Posted April 22, 2009 by Charles
From xkcd.com/
This isn’t exactly timely, except that President Obama recently “challenged” his cabinet to reduce the budget by $100 million dollars.
Let’s not mess around: $100 mil is a lot of money. But it’s a drop in the bucket – no, it’s one of the droplets from the spash of a drop in the bucket – of the President’s budget, which is weighing in at $3.6 trillion.
To make it visual, that’s $3,600,000,000,000. But at some point all of those zeros blur together. Think of it this way: if you received $1 every ten minutes since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, you still would only have about $3.4 trillion.
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Posted November 10, 2008 by Charles
Three and a half years ago I was blessed to marry a wonderful woman. She makes me a better man in every way. When we started dating my grades went up, I became a much better employee, and I cut my sugar intake by half. I also got a pretty sweet perk: her family takes an annual trip to Disney World.
Last Wednesday we took off on this year’s trip, and not a moment too soon. We’d finally moved into our new apartment, and had voted on the losing side of the presidential election (our Senator and Representative won, though). We needed a break.
Disney’s a great place. We had the internet, but didn’t use it. We got the paper, but read it sparingly. We were completely lost in this county-sized resort/amusement park area outside of Orlando. It was great. It always is.
But one thing didn’t get blocked out of the bubble. This vacation included my brother-in-law, as always, who is quite liberal. The family is conservative at all three generations present. My wife and I are by far the most conservative at a social level, but economically we’re all about the same, except for Ryan (ScrewtapeChronicles.com).
We had plenty of discussions, far too many for a vacation, about Obama’s future and the future of the country. It was pretty interesting, and for the most part peaceful. We all agree that regardless of who heads our government, we respect the office, and will stand behind him. We won’t always agree with what he does, but we’ll be behind him. Read more
Posted October 31, 2008 by Charles
In August I decided to start a separate site for my political thoughts. That’s over. It’s just too taxing to maintain two sites…particularly when no one is reading the second one.
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I was listening to Mark Levin last night, and he was driving me crazy. He kept playing these clips of Obama as though they were clear reasons why we shouldn’t vote for him, but as I listened, they were the exact opposite. There were a couple of things about the courts and about “redistributive change” and how to achieve it (O has little hope that we can get the change through the courts, acknowledging that “the institution wasn’t designed that way”, but expressed hope in a legislative pursuit), but for the most part, it was a long commercial for him.
He talked about responsibility for each other. He talked about leaving college with the choice of pursuing a big house and a lot of money and titles and such, or pusuing a greater good – “hitch your wagon to something greater than yourself”. The clips were pretty moving. The real problem, the think Levin was thinking but didn’t say out loud, is that Obama isn’t encouraging us each to make a particular decision. He’s actually trying to get enough votes to force everyone to choose a particular path. For all of his talk about sacrifice, he’s not talking about giving of ourselves, but about taking from others. Read more
Posted August 29, 2008 by Charles
For all of you who are annoyed when you come here and I’m talking politics again, I have a great surprise for you. And for those of you who have come here only for the political commentary, I have a surprise for you, too. Henceforth, nearly all of my political comments will be found at newkindofpolitics.com.
Issues that involve church and theology as well as politics will probably be found in both places, but I need a place to spill my thoughts on politics without the burden of knowing I’m outside of the intended focus of this site.
The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Barack Obama’s oft-turned phrase. He’s said it several times, like this time, June 23rd of last year, in Hartford:
So let’s rededicate ourselves to a new kind of politics – a politics of conscience.
Since then, his politics have been politics as usual, and I’ve got a lot to say about it.
Posted August 19, 2008 by Charles
Nuclear power is happy power.
I just read through the energy plans of John McCain (The Lexington Project) and Barack Obama (New Energy for America). I was surprised by both.
Obama’s is deeper than I expected it to be. That says more about my expectations than the plan, though. McCain’s, however, is thoroughly impressive. If you put the two side by side and were honest with yourself, I don’t think even the strongest O supporter could reasonably disagree. Unreasonable disagreement is always a possibility.
The candidates have a few goals in common: development of alternative energy, regulating speculation, increase fuel economy, develop clean coal, and a few others. But they differ in some profound ways, even where their goals seem the same. Read more
