @ IndyStar

In follow up to Peggy Noonan’s piece this past Friday, Gary Varvel has an excellent opinion cartoon post at his VarvBlog on the Indianpolis Star website called Empty.

It is an excellent drawing about Mr Barack Obama’s speeches.  They are great motivational speeches with no real substance behind them.  Check it out.

It does raises some good questions:

1. What is Mr Obama’s vision for the future of America?
2. What legislation has Mr Obama offered up and/or supported in the US Senate?
3. What are the chief executive skills Mr Obama has to become President of the United States?

Try A Little Tenderness – Peggy Noonan @ WSJ

I finally got around to read Peggy Noonan’s Try A Little Tenderness column at the Wall Street Journal Online today. It was a very good piece on the Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama.

She confirms what I have learned about Barack Obama. He can clearly give a motivating speech and get people behind him, but when you dig deeper into what Mr Obama has said, you find that Mr Obama did not really say anything with substance. In fact, I do not have a clear understanding of where Mr Obama stands on any of the issues. Mr Obama speaks more in generalities than what Mr Obama proposes to do to address America’s issues of the day.

This section of Ms Noonan’s column has deep impact on this topic, asking questions about the Obamas which in turn their own words may actual get us to dig deeper to understand the real meaning behind their words:

His problem was, is, his wife’s words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country, because Obama is winning. She later repeated it, then tried to explain it, saying of course she loves her country. But damage was done. Why? Because her statement focused attention on what I suspect are some basic and elementary questions that were starting to bubble out there anyway.

* * *

Here are a few of them.

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like “international justice” than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised–so raised in the liberal cocoon–that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it’s his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America’s leaders don’t love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don’t teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you’re losing America, you really don’t want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

I would agree that Mr Noonan analysis that I am too concern about my country. Were losing it because our own politicians are not doing their jobs in addressing the issues of our times. They are too focus on their political gain than resolving issues.

I would have to agree with many others that Mr Obama’s words are empty rhetoric that will not helps us in the long run. Our future of country is at stake and the Democratic party appears to be offering us something that I do not want.