New Picture

I put up a new picture because I still miss Melvyn, even seven and half years later.

Wither Obama

I never did believe the overarching "Change" hype of the Obama campaign. By record, he was fairly cautious and moderate, which is what attracted me to him. After the recklessness of the Bush years and the closing of the American Era (1945-2008), I thought he'd be a good person to get the nation to take a deep breath and reassess what we were doing.

I was wrong, so let the buyer's remorse set in.

I do acknowledge that he inherited a terrible situation, one that will take time to fix. Yet the state of the economy isn't the source of my disappointment, but his solutions are. The stimulus was a waste of money that cost over $300,000 per supposed job saved. The cash for clunkers was useless and providing a huge tax break to buy houses when the real problem is that there are too many houses and too much debt. Fighting the crash of a bubble by trying to inflate another one was a main cause of the crash in the first place.

I've also changed my view of some things in the last few months. I think we can only make the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan worse just by our presence. I thought maybe we could do some good in Afghanistan, but my mind has been changed by this book. We've done the damage and we're not the solution. Even if I believed we had the best of intentions, and I don't believe we did, the road to hell is paved with them.

He's not all to blame as we have a joke of a Congress and too many people dreaming up death panels and the like, but I refuse to choose between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

With that note, I do appreciate the more dialogue driven foreign policy of late and I do admire his biography. But the problem is 70,000 soldiers in Germany 64 years after the end of World War II, trillion-dollar deficits funding nothing useful, and a rotting infrastructure both tangible and not. And that's only part of it.

We'll be forced to deal with all of this, but I'd rather do it now before my country is bankrupt fiscally and morally.

Wither all of it.

Good Food

Today I had to cart* my father over to Milwaukee for a job meeting. It was at the new space for Gloriosos', an Italian Deli, we went across to the old one for lunch. The owner bagged our purchases. He's 87. His brothers and other relatives work there. So if you get to Milwaukee, go there.


*My father got caught going 26 over right where the speed limit drops from 65 to 55. Although the judge reduced it to 16 over, he suspended his license for 15 days. It's only the third ticket he has gotten in 52 years of driving. Stupidity incarnate.

Title of the Day

Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF

Empire

Ever wanted to know how many soldiers the US has overseas and where. Here's the link. Why do we have 70,000 soldiers in German? Well over 100,000 in Europe. This needs to end.