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Tomorrow (Friday) we're going to Union, Illinois to see the annual "A Day Out with Thomas" event. This is at the Illinois Railway Museum, which features a huge number of running an non-running trains that you can tour, climb on, and ride on. The highlight of the day is a ride on a train pulled by Thomas the Tank Engine.
We'll take pictures, as always, however Mike leaves for Zurich on Saturday so it might be late August before the pictures are posted. I know you will be simply salivating for pictures, so here are some from last year, this year's will look almost exactly the same :).
BTW this will be my last post until I return from Zurich on August 29.
Tommy Thompson, the former 4-term Governor of Wisconsin and DHS secretary under George W Bush, has dropped out of the Republican nomination race.
I said earlier that Thompson was a good man, but that now was the time for a conservative candidate who does not answer to the religious right. I had concerns about Thompson's religious backing and alignment with President Bush.
I wish good luck to Governor and Secretary Thompson, he did a lot of great things for the people of Wisconsin, and I hope he'll go back there and do more for them.
It's been a while since I posted something funny (Alberto Gonzales' congressional testimony aside...); read the fine print.
I think that we can all (or at least, most of us) muster up the wherewithal to support our troops who are in harms way, if not the war they are fighting. That seems to be an American tradition, except maybe for Jane Fonda, that we stick to.
Unfortunately our president has a different view of "support" than we do. In this article, we learn that the Democrats in Congress have turned their attention away from trying to end the Iraq war, and toward providing troops in combat with better conditions, mainly: rest. The Democrat-sponsored bill will provide troops with as much rest at home between tours as they spend in the battlefield, and reserve troops will get three times as much battlefield time at home.
President Bush complains that this bill will "put arbitrary constraints on Pentagon commanders." Yeah, arbitrary - did you get that part? A reasonable and historically consistent amount of rest is "arbitrary", and we can't do it bceause it will "constrain" Pentagon commanders.
In other words, he doesn't have the resources, due to overextending our military, to give the troops today the same level of rest between tours that troops in Viet Nam, Korea, and WWII had. But he supports our troops! You just ask him... and maybe ask him what he means when he says that.
After what seems like an endless stream of mistakes and a voters-be-damned hardheaded ignorance of problems in the White House, Bush has made a refreshing stand on a basic conservative value: taxes. Last week, in response to the terrible Minnesota bridge collapse, the Democratic Chairman of the House Transportation Committee did what Democrats do best - propose that we solve the problem by raising taxes. Five cents per gallon of gas, to be exact. Like American need another reason to put more debt on our credit cards.
The funny thing is, when bridges aren't collapsing, the House has no problem using their position to fund pork transportation bills that build bridges to nowhere and improve brand new roads. But when a real problem arises and they've spent all their funds on crap, what's the answer? Stick it to the taxpayer, that's right.
What's Bush's response? An excellent reminder that at one time, before Iraq and Gonzales and a stream of corrupt aides, Bush was a died-in-the-wool fiscal conservative.
"The way it seems to have worked is that each member on that (Transportation) committee gets to set his or her own priorities first,"
"That's not the right way to prioritize the people's money. Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities."
That's right on target. Make them stop spending our money on pork and using it to keep the infrastructure up to date before the bridges start falling down around us.
Message to congress: before you swipe more money out of my wallet, you'd better tell me how you're going to improve the job you're doing with the money you already take from me.
You get 'em, George.
Aaron, Ethan, and Justin are all in Challenger British Soccer Camp this week, learning soccer from British pros and semi-pros. Aaron is quite good at soccer and for him it's an opportunity to improve his skills before AYSO Soccer starts in the fall. This year, not only will Mike be coaching Aaron's (U12) team, but Marla will be coaching Ethan's (U6) team.
Unfortunately we don't have any pictures yet, and because of the wide angle of the soccer fields, it's unlikely that we'll have any (but we'll try).