Note
It must have been a good speech, as I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was talking to Obama, at our school, where he came to visit, and he was listening to me. I even mentioned orienteering, but then he had to go to the bathroom so he didn't get a chance to ask some more questions about it, and I didn't get a chance to ask him to do a rogaine with me. But we were going to have lunch.
What I like: building high-speed rail, high-speed internet, green energy. Wish we could significantly dismantle the military-industrial complex and convert a lot of those engineers into schoolteachers. Not so keen on military recruiting at colleges as for me it was never so much about DADT as it was about chickens. Peace through not waging war, basically, like happiness through not rogaining. And avoiding war partly by not building up the huge machinery to wage it with, the death-dealing machines and troops sitting around, tempting you, as a seemingly viable solution to protect and expand the opportunities for the corporations you feel beholden to for one reason or another. Seems like national security is far better served in other ways.
The idea of starting over with the tax code? OK... Especially the part about rebalancing our system of which corporate sectors we're subsidizing relative to others.
Don't really mind the jujitsu with the earmarks & the 5-year-hold on discretionary spending, yet, though the latter is going to be a sore point with my scientist buddies who are seeing the grant money shrinking. How are we going to do all this innovation and education without the cash? Maybe the rich people can start donating voluntarily.