Post Vacation Notes

Man, our country is beautiful!!! More people need to get out and experience what our country has to offer. I believe that Hoover Dam has to be among the Top 5 greatest engineering feats in American history. It is completely amazing what these men were able to accomplish.

Anyway, it is great being back around. It's tough for a political junkie like me to stay out of the fray. The time off has been great. But, let's get back into the mix.

Regardless of the fact that American taxpayers just gave the financial industries 1.5 trillion dollars over the last few weeks, these companies are now trimming their credit lines by $2 trillion dollars. All of that BS talk that Henry Paulson gave us about the bailout helping American consumers access credit was all phony talk. At the end of the day, we're still screwed. It was just another money grab. For example, bailed-out CitiGroup just buys Spanish construction company for $10B.

BTW, our economy is officially in recession.

U.S. manufacturing falls to the lowest level in 26 years. Now, that can't be from all of the outsourcing that we've done, could it? We are quickly becoming a straight consumer nation that makes nothing but buys everything. This is completely unsustainable.

Barack Obama announces that Hillary Clinton will be the next Secretary of State. Dr. Susan Rice will also represent the U.S. at the United Nations.

The Palm Beach County Republicans have a new member of their executive committee. He's the son of the Grand Wizard of the KKK and has David Duke as a key ally. But, says he's "offended" that people would assume he's a white supremacist. Yeah, okay.

Michael Steele says it's too premature to start counting the GOP out. He articulates ways the GOP can regain its position in American politics. Most of these are great ideas. I wonder why he never argued for these when the Republican Congress and Presidency were doing the exact opposite.

Cool sites in the sky tonight! There's also some cool stuff in the skies over there in Greenland.