Happy New World!

What are two things you hope the Obama administration does in the first year?

Just "two things"?

I'm thinking more along the lines of EVERYTHING. I'm hoping the Obama administration will address everything that's decayed due to inattention, or been purposely ruined, by the outgoing administration!

Health care

I'd like to see health care disentangled from employment. I'm a free-lance musician, married to another one-- so we're both self-employed. I sometimes have enough union work (in commercial music) in a year to cause a year of excellent health insurance to kick in for the two of us, through the union. It's like winning the lottery, though-- there's no way to predict that I'll be called to sing on a commercial which is already guaranteed to be bought by the client, and to run in enough markets for long enough to pass the earnings threshold.

But beyond my personal health care needs, I'd like to see health care treated like education, i.e. as a basic right for Americans, as it is in every other first world country.

The old saw about having to "wait in line" for health care in Canada or England is meaningless to people who have no insurance at all. The one that says "you can't choose your own doctor" is a mystery to people who have never had their "own" doctor. The admonition that "government bureaucrats would determine your care" is laughable, when our medical system already consists of insurance industry bureaucrats determining our care!

2. Return to expertise... and simple competence

We all saw undeniable incompetence in "Brownie" and FEMA's paralysis in the face of Katrina and New Orleans. However, the outgoing administration has demonstrated incompetence in so many areas that the very enormity of the problem made it hard to believe.

I'm looking forward to an administration composed of the best people for the job, not old school chums, or business associates. I want my country run by intelligent, intellectually-curious people. I want people in the State Department who know that knowledge of other cultures is imperative to dealing with them. I want experienced experts running FEMA and the FDA. I'm thrilled to see a Nobel prize winning physicist appointed to be Energy Secretary... and am guessing that Obama energy policies will be quite different from those formulated Cheney-style, in secrecy, and guided by industry.

Here's to a rejection of bullying, and a return to diplomacy. Anyone who's set foot outside the USA in the past eight years, or read a foreign newspaper, or spoken to a foreign friend, knows that Bush's Jan. 12 statement-- that America's "moral standing" was not damaged during his tenure-- is a sad fantasy.

What is one thing you hope they do not do?

There's a difference between secrecy in sensitive areas, like military movements, and wheeling and dealing between government and business, as seems to have been the case with Cheney and our energy policy, or the Pentagon and military suppliers like Halliburton.