Vague Political Stuff

I'm sitting in an airport, waiting to fly to Washington DC, and I just passed a sign that said "Ignoring Global Warming Won't Make It Go Away." 

Ummm, given the fact that we've been cooling for the past ten years, that strategy has actually worked pretty well so far. 

I have a hard time commenting on the current political scene, however, as I've never felt more disenfranchised than I do now. Obama's spending us into oblivion, whereas the right is responding with a lot of screaming and outrage and tea parties and crankiness. I'm certainly still a man of the right, but I can't get excited about generic, disaffected noise, which is pretty much all the right has to offer these days. It doesn't surprise me, as Obama's radicalism is far beyond what almost all of us anticipated, but it would be nice if we could shape scattered rage into a coherent political movement that provided palatable solutions that could get people to actually vote for us. 

Case in point: this year, projections for the Federal Government anticipate $2.2 trillion in revenue. Coincidentally, mandatory government spending - Social Security, Medicare, interest in the debt - will also reach the $2.2 trillion threshold. Which means that everything else the Federal Government does will be done on borrowed money, including national defense. 

That is unsustainable. 

All the tea parties in the world to cut spending won't do a lick of good if we don't get mandatory spending under control. Which means significant reforms in Social Security and a massive revamping of our entire health care system. Nobody on the right is thinking about either of those things with any degree of seriousness, while the Left is thinking about expanding them. 

We're living through the Chinese curse - "may you live in interesting times."