Many may believe that Obama has overreached with his budget that seemingly does the impossible; it makes the deficets of the Bush adminestration appear tiny. Even though there are things in the budget I may think excessive, all and all after you have starved the "Beast" of government for eight years, the people are entitled to something. Most of these programs will do good for society, even the ones that appear frivelous such as tatoo removal. Of course it is now pointless to ever again speak of "cutting the deficet in half". Many conservatives such as Pat Bucnannon say that "The era of big government is here to stay. There is no way of blocking it". All of the speakers at that Conservatives convention last week were pretty much "Out to Lunch" and that includes Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and even Mitt Romney, whom I must have disagreed with about 70% of what he said. It's odd that after the Goldwater deboccle, the Republicans got smart and "liberalized" their party platform. This time they seem to believe their salvation rests on ultra conservative doctrine. This is political suicide but if they want to do it- - they'll lose.
The gross domestic product was down at an anualized rate of 6.8% in the last quarter, and that's pretty bad. Unemployment in the state of California is topping ten percent. Governor Swartzenegger is saying we need to modernize our water delivery system because it hasn't kept up with population, and now mandentory water cutbacks are being considered. The end of either the water shortage, or the recession don't appear to be in sight. I don't think anybody has any idea just how huge this deficet will be, but it's measured in trillions of dollars and that is a first. I've been informed by a vaguely reliable source I'll be getting a check for $250.00.
Obama wants to leave fifty thousand troops in Iraq and also start a war in Afghinistan. Iraq is Bush's war but if we escalate in Afghanistan, this will be President Obama's war. I have an idea; let's stop this war before it starts. The roomers are that the United States is losing popularity with the comon people of Pakistan and the region in general. They don't see us as any better than the talliban. All the talking head news pundets say that Obama better have some kind of goal in mind for Afghanistan before he goes to war. Fifty thousand or even 35,000 is too many to leave in Iraq. You would think somehow we could get some sort of "peace dividend" they used to talk about. Now that we've done a such a great job in Iraq and the Meliki government is doing so swimmingly, you'd think we could be prowd of ourselves and pat ourselves on the back. But instead the concencus is that we haven't won Anything in Iraq, and that some crisis might spring up tomorrow necitating our re-escalating our efforts there.
We're losing our News icons one by one. We lost Paul Harvey yesterday. We lost Tim Russart. Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather have both dropped into a hole of obscurity. Mike Wallace is on the air less often. Everybody is saying how we need reporters who will do leg work like Woodward and Burnstein did in "All the President's Men". We need people who are willing to dig for the truth and we don't have that today. We need to have people willing to risk being wrong on occasion. I don't think Dan Rather was wrong; he was caught on a technicality. People say that if the newspapers die, then the news coverage on the Internet won't even be as good. That is something to think about. They say Craig's List had deprived newspapers of revenue from their classified adds. The Rocky Mountain News has gone under and the San Francisco Chronicle may follow. If this isn't the meatiest blog I have ever written it's just because all of the news is so depressing and it's hard to know how to digest it all. But at least now you know where to find us, at least for the next two weeks or so.
It was twenty years ago early this month that I first started listening to the twin talk show hosts of Rush Limbaugh and Tom Leykis. One of the first days I took note of Limbaugh was a day when there was a partial solar eclipse of the sun in early March of 1989. These two hosts are the ones who brought talk radio back from the grave. In many cases a literal grave, since most of the callers to these shows back then were over sixty-five. It's a good thing that talk radio was made marketable again. Now we need to revitalize the rest of the News Industry.
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