2010 Resolution For Americans: Wake Up!

By Alicia Colon

2009 was the year that common sense took a sabbatical and was nowhere in sight in the White House, Congress or the mainstream media.

Although there are so many, many reasons to make this allegation - notably April's unfathomable panic-inducing, photo-op buzzing by Air Force One near Ground Zero - I will devote this column to three areas that were treated with a total lack of intellectual prowess by the triumvirate named above: national security, global warming, and health-care reform.

National Security: We should have known how dismissive this administration was about the war on terror as soon as it replaced this nomenclature with "Overseas Contingency Operation."

This past year, President Obama bent over many times (literally) to appease the Muslim community to show that we are not targeting Islam. Ergo, profiling potential Islamist jihadists is now out of the question when it comes to basic security measures.

Had common sense been in play on Christmas Day, there would have been no way that the Nigerian would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, could have boarded an American flight with no baggage after paying for a one-way ticket in cash.

Exactly who was responsible for ignoring a well-respected Nigerian banker who notified the American Embassy that his son was a suspected jihadist? Why, it must have been President George W. Bush, according to the Obama-adoring media pundits who immediately after the incident sought ways to blame the former administration.

After all, they noted, the two masterminds of the bomb plot were Al Qaeda agents who had been released from Gitmo in 2007 and returned to Yemen. See?

This is true, but they didn't act until they knew that Mr. Bush was gone and a more accommodating administration was in power.

Common Sense Solution: Profiling must be vigorously employed by security screeners and the Patriot Act beefed up to improve inter-agency communication. What the heck are computers for?

Global Warming aka Climate Change: The first time I heard warnings about how we're destroying the billions-year-old planet my common sense antennae went up and reminded me of the Y2K scare campaign and others that ended up costing everybody money.

This time the scaremonger came in the form of ex-V.P. Al Gore and his too-ridiculous-to-be-taken-seriously-but-nevertheless-was film, "An Inconvenient Truth."

This fraudulent and subsequently debunked piece of cellular tripe won Mr. Gore a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and about a billion dollars, thanks to his carbon-credit investments.

The charade of global warming was exposed thanks to the hacking of e-mails of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit that revealed that some climatologists had tried to cover up the lack of data supported global warming.

Nevertheless, the mainstream media is still treating Climategate as a matter of computer hacking rather than the biggest scientific scandal since the Piltdown Man hoax was uncovered in 1953.

In spite of this damning evidence of fraud, our president trekked to Copenhagen where the global warming cultists opened their conference with a 4-minute film showing a stuffed polar bear falling into the dried out earth and children crying "Help."

No one has pointed out the hilarity of this global warming religion better than the late George Carlin who reminded us that the planet is 4.5 billion-years-old and we have "the conceit to think that we're somehow a threat." He also said: "The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?"

Commonsense Solution: Ditch the ridiculous cap-and-trade climate bill and give the planet credit for its own survival.

Health Care Reform: Like Rush Limbaugh, I spent a few days in the hospital last weekend because of chest pains. I'm certainly not a millionaire like he is but I received the same quality care at Staten Island University Hospital as he did in Hawaii.

My blood work was taken in the emergency room and I was given a chest X-ray. I was monitored for 2 days because of other risk factors.

I had an echocardiogram and the following day I went to the nuclear medicine department to have a thallium stress test.

Ultimately, the tests confirmed that my pain was skeletal and not cardiac-related and I was released.

Fortunately, I have what they call Cadillac insurance coverage, but the patients I met receiving the same excellent care were on Medicaid.

So what's wrong with our health-care system for 85% percent of the country? It's not perfect but certainly can be improved without a multi-trillion-dollar bill funded by taxpayers.

Poor 15-year-old Amy Carter was also kept overnight at a British hospital but was sent home diagnosed with the flu. She died of a series of heart attacks 2 days later.

A simple blood test would have determined she had heart problems but perhaps that's not routine under the National Health Care system that Congress is trying to force on us.

Common Sense Solution: Congress doesn't really care about our health care. It just wants to have control over our life-and-death decisions.

Common sense also tells us that one of our biggest domestic problems is high unemployment.

Employers are telling us that they can't hire more personnel until they know what the health-care reform will cost them.

The tone deaf congressional Democrats simply are not listening to their constituents who do not want this bill.

Common sense says: "Kill the bill. We need jobs and tax relief not 2,000-page legislation that no one can read and will leave us trillions in debt that our grandchildren will be burdened with."

There's a grassroots movement urging voters to toss everyone out of Congress in November, but that's lazy as well as crazy.

Not one Republican in the House voted for this scandalous legislation and any Republican that voted yes to the Senate version should be on a watch list when his term is up. We have 11 months to learn which bozos need to go.

Congressional leaders Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi are up for re-election in November and must be sent home.

In a just world they'd be impeached for the high crime of their abuse of power and for the misdemeanor crimes committed against common sense.

Alicia Colon lives in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com