VERY encouraging signs....with EDIT

In my daily drives around town I've begun to pay attention to what's going on around me as opposed to just trying to get from Point A to Point B.   Here's what I've noticed just within 1 1/2 miles of my home:

Everywhere I looked I saw construction.  LOTS of it!  New apartments, retail, a hotel, and more than a few new office buildings.  Yes, I know Dallas and Houston and Austin and Texas in general are doing well, but I suspect if you paid attention when driving around Atlanta or Chicago or Boston or Denver you'd see something similar.

Either our economy is turning the corner as I write this *fingers crossed* or it's close at hand and these forward-looking companies are getting the jump on their competition.  

So, does Obama get credit for this?  Who knows.  I'm of the opinion the President can sit in the Oval Office late at night eating Cheetos and watching porn and he'll still get the credit for or the blame for whatever happens, whether he deserves it or not.  In most cases whatever a president does, for better or worse, isn't obvious until years later.  

You can credit Obama or the Easter Bunny or Batman for this light at the end of the tunnel, I don't care.  I'm just glad to see these encouraging signs.

S

EDIT....from USA Today:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Existing home sales jumped 7.8% in August to the highest level in more than two years, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.

In an earlier report, U.S. builders started work on more homes in August, driven by the fastest pace of single-family home construction in more than two years.

The world's most dysfunctional people!

I'm so sick and tired....have been for years....of opening the paper every morning and reading about one crisis after another in the Middle East.  If they're not killing each other, they're blowing something up.  I swear, those people could fuck up a one car funeral procession!

I understand the hazards of drilling for more oil domestically, and building more wind farms on the prairie, and producing more energy via nuclear plants, etc, but damn, we REALLY need to do whatever it takes to be energy self-sufficient so we can cut ties with the Middle East.  

I know that developing their oil industry a century ago seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don't think we understood what ignorant barbarians we were dealing with.  This has turned out to be yet another example of unintended consequences.  Ours has proven to be a marriage made in hell!

There are many parts of the world that we barely recognize....we send them old reruns of Dallas and The Three Stooges, and they send us produce and flowers.  Honestly, if the Middle East didn't have oil, would we give them the time of day?  We need to make them one of "those parts of the world".

It seems like half our diplomatic corps is engaged one way or another in trying to arrange peace between Israel, the Palestinians, the Shiites, the Sunnis, and all the rest of those obscure rock-chuckin' tribes.  They've been at each other's throats for centuries.  I doubt they're gonna sit down now and happily break bread together just because we ask them to.

I say we need to conserve as much as we can and to rely on ourselves and our dependable allies for our energy needs. Then we can tell the Middle East to go play grenade-toss with each other.  We, and our checkbook, are outta here!

S