Never one to mince words or hold back his opinions, Gore Vidal says he regrets voting for President Barack Obama last year and calls Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, "the stupidest man in the country" in a wide-ranging interview with The Times of London.

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It doesn’t quite rank up there with the front-page apology to Chiquita that the newspaper published for three straight days in 1998, but The Cincinnati Enquirer used an entire interior page of it’s "A" Section today to apologize to Congressman Steve Driehaus.

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Now that the U.S. House of Representatives approved a health care reform bill by a 219-212 vote and the Senate appears likely to follow suit, the political wagons are circling in what’s sure to be some nasty congressional races this fall.

Republicans, however, shouldn’t expect to cruise to victory, and here’s why.

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During the past two weeks CityBeat has published its list of endorsements in the race for Cincinnati City Council,along with those on local and state issues.

Some readers have requested that the endorsements be put into a smaller format that will be simpler to print out and take along with them to their polling places on Tuesday.

So, here it is. Clip, save and enjoy.

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A group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation has bombarded voters in Ohio's 1st Congressional District with a glossy flier that tries to paint Rep. Steve Chabot as someone akin to an Old West hero.

The fliers, which began showing up in mailboxes during the past few days, feature a large photograph of a smiling Steve Chabot next to a headline that states, “Steve Chabot fights for our families.” The direct-mail campaign piece was paid for and distributed by Heritage Action for America, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group founded last year by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

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With Congress preparing for a long-awaited vote on a healthcare reform bill Sunday, some Democrats are calling the concerns of U.S. Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Price Hill) about abortion-related wording misplaced and just plain wrong.

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They can yell all they want, but protestors at recent town hall meetings organized by members of Congress cannot escape the facts: The U.S. health care system is horrible compared to other democracies — and it’s largely because of the profit motive.

An excellent article by author and ex-reporter T.R. Reid appeared Aug. 23 in The Washington Post. The piece clearly and succinctly outlines how our health care system compares to others around the world and, in the process, dispels myths being propagated by the Fox News-watching, Tea Party-loving crowd.

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If President Obama hopes to rely on all the socialists who in 2008 elected him with hopes of seeing all of America’s wealth get spread around, he better come up with something even more radical this year.

Something called the Freedom Socialist Party announced in December that it is running two candidates in a national write-in campaign — New Yorker Stephen Durham for president and Christina López, of Seattle, for vice president. And today the duo sent out a press release demonstrating that America’s real socialists are none too pleased with Obama’s first three years in office.

In a memo titled, “Recognize healthcare as a human right — make it universal and free,” Durham and López refer to Obama’s healthcare reform as one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency.

“Instead of stepping up to the plate and acknowledging that public healthcare is a need as great as public education,” the release states, “Obama made one concession after another to the pharmaceutical and insurance mega-corporations. As he restated in his February State of the Union address, his Affordable Care Act does not give the government the role of guaranteeing universal care; instead, it relies on a reformed private market.”

López goes even further, calling the healthcare program just another one of Obama’s “sellouts of the human rights of women and immigrants under corporate and right-wing pressure.”

Ouch!

Durham, according to the FSP website, says Obama and the other jokers in Washington have furthered the struggle of America’s working class and poor during their bipartisan attempts at correcting the recession.

“The Democratic and Republican parties have done nothing but cooperate in forcing workers and the poor to pay the costs of the Great Recession caused by the banks and Wall Street,” the site says. “President Obama may play to the crowd by criticizing ‘bad apple’ corporations, as he did in his State of the Union address. But the facts show that the program of corporate coddling, which creates austerity for the masses, is completely bipartisan.”

Durham and López are also offended by Obama’s recent compromise with religious institutions over providing birth control coverage.

Durham says the only way to provide quality health care is to get private insurers out of the picture altogether. For-profit insurance companies, according to a Baltimore-area neurologist Dr. Steven Strauss, are a fundamental problem.

“No one should be making a profit from providing — or, more to the point, denying — the medical care that should be treated as a basic human right,” Strauss says, according to the release. “But insurance and drug companies are among the biggest money-makers in the nation, amassing billions each year from people's suffering.”

The Freedom Socialist Party believes that a single-payer option such as Medicare, if it were to be offered to everyone, would be a reasonable first step but that all for-profit entities must be removed from the pharmaceutical, medical supply and hospitals industries.

It also suggests taxing corporations and the very wealthy — something that’s not going to take away any of Obama’s votes because he’s trying to do that, too. And the duo’s ideas for redirecting military spending to the nation’s human needs probably won’t cost the president too many reelection votes, either.

For more information go to www.socialism.com or email the stuff you hate about unrelenting capitalism to votesocialism@gmail.com.

President Obama could not be reached for comment before the publishing of this blog.

In their typically overheated and sensationalistic manner, some conservatives are actually blaming “socialism” and our northern neighbor for the recent death of actress Natasha Richardson.

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Some Greater Cincinnati residents said "Thank you" today to U.S. Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Price Hill).

Working America, an activist group affiliated with the AFL-CIO labor union, delivered over 50 handwritten letters from area residents to the congressman, thanking him for his recent support of President Obama’s health care reform bill.

Also, the letters urge Driehaus to support House efforts to pass a jobs creation bill and to impose stricter regulations on Wall Street financial firms.

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