I just got through listening to President Obama’s Town Hall meeting about health care reform.   This is the meeting that was held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and it was aired live by C-SPAN..

If I can find a link to the rebroadcast, I will post it here. Well here is the Montana one.

The following comment is both a tribute to the President and an unfortunate fact. Nobody can speak in defense of his priorities as well as he can.  Of course, he did have the advantage of getting to speak.  Nevertheless, I doubt that there are many members of Congress who would have had the breadth of knowledge and the ability to address the legitimate concerns of the attendees of the meeting.

The ability of President Obama to listen to real concerns that people have and to address those concerns as he formulates policy is one of the traits that I thought I saw as he ran for President.  This is exactly why I thought he would make a better President than some other candidates who had very similar policy ideas.

I was of course concerned about a candidate’s stand on the issues that we knew about at the time.  However, I also wanted a President I could trust to handle the issues that would come up later. The issues that we had no ability to predict that they would become issues were the ones I wanted to be covered by my choice of President.  History has shown time and again, that unpredictable issues do arise.

Follow this link to the Q & A article from the AP published in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

In my opinion, this piece is an attempt to calmly look at a complaint about the health care reform bill and see if the facts support the claim.  (Spoiler alert, the claim does not seem to stand up to an analysis.)

I have been reading in the book ‘How We Decide’, that the default behavior of the human brain is to decide an issue on emotion and then with the rational brain to invent reasons for that decision. It takes real effort to take in contrary information and use it to test your emotional decision.

I hope that on my more lucid days, I am willing to examine contrary evidence and make that test.

In my previous post, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, I alluded to an online conversation where someone had made a claim against the health care act that I thought was unlikely to be true.  Rather than just reject the claim, I asked for and received a pointer to what the complainant had read that made him think his complaint was valid.  I then read the passage myself to see if he had a valid point. In the end, I thought he had misinterpreted what the section of the bill was trying to accomplish.  I give myself a pat on the back, though, for being willing to look for evidence that might change my mind.  I know I should do more of that.

My rational reason for my emotional decision to vote for Obama was the feeling that he was the type of person who was willing to look at information that contradicted his position and try to consider it fairly.  I used this rationalization to choose him over Hilary Clinton.  Even though he and Hilary had almost identical views on many issues, I felt his process of deciding was far superior to what I perceived was her process.

The Pomegranate phone is the ultimate all-in-one device. It puts more things in the palm of your hand than you ever thought possible: phone, email, full internet browsing, camera, video, MP3 player, GPS navigation. …

www.pomegranatephone.com

Thanks to RogerG for posting this on his facebook page.

If people have objections to current health care reform proposals, they ought to raise them in these town hall meetings. Major adjustments have already been made in the legislation based on criticisms of the original proposals. More adjustments can be made.

It is especially easy to remove parts of the bill that exist only as figments of the imagination of people who have been stirred up by the likes of Sarah Palin.