Heath care, Egypt, dominate pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly sat down for an interview with President Barack Obama in the White House before the start of the Super Bowl Sunday afternoon.

The turmoil in Egypt and the recent decision against his signature health care law dominated the 14 minute interview.

O’Reilly thanked the President for his role in protecting Fox News journalists who were attacked and beaten in Egypt.

In calling for an "orderly transition" of power in Egypt, Obama said Egypt could not go "back to what it was".

While telling O'Reilly that the U.S. cannot dictate what Egypt must do, the President said “the time is now” for change, and said he expressed those concerns to Egyptian President Mubarak - a man he called a "good partner" in the war on terror.

While calling for a representative government in Egypt, he said the Muslim Brotherhood was just one faction of many. “The Egyptian people want freedom,” he said.

On the issue of health care, the President said Judge Vinson was wrong in declaring the 2,700+ page law unconstitutional.

Although pressed on the issue, Obama did not tell O'Reilly how he would react if the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, saying only that he would look at GOP proposals he thought were good, and said that he did not want to fight the battle over the law again.

The House of Representatives voted to repeal the law in mid January, and the Senate defeated a repeal measure along a strict party line vote.

Despite being ruled unconstitutional, Democrats are pushing ahead with implementation of the law.

The President also told O'Reilly the American people were "pretty evenly divided" over the issue of health care, but a Rasmussen poll shows more than half the nation's voters want the law repealed

the riots in egypt are essentially food riots.

Therefor the answer to question as to what to do involves food.

So first have a five year plan to subsidize Egyptian grain. During that five years invest in pulling up water from the ancient aquifers in the Egyptian western desert to grow grain. (Libya shares the same giant aquifer and already has huge wheat fields in the desert that can be seen from space) At the end of five years stop the subsidies and rely on the home grown wheat.

Finally an international contest would be drawn up to collapse the cost of water desalination. The contest would to see who could drop the cost of seawater desalination by $100 on three oceans. Then a new contest would be held. Whoever could beat the new price point would win 1 billion dollars. And so on until the price of desalinized water was ~50@acre foot. At Which point it becomes cost competitive to grow crops. Another contest would be held to cut the cost of delivered water by pipeline. The idea would be to bring down the cost of installing, and maintaining the pipeline and lowering the cost of pumping water.

Cheap water and cheap pipline pumping would make it possible to desert farm 1000 mile from any seacoast with desalinized water. Basically you’d be able to turn the deserts green around the world and double the size of the habitable planet and solve the worlds food water and population problem for 100-200 years.

I have read that Mubarak has 40 billion in personal wealth. You might be able to get him to subsidize Egyptian grain imports for 5 years at a cost of 12 billion or so.
You might also be able to get the Saudis to invest in Egyptian agriculture by pulling up water from the ancient aquifers. That might cost another 12 billion. It is in the Saudi interest to have a stable Egypt.
Finally the cost of contests would also be born by international billionaires as proposed by Bill Gates. This program would run ten years for a cost of ~12 billion.

In the end none of the parties that are non islamist will be able to govern unless they have a vision. This is it. Mubarak has actually been playing with the idea of grain independence–but he has not been able to deliver.

You are both correct.

Saudi Arabia has turned itself into a bit of a food exporter using de-salinization plants fueled by the natural gas they just used to burn off! (They also use it to create electric power. They have seriously reduced their aquifers, however, and have to deal with salinization by ever-heavier irrigation and very careful crop rotation and fallowing with alfalfa (actually a traditional desert farming plant) clover, soybeans, and vetches.

Libya became an agricultural powerhouse when the Italians ran it, and the Libyans also have increased their bounty using the same methods as the Saudis. Ironically, in Roman times, Egyptian wheat was a staple in Roman Italy and elsewhere. Now however, Italy, France, and Spain always have potential subsidized wheat surpluses, and are probably a source for Egypt, which of course in earlier times had a fraction of its present population.

The Egyptians are talented engineers and have many elaborate projects underway to increase arable land. Their problem is two-fold, poor administration and massive inbred corruption. If it is anything like Saudi Arabia, by the time it comes to actually doing a project, the necessary bribes and baksheesh can literally reduce the budget for operations down to pennies on the dollar compared to the face amount of contracts! Lots of badly needed stuff gets started and then lingers on in fits and starts while the payoffs continue.

Just like Chicago and Boston!

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