SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS

California Governor
The latest poll shows the approval rating for Arnold Schwarzenegger is down to an all time low of 22%, the same as Gray Davis had when he was recalled. Gee, and Arnold has such potential. I remember that he said he would bring a business approach to State government, would eliminate all that rampant waste, fraud, and abuse, and then balance the budget without raising taxes. Well, the current State budget is $20 billion short of balancing, the same amount as last year, but not to worry. Republican candidate for governor Meg Whitman, former head of EBay, is promising to bring a business approach to government, eliminate all that waste, fraud, and abuse, and balance the budget without raising taxes. Thank goodness we have a Republican candidate for governor bringing fresh ideas to State government!

How Many Times Are You Going To Nuke 'em?
The Obama administion has announced plans to reduce the US nuclear arsenal from a little over 5,000 warhead to only a little over 3,000 warheads, a reduction of about 40%. There go the Democrats again, putting American security at risk. Now instead of being able to destroy the world 25 times over, we will be able to destroy the world only 15 times over. Actually, I am being "conservative." It may be going from 50 times to 30 times since Carl Sagan and a group of scientists calculated that as little as 100 thermonuclear bombs going off could bring about nuclear winter. Remember nuclear winter? Enough nuclear bombs exploding and cities destroyed and the ash, dust, and soot could cover the whole earth, drop temperatures to where it was year around winter for maybe a decade, destroying civilization and much of humanity. But, hey on the good side, this is one way to combat global warming that conservatives could support--bomb (insert your favorite enemy here) back to the stone age and combat global warming at the same time.

The administration also announced that they will increase the amount spent on "modernizing" our nuclear arsenal. That is, they will make sure that those old bombs are replaced or checked for reliability to make sure that they explode when we set out to destroy the world. Considering that the whole point of nuclear weapons is to never drop them, but only use them as a deterrent, I think a little uncertainty about their reliability would be a good thing. A President might be a little more hesitant about launching a nuclear strike if he or she wasn't sure they would work.

Debt Relief Is On The Way
The congressional Republicans have announced plans to find $20 billion in deficit reduction. Thank goodness for their expertise. After all, Bush increased the total US deficit less than two times compared to Reagan's almost three times. Of course, as covered in my last post, Senator John Kyl said deficits don't matter when cutting taxes for the rich. In 2005 the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the tax cuts to be over $500 billion FOR THAT YEAR ALONE. Oh, and when asked why the Republicans didn't do anything about the deficit when they passed the Medicare drug benefit about half a dozen years ago (adding about $640 billion to the debt over 10 years), Republican Senator Orrin Hatch admitted that they didn't think about those things back then. Of course they made history by being the first legislature anywhere to actually cut taxes during a war. That War in Iraq has added $1 trillion to the deficit and it is still going up daily, albeit much slower now. Thanks to veteran disability payments and other such associated costs, the final bill has been estimated to be between $2 and $3 trillion. But when searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, money is no object, right?

So, send your ideas for debt reduction to your favorite Republican. Here are a couple of suggestions. In addition to doing away with the Bush tax cuts, how about "re-sizing" the military, to use an au courant term from the world of business. The Defense Department budget has doubled in the last 10 years (we now spend as much as the rest of the world COMBINED). Seeing as how al Qaida is our only real enemy now, I have the following questions. How many submarines and carrier task forces does it take to maintain naval superiority? How many jet fighters will it take to maintain air superiority over al Qaida? How many tanks will it take to defeat them? How many overseas bases? With about 40,000 Marines on Okinawa, I'm sure that island is safe, but is that where they are needed? Since conservatives insist that it must be a "war" against terrorism and not just police action, these are important questions they need to address.