For a year there was anger among liberals about the failure of the Democrat led legislative and executive branches to pass health care legislation. President Obama had made the issue a central component of his platform. The only argument the Democratic candidates had during the run-up to the 2008 elections was whether there would be a “public option” component in the reform. Barrack Obama won, so why was it taking so long?

And then there was the insanity spewing forth from the right. The legislation is going to ensure a quick demise of granny. The country is going to turn overnight into a communist dictatorship. Abortions are going to be government subsidized in an orgy of fetus killing once the bill passes. The climate was, and remains, toxic. Take for interest the beliefs of the Republicans. Sixty seven percent believe Obama is a socialist (I’m still waiting for the public option from the socialist). Fifty seven percent believe he is a Muslim (I guess they forgot the whole Reverend Wright “scandal”), sixty one percent believe Obama wants to take away American’s guns (just ask the gun shop owners who are raking in the dough from the delusional masses), thirty eight percent believe Obama is doing many of the things Hitler did (as a matter of fact, however, so do I. Surely Hitler had to eat, sleep and pee standing up). Welcome to the wing-nut world of Tea Party politics.

Of course, lost in the vitriol was the things the Health Care bill actually does. It prevents insurance companies from dropping people with pre-existing conditions, prevents insurance companies from placing lifetime caps on the insured, and will insure 31 million people that don’t currently have health insurance. These are not run by the government, merely regulated by the government. Regulation. Something the government has done very little of recently (see economic meltdown).

Anti-abortion activists are up in arms about the bill even though President Obama signed an executive order preventing the government from subsidizing abortions in the new bill and ensuring the current language does not change. Despite this, anti-abortion Democrat Stupak was demonized for signing the bill (even though he was central in ensuring Obama signed the executive order). No one on the right has ever given recognition to the fact that 31 million people, many near the edge of poverty, will now get health care. This means that a potential mother, faced with the burden of debt incurred by child birth in a hospital will no longer have to decide between an abortion or an expensive hospital procedure. Instead, she will be covered.

So where are the right wingers who sit in Church everyday and pray to a God whose holy book expounds on the ideal of social justice? Do not the 31 million people on the fringes deserve health care? Or do you leave the church thinking, I got mine. No society as fortunate as ours deserves to leave out the least of us. Give that some thought while you celebrate the death and resurrection of the Lord of social justice.

In the past month, Yemen has burst on the media scene after disenfranchised Nigerian, Umar Abdulmutallab, attempted to blow up a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit by enclosing explosives in his skivvies. Abdulmutallab was trained and financed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a splinter group that has found refuge in Yemen’s rugged geography and absence of an effective central government.

Yemen teeters on economic and political collapse in the aftermath of two decades of regional turmoil. In 1990, the Yemen government chose to sympathize with Saddam Hussein’s Kuwaiti incursion. An angry Saudi Arabia pulled funding from Yemen and expelled Yemeni workers from the kingdom which resulted in widespread unemployment in a country largely devoid of jobs.The Yemen currency, the rial, went into freefall. Prior to 1990, the rial exchanged at a rate of 10 rials to the dollar. Today the rial trades at 205 which has resulted in disastrous inflation.  As the Saudis turned off the aid spicket, Arab teachers from Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Jordan among others, that formed the backbone of Yemen’s education system, went home. Yemen’s fledgling school system has never recovered.   

Like in many Middle Eastern countries, corruption is rampant. At every level, from huge internal infrastructure projects down to the students who wish to miss a day of school to help their family in the fields, baksheesh (a bribe) is the mechanism for its implementation.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the President of Yemen, has been in power since the 1970s and he aims to install his son, Ahmed, as his successor. Succession wears many hats in modern Yemen history. Under the Yemen Imam, the successor had to be a Sayyid, or a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. These Zaydi leaders (a branch of the Shia sect) ruled Yemen for generations and were chosen from Yemen’s northern tribal lands. The last three Imams departed from the selection process in determining their successor and chose their sons as heirs. This upset many among their traditional supporters. The civil war that raged in Yemen throughout most of the 1960s was supposed to change all that. A republic emerged and the old ways of the Imamate were abandoned. Saleh, a Zaydi but not a Sayyid, has dominated contemporary Yemen but his power base has shrunk throughout his reign.

Yemeni oil reserves, which were not large by the region’s standards to begin with, have largely dried up. The country currently wages a war against a traditionalist Zaydi group in the north known as the Houthis. Southern Yemen has increasingly called for succession;  South Yemen was annexed in 1994 by a stronger and more populous North Yemen. Since 2001, Al Qaida has gained ground in Yemen. Osama Bin Laden’s family originated in Yemen in the southern province of Hadramout in the village of Wadi Doan. It is in this region along with the eastern reaches of Yemen where AQAP resides.

Besides being the poorest nation on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen faces many other challenges. The country is ravaged by the chewing of qat, a mild stimulant that saps not only the drive of the population but also its water supply. Much of the water used for irrigation is filtered to moisten the roots of the qat fields. Some analysts project the capital of Yemen, Sana’a, could exhaust its water supply within the next ten years. Yemeni farmers make more off of qat than they could off of other staple crops but qat is not exported and thus the nation loses out on hard currency that could be obtained through the growing of foodstuffs. This further exacerbates the dwindling value of the rial. Yemen once was a thriving coffee exporter. In fact the word mocha derives from the Yemen port of Mokha from which large amounts of coffee were exported during the Imamate era. These days, Yemen exports only the labor of its young men.

Finally, the one attraction that Yemen has to offer is also in jeopardy in the post-9/11 world: tourism. Yemen, with its “skyscrapers” of earth, its welcoming people and a culture tied so closely to its ancient heritage, radiates an aura of the exotic unlike any place on the earth. But as western tourism associates Yemen more with the dangerous rather than as an alluring destination, the nation loses out once again on the wealth that can assist in rectifying its problems.

The plane that carried the potential suicide bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, was headed for Detroit. This should not be lost on those who know about Arab demographics. The largest population of Yemen-Americans lives in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan. If Abdulmutallab would have succeeded on Christmas Day, he could  have easily killed Yemeni Americans that day.