Clinton Did it Why can't Bush

Former President Bill Clinton saw fit to give a full unconditional pardon to Mark Rich who was a felon hiding in another county and avoiding capture / prosecution in America where he committed his crimes. One other interesting piece of information on this pardon was that Mrs. Rich donated large sums of money to the Clinton campaign. I'm asking that President Bush give the same consideration to these two Border Patrol Agents that "Slick Willy" gave to a slimy criminal with a rich wife.

The Cancer known as the UAW

As someone who tries to be aware of history and use its lessons to improve the future, I can't say that unions have not had in many respects a positive impact on American industry. At the turn of the last century and for many years after, workers were often subjected to inhumane, dangerous, and ridiculously low paying jobs and had no protection of any kind. The AFL & CIO were pioneers in the labor movement and started to bring these injustices to light. At the time, there were few if any laws giving workers any rights and those that did exist were weekly enforced. When the government stepped up and started to create and adequately enforce labor laws, the unions did not slow down or reduce worker fees to the union. There is no example more fitting of this than the United Auto Workers union "UAW". When negotiations come up, the UAW puts out unreasonable requests for pay, benefits, and other perks knowing that the Big 3 will kowtow to their demands because of the economic disaster caused by strikes. The Big 3 have failed to address this cancer and now hundreds of thousands of people in or related to the auto industry will loose the only thing they know how to do unless the auto industry is allowed to feed at the teet of the taxpayer, a trend that has gotten entirely too popular in American industry.

America it is time to ask yourself this question: When did we become a country where if you build a better mousetrap you and and so does the guy who didn't build a better mouse trap? That my friends is called "Socialism" and is far removed from capitalism and quickly destabilizes healthy democracies.

Poll Question Answer

Ok yet another poll question has come and gone. In the previous question: "Will Hillary get the nod for the Secretary of State posting in the Obama Administration?" 50% of the respondents thought that Sen. Clinton would not get the Secretary of State position, but would get a position of prominence. 25% of the respondents thought that Sen. Clinton would get the Sec. State nomination and 25% thought she would not.

New poll question to be added soon and thanks for taking part in the blogespheres own type of democracy.

I modified my template, what was I thinking?

Shortly after I started to blog, I wanted a 3 column template and found that Blogger didn't offer one. I went and looked at some 3rd party providers and quickly determined that I didn't know as much about computers as I thought I did, HTML this, CSS that, oh lets not forget their buddy XML. If these sound like Sand Script with a Russian accent to you, good, that means I'm not alone.

I recently got brave due to some spare time (see: Devils hands / really bad idea) and decided that I was going to modify my template and get the 3 columns that I wanted. I saved my current template (not a useful as it would seem) so that I would have a fall back if I did something wrong (all but guaranteed). I then went deep into the "code" looking for several things that I expected to find (right after Elvis & Jimmy Hoffa) such as the code specific to the left column and the width adjustment for the center / posting column. I planed on finding the code for the narrow column on the left, duplicate this code and make the change for right as opposed to left justification. I made some changes, feeling confident that I found and changed the correct lines of code (flatulence putting you on the moon more likely) and clicked the appropriate boxes to accept the changes and save. Blogger asked me if I was sure I wanted to make these changes (mental note: questions like this are trying to prevent idiots like me from making bad choices). I confidently clicked the appropriate boxes and waited to see my awesome creation. If you've ever tried this yourself and it worked out, then your obviously smarter than I am (doesn't take much). If what occurred to you is anything like what happened to me, than you likely said things that you wouldn't say in the presence of small children, woman, or priests. As you can imagine, the outcome was somewhere between blater pain in traffic and forced viewing of Rosie O'Donnell (not sure which is worse).

No problem, I was smart, I saved my original work right? Well sort of, you see when you save a Blogger template, it only saves your actually work (posts) and a minimal amount of formatting. All the sidebar materials including links, widgets, list, and anything else except the blog archive went bye bye (insert visual of rake handle to the crotch). If your like me and you have a lot of sidebar add ons and other sidebar items then this becomes a large pain in posterior region.

I realized that I needed help or an asylum and I needed it soon or my by blog was toast (and not the nice cinnamon sugar kind from childhood). Thanks to Carl Kilo over at Spark it Up I got back on track with a Blogger friendly template that he found and sent to me. Once I got the new template loaded things were more or less back to normal, less spending the morning putting in all new widgets and links. I'm sure that I forgot some that were on my original blog.

There is some good new out of this, I finally got a 3 column template (good blogger, now I can have donut). If you too want your Blogger based blog to be a 3 column template, you may want to go here, this site has 3 column templates that are the same as the basic 2 column templates already offered by Blogger. This is very handy for most Blogger users, because it allows them keep the ease of use and familiar feel from a Blogger provided template but adds the use and options of a 3 column template. If you want to dig deeper and do other cool things to your blog you may want to go the Blogflak blog where they cover just about everything you could ever want to do to a blog (wish I found them before I dived into the chum water).

If you've previously voted on my current poll question, please vote again as this was one of them many things that went to the technology netherworld during this project.

Thanks to Carl Kilo, who's help was invaluable on this project.

Poll Question Answer

In the most recent Poll Question: "Will President Elect Obama go left right away or take more of a centrist angle." Your comments were split right down the middle with 50% of those who responded indicating that President Elect Obama would go straight to the left and 50% of those who responded believed that President Elect Obama would take more of a centrist approach.

A new poll question will be up soon and as always, thank you for taking part in the blogespheres own format of democracy.

Short, Sweet, To the Point "Common Sense"

Now you can hear The Augusta Water Cooler

The Augusta Water Cooler is one of the newest stations on blogtalkradio a great Internet radio station provider. Scheduling, show listings, archives, and downloads for the radio version of the Augusta Water Cooler can be found on the profile page here. If your not available when the show airs and want to listen, don't fret, you can listen to the show from the blogtalkradio widget on this very blog, listen on the blogtalkradio website and yes even itunes. For those of you wanting to subscribe to itunes, simply got to the profile page and click the itunes icon at the top of the page.

Are you a commenter? Great glad to hear it because this is not some podcast that you can only listen too after the fact, it is in fact a live on the air show that can take callers. In future airings, I plan to expand the shows length, have have guests, and generally improve the fit and finish of the entire experience.

This will not be simply a dictated version of what is on this blog, the audio version will contain exclusive story lines and and additions to what is in print.

As always comments and suggestions are accepted and appreciated. I look forward to being able to have this medium to compliment this blog. There are distinctly different in how they come across. A print blog such as this one can be fine tuned and every post checked, rechecked, and then further edited previous to anyone seeing it. A live on the air show is just that, there is no edit button and your thoughts tend to be more free and well they just come across differently. If you've ever read a book written by a radio talk show host, you know exactly what I'm referring to.

I'd like to thank all the people who read this blog and gave me the inspiration to go further and take it to audible world.