Misc. thoughts

Dear James, Daniel and Emily,

1. Wishing my nephew David luck as he leaves today for Denmark where he will be a paid player coach for a professional football team there. I wish him all the luck in the world and hope he takes advantage of the fabulous opportunities that he is being presented.

2. Yesterday I typed a very angry, erratic post, which I decided not to post, about conservatives and government. I decided not to post it because it was too incoherent. I will sum up my thoughts with a blanket statement that one of my hopes of the change in D.C. is a change in culture where people stop being afraid of having government perform the jobs it once did: education, prisons, defense, transportation building. I think one of the sadder effects of the great Conservative movement has been the decline in the government being able to do it's own tasks, and instead for profit corporations have moved into areas where the profit margins are theoretically small, yet have become big due to the government overpaying.

3. I am quite proud and pleased to know that my country is now out of the torture business. I wish I could say this was something that concerned me on a daily basis, but I will admit it didn't. But in retrospect it was a bad thing. Our country is supposed to be a shining beacon of liberty and the rule of law, and we have not stood for that the last couple of years under the mistaken assumption that we had to sacrifice these principals in the name of security.

4. I got into a mini argument with a friend yesterday over a comment made by Rush Limbaugh. Rush had stated that he hoped Obama failed. He qualified the statement by stating that he hopes the liberal policies that Obama is planning fail. My response is that if this failure takes place it will be at a tremendous cost to this country, he is in effect hoping that our economy and security get worse than they already are. Now I know that there were people protesting Bush when he was elected. But I don't think for one minute that anyone other than the real left wing nut jobs wanted George III to fail after 9/11. We wanted him to protect our country.

It reminds me of when Reagan was shot, there were a lot of people who disagreed with his policies, but no one wanted an assassin to succeed in killing him. The problem is that Rush won't be penalized for this, his ratings will not go down, he will not be pushed to the rubbish heap along with the other discredited voices and critics from the extremes of both sides. Instead he will continue on, with his ditto heads echoing whatever drivel he spouts. And that more than anything is what ticks me off.