A long way to go before hitting bottom

Well, a quick scan of the news shows that nothing much has changed in the four days since my last post. The oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The Senate turned its back on jobless Americans again by going into recess without freeing up funding for emergency unemployment benefits. Guess they needed to get out of town for the holiday weekend and couldn't be bothered. Hewlett-Packard's announcement today that it is laying off 9,000 employees is further evidence that the unemployment crisis is not getting better.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was on the radio this morning talking to ultra-conservative host Laura Ingraham -- one of the most grating voices in the media. Seems the Republican governor is joining other conservatives in their newly found concerns related to the the environmental destruction in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a man who still wants off-shore drilling along the Virginia coast. Yup, just can't wait to start scarring the Atlantic so that the state can bring in a few bucks.

McDonnell needs to start paying more attention to obtaining jobs now for the state -- jobs that don't involve living in a rig 50 miles off Virginia Beach and endangering one's life for a paycheck that is barely above minimum wage.

McDonnell, like Ingraham and others on the far right, isn't going to pass up an opportunity to blast President Obama for his handling of the oil spill. So if it means they temporarily need to act like tree-hugging liberals to score some political points, then that's what they'll do.

It's a farce.

I have lived on this planet for 52 years and never once heard a right-winger speak eloquently about the environment, nature or the need to protect the planet. Now they want us to believe they are concerned about the gulf region? They want us to believe they would have forced BP to have this resolved by now? C'mon. The right wing is pro big oil, pro big business, pro big everything. To portray themselves as guardians of the land and seas is comical. BP would be under less pressure to fix the damn leak if Rush Limbaugh clones were in power.

It's not even 11 a.m. and I am pretty exhausted from what I am reading and hearing in the news today. The hypocrisy alone is at an epidemic level and is part of the reason why the news hasn't improved over the holiday weekend. A quick glance at the help-wanted ads tells me that job openings are drying up again. Tensions with one of our closest allies, Israel, are increasing. The list goes on.

So rather than rant about it all, I am going to take a step back and just accept that things are probably going to get a lot worse in every regard before they get better. My gut is telling me we have got a long way to go before we truly hit bottom -- perhaps years.