Any reader of this blog can tell you that I often put up notes and updates about my student loans. Well, there is more that I do in the student loan world besides complain about my lenders or celebrate small successes. In fact, one of the things that I try to be active about is advocating for better federal legislation to help those who are in serious student loan debt.
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President Obama’s First Evening Press Conference
President Barack Obama had his first primetime press conference last night. If you watched, I wonder if you saw as interesting an event as I saw… Ha ha ha! Honestly, that press conference would have been off of my television if FOX had its normal Monday night line-up on!
Really, President Obama needs to liven things up a bit. We’re looking for change from him, not the same old boring “what the hell is he talking about?” crap! I will say, though, that it was nice to watch the President of the United States and not have to worry about him saying something that made absolutely no sense. On the other hand, while the rest of country goes crazy over Obama’s speaking style, I really, really hate it. I know that the biased liberal media will never publish a negative thing about his speaking style, but this man relies on “ehhh” and “ihhh” WAY too much when he talks. Go back and listen to the entire speech (if you can stomach it) and try to count how many times he interjects “ehhh” and “ihhh” in a single sentence. It’s alarming.
Again, the alternative could be, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…you can’t fool me twice.” Good grief.
But even as I take my own potshot at President George W. Bush, I have to say that it was a little gross that Obama cited the federal leadership of the last eight years as the reason for the current economic downturn. Look, I agree with the rest of the gang that the folks running the world down in Washington were a little goofed up, but that includes the Democrats, too. Further, the biggest perpetrators of our current problems were the greedy people on Wall Street and the ignorant people on Main Street. The root of this downturn is the devastated housing market. The root of the devastated housing market are people who were buying $500,000 homes when they could only afford $150,000 homes. The side-root of that same problem were the bankers who gave mortgages to people who couldn’t afford their homes!
Ugh…it’s not all about Bush! I had hoped that Obama would bring this country past the Bush derangement syndrome, but after his campaign-style speech last night, I guess that real change hasn’t come…yet.
Talk About Getting Our Money’s Worth
There is a common joke when talking about government projects that whatever the project is the government should let Wal-Mart do it because it’ll come in under budget and ahead of schedule. I propose that from now on we let NASA take on all government projects.
Remember those two twin Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that landed on the red planet some five years ago? Their mission was to collect data for three weeks and send it back to Earth. The models were designed to survive for three weeks and after that any time we got out of them would be a bonus. Well, here we are more than five years later and those two little rovers are still going strong!
An accumulation of dust on the rovers’ electricity-generating solar panels was expected to be one of the most likely causes of their eventual deaths, but wind has occasionally cleaned the panels.
Spirit, however, has an 18-month buildup of dust and its panels were barely able to provide sufficient power during Mars’ just-ended southern hemisphere winter. At one point it failed to receive commands, and its status fell to “serious but stable” condition.
These little robots are amazing. It’s a shame that we’ll likely never be able to recover them and bring them back to earth. They’ve provided such an incredible view of the Martian landscape – it would be great to have them in the Smithsonian.
Another Debate with More of the Same
Last night we had another debate between Senators McCain and Obama and it was pretty much more of the same. If you have to declare a winner, I’d have to go with McCain because the format really allowed him to engage with a national television audience in a way that he hasn’t been able to yet. Plus I thought the format really worked against Obama’s strength as a talking point reciter (not that being a talking point reciter is a bad thing, but it’s essentially all that Obama does). But everyone knows how these things go – the media will list Obama as the winner and cite McCain’s inability to slam a homerun during one of the debates.
Thank God I have an independent mind of my own to make up my own decisions! The amount of bias in the media these days is scary.
Anyway, if you really want to declare a winner last night it might have to be Tom Brokaw. Talk about a guy who managed to annoy almost everyone watching by being the only one who was doing his job correctly! That’s got to be a tough position for someone to be in – the straight man between two candidates for Presidents. And was it just me or did Brokaw look extremely white, pale, and aged?
All in all the debate was more bore than anything else. Neither of these candidates is going to put themselves out there and make a major statement during the debates, though McCain almost did with his statement regarding the Treasury buying up all of the bad mortgage debt out there. I am not a fan of this at all – nor am I a fan of this ridiculous bailout (which has so far led to the market falling further).
The real shame of our times is that neither McCain nor Obama have what it takes to fix the economy, yet these are the two choices that we are given. Third party anyone?
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Private Water vs. Public Water
USAToday.com published an article talking about how water went from a free commodity to a privatized industry via the bottled water giants. The article has some good points in it, but I couldn’t understand this one:
It’s a dangerous state of affairs, Royte explains, because degrading water systems will decrease consumers’ trust in tap water and increase purchases of bottled water: “Opting out of public water in favor of private isn’t going to help preserve — or improve — municipal water supplies, but preserve them we must: too many people can afford to drink nothing but.”
Maybe I just don’t understand the structure of this sentence, but if one is to opt out of using municipal water supplies in favor of private water supplies, then how is that person not preserving the municipal water supply? Go ahead, re-read the sentence. See what I mean? If I’m not drinking water from Source A, then does Source A have more water in it than it would have if I drank from there?
This is getting too close to a weird math problem for my liking, so back to the article!
I once saw a presentation that talked about the lack of potable water supplies in third world countries. Really, it’s a shame when you think about how many people in the world do not have the luxury of getting up and going to the store to get some water. Of course I would argue that before we – as Americans and socially conscious humans – take care of the third world, we should take care of our own folks in this country. There are areas of the rural south in Kentucky, for example, that do not have potable water. We need to help them first.
Take a read of the article on USAToday.com, I think it’s interesting.
