427. End of Year Rambling

2008 comes to an end in a few hours, thankfully. The thankfully is both good and bad, as is always the case. Was 2008 bad? There were mistakes here and there and I had to do some work to keep a seat on the Kentucky Democratic Party State Central Executive Committee. There were campaigns with liars as their chiefs (or chiefettes) and others with calm, collected, and honest leadership. I met and worked with a Harvard Law School graduate who was a former College Democrats Executive Director who worried and fussed over every thing and led our first term congressman here along the Left Bank of the Ohio River near Milepost 606 to a second term in the 111th Congress, winning the race by receiving more votes than any other partisan candidate ever on a Jefferson County ballot. That was, thankfully, a good thing. 2008 brings (almost) an end to the eight years of a junta-led federal government, a government stolen from the voters by Katherine Harris and others in Florida and five members of a nine member panel with offices at #1 First Street NE in Washington, DC. 2008, thankfully, saw the election of an biracial president younger than me by eleven months, born in a state which was admitted to the Union just under two years before his birth. That was a good thing. 2008 also saw the collapse of the Republic's financial system, a collapse brought on by over-eager tax-cutters dating back to the late 1970s, whose political mantra has been to reduce government to a point that it would eventually disappear. They've caused weak-backed politicians to vote to cut taxes over and over, especially taxes on corporations. Most of the tax dollars that used to go into reinvestment in the governments now goes into overseas jobs which cost less to fund and mean more money in the pockets of the top brass of those same corporation. Thankfully this new young biracial president has an interest in building and rebuilding America's infrastructure, the way FDR did in the 1930s, the way Eisenhower planned in the 1950s, and with a zeal hopefully equal to that of JFK whose determination led America to the Moon within a ten year window. If only we had local officials with the same determination.

We'll leave that for 2009.

Happy New Year.