* I’m back! Yay! Praise the Great Landlord!
* So I guess there’s been some sort of debt deal. There’s dispute over whether it could possibly lead to more taxes or will just be spending cuts, but the important thing is that liberals seem outraged. Obama wanted to spend more money, and everyone was supposed to be like, “We’ll just get out of your way and let you spend as much money as you want.” Instead, everyone was like, “You insane idiots, stop spending so much money!” Such basic common sense confused and enraged liberals. Yeah, we’re not going to get much in the way of real cuts and our debt is just going to keep going up, but how much were we going to achieve while Obama is president? The important thing is getting things moving in the right direction. Let’s see what happens next time the debt ceiling comes up… especially if we have a Republican president.
* This whole thing just further emphasized how useless Obama is, but once again I need to point out there was no reason to think he’d be anything but. In his previous job — mediocre legislator — he literally did nothing you couldn’t train a dog to do. Just voted yes or no on stuff, and that was it — nothing else of note. And before you say, “He gave speeches; a dog couldn’t do that,” I would mention that you could have a dog stand in front of a teleprompter and bark for ten minutes, and it would say just as much of substance as any speech Obama has ever given.
Anyway, the point is let’s have some better standards for the president in the future. Let’s make sure he was at least assistant to the manager at a real company or something.
* The movie Cowboys and Aliens was number one over the weekend, and it also seems like a good description of the two sides in this country now. You have cowboys — independent people who don’t need a giant government — and aliens — people who don’t live on this world and think you can spend and spend forever without consequence. If only we could defeat them by throwing water on them like those stupid aliens in Signs.
* SarahK and I have been following that Dave Ramsey plan to get our finances in order. Basically, you first attack your debt, then get an emergency fund, and then handle retirement, college savings, and paying off the house. While the latter part probably doesn’t apply to government, the first few steps do seem like what we should be working towards for the country. We need to get aggressive about our debt, first trimming down the government as much as possible so we’re spending less than we take in and can finally hit that long term debt. When the debt is handled, we save up a couple trillion in an emergency fund — that way we could have a new war or something and not go back into debt. When we have no debt and a emergency fund saved up, then the federal government can just refund any left over money. Of course, the plan only works well if you can really cut your budget down and keep it down. Might have to exile liberals to Antarctica to insure that — which is yet another expense. I guess you could consider it an investment.
* There was a survey done of which countries like the U.S. the most, and Japan and Kenya both have a higher favorable rating of America than Americans do. I guess it’s because they don’t have hippies to deal with. Interesting, France loves America only a little less than Americans do even though we all like hate France. World’s gone topsy turvy, people.
* A survey says that people who use Internet Explorer have below average IQs. Makes sense; I can’t think of any reason you’d use IE other than that you’re too dumb to know how to install another browser. When we got a new computer to connect to our TV as an entertainment center, I tried using IE briefly, but after five seconds with it I got so frustrated that I went to download Chrome. If you like big, bloated pieces of software that are really slow, Microsoft has you covered, but smart people don’t like that.
* I got the 3DS back when it first came out even though there weren’t really any games for it. Months later… there still aren’t really very many worthwhile games for it. And now Nintendo has announced a $80 (32%) price reduction
already. Doesn’t sound like this systems is printing money like the Wii or the previous DS. What I get for being the sucker who bought early, though, is the title “ambassador” (like John Bolton!) and 10 free NES and 10 GameBoy Advanced game downloads for it. Of course, the whole handheld game paradigm is changing, as why pay $40 for a game on the 3DS when you can get Angry Birds for iPad for $5 (or Sid Meier’s Pirates for $4 — Awesome!). Nintendo just needs to slap together some game of Mario being thrown out of a slingshot at goombas and be done with it.
* I had mentioned before I’m reading The Hunger Games
at SarahK’s urging and someone asked what I thought of it. Well, I finished it, and though I have a few minor quibbles, it was overall very engrossing. Definitely will read the rest of the series. Technically, it’s a young adult book, but it sure has a lot of violence and killing for young adults. Then again, maybe kids these days aren’t learning enough gory violence from games like Angry Birds.
* My congressman Raul Labrador was on Meet the Press on Sunday and everyone thinks he did pretty awesome representing the Tea Party side of things. His opponent tried to do racist attacks on him in the 2010 election, implying since Labrador was Hispanic he’d let illegal immigrant crack dealers into our state, but the Democrat incumbent still lost handily because he had one big problem: He was a Democrat. In Idaho. In 2010.
Bad idea.
* Wisdom of the Day: “The tea party didn’t hold America hostage, it gave DC an intervention.” –Jeremy
