I’ve been in Augusta this past week (pictures here) and I’ve been terribly busy at home since I got back. I’ve got a full week at work this week and things I need to be doing at home.

It doesn’t look like things are going to ease up much in the weeks to come. I’ve been given a project to put in in four weeks time and there is a good bit of stuff to put together on it. I’m going to have to work hard on figuring how to get blogging back into my work flow.

I understand that this doesn’t make for interesting reading for you and that’s the only reason you are here. I understand I owe you the rest of my look at John Kerry but politics are really starting to depress me so I don’t know when the next installment of that will be in.

All I can ask is that you please bear with me. I’ll be back to writing soon.

This election has really had my stomach tied up in knots. I’m really not all that dissatisfied with George W. Bush’s accomplishments as president but the part that does have me dissatisfied is a doozy. I understand the importance of security these days and I’ll allow for a little closer policing of the populace these days than I would have five years ago but if you pick someone up they need to be charged. and at the very least they need access to an attorney and the courts because the wrong person could have been picked up. Citizens disappearing off the street for no known good reason is not something I can tolerate.

Now for some there probably appears to be a simple solution for someone like me, vote for Kerry. Well there have been a number of things about Kerry that just makes me very nervous about being responsible for putting that man in office. I am troubled by a man who appears to have taken every position possible on every issue. I am also troubled by a man whose only answer to our problems is to make me pay more taxes than I’m currently spending so he can spend more money. Of course, I’m also troubled by a man who just wants to spend money that isn’t coming in.

Now when it comes to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan I’ve really no problem there. No, I don’t like everthing that has happened but I’m very pleased that both Mohammad Omar and Sadam Hussein are out of power. Unlike some people I find that the progress that has been made in both countries are remarkable considering all the circumstances. It seems that some people forget that sixty years after World War II and fifty yeas after the Korean Conflict we still have troops stationed in Frankfurt, Okinawa and Seoul.

So, basically the two issues that are driving my decision for the presidential election are civil liberties and the economy. I want a president who will protect my civil liberties and who will be a good steward of my tax money. I know from the last four years what I’m getting with Bush and I’m not too happy with his score in those two areas. The tax break was great but the excessive spending just didn’t get it and we have people disappering off the streets.

Tonight I decided to put my prejudice behind me and reexamine John Kerry. I went to John Kerry’s website and here’s what I came up with.

I was out of work for about nine months last year. During that time I drew unemployment, looked for employment and attempted to just find contract jobs and start my own business. Suddenly, my industry rebounded and I went back to work this past September. We are continuously hiring new people but I’m still concerned about the jobs moving offshore. This is one area that I think maybe Kerry and I think alike on:

Today, Kerry is detailing a key part of his overall jobs agenda - a proposal to undertake the most sweeping international corporate tax reform in over four decades. Kerry will eliminate all of the tax breaks that encourage companies to move jobs overseas and use the savings to encourage companies to create jobs in America. Kerry will help jumpstart job creation with a New Jobs Tax Credit paid for by a one-year tax holiday to encourage companies to reinvest their foreign earnings in America.¹

Okay, this is something I can really appreciate. Giving tax breaks for moving offshore is something I’ve never understood. Reinvesting those foreign earnings in America means reinvesting in the industry that I make my living in. This satisfies me on two counts.

International tax reform is part of Kerry’s overall plan to regain America’s competitive edge, together with policies to lower the cost of health premiums for companies, modernize our information infrastructure, make energy more affordable, increase investments in education, and regain confidence in our fiscal future.²

I can find nothing I can disagree with Kerry on this page. I’ll be interested to keep up with the specifics here. Let me move on to see what else he plans to do with my money. Both how much of it he wants to take from me and how he intends to spend what he does take from me.

Next stop is education. Education is important to me because I have a son still in public schools. I’ve got my own ideas about education. I started reading the following:

As President, John Kerry will roll up his sleeves and get things done for America’s schools. It’s time to stop sending new mandates from Washington to school districts without providing the necessary resources needed to carry out those new rules. That’s why John Kerry is proposing a new ‘Education Trust Fund’ that means fully funding education, no questions asked.³

The federal unfunded mandates have always given me a problem. What they are telling me is that they aren’t going to take my money from me to pay for something, they are going to force my local politician to take money from me to pay for it. Either way the money comes out of my pockets and I’ve got to really do some looking to find the politician that is responsible for the mess. That last sentance there took me back though.

That’s why John Kerry is proposing a new ‘Education Trust Fund’ that means fully funding education, no questions asked.

The money going into that trust fund is going to come out of my pockets. The term “fully funded” always bothers me. Everyone puts fluff in their budget requests, that’s a given. Fully funding something means giving every dollar asked for. The “no questions asked” part bothers me to the extreme, especially when we are fully funding along with not asking questions. This is a dangerous way to go about funding any project.

So John Kerry is batting .500 with me right now. That’s considerably better than the .333 that George W. Bush has with me.

Let’s move on to my next tab, health care. It is my idea that one reason we have such high health care cost is because insurance companies demand way more record keeping and documentation than they really need to control fraud. I also believe that another reason is the high cost of malpractice insurance due to all the extremely high malpractice settlements against doctors.

Here’s John Kerry’s take on high rising health care costs.

First, we’re going to cut your family’s premiums by up to $1000. That’s $1000 in real savings you can use to buy groceries, pay the bills, and save for your future. And that will mean more jobs and more competitive American businesses.

Second, we’re going to make sure that government bureaucrats aren’t messing with your health care. We’re going to save money by cutting waste from the health care system – not adding it. The cost of health care today is $1.4 trillion. It would be one thing if all those dollars were being spent making Americans healthier. They’re not.

Our system simply has too much waste and too much fraud; there’s too much inefficiency and too much abuse, too much bureaucracy and too much greed. Doctors are drowning in paperwork instead of seeing patients. Families are sitting in emergency rooms wading through forms instead of being by the side of their loved ones. And industry insiders are cutting corners and making deals that all of us end up paying for. This is wrong, and when I am President, it will end.⁴

Okay, I’ve got to ask how is he planning on cutting my premiums by up to $1000 and if he’s talking about “up to” $1000 what’s the median amount going to be? Still, I’ve got to agree with everything else he’s said above but I’m not seeing enoug specifics here to feel real comfortable with him on healthcare… yet. I’ll give him a pass on this until I know more.

I’ll get into more of this this weekend but so far I’m neutral on Kerry. At the moment he has my vote. I’ll comment some more on this over the weekend. Tomorrow’s my 27^the wedding anniversary so I will have my mind on other things until this weekend.

Joshua has an interesting observation over at Strip Mining for Whimsey:

It’s weird, seeing RPG geeks get old. When I was a kid there just wasn’t any such thing as an old RPG geek. Now they’re everywhere. And boy— let me tell you: they were kind of embarrassing when they were young and underfed. But the older and heavier they get, the worse I feel for them.

I was never into the RPG thing. It gained shortly after I left high school so I wasn’t introduced to it until after I had other things taking up my time. Had I been born a few years later I most likely would have been drawn deeply into them. After reading Joshua’s description of the older ones I’m glad I was born when I was born.

Yeah it isn’t by much, but PCWorld is reporting that Mozilla based browsers have seen a full one percent gain in total market share.

Internet Explorer has held more than 95 percent of the browser market since June 2002, and until June had remained steady with about 95.7 percent of the browser market, according to WebSideStory’s measurements. Over the last month, however, its market share has slowly dropped from 95.73 percent on June 4 to 94.73 percent on July 6.

Now this means next to nothing to Microsoft, they can easily handle a one percent erosion but it means a 26% growth rate for Mozilla based browsers. If you are building webpages you need to keep an eye on these numbers. If you are building webpages geared toward IE you have just lost 1% of you audience.

Next Friday will mark my twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. Twenty-seven years is a long time to be married and I’m proud as I can be of every one of those years. I love my wife dearly and would never do anything to damage our relationship or her trust.

That being said, there are some things that being married for that long causes one to miss out on. I haven’t been a part of the pickup scene in bars for over twenty-seven years. Most of the time when I’m in bars I’m with my wife. This evening wasn’t one of those times.

I’m in Augusta, GA on business with a co-worker. He’s a single 42 year old co-worker who, as far as I know, has never been married. After leaving work at our customer’s site today he wanted to stop at a sports bar here in Augusta for a beer.

The first bar we stopped at he decided wasn’t right so back outside we went to find one more to his liking. We ended up at “Somewhere in Augusta” and I’ve got to hand it to him this was a very nice place. Not nice in the sense of being expensive, but nice in the sense of being a comfortable place to sop for a beer.

We had had a couple of beers and a basket of onion rings when a very attractive lady that I judged to be in her late 30s or early 40s asked if the seat next to my co-worker was taken. She and Rich hit it off right off the bat with Rich flipping out his lighter the moment she brought out a cigarrette. They got to talking and politely included me in their conversation, but I could tell that all her attention was on Rich.

We ordered another round of beers and continued with the conversation. As I was finishing with my beer the nice lady called for our tab and Rich let me know that he could find his way back to our motel and would see me in a few hours. I took this que to say my goodnights and find my way back to my motel to write down this story.

I feel quite blessed to have seen my co-worker in action. It’s a lifestyle that I am no longer interested in for myself but I find the interactions taking place here extremely interesting. I don’t know what the ending will actually be and it doesn’t matter. That part is none of my business, just seeing the pickup in action made this an excellent night…. and it isn’t even 7:00pm yet.

Some of these quizes I enjoy taking just to see how the result compares to my self-image. I really would like to think of myself as more of an action figure but….

My sphere is Knight (Know Loyalty and Respect), and my class is Arms Master (Pragmatic and Stout). I am an Advisor. Your great sense of ethics and honor, as well as your practical knowledge of the world, makes you an excellent advisor and confidant to the people who are respectful of your ways, and to whom you will show respect in return. Liu Bei, the well-meaning King of the ancient Shu kingdom in China, was not famous for his own accomplishments, but for the excellent quality of his generals, and the brilliance of his advisor of special repute, Zhuge Liang. What kind of Warrior are you?

China and Viet Nam are being accused of dumping shrimp in the US and the US is about to impose some awful large tariffs on these countries’ exports of shrimp. I guess I can kiss cheap shrimp goodbye.

Of course this source is from a Chinese news source so I can expect a little bias toward the Chinese from it but it sounds an awful lot like the Chinese have a point.

An official from the Chinese Shrimp Industry Alliance, an organization established specially because of the dumping charges, said Chinese shrimp producers were able to sell at prices far lower than American shrimp producers because they had invested in modern technology for their shrimp farms and had lower labour costs.

“We are simply more efficient than the US industry, which mostly harvests shrimp from the sea,” he said.

Ewww, I hate hearing those words that another country may be technologically superior to the US but it’s most likely true. That’s the problem with govenrment subsidies they tend to dry up all the reasons for applying technology to a problem.

Dori had a link to the Regime Change Guide that had a section that I found troubling.

Do you have a residency in any of these states? Parents? Grandparents? Cousins? Aunts? Uncles? Friends? Just one friend? An acquaintance? Someone you had coffee with at some point in the last few years of your life? What we’re looking for here is an address you can move to temporarily. If you establish temporary residence, you can always vote absentee, if it’s hard to be in the state on Election Day. But hey, don’t do anything illegal. It is legal to move to another state for a while, establish residence so you can work on a campaign or organize some rallies/concerts/pizza parties — and then vote there. Just don’t vote twice. There are, you know, “laws” about that.

Now, I’ve got no problem with people working hard to remove a politician from office. I’ve really no problem with little tricks and strategies used to acheive those goals. Moving one’s residence to another state, a state that one has no intention of really living in and contributing to the community crosses the boundry of what I find being acceptable.

This isn’t just with the current presidential campaign. There is a group of Libertarians that want to get 20,000 like minded individuals to move to New Hampshire to create a Libertarian state. There’s people who have roots going back generations in New Hampshire that are suddenly going to find their lives changed by outsiders attempting to make a point.

There’s also the group, ChristianExodus.org, that wants to move thousands of “thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government.” These folks want to secede from the Union once they have their people in place. Forget the will of the people currently living in South Carolina, just move in people with a like mind and take not just their state, but their entire nation away from them.

Well, at least those Libertarians are looking at this move as being permanent and they are planning to contribute things back to the community. Even the Christian Exodus folk are going to find a lot of like-minded individuals already living in South Carolina. This Regime Change suggestion is just attempting to dilute the political voice of those people living in the battleground states and it just seems wrong.

Just a few moments ago I imported all the posts from Justin’s Journal into this weblog. All my writings are now in one place, along with their previous place on DallasBay.net. Comments have not been brought over. That’s the one thing I’m still trying to figure out how to import.

I think I’m going to like WordPress.