It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

I figured I'd try to do some small blog posting on observations about the Obama presidency, at least for the first few days/weeks/months (eg: the "critical time"), in an attempt to document in small part the actions of our "historical but not because of his race" (actual reason for historical-ness un-cited) 44th president. Executive order: increasing transparency in government. That's a good idea, I think. I mean, I can't think of a much more transparent way to start your administration other than personally lobbying Congress behind closed doors to release the 2nd half of a $700 Billion blank check, of which the first $350 Billion was spent in secret, and the Treasury officials in charge are still either not sure exactly how they wasted all the money, or aren't eager to tell. I'm sure there will be more accountability for the 2nd $350 Billion, surely that was included in the new "transparency and openness" guidelines. Surely our new ...

I've been wanting to write this somewhere for a while, and the black hole of the internet seems as good of place as any. After the last presidential election (when the candidate who won the popular vote didn't win the election), everybody who didn't want Bush to win harped on the electoral college as an antiquated system which produces the "wrong" result. The antiquated might be right, but it was a good idea at the time, and it still could be a good idea, it just needs to go further. Way back in the day, presidents were not elected directly, because there was no way to really know the candidates beyond hype, word of mouth, and advertising (sound familiar?). The founding fathers wanted good people running the country, not the people with the most advertising, so the instituted a system whereby instead of voting for a person, you basically nominated someone to vote for you who knew the candidates and could pick the candidate closest to your views. The original syste...

Cool page: http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data Basically it's the real monetary numbers for the US (adjusted to counter the political driven skew which has been increasing for the last 20 years or so). For example, the CPI calculated assuming you bought the same quality goods over the entire period (instead of the current calculation, which assumes you buy cheaper stuff when you have less money, making the official CPI pretty worthless for measuring actual inflation). It's beyond my understanding of economics and data manipulation to estimate if the fake (official) CPI will ever "catch up" to the actual CPI, and thus reflect actual inflation, but I'm guessing not. Anyway, it's always good to know the real numbers, knowledge = power and whatnot...

I know, it's pretty rare. But occasionally in the midst of all the partisan bickering, sniveling, infighting, railroading, grandstanding, and generally wasting time and huge amounts of money, somebody does something right. In this case, it was Bush commuting Libby's sentence. Sure, he probably wanted to pardon him, but that can always be done later, a-la "11th-hour slick willy". Oh, and just in case you don't agree, let's review: - Partisan trail looking for a scapegoat and a soapbox - Libby not accused of leaking anything (despite the media focus) - Libby a "good guy" from all accounts, doing his job - Convicted for inconsistent statements over two years of interrogation by hostile lawyers, and on the basis of personal recollections of events - Given a ridiculously large sentence on the encouragement of a very biased prosecution and a somewhat biased jury Basically, a sham trial of a scapegoat, convicted for giving statements inconsistent with other...

My prediction: Fred Thompson. Yeah, he's not officially running now. But he's going to win. Anyone who's not utterly repulsive to the independent voters could beat "55% hate" Hillary, and although Thompson is playing up the conservative issues for the primary, he's not nearly right-wing enough to allow a left-wing wacko to win the general election. So unless something strange happens, I'm predicting Thompson in '08. Just wanted to put that up as an opening test of blogging, cause it's what I'm currently thinking about. :)