When did the Peace Prize become a participation trophy? It wasn’t today, it became irrelevant awhile ago, but it was too irrelevant to even write about till now. The Prize has been awarded based on Hope and Change. Anyone else would see how silly this is and decline the award, but Obama is so arrogant he is going to accept this and probably even keep the money. He might say he’s giving it to a charity, but it will be his charity foundation.

I actually had to listen to his speech because it was carried by everyone. An arrogant man trying and failing to be humble and no mention of what he’s going to do with the money. What a crock.

Can we survive another three years? It’s only a year till 2010 when people can show they have woken up and replace some of the idiots in Congress. With some sort of stalemate in the government, maybe the left agenda will be on hold for awhile like what happened to Clinton. He had to come center right to get anything done. Putting some reins on this administration and this government as a whole is needed.

With this President following in the footsteps of Carter, who will emerge as our next Reagan. Sarah Palin? Probably not. She would be a good VP again, but she doesn’t have the leadership or the experience to pull us out of this mess, let alone the mess this country will be in several years from now. And the press will bring up the past when McCain threw her under the bus, let alone every other press fiasco, so maybe even VP wouldn’t be such a good choice. My vote is on Romney right now, but because of the chaos and disaster that may be upon us if this agenda goes any further, the pendulum will have such a wild swing the other direction we could be looking at someone like Ron Paul.

Term Limits: There probably should be term limits, but two may be too few for the House, that’s only four years. How about an age limit? Especially some of these old farts in the Senate, how much work do they do nowadays anyway?

Abolish the Electoral College? The electoral college allows the rest of the country to participate in the Presidential election instead of the two population centers of NYC and LA. You want the most liberal areas or the country to have control of the President? When it works, there’s nothing wrong with the electoral college

Required Service: Maybe. I don’t want the draft for the military. The military is the best in the world because it’s all volunteer. Draft people for the Peace Corps. You can’t force people to be grateful.

Don’t know who Thomas Paine is? Or his pamphlet Common Sense? Went to public school in the last 15 years? Thanks goodness for the Internet. Here’s a good place to start: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense

And now the Republicans decide to start acting like Republicans? Where have they been the last five years? How about a few months ago? Why didn’t they stand up during the last stimulus failure? If it takes a Democratic President for the Republicans to get their spine back, then Obama as President is a good thing.

Hopefully, they can keep their spine and take some seats in two years.

Life on the Road has been offline since Friday. I’ve been lobbying to get more control and the longer it’s down, the better my chances are of getting total control. I’m just a truck driver, but even I know about backups and redundancy. I’ve already offered space on this server with a current backup, I’m not sure of the exact details of the outage yet, so I’m not sure why they can’t restore the site on my server.

I’m also in the middle of decision of my own. I’m seriously investigating another company to work for. The money maybe a little less, but it might be more consistent. I will have to find a place to store the trailer until it’s sold and I may be gone more but the company I’m with now, hasn’t been a trucking company for a long time. It changed into a warehouse and a brokerage that happens to have a few trucks. I’ve made good money and even last month, with almost 50% of my total miles being empty, the loaded miles were really good and made up for it.

The new company will be more like Graebel, that pays a rate per mile with a fuel surcharge, with strict detention and layover rules. It will mean going to Canada and more New York City but the one driver I know over there seems to really like it. Maybe it’s just time for a change.

Florida is tough for me to get out of with a load on a good day. I thought there were a couple of things lined up, but they fell through. Normal stuff. The truck stop is almost full even in the middle of the day, not good. I’ve noticed a few trucks (moving style trailers like mine) that were already here when I got here and they’re still here, not good.

Is the election over yet?

I can’t listen to any more news. McCain is struggling and it doesn’t look good. I just want to point out a few things: The economy didn’t fall on its butt until this last year. The seven years Bush was in office were actually pretty good, even with the war going on. I keep hearing how there are people in Congress that don’t know how we got here. Figures, since they were the ones that put us here and in their arrogance they can’t see that putting their fingers in the market screwed it up. You would think they would know how to fix it, since they’re the ones that broke it. Admitting you have a problem is the first step in fixing your problem. Or something like that. That’s not going to happen with the arrogance in this Congress.

Joe Biden’s comment about how Obama is going to be tested his first six months was idiotic and if he knows something with some hard facts, he needs to explain himself. If he’s just running off at the mouth like he often does to make himself look important, he needs to just shut up.

But here’s an idea – The price of oil dropping is usually good for the US. For economies that depend on higher prices for oil, it’s not so good. The Saudi’s, the Russians, Venezuala and Iran to name a few. What do they all have in common? They all hate US. One little spark in the Middle East and oil shoots back up to $100 a barrel over night. What could possibly happen in the Middle East really soon? Especially if Barack takes office? Iran isn’t going to do anything with Bush still in the White House. Obama has already put doubts in people’s minds about our relationship with Israel and he has pretty much said he can talk his way out of any situation in the Middle East. While he’s busy talking, Israel is a glass parking lot and oil is even higher than before. Just a thought.

Those were the days.

We lived through the disaster of Carter’s energy plan and foreign policy, I suppose we can live through it again. Hopefully two years isn’t long enough for the Obama-Reid-Pelosi dynasty to do too much damage. Hopefully by next election Republicans will have regained their soul and their backbone and will take back a piece of the House to balance things out a little.

It took a Carter in order for a Reagan to emerge. But the pendulum will have swung so far left by that time, that the next Reagan will be more like a Ron Paul who was really ahead of his time, it wasn’t his time to win yet. I bet he would be doing pretty well if this had happened a lot sooner. Him or someone like him will be the one with the answers and the fortitude and commitment to actually do what will need to be done by that time.

And what will need to be done? Cut government, not with a scalpel but with a chain saw. Ron Paul wanted to just disband a lot of the Federal government because most of the bureaucracy has no real purpose and has no business even existing. Taxes will need to be cut like Reagan did plus a lot more. Some of the states are a little ahead of the curve and will realize what to do before the Federal government and that may be the only thing that saves us from total disaster.

Get your Recession Survival guide, you’re going to need it.

After the spending binge of the next administration, how bad will it have to get before both parties realize they can’t do whatever they want to do with no consequences? I’m not real thrilled about either choice right now, both will take us to the same place, the Republicans were taking us to the brink in a train, while the Democrats want to take a jet. I guess the sooner we hit bottom, the sooner we can recover.

Can it get any better? What’s changenism? And this guy is the head of the Finance and Banking Committee? Wasn’t he connected to Fannie and Freddie? Must have been someone else. It was those evil Republicans that did this. Barney Rubble wants everyone regulated except for the government. Who regulates the regulators? We the People. Or so I used to think.

And now with Joe the plumber. I thought the democratic party was pro working man. Aren’t they supposed to be the compassionate ones? Aren’t they the party that wants everyone to be included? Since he’s not in the union, he’s not relevant to them. Since he wants to better himself instead of remaining elbow deep in other people’s feces, his questions don’t count. Since he’s a registered Republican he’s not relevant and not supposed to speak to the anointed one. I wrote a Joe the Plumber post over on Life on the Road you can check out.

Since we are registered as “unaffiliated”, I get calls from both sides. I always give different answers on surveys, so don’t believe any polls you hear about, especially about the Nevada candidates. I had one democrat caller say they wanted to talk about the issues, but they asked if I was supporting Obama, I said, “probably not”. They didn’t want to discuss the issues anymore and hung up. I want them to convince me to vote for their guy. I’m not talking about the survey takers, that’s different, this was clearly a party volunteer. One time I was asked if I was supporting Obama and I answered, “Hell, yeah! I want him to take ALL my money, not just some of it.” They hung up too.

Speaking of voting, I’m filling out my absentee ballot after dinner tonight. I would take it in to the restaurant, but don’t want gravy falling on the Obama box by mistake. I’ve still got plenty of homework to do and I need to check with CSN and see how I did on my english placement test. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if I had to take a remedial class to get to a college freshman english class? How is someone going to tell if I need a remedial english class from one page of an essay? Just looking at this site, there are probably plenty of reasons I should be in remedial english. Nevermind. Math, that’s a different story. I know I’m going to be in the pre-math class, I’m not even worried about that yet.

RTC Southern Nevada

The mass transit system in Vegas is great. You can take a bus just about anywhere in the metro area. It’s $1.25 to ride one way or $2.50 for a 24 hour pass, as many transfers and any direction for 24 hours. It’s a great bargain. I rode to the shop, picked up the truck, took it to the APU shop, back to the house, then to my dentist appointment the next day. I was in the dentist for so long it was past 24 hours, so I walked home. All buses have bike racks and it takes two seconds to put your bike up or take it down. The website for the bus system has a routing program, you put in your origination, destination and the time of day and it gives you three options. All with times and walking distance and a very detailed map and trip info. It really is pretty cool. And since Vegas is a 24 hour town, a lot of the buses have 24 hour schedules. Those aren’t for the tourists, they’re for the casino workers and everyone else that works the night shifts.

The Bailout Mess

What else have we done? I’ve listened to way too much news. The so-called bailout that wasn’t really a bailout was probably necessary, but all of the extra junk that they put in the bill probably wasn’t. Everyone says they want to fix the problem and not place blame. I would feel a lot better if an investigation was done and people went to jail. Why is this different from Enron? People are losing their retirements and 401k’s just like Enron. Enron lied about their books while the executives were spending shareholder money. People went to jail. In this mortgage security fiasco, people need to go to jail. Maxine Waters, Barney Franks and Chris Dodd would be a good start.

Everyone has seen this video right? The democrats yelling at the regulators trying to tell them Fannie and Freddie are cooking their books, while the democrats are saying there’s nothing wrong.

Chris Dodd on the bank and finance committe getting the most money from Fannie and Freddie? What’s up with that?

What about ACORN?

While we’re throwing people in jail, how about the people at ACORN? And wasn’t Barack Obama training ACORN community organizers and telling them how to intimidate banks with racism if they didn’t make loans to people that couldn’t afford to pay them back? And no one knows who’s fault this is? They can’t have an investigation because it would be like a bunch of foxes trying to determine which one of them raided the hen house when they all did it at the same time they’re all denying it.

ACORN gets raided in Nevada for voter fraud? What a surprise? They actually investigated and raided ACORN’s office. ACORN will have so much power when Obama gets in office they will do anything it takes to get him in office. Did you know in Ohio, when you register to vote, you can place your vote. So if you just make up a name when you register, they can’t check and see if your even eligible to vote until much, much later. If at all. ACORN is working BIG TIME in OHIO. What a stupid system.

I can’t wait for the election to be over. I really don’t think anything is going to get much better and might even get worse, no matter who is in office.