Here at my lovely interships, I very rarely have anything to do. This gives me ample time to sit and do nothing. Or, as I usually end up doing, reading every story on the CNN home page. This invariably led me to reading a LOT of stuff on the health care bill that's up for a vote this weekend. Of course, I didn't just read CNN's health care coverage (they fell back into their old liberally-biased ways on this particular issue). I had successfully avoided forming an opinion on health care for a good year and a half; as long as we weren't getting a single-payer, universal health care system, I didn't really care what they did. But then I read about it and saw some of the things in the bill and about lost it. While I agree with the (very) general spirit of the bill, the idea that the 30 million uninsured Americans should have help being insured, several of the particulars of the bill are just atrocious.
1. Individuals will be fined for not purchasing health care. Read that one more time and let it really sink in. The government is going to fine individuals for making an individual choice about their life. Remember the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" thing from the Declaration of Independence? How exactly does this provision reconcile with those? A person in the United States is supposed to be free to lead their lives how they want; that's been the backbone of our country in theory since 1776 and in practice since about 1965. As long as it's not hurting other people, people are allowed to act however they want; that's why it's not illegal to be gay or atheist or Christian or racist or fat or a redneck.
In that same vein, people have the right to screw up their own lives if they choose. People can choose to eat and eat and eat until they're morbidly obese; the government tells them they're being stupid, but they don't criminalize being fat. Similarly, people should be allowed to buy or not buy health insurance. If they don't buy insurance, people should be informed that they are at risk of spending untold amounts of money in the event of any sort of medical problem and that medications will cost them a pretty penny as well. But if someone still wants to not buy insurance, they should be free to do so without the government fining them 2% of their income. Congress wants to control an individual's choice about their own life, which is a very good example of communism.
2. They want to fine companies with more than 50 employees who don't provide insurance to their employees. On its face, this doesn't really sound all that bad. Companies should provide their employees with insurance if they are fiscally able. But the key point there is "fiscally able." Let's imagine a company that has 60 employees. They aren't very large, and especially with the economy in its current state, they are having trouble making payroll every two weeks. Now the government is forcing them to give all of their employees health coverage. What happens? There's a good chance that they would lay off 11 people so they could drop out of the "large employer" category; then there are 11 people out of a job and 49 still without health insurance. Alternatively, the company could choose to ignore the rule and just pay the $2,000-per-employee fine, or they could just provide health insurance for all 60 employees. Both of these scenarios could very easily lead to the company going out of business and 60 people losing their jobs. Again, how is forcing the government's will on these corporations a good thing?
3. Where on earth will we get $940 billion? My first question with any government bill is, "How will we pay for this?" With a $12 trillion debt and a $1.4 trillion defecit this year alone, we have no money. However, according the the Democrats, this $940 billion monstrosity will actually reduce the defecit by $138 billion over the next 10 years and by $1.2 trillion in the decade following that. Okay, sure. One problem, though: neither of those is close to accurate.
Those numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan entity inside Congress that scores the fiscal impact of every single bill that comes through the chambers. The small number of people who work there have been working 100-hour weeks for a year and a half trying to keep up with the health care bills, as well as all the other bills that have been coming through Congress at the same time. They're tired. On a more corporeal point, they skewed their numbers heavily. They don't mention that the bill won't go into effect for four years, though the tax and fee increases will start immediately. So they'll be collecting taxes for 10 years while only paying six years worth of benefits. Second, that $138 billion in defecit reduction for the first 10 years includes $100 billion in revenue for the new CLASS long-term insurance; senior adults have to pay into the CLASS system for five years before they can start collecting benefits. This means for the first decade, the system will take in more revenue than it's spending; that's what the CBO put into their defecit estimates. However, after that first 10 years, CLASS will spend significantly more than it takes in, and the CBO didn't take that into account. The $100 billion in revenue will have to be repaid, so how can it possibly help the defecit in a real way?
What about that $1.2 trillion that will be saved next decade? Well, the CBO themselves said there is absolutely no way to guess what will really happen; that number is pure conjecture. And Medicare currently costs eight times as much as the CBO originally projected, so why should we think this health care bill would be any different?
4. Efforts to lower costs will do the exact opposite. This bill raises government fees on medical supply manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and the like; those raised fees will be passed on to consumers, meaning they will be passed on to consumers' insurance. Along with the increased taxes on insurance companies in the bill, this will cause premiums to keep going up. People will end up paying the same amount they pay now for significantly less coverage or be forced to pay a lot more for their current level of coverage. And the subsidies the government is promising to help defray these costs will not come close to helping these people (who, remember, are forced to buy health insurance). There is no logic in any of this.
5. Medicare and Medicaid still exist. I could almost overlook all of these faults if this bill totally eliminated Medicare and Medicaid. The money that would save would more than pay for this bill as well as really cutting down on the defecit and drastically slowing the progression of the national debt. If everyone has health insurance, why on earth do we still need these broken programs?
Medicare and Medicaid are killing our country. They are the greatest burdens on our tax money, our defecit and our future. Also, they simply don't work. Pharmacies in Washington state are refusing new Medicaid patients starting in April because the system doesn't reimburse them for the nearly-free medicine they give to patients and it's driving them out of business. Doctors around the country raise rates on privately-insured patients regularly to make up for the lack of reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid patients. These systems need to go.
But this bill leaves them in place. Sure, it cuts them back, but not nearly to the necessary degree. Like I already said, if everyone has health insurance, why will these cancers be allowed to continue existing?
With all this said, I really do think our health care system needs overhaul. Premiums are already too high and there are FAR too many people who don't have coverage. I believe patients who have been paying their premiums should not be able to be dropped by their insurance companies when they get sick, nor do I believe people with pre-existing conditions should be denied coverage.
But this bill is not the way to solve these problems. The government should give tax breaks to insurance companies that insure people with pre-existing conditions and who give lower-than-average premiums. Tax breaks don't "make the richer richer" or give some inordanant amount of power to insurance companies: they spur competiton. Creating an environment that encourages new insurance companies to rise up and become sustainable, money-making entities will help lower premiums and insure more people.
If there is even a shred of sense left in Congress, this bill should be thrown back into the fires of Mt. Doom where it was forged.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Purple Haze
For those of you who don't know, I fell last week on the ice by my apartment and either cracked or severely, severely bruised my tailbone. I can barely walk, sit, stand, etc. I've had lots of time to just lay on my side and think. I've finally started to put my four years of Political Science education to use in forming opinions, so if you don't mind, I'm going to take the next few paragraphs to write down some of my thoughts. You don't have to read them; I just need to write them and this seemed like as good a place as any.
First of all, I work for government accountability groups (also called watchdogs) that lean pretty far to the left. Now you know me: I've set my self smack-dab in the middle, though I lean to the right occasionally, when I have to. But these organizations do a pretty good job of staying out of the partisan muck on most issues. On things like election reform and government transparency, they are very good at appealing to both sides of the aisle.
But there is one issue where they have let me down: campaign finance reform. I started working for them because I whole-heartedly believe in election reform (more on that later), but I was unlucky enough to start two days after the Supreme Court handed down their Citizens United v. FEC decision. The case concerned a film, Hillary: The Movie, which was a documentary made during the 2008 primary season deriding Hillary Clinton. The FEC decided this counted as money spent by a corporation to directly defeat Clinton, which was illegal at the time under Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce from 1990. the FEC hit Citizens United with a massive fine and barred them from releasing the movie, so CU sued them in a case that made it to SCOTUS. A 5-4 majority ruled in January that Austin was unconstitutional because corporations are entitled to the same free speech rights as people and therefore should be allowed to spend as much money as they want independently running ads for or against specific candidates.
As soon as Justice Kennedy typed the last period on his majority opinion, the entire left side of the political spectrum absolutely blew up. Op-eds in newspapers, statements from Congressmen, even Obama in the State of the Union, came out blasting SCOTUS's decision. Every single one of them said the decision "opened the floodgates for corporate money" into the political game, like the phrase "opened the floodgates" had been declared the greatest phrase in the history of the English language by some committee that oversees those types of things. Liberals (and even moderates) swarmed every outlet they could get their words through declaring this the end of democracy and the worst display of judicial activism in history; Satan and his army of demons could have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue declaring a New World Order and Democrats wouldn't have noticed because the apocalypse had already come in the form of Citizens United.
That's where I come in. I was unlucky enough to start working two days after this decision came out. I thought I was going to get to work on things I was passionate about, like election reform; but I was instead thrown head-first into the Citizens United storm. I was fine with it for the first few days; this was what they were working on, so this was what I was working on. The very nice people at my office were pouring a lot into trying to fix what they saw as wrong with this decision, and I was more than happy to help.
But then I actually started seeing how they wanted to fix it, namely through the Fair Elections Now Act. Now I don't really have a big problem with the act itself; it will force candidates to get several small donations from their constituents for which they will receive matching funds from the government along with other government grants. They plan to pay for all this through taxes on unused television airwaves or something like that; it's supposed to be deficit-neutral. It won't be deficit-neutral, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it would be.
My problem is not with the bill itself, necessarily; it's with how we go about trying to get Congressmen to co-sponsor the bill. We call our 400,000 members and ask them to call their Congressman or Senator and tell them that they want Congress to pass FENA. But we lie to them. Not me, actually, but the volunteers who read a script to the people over the phone are lying to them. It's not just us, mind you; every liberal or left-leaning pundit who derides Citizens United tell the same lies. This makes me wonder if they are indeed lies or if it's just some mass delusion that liberals have decided as a group to believe. And no, I don't honestly believe that the company I work for is consciously lying to its members. But whatever the case is, we're wrong on several key points.
1. Our callers, along with liberal pundits and Obama's State of the Union, inform people that Citizens United "overturned 100 years of campaign finance laws" and undermines all the steps that the early-20th century Progressives took to stop corruption. Well, no, none of that is even close to true. The only piece of campaign finance legislation that is a century old is the Tillman Act of 1907. This act was Teddy Roosevelt's baby; it banned corporations from giving money directly to political campaigns. This has been the law since 1907, and it's still the law after Citizens United. Remember what I said earlier: Citizens United directly overturned the law set down in Austin that banned corporations from making independent expenditures on political ads. That decision was in effect since 1990. So that "100 years of campaign finance laws" that my company and the President of the United States think has been overturned is really just 20 years. Citizens United also overturned some minor provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act), but that has only been in place since 2002. So that "100 years" was literally pulled out of thin air by somebody. Like I said, I really and honestly hope these people aren't lying, that they're just wrong or have been misled by someone.
2. Back to that "opened the floodgates" thing. Every liberal and their mother is convinced that all these giant corporations are going to spend $83 gazillion in this upcoming mid-term election and in every election until this problem is fixed. They're convinced that corporations are going to buy candidates; Sen. Chris Dodd even went so far as to say we may soon see Congressmen with corporate logos affixed to their suits like NASCAR drivers. How do they even think this is possible? What for-profit corporation in its right mind is going to risk losing customers and pissing off shareholders by spending millions of corporate funds to run ads attacking a candidate? Corporations have lobbyists. They spend a lot of money to make sure they have good lobbyists. Corporations are best served maintaining their current status quo: give money to everyone and let their high-paid lobbyists convince Congressmen to see things their way. But liberals, my company included, can't see past their end-of-democracy rhetoric and imagine that any of what I just said is possible. Corporations can spend all of their profits attacking the junior Senator from Wyoming, so they obviously will do just that, and the whole of American government will collapse. Again, I hope they're just blind to the truth and not blatantly lying to people to incite some sort of anger at SCOTUS and the Constitution.
3. Accusing SCOTUS of practicing blatant judicial activism like it's a bad thing. The liberals are again coming out of the woodwork to say just how terrible the majority was in their opinion and how they were practicing judicial activism. Some are even calling for the justices to be impeached because of this decision. But liberals have no place to talk about judicial activism. Brown v. the Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Engel v. Vitale. All of these are instances of liberal justices from the 1950s and 60s far overstepping the bounds of the federal government to do whatever they wanted; when my textbooks discussed judicial activism, these were the very definition. Liberals championed judicial activism when these cases were decided, but now that the Roberts Court has practiced the same activism on something that the federal government actually does have jurisdiction over, they should all be impeached? Where is the logic in that?
In fact, that's my question for all of this: where is the logic? Liberals have always prided themselves on being so much smarter than the redneck Southern conservatives. But in this case, it seems like they didn't even bother to read the decision before they jumped to myriad conclusions that have no basis in reality. "Overturned 100 years of campaign finance legislation?" On what planet? The left seems to have completely abandoned logic and reason in favor of doomsday rhetoric with no foundation in this universe. The only way to know how Citizens United will affect elections is to wait until November and just watch. If there is a flood of corporate ads that leads to a sweeping defeat of Congressmen, then OK, I was wrong, pass a bill. But until this all plays out, Congress should not pass FENA or any other sweeping reform legislation that is based on stopping a situation that may never occur. Laws should not be passed on hypotheticals.
First of all, I work for government accountability groups (also called watchdogs) that lean pretty far to the left. Now you know me: I've set my self smack-dab in the middle, though I lean to the right occasionally, when I have to. But these organizations do a pretty good job of staying out of the partisan muck on most issues. On things like election reform and government transparency, they are very good at appealing to both sides of the aisle.
But there is one issue where they have let me down: campaign finance reform. I started working for them because I whole-heartedly believe in election reform (more on that later), but I was unlucky enough to start two days after the Supreme Court handed down their Citizens United v. FEC decision. The case concerned a film, Hillary: The Movie, which was a documentary made during the 2008 primary season deriding Hillary Clinton. The FEC decided this counted as money spent by a corporation to directly defeat Clinton, which was illegal at the time under Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce from 1990. the FEC hit Citizens United with a massive fine and barred them from releasing the movie, so CU sued them in a case that made it to SCOTUS. A 5-4 majority ruled in January that Austin was unconstitutional because corporations are entitled to the same free speech rights as people and therefore should be allowed to spend as much money as they want independently running ads for or against specific candidates.
As soon as Justice Kennedy typed the last period on his majority opinion, the entire left side of the political spectrum absolutely blew up. Op-eds in newspapers, statements from Congressmen, even Obama in the State of the Union, came out blasting SCOTUS's decision. Every single one of them said the decision "opened the floodgates for corporate money" into the political game, like the phrase "opened the floodgates" had been declared the greatest phrase in the history of the English language by some committee that oversees those types of things. Liberals (and even moderates) swarmed every outlet they could get their words through declaring this the end of democracy and the worst display of judicial activism in history; Satan and his army of demons could have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue declaring a New World Order and Democrats wouldn't have noticed because the apocalypse had already come in the form of Citizens United.
That's where I come in. I was unlucky enough to start working two days after this decision came out. I thought I was going to get to work on things I was passionate about, like election reform; but I was instead thrown head-first into the Citizens United storm. I was fine with it for the first few days; this was what they were working on, so this was what I was working on. The very nice people at my office were pouring a lot into trying to fix what they saw as wrong with this decision, and I was more than happy to help.
But then I actually started seeing how they wanted to fix it, namely through the Fair Elections Now Act. Now I don't really have a big problem with the act itself; it will force candidates to get several small donations from their constituents for which they will receive matching funds from the government along with other government grants. They plan to pay for all this through taxes on unused television airwaves or something like that; it's supposed to be deficit-neutral. It won't be deficit-neutral, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it would be.
My problem is not with the bill itself, necessarily; it's with how we go about trying to get Congressmen to co-sponsor the bill. We call our 400,000 members and ask them to call their Congressman or Senator and tell them that they want Congress to pass FENA. But we lie to them. Not me, actually, but the volunteers who read a script to the people over the phone are lying to them. It's not just us, mind you; every liberal or left-leaning pundit who derides Citizens United tell the same lies. This makes me wonder if they are indeed lies or if it's just some mass delusion that liberals have decided as a group to believe. And no, I don't honestly believe that the company I work for is consciously lying to its members. But whatever the case is, we're wrong on several key points.
1. Our callers, along with liberal pundits and Obama's State of the Union, inform people that Citizens United "overturned 100 years of campaign finance laws" and undermines all the steps that the early-20th century Progressives took to stop corruption. Well, no, none of that is even close to true. The only piece of campaign finance legislation that is a century old is the Tillman Act of 1907. This act was Teddy Roosevelt's baby; it banned corporations from giving money directly to political campaigns. This has been the law since 1907, and it's still the law after Citizens United. Remember what I said earlier: Citizens United directly overturned the law set down in Austin that banned corporations from making independent expenditures on political ads. That decision was in effect since 1990. So that "100 years of campaign finance laws" that my company and the President of the United States think has been overturned is really just 20 years. Citizens United also overturned some minor provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act), but that has only been in place since 2002. So that "100 years" was literally pulled out of thin air by somebody. Like I said, I really and honestly hope these people aren't lying, that they're just wrong or have been misled by someone.
2. Back to that "opened the floodgates" thing. Every liberal and their mother is convinced that all these giant corporations are going to spend $83 gazillion in this upcoming mid-term election and in every election until this problem is fixed. They're convinced that corporations are going to buy candidates; Sen. Chris Dodd even went so far as to say we may soon see Congressmen with corporate logos affixed to their suits like NASCAR drivers. How do they even think this is possible? What for-profit corporation in its right mind is going to risk losing customers and pissing off shareholders by spending millions of corporate funds to run ads attacking a candidate? Corporations have lobbyists. They spend a lot of money to make sure they have good lobbyists. Corporations are best served maintaining their current status quo: give money to everyone and let their high-paid lobbyists convince Congressmen to see things their way. But liberals, my company included, can't see past their end-of-democracy rhetoric and imagine that any of what I just said is possible. Corporations can spend all of their profits attacking the junior Senator from Wyoming, so they obviously will do just that, and the whole of American government will collapse. Again, I hope they're just blind to the truth and not blatantly lying to people to incite some sort of anger at SCOTUS and the Constitution.
3. Accusing SCOTUS of practicing blatant judicial activism like it's a bad thing. The liberals are again coming out of the woodwork to say just how terrible the majority was in their opinion and how they were practicing judicial activism. Some are even calling for the justices to be impeached because of this decision. But liberals have no place to talk about judicial activism. Brown v. the Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Engel v. Vitale. All of these are instances of liberal justices from the 1950s and 60s far overstepping the bounds of the federal government to do whatever they wanted; when my textbooks discussed judicial activism, these were the very definition. Liberals championed judicial activism when these cases were decided, but now that the Roberts Court has practiced the same activism on something that the federal government actually does have jurisdiction over, they should all be impeached? Where is the logic in that?
In fact, that's my question for all of this: where is the logic? Liberals have always prided themselves on being so much smarter than the redneck Southern conservatives. But in this case, it seems like they didn't even bother to read the decision before they jumped to myriad conclusions that have no basis in reality. "Overturned 100 years of campaign finance legislation?" On what planet? The left seems to have completely abandoned logic and reason in favor of doomsday rhetoric with no foundation in this universe. The only way to know how Citizens United will affect elections is to wait until November and just watch. If there is a flood of corporate ads that leads to a sweeping defeat of Congressmen, then OK, I was wrong, pass a bill. But until this all plays out, Congress should not pass FENA or any other sweeping reform legislation that is based on stopping a situation that may never occur. Laws should not be passed on hypotheticals.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
It's the End of the World as We Know It
This city is finally beginning to thaw out after the wonderful Snowpocalypse that we were subjugated to earlier this week. In my journeys I have actually found piles of snow over my head. Over my head. Think about that for a second.
Washington seriously freaked out with all this snow. Leading up to it, I wasn't able to buy groceries because of the droves of people flooding Target. I then couldn't leave my apartment for about 5 days, mostly because everything was closed and there was nowhere to go. But, like I said, it's starting to get better; I was actually able to go to work yesterday for a change.
Speaking of which, my internships are going well. I've gotten to spend most of the past two weeks delivering petitions to Congressmen; I carried a stack of over 36,000 sheets of paper to Diane Feinstein's office alone. We got over 200,000 signatures in less than a week on a petition urging Congress to pass the Fair Election Now Act (Common Cause's baby) in response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United case.
Aside from petition deliveries, I've made folders, stuffed envelopes, and done other stereotypical intern stuff. I'm enjoying it, however. Even though they're a liberal group, I don't completely disagree with everything they do, plus everyone is really nice.
I do, however, find myself desperately missing Mississippi. Getting away has proven to me how much I love it. I miss the people, the towns, the not having to walk everywhere. I can't wait until April when finally get to go back.
So there you have the last few weeks in a nutshell. Nothing terribly exciting, besides being held hostage by snow. But as soon as something exciting does happen, I'll let you know.
Washington seriously freaked out with all this snow. Leading up to it, I wasn't able to buy groceries because of the droves of people flooding Target. I then couldn't leave my apartment for about 5 days, mostly because everything was closed and there was nowhere to go. But, like I said, it's starting to get better; I was actually able to go to work yesterday for a change.
Speaking of which, my internships are going well. I've gotten to spend most of the past two weeks delivering petitions to Congressmen; I carried a stack of over 36,000 sheets of paper to Diane Feinstein's office alone. We got over 200,000 signatures in less than a week on a petition urging Congress to pass the Fair Election Now Act (Common Cause's baby) in response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United case.
Aside from petition deliveries, I've made folders, stuffed envelopes, and done other stereotypical intern stuff. I'm enjoying it, however. Even though they're a liberal group, I don't completely disagree with everything they do, plus everyone is really nice.
I do, however, find myself desperately missing Mississippi. Getting away has proven to me how much I love it. I miss the people, the towns, the not having to walk everywhere. I can't wait until April when finally get to go back.
So there you have the last few weeks in a nutshell. Nothing terribly exciting, besides being held hostage by snow. But as soon as something exciting does happen, I'll let you know.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Crack the Shutters
I'm finally updating. I know, be shocked. Interesting stuff has finally happened (and Susan would only let me eat at Five Guy's if I updated, but still).
I finally have an internship! After three weeks with nothing to do, I started today at Common Cause and Public Campaign. At Common Cause I am a research intern responsible for researching Congressmen and writing reports on their voting records and money trail, along with other things. I'm also a communications intern for Public Campaign, where I hopefully be able to write press releases, blog, and generally do other things that my journalism classes taught me about. Both organizations are government accountability groups that focus on several reform issues, though Public Campaign focuses solely on campaign finance reform. I'm very excited and can't wait to actually get into the groove of working again.
In other news, I found out (on my birthday) that I have been nominated for the Taylor Medal, the highest academic achievement at Ole Miss. They only give them to 1% of the student body, and they are (theoretically) based solely on academic performance. I have a 4.0 GPA, but my course load wasn't quite as rigorous as people who weren't political science majors, so I honestly have no idea where I stand in the running. But it's seriously the only award I've ever wanted, so I really hope that I get it. I know God has everything under control, so I'm trying desperately to not worry about it.
That's about it from this side of the Potomac, but I'll try to be more diligent as more cool stuff starts happening.
I finally have an internship! After three weeks with nothing to do, I started today at Common Cause and Public Campaign. At Common Cause I am a research intern responsible for researching Congressmen and writing reports on their voting records and money trail, along with other things. I'm also a communications intern for Public Campaign, where I hopefully be able to write press releases, blog, and generally do other things that my journalism classes taught me about. Both organizations are government accountability groups that focus on several reform issues, though Public Campaign focuses solely on campaign finance reform. I'm very excited and can't wait to actually get into the groove of working again.
In other news, I found out (on my birthday) that I have been nominated for the Taylor Medal, the highest academic achievement at Ole Miss. They only give them to 1% of the student body, and they are (theoretically) based solely on academic performance. I have a 4.0 GPA, but my course load wasn't quite as rigorous as people who weren't political science majors, so I honestly have no idea where I stand in the running. But it's seriously the only award I've ever wanted, so I really hope that I get it. I know God has everything under control, so I'm trying desperately to not worry about it.
That's about it from this side of the Potomac, but I'll try to be more diligent as more cool stuff starts happening.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Transatlanticism
I've finished my very first week here in DC an I'm still not entirely sure what to think. Overall, I would say it has been fun, if less eventful than I was hoping.
Cal and I got to have some lovely adventures. We went to the National Archives on our first day where we saw the original Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constituion and the Bill of Rights. We then went to the Smithsonian Museum of American History on Friday; they had some of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Abe Lincoln's hat, Fonzie's jacket, George Washington's uniform, the flag from Ft. McHenry...like I said, I've gotten to see some amazing things. Add to all that my first glimpses of the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and I'd say this has been one heck of a week.
Other than that, I'm still looking for a job. I'm supposed to hear back from the place I interviewed tomorrow, so everyone keep me in your prayers if you would.
Hopefully things will pick up this week as far as excitement goes, so I might have more stuff to write about. I hope you're all doing well.
Cal and I got to have some lovely adventures. We went to the National Archives on our first day where we saw the original Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constituion and the Bill of Rights. We then went to the Smithsonian Museum of American History on Friday; they had some of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Abe Lincoln's hat, Fonzie's jacket, George Washington's uniform, the flag from Ft. McHenry...like I said, I've gotten to see some amazing things. Add to all that my first glimpses of the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and I'd say this has been one heck of a week.
Other than that, I'm still looking for a job. I'm supposed to hear back from the place I interviewed tomorrow, so everyone keep me in your prayers if you would.
Hopefully things will pick up this week as far as excitement goes, so I might have more stuff to write about. I hope you're all doing well.
Monday, January 4, 2010
The Final Countdown
If my calculations are correct, in 12 hours I will be moved in to my apartment in the heart of Washington, D.C. It's halfway scary, halfway exciting and entirely strange. I don't know anything about the city, I don't have a job yet, and I only know one person there. I have no idea what's about to happen. But anytime something interesting does happen, I'll write about it here so you guys can keep track. I'll also post pictures and videos and all sorts of other goodies as they occur, so feel free to keep track if you want. And I'm not falling off the face of the earth; please call or text or Facebook me. I may not respond immediately, but I'll try my best.
Hope you are all having a wonderful evening, and I hope you'll stick with me as I embark on this completely silly and ridiculous venture I have undertaken.
Hope you are all having a wonderful evening, and I hope you'll stick with me as I embark on this completely silly and ridiculous venture I have undertaken.
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