Through An Old Timer's Eyes

Watching the Independence Day fireworks display made me wonder what was going through my brother's mind. He spent a couple hundred days on the front lines in WWII without a break as they battled the Germans for Italy.

As we sat in my niece's car watching the bombs bursting in air, the only thing he said was, "That one sounded like the Screaming Mimi that the Krauts hit us with."

When the fireworks were blazing away, I thought about our troops in lraq and Afghanistan and wondered if the enemies had any weapons that sounded like what I was hearing. War has changed so much. There are no front lines. The America-haters will pop out of anywhere and start shooting. The terror in that kind of fighting has to be incredible because you never know where the enemy is.

These so-called holy warriors cannot fight a head-on-head war, as we showed in the first Gulf War. The Jews also proved it in the Six-Day War.

So, how did I get all that out of a fireworks display?

We spent the holiday weekend in Benton and the ride home on Sunday was spectacular. Most of the cornfields were more than knee-high by the fourth of July and the crops we saw looked very healthy. I wonder if the corn crop is going to be harvested for feed or is it going to be turned into fuel? It seemed like there was corn planted in every vacant place and that sort of makes me think it will go for fuel.

You have to wonder about this U.S. Department of Energy. Thirty-eight years ago, President Jimmy Carter formed this department to help us to wean ourselves from foreign oil.

Today, they have a budget of $24.2 billion, with 116,000 full time employees and 100,000 contractors and I can't see where they have made much progress yet. The big and little oil companies do not want any part in solving the problem. Greed is what it is all about.

This holiday weekend was supposed to kick off a big drive by the police to pick up speeders. Evidently, no one told the state police about it, because on the trip to Benton and back I only saw two trooper cars.

They were supposes to be using SUVs, pickup trucks and sports cars to carry out this mission, but I paid strict attention and I did not see one speeder pulled over. This program was supposed to put more bucks in the coffers, but unless they were all at the big cities it didn't happen.

Maybe the crackdown was in the forests, where they could catch the four-wheelers speeding through the trees. The forest rangers carry more armament that the Marines in Afghanistan to patrol the high crime areas of Penn's Woods. What a waste of taxpayer money. Not counting the gas they waste, each one is carrying at least $600 worth of equipment. Smokey Bear and Woodsy Owl had better mind their Ps and Qs.

Not being a financial genius, I am having a hard time figuring out just where in the hell did the money go when everyone had their 401k plans wiped out? Who got the loot? If the blue collar worker lost his money, then who was the white collar SOB who took it? Was it those used car salesmen on Wall Street or was it the brokers who invested the little man's money? Where did the billions of dollars go? Someone got it and I would sure like to know who it was

I have a plan that would bail out Uncle Sugar in about three months, but if I was to tell the President and he sold it to Congress, it would never work because they would steal that money in a New York second. It is based on common sense and there is none of that left in Washington D.C.

I guess nobody cares about my plans because my write-in campaign for President didn't go so well.

The History Channel had a lot of programming over the holiday weekend about the Revolutionary War. I learned what happened to Benedict Arnold. He was a firstclass dummy and really messed up.

There it is again -- greed made him do it.