I’m back from the family reunion cruise, which was a blast. I’ll write more about it sooner or later, but you can see some pictures from Melissa in the mean time.
I have a huge, huge, overwhelming to-do list at the moment and it’ll probably take me at least a few days to drill through it. This site might see a ‘less-than-usual’ rate of updates for a few days as I play a complex game of catch-up.
For now, please enjoy this funny picture of Vincent in a bag on our kitchen floor.
:-)
| Fairfax Board (Chairman) | |
|---|---|
| Sharon Bulova (D): | 49.98% |
| Carey Campbell (IG): | 0.41% |
| Christopher DeCarlo (I): | 0.75% |
| Pat Herrity (R): | 48.82% |
| Other: | 0.04% |
News Alerts & Statements:
Stay tuned for important updates as they occur (most recent at the top).
From today until February 1, I will be packing, unpacking, and/or traveling and posting will be very light (if they occur at all). Melissa and I will be joining my family for a reunion cruise to the Caribbean and my Internet access will likely be sporadic at-best.
I’m sure we’ll have a blast though. It’ll be my first time to the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas, so I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll try to at least write a little now and then, even if I can’t post it until I get back.
As always, I’m sure you’ll be able to find plenty of other things to read while I’m gone. My links page might be a good place to start.
Barack H. Obama (D) has been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Per Constitutional provision, the peaceful transfer of executive power from outgoing President George W. Bush (R) to Obama occurred at noon today. The transition was recognized with the new president taking of the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Obama’s ascension to the presidency is an historic event in-and-of itself, made even more poignant by his being the first non-white person to hold the highest elected office in the United States. Obama is the biracial son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, though he is erroneously identified in many media outlets as simply ‘African-American’. Obama was sworn in as president less than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended discrimination on the basis of race. When Obama was born, his parents’ relationship would have been illegal in many states (including my home state of Virginia) under anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriage.
The inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, brought record crowds into the city. Preliminary estimates indicate that the gathered crowd numbered in the millions, possibly setting new records.
Despite my many political differences with President Obama, I sincerely wish him a safe and successful presidency.
The ‘New Deal’ is something we all learn about in school but, like so many things we Americans learn in school, they don’t teach it very well. The story we get told in our history classes is oversimplified and only half-true—the stock market crashed in 1929 and the country spiraled into an economic depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) was elected to the Presidency in 1932, he then created broad new government programs labeled the ‘New Deal’ and single-handedly saved America just in time for World War II.
Of course there is a whole other side to this story. Many conservatives at the far right of the political spectrum paint FDR as a socialist boogeyman who undermined the American economy, prolonged the depression, set dangerous precedents of government interventionism and expansionism, and spent all his time trying to destroy America. As is so often the case, reality lies somewhere in-between.
FDR was well-intentioned. He was not out to destroy America. I believe that FDR truly believed that his polices were best for the country but, despite what your middle school history teachers told you, he was wrong. Well-intentioned or not, FDR’s efforts to end the Great Depression prolonged it. His policies did set many dangerous precedents and made toilet paper of the Constitutional limits on government.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
