Sunday, November 9, 2008

Happenings

The below article is my last post on politics for a while. I try to keep my blog just a fun place to talk about horses, but I wanted to get this out. Please feel free to not read it if you will get offended. I am not trying to bash anyone, just stating my viewpoint about what our country needs versus what it has chosen.


Well, we have a new president now. I am glad the suspense is over. I am just going to hope that either Obama is very ineffective or that he manages to get a whole bunch of his agenda done at once. If he gets a lot of his agenda accomplished quickly it will make Americans very, very mad and maybe wake people up. This country is like the frog in a boiling pot that has not noticed how bad things have gotten. I still can't believe we actually voted for a socialist/communist to run what is supposed to be a free country, but we did and now we get to experience the joys of socialism. It's worked SOO well in places like Russia, Cuba, most of Europe (with its extremely high levels of depression, an almost majority of people who never even try to get jobs, and hardly any children being born - getting taken over by immigrants), and all those other places it's been tried. (Yes, the sarcasm is a little heavy!) And don't quote China as a socialist place that is doing well. Their increasing prosperity is DIRECTLY correlated with every move they make towards a free market society.

Oh well. At least some good bills got passed, for a change.



I had a hard time before the election just leaving things to God. I know He is ultimately in charge and whatever happens is in His plan, but I felt like I was watching somebody stab themself over and over and I couldn't make them stop. Watching my country deliberately do such self-destructive things is really hard, but now it's done and it is the time for me to pray harder and keep living my life and doing the things I know I am supposed to do. One of which includes respecting the office of the president and showing some class towards the new president with whom I have almost nothing in common, unlike the majority of liberals the last eight years. I don't want to call names or things like that.

I also hope that this might actually clean up the Republican party. They have gotten so liberal leaning and so wishy-washy lately that it is disgusting. We need people with spines, who will articulate what and why they believe and who don't go around trying to make people like them but who actually do the things they are able to do and don't back down just because someone accuses them of being mean. If you believe something is best for the country, then TRY TO DO IT and don't let whiners stop you! At least now the GOP can see that pandering didn't help them win.

At least one good thing is that we have finally elected a member of a minority as president, so hopefully that will settle a great deal of the angst about racism and associated issues.


I am going to miss President Bush. I really am.

In the toughest of tough political climates with a media that functioned as an opposing lobby and with very little support from his own party, he still managed to do some amazing and audacious things. He stuck by his principles and his decisions consistently during the whole eight years and was consistently gracious to hateful people who stopped at nothing to smear him. Having been very involved with the Iraq War news and Iraqi blogs for about two years (not so much anymore) I am still dumbfounded at the completely biased way the media has misrepresented the efforts over there and what really has and hasn't "been found" and all the straw-men that were used to discredit our strategic purposes over there. I am amazed at how everything, even the weather, has been spun so as to try to find a way put blame on Bush, and cannot believe the way people would actually openly wish for bad things to happen to America just so that they could use it against Bush. I also am quite disgusted with the Republicans for not having the courage of their convictions and for not really trying hard to get the conservative message out.

I still am amazed we were lucky (blessed) enough to have President Bush for eight whole years and I hope the rest of his life is good. I disliked his big-government policies, but I respect him a great deal and am not looking forward to having a new president who is wobbly and inexperienced on some things and on others firmly set on courses that will be very, very bad for our country long-term.


Finally, the current financial crisis is something we all share responsibility for. It has been building for decades and warned about thousands of times. The problems come from a combination of programs trying to fix things by throwing money at problems, laws trying to regulate things to make them safer and less risky and/or more fair, and a general (natural) human desire to get fun stuff before the right time. The government can fix its share of the problem by allowing citizens more freedom (and thus opportunity), by not trying to "make" fairness happen, and by not trying to solve every problem for everyone. Then it is up to us, The People of the United States, to work on our own problems with the tools we have, which are many.


Most of my readers are horse people. Hay prices have gone dramatically up in recent years. The price spikes are actually quite predictable (and have been predicted many times) due to policies that started during the Great Depression and that have gotten more involved over time. Farmers in our country produce a great deal of the world's food - in fact, America produces 25% of the world's GDP every year! However, being either a small family farmer or a big farmer in this country presents many, many challeges. Meat and dairy inspection laws in most states favor only the large producer, such that a $500,000 state-of-the art slaughter plant would be required if a family wanted to sell 20 chickens a year to their neighbors, already processed. The laws could be modified so that farms could produce and process meat (and dairy) just as hygienically in a clean room with stainless steel and concretee and good refrigeration. However, the tangled bunch of laws keep getting more tangled. When the powers that be decide that too many farmers are planting corn in a year, thus bringing the price down, the government will PAY some farmers NOT to plant corn. Huh? What is with that? As a result of all the tinkering by the USDA and other buraucracies, milk prices paid to dairy farmers have stayed almost the same as in the 50s. Everything else went way up, though, so farmers now have a very, very small margin of profit on each cow, and must have thousands rather than dozens of cows, and feed antibiotics and growth hormones to try to get slightly more profit out of the cow before she dies at 4 or 5. If the government had not been messing with the market economy in farming, we would be paying a lot less taxes, but quite a bit more at the grocery store. However, the food we bought would be from farmers who were actually earning a living most years and who were able to raise the food in a healthy manner with far less pollution, chemicals, and environmental impact. We all want that, but we keep electing people who make laws that take us farther and farther away from any chance of that. Hmm.


Below are various random links:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122611181065310615.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584386627599251.html

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/11/may-have-been-t.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/04/AR2008110403872.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2008/11/05/congress-obama-senate-biz-beltway-cx_bw_1105legislate.html

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/06/coburn-obama-conservatives-oped-cx_tc_1106coburn.html

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/11/04/dateline-2012-the-waning-days-of-the-failed-obama-presidency/

http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=4853

http://www.stockmangrassfarmer.net/


Anyway, enough with the ranting now and thanks if you managed to read it all! I'll get back to planting wheat and playing with the horses. Hopefully I can do a more fun post about The Spoiled Ones tomorrow.


L

3 comments:

photogchic said...

I can tell you put a lot of thought into your post and it is great that we can come together and have civilized political discussions and most importantly, let people be entitled to their opinions. I have to say, I am thrilled an optimistic about the future. I am not one of those people running around yelling "Change!" "Hope!" But I feel like there is someone in the White House with a high IQ and a world view. Don't listen to the right pundits..they are preying on peoples fears, fears of communism and socialism. If anything..you should be disgruntled about the mass fraud that is going on with this bailout, the cuts to veterans benefits, ridiculous corporate profits and scandals, the jobs lost over the past 8 years, outing a CIA agent, the failure of "no child left behind", FEMA crisis, the shortcuts Bush passed for the FDA, the lack of a plan for going to war (read Fiasco) , the mass of illegal aliens...and on and on...all under Bush. You are gonna be alright...this country is going to be alright...have some optimism about our future and give Obama a chance. You are right about the republicans...there party is a mess..and Bush destroyed that too. Alright girl...enough of my rant. We can agree to disagree. Is Mira a Republican?:-)

Original L said...

Tee hee, no Mira is not an R or a D, or even an I. That is why I USUALLY don't discuss politics here, but I felt like I had to do a "for the record post."

I'm glad you were not offended, and yes people will give Obama a chance, me included. However, I already know a bunch of things he is planning to do (that his record backs up that he really does want to accomplish) that I am totally against ideologically. So, I plan to be a polite dissenter.

*Bailout - ugh, they are not good ideas, but everybody in Washington seemed to want it.
*Veteran's benefits - not something I've researched much, so I'll have to look it up sometime.
*Corporate profits and scandals - how does the president keep people from breaking laws?
*Jobs lost. Despite what the media says, the last 8 years have had record unemployment rates quite consistently until now.
*Fema - A complicated issue, but I think a lot more blame goes local. Look it up - the White House actually had to call the governor and ask her to evacuate before she bothered to order it.
*Illegal aliens - why can't either side get it right? It's such a simple thing to fix (legally), really!

Now that the election is over I'm not really grumpy. We'll just wait and see and work towards good things for the country.

Bill and Darlene said...

I agree with you, Original L. Bush could only do so much with a mostly Democratic/liberal congress.