If I don't die by Thursday, I'll be roaring Friday night.

Who do you trust?

Frankly, there hasn’t been a politician since Jack Danforth that I’d trust with a nickel.

Do I trust the “intelligence” and “counterintelligence” agencies to be truthful? Of course not. Truth is the true wilderness of mirrors. You lie to your enemies and then you spy on them, and what you learn in return is a lie. It doesn’t really matter if they’re domestic or foreign foes, does it? Somehow, along the way, the lie becomes true because it becomes recategorized as “intelligence.” It’s like an Easter egg hunt – colorful, beautifully decorated Easter eggs, but false nonetheless.

I emailed you some issues that concern me. The majority of them are domestic, and this is where I feel the current administration is really dropping the ball.

The deficit is over a half a trillion dollars and growing. We had a surplus under the last administration and laws were passed to force a “balanced budget.” What happened to fiscal responsibility? Are you seriously going to go along with the suggestion that it’s possible to have a tax cut and an increase in spending at the same time and that all’s well? Try doing that with your household budget. Who’s going to pay the bill? Nicholas, William, Amanda, Peter, Elizabeth, Emily, Alyson and their children are going to! And these aren’t even domestic spending proposals – these are hundred billion dollar chunks going overseas or enriching companies like Haliburton.

You have questions?! I have a ton of them!

Where are the “weapons of mass destruction”? Since none were found the administration was quick to convert to “we removed a really bad guy” and now everything’s going to be OK. Since the hot war’s finish, we’ve lost more lives in the cold aftermath. How many times did we hear before the war that the US was not going to be in the business of nation building and that Iraq would be able to finance its own reconstruction? Now the US taxpayer is on the hook for 100 billion dollars a year in perpetuity. It’ll end someday, right, when?

Who flew the airplanes into the WTC? I don’t have any first hand knowledge of who was on those planes, but I suspect that it really was a group of people who really hated the west. Not JUST America, but all people who didn’t think like they did, all the more reason for getting an international coalition together to fight back. But we didn’t do that, did we?

You rightly pointed out that the health care mess isn’t George W’s fault. It pains me that the Executive office doesn’t have even a hint of a solution in its rhetoric. If the President isn’t responsible for setting domestic policy, or even setting the tone for domestic policy discussion, who is? Health care isn’t on their agenda, but 40 million Americans now go without.

Likewise I’m pained about the reduction in federal spending for education; one of George W’s campaign promises, if I recall correctly, was that he was going to be the ‘education president.’ Funding is so bad in affluent communities like Santa Barbara that Amanda’s kindergarten last year asked parents to donate construction paper because there was no money left in the budget. Imagine what it’s like in an inner-city school.

Shall we go on to the employment picture? I’m pretty tired of hearing that job growth is a priority with this administration. Every time I hear that jobs are a priority, unemployment claims go up. 11 million Americans are out of work. I’d love to take that $172 billion dollars Bush wants to spend this year in Iraq and use it to retrain American workers.

I guess I’m just being that shrill left-wing Democrat liberal patsy with no clue thinking that our Executive branch ought to spend more time thinking about domestic policy than it does…

But, maybe it’s not just me!