I was getting my morning news when I came across an article about the Senate and the “Cash for Clunkers” program funding. I didn’t like what I read, so I wrote the following email to both of my Senators here in Ohio. I expect at most a form letter in return, but maybe it will nudge them in the right direction.

I am reading the news online and see that the Republicans and some Democrats in the Senate are going to oppose more funding for the “Cash for Clunkers” program. I hope you are not one of the people that will be doing so.

Senator DeMint seems to think that the program is just helping car dealers and ignoring other small business owners. If you interpret the program as narrowly as possible, then he is right. If you look at the practical effects, it is much more than that.

Those dealerships are continuing to employ people, who will have money to spend at other businesses locally. The cars are made by factories all over, which will be able to employ people, who will also remain employed and have money to spend where they live. And of course, all of the money gets taxed on each change of hands, helping maintain the tax base of each school district, city, county, and state that those people live in. And of course, all of those people that remain employed, and the people they help keep on employment by spending their earnings, are not on the unemployment rolls, yet another money savings to states.

The people buying the cars are saving money, both on the sale and by using less gas. Which means less pollution, which leads to less healthcare costs.

Frankly, the only people that I can figure would not be happy about the entire program are the oil companies, since they will sell less oil. But since, for example, Shell Oil’s profits for last quarter were $2.3 billion dollars, I find it hard to believe cries of hardship from them.

So there are a lot of reasons and benefits to continuing the program. Yes it does mean increased spending, but frankly, $2 billion dollars is a drop in the buck when dealing with Federal spending. Better to spend the money on a proven and successful program, with huge secondary and tertiary benefits then using it to do something like start a foreign war.

Well, new words from me at any rate. I just looked at my front page and it has been 3 months since I posted anything. It certainly doesn’t feel as though I have been silent so long. And it certainly is not because I have been so busy with real life, quite the opposite in fact.

I did mess my back up Memorial Day weekend, and the drugs I was on made the next two weeks disappear even more quickly then normal. The rest of the time, I have no excuse for. Not that there was a huge audience to disappoint here anyway.

I did re-read all of the Vorkosigan books during that period. While not horribly productive, it was certainly a great deal of fun. Well, actually, I am still in the process of reading Mirror Dance. It is the most difficult for me to read for some reason.

There is certainly enough in the political sphere to warrant attention here. From the lies being spread about the healthcare plans, to the idiocy of the Birthers, to the voting on Judge Sotomayor, there is plenty that I could comment on. But I have found that just reading the stories and seeing the clips from the news shows just wears me out. I see the politicians and talking heads spreading misinformation and outright lies, and I get angry at them. And I get angry at the supposed journalists that don’t challenge them on the lies. By the time I am done, I am too disgusted to write anything myself.

Then there is gaming. I have not been able to visit my friends to play board games recently, I have been saving the money. I have been playing City of Heroes and EVE Online. Thank goodness for annual subscriptions, or I would have had to let both of them go also.

The Mission Architect for City of Heroes has been a great deal of fun. While there are a lot of really bad stories, and a lot of farms, overall it is a very nice addition to the game. There are some outstanding stories already created, and I am certain more will be added as more features and abilities are added to the system.

And of course, the big news for COH fans is the coming of two of the most requested things in the history of the game. Power customization and switching sides. I was not really too excited about the power customization in Issue 16 at first. But as I have played more of my alts, I keep finding things that I would like to change, to better fit the character concept and look. And the animation changes coming for Martial Arts and Super Strength are very welcome, giving each player with those powersets the ability to differentiate their character from others.

I started out excited about Going Rogue and being able to switch sides. I have characters on both blue and red sides that can easily fit moving into the grey, or even out right switching. I created them with that idea in mind, some over 5 years ago when I started playing the game. It has taken a long time to get here, but I have had a lot of fun waiting.

Well, I will try to be a bit more proactive about posting here.

I have mentioned the benefits of being on Twitter before. I encountered another today, from the computer of @GottaLaff when I checked out a link to one of her posts at The Political Carnival. You never really know what you will find when you follow a link on Twitter, although I have not yet been RickRolled there, but I have enjoyed the writings of GottaLaff that I have already read, so it was not a big risk.

This particular post was mostly from an Op-Ed piece at the New York Times, so I went over there to read the original. I do not know just how accurate the piece is about the European point of view, since I do not live in Europe and have not been taking any polls there. But I do know a few Europeans, and while they feel that Bush did do a few decent things, they mostly think that Obama is a huge improvement, both for their nations and for the United States.

I have to say that for me personally, the article is accurate, as far as it goes. I do feel proud of our President. And I have a great deal of faith in him and his leadership. This doesn’t mean I think he is the “messiah” or he can do no wrong. He has some positions I disagree with, and he has made some mistakes already. But it does mean I think he has the ability to lead us, and show us as a nation, how to be a better than we are.

I just hope that when he makes a big mistake, which I am afraid is inevitable, it will not cause the faith and hope he instills in so many around the world to backlash. We are always hardest on our leaders when they fail us, and the greater the hope we feel, the lower the depths we fall to. And in over thirty years of following politics, I can not remember anyone instilling so much hope and optimism in so many people.

So the Washington Post has an article up today about the fact that several of Bush’s appointees for U.S. Attorneys have not offered their resignations and do not plan to. Very much is made of the idea that “While [Obama] pledged bipartisanship during his campaign, replacing the cadre of mostly conservative U.S. attorneys would signal a new direction.”

The idea seems to be that Obama must keep these attorneys in place, or he is going back on his word. After all, the only reason that he could possibly want to replace the current U.S. Attorneys is for political reasons. And it isn’t like other Presidents have replaced all of the attorneys when they took office. Oh wait,

When President Bill Clinton took office, he fired all U.S. attorneys at once, provoking intense criticism in the conservative legal community and among career lawyers at the Justice Department.

President George W. Bush took a different approach, slowly releasing several of the prosecutors but keeping in place Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, while she pursued terrorism cases and a politically sensitive investigation of Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

So I guess it has happened a time or two. And while it is true that Clinton asked for resignations from all the attorneys at once, the writer left out a few things. As David G. Savage pointed out way back in March of 2007, the Clinton administration backed off from their initial effort and, to quote one of the fired attorneys, Tom Corbett, “It was how the message was delivered more than what actually occurred.”

By the end of his first 2 years in office, Clinton had replaced 89 of the 93 U.S. Attorneys. Way more then Bush’s total of 88 of 93 by the end of his first 2 years. But exactly the same as Reagan’s total of 89 of 93 in 2 years.

Reagan? Yes, Reagan, he also removed the U.S. Attorneys that Carter had appointed. And Carter did the same. It is in fact a tradition that when a new president takes office, all U.S. Attorneys offer their resignation. And the new president eventually accepts that resignation and fills the position with his appointee.

As of right now, according to this Baltimore Sun article from March 9th, 42 of the Bush appointees have resigned and Obama has said that the other 51 can stay for now. And some, like Patrick Fitzgerald of Blagojevich fame and the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame case, and many others, are going to remain in office. This is also normal, as mentioned in the Post article, Bush kept the U.S. Attorney for Southern Manhattan when he took over, just as Clinton kept on some from the prior administration, which was completely ignored in the article.

It seems that the best way to answer the question asked by the Washington Post in their article, is to read the article in the Baltimore Sun. Of course, it would hardly do for the Post to tell people that. Especially since the Sun article is a much more balanced one, presenting more actual facts with less innuendo about what Obama has done and may do.

With all of the noise about the bloated spending bill, especially from the “conservative” GOP, I was curious about exactly who was asking for all that money. How to find out? Google of course. A quick search using Republicans, earmarks,  and spending bill returned quite a few hits. Several of the links are to older stories, or stories about the President signing the bill today.

But there were a few other links that were worth looking at. With the kind of numbers that make most of the GOP look just a bit hypocritical. Along with a few Democrats.

US News & World Report has an opinion piece by John A Farrell that not only names a few Republican Senators willing to take the evil money of earmarks, it points out another point of view. Maybe that money in some of these earmarks is being used to do things like keep jobs going? Or helping with education?

Newsday.com has an article arguing exactly that. Well the politicians in the article are arguing it anyway. The story focuses on just how some of the money is being allocated in Long Island, by members of both parties. And shows why most members of the public are not that upset by most earmarks. It is the old saw about it being an earmark if it is in your state, pork if it is somewhere else.

Then there is Ron Paul, who votes against appropriation bills. But always has earmarks in them for his district. While Fox is inaccurate about Paul having the most earmarks of any Republican, he is not even number 1 in the House, he does have his name on $73 million worth. He has an interesting argument about them and how they should be used also.

There is an article on Roaring Republican, a conservative blog, that points out the hypocrisy of various Republican Senators with regard to the Omnibus bill. I may not agree with him on politics, but he is doing the right thing about trying to keep his party honest. That is what is really needed for both parties in government.

And while I hate to say it, Fox News actually has a fairly balanced article on their website. They name quite a few senators from both parties that voted for the bill, and the amount of money their states are getting. They seem to be focusing on calling out the Republicans that did so, but they also mention a few Democrats. And they point out some of the senators that voted against the bill. Including Bayh of Indiana. They missed the part about him voting against cloture while having almost $15 million in earmarks in it. That should look good in conservative Indiana.

A much more slanted look at the bill is found at Heritage Foundation. Reading that article would easily lead you to believe that the entire bill and all the earmarks are there because of Democrats. On the list of supposedly outrageous earmarks they have picked out, 3 are from Democrats, 3 from Republicans, and 1 with bi-partisan support. The Foundation is a conservative organization, so it is understandable for them to rail against government spending (I am going to refrain from searching to see what they thought about the first 6 years of the Bush administration. I want to get this finished.) but their failure to point out it is a bi-partisan practice is a bit prejudicial.

The Taxpayers for Common Sense do more than just complain about what Congress does. They provide a nice database with all the information about the earmarks in the Omnibus bill. If you really want to know who is spending what money in the bill, this is the place to find it. The only problem with it is the lack of party affiliation of the various Senators and Representatives in the database. Wikipedia can help with that problem, but it does make finding facts more difficult.

And that is where my rambling took me today. All kinds of interesting things on the web isn’t there.

Governor Jindal obviously had a hard row to hoe. He was following one of the best political speakers of our time, who has enormous personal popularity right now. Worse for Jindal and the GOP in general, we want to believe in President Obama. We want him to show us the way out of the current mess the nation, and the world, is in. So Jindal would have had to really hit it out of the park to just avoid losing ground even if Obama only gave an average speech.

Unfortunately for Jindal, Obama didn’t give an average speech, even for him. It didn’t have the punch of the 2004 convention speech, or even his acceptance speech last August. But it hit the people more strongly than his inauguration speech. That was easy to see watching MSNBC and their graph of reactions from both Obama and McCain voters, and is even more apparent on CNN’s Report Card on the speech.

Of course, Jindal did not help himself at all with the actual speech. Complaining about a non-existent maglev rail planned between Disneyland and Las Vegas, and about a volcano monitoring provision that has saved lives in the past, is not a good way to establish that people should trust you. Especially when you are the governor of a state that not only relies on hurricane warnings, but also has an actual high-speed rail corridor included in the latest proposals.

And the response to the speech has not been pretty. While Paul Krugman is a liberal, so can be expected to not care for Jindal’s speech, the Republican side has not been all that nice either. In fact, he has been panned by about everybody that has the stage to do so.

It is really hard to believe that someone so intelligent and capable could be so tone deaf. But it is a long time until 2012, so it is likely that the governor will be able to shine up his image, removing some of the tarnish that was applied last night. But he will have to stop repeating GOP talking points and be a leader in order to do that.

It is a day of bad news for various states around the country. California is so far in debt, it is starting to shut down, Kansas is keeping tax refunds and can’t pay workers Friday, and Alaska is suddenly facing a huge budget shortfall. And all of these situations have something in common. They are being facilitated by the Republican Party.

In California, the minority GOP will not vote for a budget that includes $15 billion in spending cuts, because it also includes $14 billion in tax increases. There is an argument to be made about raising taxes in a recession being a bad thing. The federal government  has avoided that in the just passed stimulus package, by deficit spending. But states that can’t do that are much more limited in their responses to these things.

The Republicans in California, in a time when their state already have high unemployment rates, seem to think that shutting down the state and increasing the number of people on unemployment, from both state and private jobs, is the best way to handle things. I admit, I am not Paul Krugman, but this does not really seem like a good idea to me.

Kansas is slightly different. They actually have the money, but it is in the wrong accounts. This happens, the town I live in just had the same problem, they worked through it by passing an ordinance to use some of the money from the other places to deal with budget shortfalls. This is not a long term fix, but it will get them through this year at least, maybe long enough for things to start turning around.

But they can’t do it. The Republican legislature will not pass the needed measure, apparently in an attempt to blackmail the Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius into signing a huge bill of spending cuts that recently passed. I have no opinion on the merits of the spending cuts, and the governor has not made any statements to this point about whether she would sign it or not. Her message to state employees indicates she can’t sign it, it has yet to get to her. Again, the Republicans are putting their goals ahead of the people they are supposedly serving.

And then there is Alaska. Sarah Palin was very vocal about the money she was able to give to state residents by taxing the oil companies. Especially the extra $1200 per person she got passed. Every politician loves to be able to tell voters he gave them money when it is election time. But it might have been more fiscally conservative to save that money, for times when oil prices are down and the state is facing a budget deficit.

They are not as badly off as California, or even Kansas. They did save money for just this kind of situation, which shows some prudence. But that savings could have been larger, and the Governor would rather cut more spending rather than tap those savings. Which will again, put more people out of jobs.

Add all of these to the Congressional Republicans fight against the stimulus package and it kind of leads to one question. What is it about the Republican Party that makes them hate people that work?

Well, that is not really fair. There are actually quite a few Republicans that do not feel that way. Unfortunately, these days they do not seem to be the majority. I hope that changes over the next few years. A healthy democracy needs a healthy debate, which we do not have today.

I am somewhat confused. I have friends that say that is easy to do, so they would not be surprised to hear it. But I do not understand why Senator Gregg’s withdrawal of his name is a black eye for Obama. They did not approach him, although whether he approached them directly or Reid passed his name is up in the air, so if he pulls his name out, it should not reflect on them.

Well, maybe it does in one way. Maybe he realized, after watching the way the Obama administration got their act together and got the stimulus moving again, that he was only going to be one minority voice on the cabinet. I am not saying that Obama would not listen to him or would use him only as a token GOP member. (He would have been third out of 15 department heads. Pretty big token.) But the obvious differences between his views and the views of most of the Obama administration meant he would not have much effect.

And Gregg may have realized that as a moderate Republican from New England, with no intention of running again in 2010, he could have a lot of power on close votes in the Senate. The two moderate Republicans from Maine have certainly shown that being the swing vote can be a lucrative position. A fourth moderate Republican would dilute this power somewhat, as would Al Franken getting seated as the 59th Democratics senator, both of those events helping Harry Reid handle cloture votes more readily. But the person who makes the 60th vote for cloture can still have an immense influence on the shape of legislation.

Maybe Gregg decided he could have more effect if he tried to be that 4th moderate Republican, willing t0 help out the Democrats for changes in their bills. Not all of them of course. But maybe he would be willing to compromise on bills that Snowe, Collins, and Spectre would not. And the 4 of them can actually team up, with a different one making that vote each time, so the ones that have hard elections coming (Arlen Spectre) can say they didn’t always vote with the Dems.

But as I said, politics are confusing. Maybe Gregg’s change of mind is a problem for Obama. Personally I think the biggest problem he has is deciding who to try next as Commerce Secretary. And HHS Secretary (I am rooting for Howard Dean personally.) Thank goodness he finally has a Labor Secretary and CIA Director, although the delays there were not his fault. Considering his team is still not completely put together, Obama and his administration have been doing pretty good getting things done.

I have just started on Twitter in the last couple of weeks. But getting pointed to things like this on it already make it worthwhile. Andrew Sullivan’s post was mostly written by someone else, but it strikes to the heart of the change that happened in this country last week.

So the week started with Bush as the President of the USA and not much happening except getting ready for the inauguration. Then Tuesday happens, and it feels like a tornado is going through the government. In over 30 years of watching national politics, I do not remember this kind of change happening so quickly, in so many areas.

CNN is making a big deal about covering Obama’s first 100 days. But is seems that in his first 100 hours, he has already accomplished more than the Bush administration did in the last year. Just the first three days of Executive Orders shows the enormous difference between the former and present administrations.

Not everybody is happy of course. The Republicans have decided that their losses in the elections are proof they need to stand up and disagree with Obama more. I am not sure pushing back hard is a good idea at this time. It will probably be popular with their base, but not so much with the more moderate section of the population that they need to woo back. It does show a certain amount of chutzpah, which I wish some of the Democrats could learn to have. On the other hand, it may just be an inability to grasp reality.

And one very important Democrat understands exactly where the country is right now. And the President let the GOP know it during their meeting this morning.

But some progressives need to see about picking up some tin foil from their haberdasher. While the title of his article, Obama and Ted Kennedy See Plans Foiled as Caroline Withdraws? does end with a question mark, Steve Clemons writes it like he knows exactly what Obama and Ted Kennedy were planning. And what they were planning was a Machiavellian scheme to set up Caroline Kennedy for a run at the Presidency in 2016. His reliance on anonymous insiders and an inability to get simple facts straight (Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will have to run in 2010, then again in 2012 if she wins), as well as his apparent mind reading abilities, tend to count against his credibility.

And it is looking like the trial in Minnesota will not be too long. Coleman does not appear to be doing well even convincing judges appointed by Republicans that his legal arguments are correct. With luck, this might possibly be over by the end of next week. (Was that enough weasel words?)

I guess it all comes down to, right now it feels really good to be able to say President Barack Obama. I hope he continues as well as he has started.