!Gasp! I Think George Bush Was (and is) A Great President

The last six years will go down in history as the end of journalism.  The mainstream media in this company laid down their right to call themselves journalists, and took up the mantle of the propagandist, when they began a concentrated effort to discredit President Bush.

Now, as it stands today, we will have a President who shares Michael Moore's opinions of our current president.  He, and millions like him, think President Bush is an idiot, a liar, out of touch, a war-monger, and grossly incompetent.  They have (with the media's help) branded him as the cause of all of our economic woes, single handedly responsible for our current "recession".

This makes almost no sense to me.  The last eight years have been the most prosperous in the history of our country, period.  The average american has seen a great increase in his standards of wealth under the unholy Bush administration, Starbucks has replaced McDonalds, Target has replaced Wal-Mart, Panera Bread has replaced the local diner.  Even today, with our "recession", America is wealthier than it was back in 2000, and we were hardly paupers then.

It is my opinion that the current economic crisis has been brought about 1)because of the mismanagement of our nations oil reserves and unneeded dependence on foreign oil and 2)by the liberal congress' refusal to change the policies on Fannie May and Freddy Mac.  Neither of these two situations had anything to do with President Bush, and he made efforts to fix both problems years ago only to be trumped by a liberal congress.

The main beef that American's have with our president is over the war in Iraq.  This is where all of the anger came from in the first place.  The Iraq war has been fuel for the fire of the peacenick left wing fringe of the democratic party, and has pushed them to action.  But it needs to be remembered that the vote to go into this conflict was almost unanimously affirmed in congress, that it was voted on by prominent democrats, and that everyone (including the president) was working on bad intelligence.  The threat was their, and I am thankful that we have a president who was willing to do something about it.  

I am also thankful that our president has overseen the rebuilding of Iraq.  We have built schools and power grids, and for the average Iraqi, life is much better than it was.  The war is won and everything Bush is doing is working.

I wish I had time to write more on this and I may later, but I wanted to get on my little stump and support our president.

Where do these cooks come from?

When I was in college, doing some visiting at UT, I remember knocking on the door of this apartment to only to be drug in (literally) by an irate man who appeared to be in his fifties. This man (who never gave us his name) went on to describe to us in bitter tones how we were responsible for all of the evils in the world. He literally told us that we were murderers of millions who were in some way personally responsible for all of the poverty of Africa. That through ignorance we had weaned all of the evils in the world. At the time I was working with underprivileged kids at the Boys & Girl's Club, when I asked him what he did for a living, he just told me "I sell roses."
Fortunately, I haven't personally run into any more rose-sellers since then. I have, however, run across slews of them on the Internet. Do a search on 911, the Iraq war, or many other political hot topics and you will find a slew of them. The conspiracy theorists, the hate-mongers, the bitter, those who refuse to see America as anything positive. I have to scratch my head sometimes and wonder, where do these people come from?
I wasn't alive in the fifties, but everything I have read about it suggests that the left in America was unabashedly socialist and pro-communist. I wasn't alive in the sixties, but everything I have read about it seems to suggest that the left, or at least the student led left, were violently anti-war to the point where they claimed that Americans were responsible for the deaths of "millions" of Vietnamese.
I think the scariest thing about the situation is that these are the people who are now running the democratic party. Not their middle leaning base, those who represent the common people who believe in the system of government laid down by our founders, but the people who think America needs to be radically changed. Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama is as left leaning as ever a political candidate was. Not even Wallace, the secretary of state under Truman who ran under a "progressive" banner at the beginning of Mcarthy's reign, was as openly liberal as Mr. Obama has been.
When normal Americans here opinions like that of the rose-seller, they scratch their head and ponder. When Mr. Obama hears these opinions, I can't help but think he sees supporters.

Amazing Technology - Time to look away

I am an admitted geek.  I love technology, love what it can do for me -furthermore, I love technology done right.  My Macbook is almost always on and is one of the few pieces of technology that I can honestly say has changed my life for the better.  My iPod touch holds my lesson plans, about a thousand contacts, my calendar, a GTD system, my budget, a dozen books, and solitaire in my pocket all the time.  My iMac makes my office look good - and is an amazing computer to boot.  

So you can imagine that I was a little interested in Apple's unavailing of the new MacBook's the other day.  I have read the blogs and watched the videos and even lusted a little bit.  They really are beautiful machines, and they address so many of the flaws of the current model.  It was want at first sight.

Then I thought about it.  I have a perfectly functional laptop, it is no slower today than when I purchased it almost three years ago.  Even with my 1gb of ram it breezes through my photoshop work.  I even keep Photoshop and Indesign open at the same time with no problem.  

Which brings me to another recently released piece of technology that I won't even be looking at, and that is the new Creative Suite from Adobe.  When Adobe came out with CS3 I had a copy of (slow) CS2 on my computer.  Using CS3 felt so, good.  I was extremely pleased when my church bought a copy and I got it on my computer.  

But I have no desire to even look at CS4.  I still can't get over how well CS3 works for me, why would I want CS4.  I am determined not to even download the free demo.

That being said there is a piece of software I can see myself getting.  That is the new Bento 2 from Apple.  I love iWork and it has totally met (exceeded) my pretty basic needs, but the one thing it left out was a database.  The $299 filemaker pro would be nice, but the price tag made it a non-option.  I downloaded the trial of the first Bento and liked it, but couldn't justify spending $50 on it.  Bento2 on the other hand will fulfill quite a few needs that my ever changing job creates; like how to keep track of all of the people visiting my sunday school class, or how to plan the events I have coming up.  I really like what they have done with this new version of the program, and can justify spending some money on it.

But as far as all other things coming out, I am completely content with what I have, and that just may be more beautiful then even the new MacBooks.

Looking to the future

Amanda and I have a lot to look forward to.  One of those things is that we will be (Lord willing) moving out of our current apartment to the Camp that we run in the summer time.  Here is a link to some pictures of the horse barn being turned into a house.