more airline miles and what i learned today

Yesterday, I had a meeting in Washington, DC in the middle of the afternoon.   It's a monthly meeting at the AFL-CIO--I work for a union, in case you don't know that about me, already--and usually, I just take the train down in the morning, and back in the afternoon.  This time, however, it actually turned out to be less expensive to fly, so I wound up getting an extra 1,000 airline miles toward my goal of reaching 2 million mile status on American Airlines.

Even though attending meetings is not on my 101 Things list, this particular meeting had some really interesting info, which I feel compelled to share.  You can count me in the camp of people who voted for President Obama, but who have been profoundly disappointed in his performance in a number of areas.  I think he's forever alienated a well-disciplined electorate by utterly failing when it comes to making any progress on issues of importance to the LGBT community.  I think he failed to show leadership in the Health Care debate, which gave us a watered-down bill that doesn't do enough to fix the problems in our system.  I think he should have learned the lessons of banking crises in Sweden and Japan and come up with a bail-out plan that was more than just a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to private shareholders.   And I think he missed a huge opportunity to show leadership in the gulf spill.

But, after sitting in my meeting at the AFL and considering how many successes he's had, I'll give credit where credit is due.  Our economy was on the verge of devastating collapse, and he pulled us back from the brink.  He got health care reform done, even if he let the lunatic fringe hijack the process which affected the resulting bill.  And he just passed a financial reform bill that seems to go a long way to putting Wall Street in its place.  Take a look at this graphic about jobs under the waning years of the Bush administration, and the first year of Obama.  At our meeting, the chart had been updated to include the first few months of 2010, and let me tell you...those bars were all above the line.  (I couldn't find an updated chart online to reproduce it).

So, I got a little closer to my 2 million mile goal, and in the process, I learned that the 2010 mid-term elections are going to be decided by a very critical small number of votes.  And that voter turn-out will be key.  So, I'm just hoping that like-minded people in districts where there are competitive races will keep that in mind when deciding whether or not to go to the polls and vote for a democrat.

When I got home, I had a conference call that lasted until 11 p.m.  I was exhausted and we were out of bourbon, so I didn't have anything to drink last night.   Except water.  The great irony is that I never drink enough in any one evening to be hungover the next day, but this morning, after an 18 hour work day and only water to drink in the evening, I feel like I've been run over by a truck.  Go figure.