One

Finally a week where I was too busy blog but not to busy to take in the historic changing of the guard in Washington, DC. President Barack Obama isn't wasting anytime putting his stamp on the office. Thank God!

He basically gave the hard line wing of the Republican party the finger. Who can argue with his sentiment that it's time for the GOP to quit listening to Rush Limbaugh and get about the task of fixing the economic ills of this country. Mr. Obama's quote of the week to a gathering of Republican leaders arguing with him over the stimulus package, "I won."

I'm afraid even throwing a trillon dollars at this problem isn't going to solve it. Once they let Lehmann Brothers fail there was no turning back the clock. I think the government needs to take a step back and let a couple of these other big banks go as well, specifically Citi and Bank of America.

I blame deregulation for a lot of the ills that are being visited upon us. The banks simply got too big to control. Unfortunately, they got to big to let fail. Deregulation has killed broadcasting and in some ways the newspaper business as well. These mega media groups bought properties based on ever expanding advertising revenues. Any hiccup in the economy meant painful draconian cuts in jobs. The Internet took a slow burning fire that had been ruining newspapers, television and radio for years and turned it into a raging inferno. The media business set itself on fire when it didn't come up with a pay model for all of that information that gets shoveled to the web.

Communities are going to suffer greatly because newsrooms will stop covering the hard subjects like government and fall back to the easy gets of murder and mayhem. Bloggers will have to fill the void but that is a dangerous path in the search for truth. I believe some bloggers offer useful insight to the political process, take for example Tonys Kansas City. But bloggers generally have agendas, even TKC, a well run newsroom at a TV or newspaper doesn't.

Here's hoping that our new President is given a chance to fix what's ailing us. Rush Limbaugh and his gang had their chance and after a promising start (The Contract with America) but in the end they became even bigger spenders than the Democrats that had wrested power away from. I think we're in for a lot more pain, three to five years worth perhaps. Generation X is going to learn some tough lessons that our parents and their parents experienced.