LocalCommentary.com
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Monday, January 2, 2006Happy New (Blog) Year!The 2005 blogging year ended for me much sooner than I intended. . . . Here are some thoughts on stuff that happened during my unexpectedly long absence from the blogosphere. The 2005 blogging year ended for me much sooner than I intended, and it ended with a whimper -- or, rather, a cough. Make that a coughing fit. First there was the usual Christmas marathon. Then there was the flu. Then there was the problem of trying to catch up at work, church, and home after the flu, and during the Christmas marathon. This overlapped with trying to inch ahead in the days before Christmas, prior to my spending the week after Christmas in sunny Florida (mostly St. Augustine and the Keys). I wanted to blog during those last three weeks of December. I made notes and even drafted a couple of posts, but that's all water under the bridge. In my absence from the blogosphere, Iraq elected its first government under their new constitution. This was their third election. Turnout was high and incidents relatively few, I believe. For me, Iraq is firmly in the plus column right now. Electronic surveillance also hit the fan, as if there's something wrong with the government listening in while suspected terrorists communicate with US citizens or others in the United States. I expect this will turn out to be mostly one more partisan attempt to destroy the President and regain power. But I do wish the Bush Administration would learn how to explain these things so as to defuse them, rather than fanning the flames. Just between you and me, I assume that my e-mails and everyone else's are routinely scanned by the NSA, looking for possible trouble -- and my phone calls, too, come to think of it. I can live with that, believe it or not, at least for the present. As far as internal threats to our liberties go, we're far more likely to become a full-blown welfare state than a police state. Locally, American Fork's mayor-elect and the partly-new City Council have been meeting regularly to organize, plan, prioritize, etc., prior to today's swearing in -- which, as I and others have joked almost ad nauseum, is followed by four years of swearing at. (It's time to move on to a new joke.) Finally, about the blog. Thanks for reading. Every so often I run into someone I didn't know was a reader, and that someone says kind things. Less frequently, someone e-mails me about it, or actually replies to a post. (Please do that, if you have something to say!) I especially appreciate the substantive comments. So. Ahem. Onward. And happy new year. Copyright 2006 by David Rodeback. |
