Bill D., your post of 22 May 10 - 12:48 p.m. is well thought out and much to the point. Thank you.

I voted for Obama on the basis that, of the available candidates in the running who actually had a chance to win, his agenda was the nearest to that of Dennis Kucinich.

If I have any issues with Obama, it's that I agreed with most of the agenda he expressed during the campaign and had great expectations for him and from him. I must admit to being a bit disappointed in how things are working out, but I believe the problem is two-fold:

First, the Republican opposition is absolutely determined to block everything he wants to do, to the extent of working against the general good of the country rather than let Obama accomplish any of the things on his initial agenda. It's obstructionism simply for the sake of trying to win political points.

And second, Obama is trying far to hard to elicit cooperation and build concensus when this is the absolutely last thing that he will ever get from the neo-"conservatives." Sometimes you just can't "make nice." You have to pull out all the stops, forget about getting cooperation from the opposition, and do whatever is necessary to get done what needs to be done.

This, of course, will get one called all sorts of things:   "Fascist," "dictator," "Nazi," "socialist," and on through the whole litany of what is already being said gratuitiously by the neo-"conservatives" and their blatantly biased cohorts in the so-called "news" nedia—along with, of course, the lunatic fringe, like our resident paranoid hate-monger, "ichMael" with his manic cranking out of ridiculously libelous web sites. ichMael is not alone. There is more than enough of this sort of vicious malevolence going around

Web pages like ichMael's come from just about every area in the country, but there seems to be a disproportionate number of them originating in the South, which tends to make me think that one of the major reasons for the sheer brutality of their attacks on Obama is simply that, as far as they are concerned, he is the wrong color.

Therefore their hate knows no bounds, and they will say anything against him, accusing him of things that would never occur to any sane person, especially to Obama himself.

Don Firth