for a perspective on this One trillion seconds of ordinary clock time = ( 1012 sec)/( 3.16 x 107 sec/yr) = 31,546 years!Kennedy was witty, erudite, and delivered wonderful speeches. He was lacking in political acumen and a novice against the hard nosed Soviets. He failed almost immediately with the bay of pigs. The Soviets, under Khrushchev, considered him week and inexperienced. They were able to build the Berlin Wall and, in reality, got our ICBM's out of Turkey in exchange for our promise not to invade or cause invasions in Cuba. The Soviets did have to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba. The 'Missile Crisis' was a classic Communist dialectic, two steps forward, one step backward. Net, one step forward.
‘This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address. It was the first of several references — some oblique, some direct — to the Kennedy presidency. He issued a “challenge” to America’s scientists and engineers, offering to fund an “Apollo” project for clean energy. Echoing Kennedy’s iconic 1961 call to put a man on the moon “by the end of this decade,” Obama set the year 2035 as the date by which America should obtain 80 percent of its power from clean-energy sources. By 2015, he proclaimed, America should have a million electric cars on the road. Within 25 years, he declared, 80 percent of Americans should have access to high-speed rail.
“We do big things,” said the president. ---[Including make big mistkes in presidential elections.]
For some Americans, weaned on black-and-white images of John F. Kennedy’s romantic, soaring speeches, the presidency isn’t an executive’s job — it’s a knight-errant’s. President Obama, who was born three months after Kennedy’s moon-shot address, seems to have a particularly bad case of Kennedyitis. Challenges, quests, “winning the future” — all cast the president as the prophet who leads the nation toward a glorious destiny. [Kennedy delivered Sorensen's speaches beautifully.]
President Obama has budgeted $635 billion for Obamacare over the next decade. Even those not given to panic, like the CBO, estimate that $1.2 trillion is closer to the mark. But even that is probably way too low. The bill doesn’t really kick in until 2014. From 2014 to 2024, the more likely costs will be $2.5 to $3 trillion. That added burden, along with the stimulus and other spending during the two years in which he enjoyed a Democratic House, is the inescapable yoke of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Read the article at the above link.
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