The First Post of 2011

Welcome to the new year!  The pic to the right was one I snapped as we stepped outside on January 1.  The day was warm, it was sunny, and a light rain was falling.  It was a good way to begin the new year.

So I'm kind of treating this post as a new beginning.  This is especially since I pretty much crapped out in December, and was lucky to get a post or two a week up.  I'm going to shoot for something better starting now (as in at least 2-3 posts).  I may, over the next few weeks, also start re-tweaking the site, because, after a few years, I think it's in need of an overhaul.

Speaking of overhauls, the overhaul of Washington has begun.  The GOP has already begun this with their (pretty much symbolic) rejection of earmarks, as well as introducing a bill, beautifully entitled as the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." It's 2 pages (although a couple pages reforming health insurance in a good way would be a good addition).  Compare that with the 2000 plus pages that made up the Obamacare monstrosity.  Alas, it's also a largely symbolic move, as it faces certain death in the Senate, and the White House if it somehow squeaked through the Senate.

The real battle of health care will be fought with funding and regulation.  As in the administration will continue to push forward with setting up the monolith of Obamacare, and the GOP in the House hold the purse strings, and can choke off much of the bill's provisions by not funding them.  And since the key to fixing the debt disaster is cutting spending, it's a two-fer here.

And then there's the reading of the Constitution.  This is symbolism with a purpose.  Because the very job description of the 435 Representatives gathered there is contained in Article I, as well as the stated limits on their power.  The purpose comes if the GOP follows the Constitution in proposing laws, and more importantly, choosing how they spend the money that comes pouring into Washington.

We've been politically kicked in the teeth enough that I'm not jumping up and down and ready to hand over the reigns to the GOP though.

So this brings us to the plans of the Obama administration.  And that, with the GOP cock-blocking his agenda, is to use the power of unelected bureaucrats to continue advancing his agenda.  The EPA for environmental things, including cap-and-tax regulation and hawking the religion of MMGWH (that's Man-Made Global Warming Hysteria).  The FCC to get control of the Internet (or turn it into an oligopoly with the big ISPs in control).  And so on and so forth, with each chunk of the regulatory alphabet soup grabbing some more power and adding to its regulation.  I'm sure there will be more examples that I can find (just not now, because I'm feeling lazy (yeah, I can hear the collective (sarcastic) gasp)).

Ok, enough about the politics, back to me:

I'm also finding I'm spending more time producing the weekly 3x2cast than I expected.  And we're going to touch on politics there as well (just with less depth) there as well, so come on over.  new posts should be going up every Saturday (although last week's post went up just before it was Sunday, and the actual podcast was not done uploading until after that).

So with that, I'm going to close out this first post of 2011 with the hope that we can have some fun discussing some things in a good political off year.  And that the country begins its crawl out of the financial and employment crapper.