It seems like forever since I wrote anything on politics. A lot has happened in my life in the last couple weeks, which I will write about when I get a chance.

Ironically, since I write regularly about the Sunday news shows, I missed all of Obama's interviews on the Sunday news shows Sunday. I played this weekend at a music festival in southern Indiana, and Kristi and I didn't have a TV available all morning. I thought that the non-Sunday morning news organizations did not give a lot of coverage to those interviews. There were a few things that came out in the news. One that got repeated a lot was in his interview to an hispanic network, where he said that he was in favor of the "public option" in health care reform. That was about the big news.

Obama must feel like he has to keep an incredibly high profile to keep a couple steps ahead of the machine that it out to bring him down. I think in the wake of the unacceptably aggressively anti-Obama tone of some the "Tea Party" protests that took place in August and the Jimmy Carter remarks about racism impacting a certain segment of the U.S. populations' view of Obama, it is not an unwise strategy.

The republicans are making a big deal of all of the spending that Obama has undertaken, and, as pretty much a fiscal conservative myself, I agree the concern. But the blame is misguided. And while it is impossible to lay the blame for the total US government debt on one president, it certainly isn't primarily Obama to blame, when he hasn't been in office for a year, and inherited all of these problems, including a sea of red ink that came from the 8 year republican president, who had a republican congress for a good bit of that.

And what is needed to change the deficits is not just changing health care, social security, and medicare and medicaid, but also reducing our military spending. Our military spending is way out of proportion with the rest of the world, and do we feel real safe? We need a total rethinking of how we have a safe and peaceful world. We just cannot afford wars anymore, and we have to make them obsolete.

On that subject, I am glad that the media seems to be picking up on a growing frustration about the war in Afghanistan. So much money has been tossed at the middle east, and what is "victory?" No one knows. Obama is "reviewing" the policy, but wouldn't it be ironic as can be if Obama was to escalate Afghanistan, have it not turn out as hoped, and end up having it stuck to him like the Vietnam war is to LBJ? Wasn't Obama the "anti-war" candidate? Oh, what a strange world we live in.