Friday, February 25, 2011

Sitting On My Porch Party Sixty Three

All day long I debated whether or not to kick off my Mardi Gras season and hit a parade tonight. I passed on that because in the morning I have to go help make floats for KIPP Central City’s annual parade. I’ll let that be the start of my holiday season then I’ll catch the 2PM parade after that. The other reason I decided not to go is that it seems to be really warm for February. My seasonal clock is all off. Today women were out stopping traffic in their outfits and that doesn’t usually start happening until April. If the weather stays this way Mardi Gras day is going to be wild.

It’s been a long week and I am not much into being out in the crowd tonight. I just want to tell everybody that I have some wonderful friends. I treat a lot of them like they get on my nerves but I really appreciate them.

To be an effective blogger and cover the type of content I do you have to try and pay attention to what’s going on in the world. I have been watching this fight over collective bargaining that started in Wisconsin and it’s puzzling. Everybody is in an uproar now but with two years of passion and fire coming from the Tea Party and other conservative groups, what did everything one think was going to happen when you put guys like Scott Walker in office? Did you think they were going to win the election with an energized voting base and then all of a sudden start compromising? That’s what Democrats do. Republicans don’t usually go compromise their agenda like that. If they say they are eliminating half of the state employees they are going to eliminate half of the employees or try their best to do it. The time to fight was before the election. Now there are 14 senators in Wisconsin that can’t come home until the governor’s term is over because it’s the only way he stops trying to pass that bill.

After all the rallies and all the passion for two years before the 2010 election we have ended up with unions, Planned Parenthood, and PBS being the reason we are spending too much. Our solution to too much government was to take out Grover and Cookie Monster. Once the spending on health exams for poor women stop the jobs will just start rolling in.

Down here in South Louisiana people dislike the president so much that Democrats are changing parties just to keep their opponents from putting their name and Obama’s name in the same sentence. I hear them talk about the stimulus breaking the bank and I know Governor Jindal took a stand and sent money back. Everybody thought that was great. Even though I felt he should have taken all the help he could get I was willing to respect his decision. Then one day was driving out to the mall and I got to the Causeway where they are doing all kinds of work to make the ride to and from work easier for people that live on the other side of the lake. I was wondering how we had the money to pay for that kind of thing when I seen the signs that said the project was paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”. That’s when I realized that the governor was only turning money down that made him look good to his close minded supporters. If he really wanted to take a stand he would have stopped that Causeway project because the money came from the tax payers. It’s all just a dog and pony show.

That’s why Governor Jindal can have a press conference to suggest the UNO/SUNO merge. He knew a lot of people in this state would see the “NO” parts of those schools’ name and have his back. Now when he cuts the budget for higher education again everyone will blame SUNO and UNO and he’ll be alright politically. There are dead fish and oil showing up daily on the shores of the state and I haven’t heard anything from our leader. I bet if President Obama said tomorrow he was putting a hold on deepwater drilling again the governor would have a press conference ten minutes after the announcing saying the president was killing jobs.

The country was in such turmoil financially when President Obama got elected. We were in two wars, employment was high, and the Republican president had blown the deficit wide open with his tax cuts and refusal to end the two wars he started. The country was so starving for change that they elected President Obama because of his passion and promise to change the way the government does business. Its two years later. We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tax cuts for the rich got extended two more years. The only time I hear President Obama get angry is when he’s talking to his own supporters and his opponents seem to be trying to implement things they didn’t even try when they had all three houses of government. So far this isn’t working out quite like I thought.

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