By Steve Thompson, Chairman of the Butte County Republican Party
Hello Everyone, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you’ll enjoy your New Year celebrations.
I’ve been away for a while now, both away and very busy the past month, but then, who isn’t busy in December? Most of us are running ourselves ragged putting up decorations, baking, and shopping for the perfect gifts. It seems crazy but it’s all for a good cause and there’s nothing that quite compares to Christmas with your family. Heck, even atheists get in on the fun running around looking for things to hate and people to sue this time of year!
For me there was a bit of travel this December as well. I spent the first week of the month away on military training in Louisiana of all places. I won’t bore you with the training, but if this were a food column I could probably write a full blog on my experiences there and recipes containing a lot of good spice. Anyone here like gumbo?
No sooner did I return when I packed my bags for an elk hunting trip in Nevada with my father. I had requested some vacation time before I knew about the army trip, and fortunately I have an employer who is extremely supportive of my military duties, so it didn’t become a problem. I went from Louisiana temperatures in the 50’s to upstate Nevada temps down in the teens. But we had a successful hunt and the Thompson freezer will have meat this year.
I suppose I could write another blog on hunting and the outdoor experience too. Filling your freezer with your own meat could become a necessity for more people as the cost of everything continues to go up these days. Perhaps the scariest one for me right now is fuel and energy costs. I bought gas the other day and almost had to call the bank for a loan. I thought for a second what the heck is our President doing about the price of fuel in the country, but then remembered our current President comes from the political persuasion of those who think higher gas prices is a good thing. Somehow this is supposed to get us out of our cars and save the earth from global warming/cooling/we-can’t-predict-so-we’ll-call-it-climate-change. Unfortunately in the real world most of us still have places we have to drive (like work, for the half of us still employed), and most of us still cannot afford hybrid cars. Guess we fell through the cracks of the rich liberal paradigm.
So my first new year observation is that gas prices are way too high and the President, if he cares about the average working citizen, should do something to lower the costs. He should shoot for a goal of cutting the cost at the pump in half right about now. Liberals love to give free stimulus money to companies they claim to hate so he should be able to work something out with those evil oil companies, right?
My next observation (a little more positive) is that while the price of most things continues to go up, Americans dodged the bullet on tax increases this year. We owe this to the election of Republicans to Congress, with the help of patriotic TEA Party activists across the country. Say what you want about this batch of newly elected Republicans, but before they even took office they got President Obama to blink and back down on gouging the American taxpayers. That’s not too shabby, and it proves early in the year that the best thing American voters can do to save money (aside from changing their own oil) is to vote Republican.
Voters in California got a slightly different deal than the rest of the country. While everyone else went with an exciting new Congress, Californians voted in a governor from the stone age with democrat Jerry Brown. California is now completely under control of democrats and it will be interesting to see, by this time next year, if we’re all eating rainbow stew or living in soup kitchens. Probably it will be somewhere in the middle, although worse than it is now. More business and jobs will leave the state while democrats deny the occurrence as there are no good university studies that have been allowed to document it.
Finally, I’m concerned (as we all should be) about this business of the democrats trying to take over the internet. While Al Gore may have claimed to invent it, it’s been mostly a private enterprise without a lot of government interference for the most part, and to date that seems to work just fine. True, the internet has it’s problems and you can’t let your kids use it unsupervised, but do we really want the draconian arm of government controlling what we view or don’t view on the internet? Why the sudden urgency of democrats to put the internet under federal control? And how lame do they think we are using backwards doublespeak like “Net Neutrality,” and trying to convince us that private corporations are going to control the internet if we don’t let the government do it first?
This has the same smell to it as their attempts to impose neutrality on radio air waves, which is basically a blatant attempt to silence political watchdogs like Rush Limbaugh. I wonder how long before they come up with arguments that blogs like Post Scripts have too many readers and we need our government to force a more “balanced” viewpoint on us all? Whoo-hoo everyone let freedom reign!!!
2011 is looking to be a fun year (if you enjoy fighting the government for what freedoms we have left) and I hope you all will stay tuned for more great observations. I would also like to thank Jack and Tina for allowing my posts and for doing all that they do to keep readers informed about the issues. Happy New Year everyone!