Interesting

The town hall meeting yesterday with Sen. Jeff Sessions was pretty interesting. There was a fairly large crowd, the vast majority of which were retirees. There were some younger people there though and I wasn't the youngest that I saw, so I would say there was a pretty good range of folks. This is especially true if you consider that it was 2:00 on a Wednesday afternoon.

As to the Senator and what he said: He's not as well spoken as I was expecting him to be. Being honest, I've not paid much attention to Mr. Sessions before yesterday so I don't know that I've ever heard him speak before, and I'm not saying he was bad or did a poor job, he just wasn't as forceful as I imagined him to be.

The nice thing about it was that he really didn't seem to have prepared a statement or answers. He really seemed to just be answering questions on the fly and it was nice to see a Senator be so candid. He talked mainly about health care reform although some of the questions also got into cap and trade, religion in schools and government and social security. The crowd was pretty easy on the Senator himself, but took a few good shots at Congress as a whole and several voiced complaints about Washington politicians and the poor job they've been doing listening to the American people.

All in all, it was a pretty good and like I said, interesting to see. I only saw two signs in the meeting and I think the same old lady was holding them both. The first read "IMPeach Obama" (that's the case she used and everything) and the other said "Stop funding ACORN". There was also an SUV outside I saw when leaving that had signs all over it mainly talking about stealing the children's futures.

Here are links to the WSFA coverage and the Andalusia Star News article about the meeting:

http://www.wsfa.com/global/Story.asp?s=11029661

http://www.andalusiastarnews.com/news/2009/sep/03/citizens-speak-out/

I haven't watched the WSFA video yet, but I may be in there somewhere. Let me know if you see me.

Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

Town Hall

Our area's U.S. Senator, Jeff Sessions, is coming to Andalusia to host a town hall meeting about the health care reform bill. Being a Republican, I doubt that it will be nearly as interesting a meeting as it would be if he were a Democrat, but still, I plan on going and seeing what he has to say. I don't know that I've ever actually participated in something like this before so I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully it will be worth going to.

In case you missed the news yesterday: Michelle Duggar is pregnant with her 19th child. A lot of people seem to be offended by this but I don't really understand why. If she's healthy and her children are healthy and they can afford to have them then more power to them. At least they're not on welfare sucking the system dry. There aren't many parents that I've ever talked to that haven't said they wouldn't have one more if they could afford it or some other circumstance didn't prevent them from having one more child. This family has just had one more after one more and as long as they're happy, then good for them.

Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

Avengers Assemble!

So big news in the entertainment world yesterday as Disney bought Marvel. Marvel is the company that owns comic book characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America and a host of others that are fairly recognizable to the vast majority of people. To me, the really interesting part about the deal isn't necessarily what happens to the comics. Disney doesn't really "do" comics, so I would imagine they'll mostly leave that aspect of Marvel alone for the time being. What Disney does "do" however is T.V., movies and theme parks. All of these aspects of Marvel are basically licensed out to other publishers. This also includes video games. As these license deals being to expire, it will be interesting to see if Disney brings things like the various Marvel character movies in-house or not. Universal also stands to take a hit at its theme parks as they compete directly with Disney and have a good amount of their parks revolving around Marvel characters. In the short term, I doubt much changes, but you never know. One day there may be a "Marvel Universe" park at Disney World.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul