Hurricane Ike hits Ohio

The remnants of Hurricane Ike are currently hitting Ohio with extremely high winds, downed trees and power outages. We lost our power earlier in the evening and it's just been restored within the past hour or so. The fire department has had an insanely busy night, as every few minutes it seems that another fire truck or emergency vehicle goes racing past my house, sirens blaring. I suspect that they are responding to many trees going down and taking wires with them on the way. As I type this, the city is cleaning up the top section of one of the ancient mighty oaks that grace a house two doors down. It snapped off in the high winds and partially blocked access to our street. I've seen many downed trees all evening as I drove around earlier trying to find an open store that had power. I finally found that the south side of the city still had it so I went and did my shopping in a discount store there. When I got home, I found my power restored, thank goodness. I was afraid that I'd be in the dark all night, but it was probably just a downed wire from a tree falling on it that knocked it out in the first place. Right now, the high winds are dying down and there is a little bit of rain falling. I suspect that the worst of the winds are over and while it will still be windy while this dying hurricane blows through, it won't be nearly as bad as it was earlier in the evening. I'd begun to wonder just what was causing such high winds and darkened skies. I assumed that it was just another storm system or front moving through our area, but along with the winds, it felt weirdly muggy, suggesting tropical origins. I can't believe that this hurricane has packed such a punch for how long it's been over land. These things tend to lose all of their steam once they make landfall because they gain most of their fuel over warm water, but I heard it said that this storm was as big, size-wise, as Texas, so it doubtless could still pack quite a punch while over land for so long. We're getting the remnants of this storm and it's still throwing around very damaging high winds, so these things are nothing to be trifled with, even this long after making landfall. It should be interesting once day breaks to see the full extent of the damage this storm has managed to leave behind in its wake. Hard to tell now in the dark of night, but if my street is any indication of how bad things have been, then I suspect that there is a lot worse damage elsewhere in the city that will keep municipal workers busy all night long cleaning up. Guess they don't have a lot of sleep ahead for them tonight, but I'll bet they'll make great overtime pay!

HILLARY CLINTON VISITS AKRON, OH
I ventured over to Ellet High School in the eastern part of Akron today to hear Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stump for Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. Stuffed inside of a high school gymnasium that was obviously packed to overfilling capacity and was mostly standing room only, it was stiflingly hot with so many people so tightly packed in for the occasion. I was granted a bottom row seat on the bleachers owing to my still having an air cast on my right leg, but fairly soon, my view was blocked by all of the people standing in front of me, so I ended up having to spend the entire speech standing just so I could see Senator Clinton. I ran into a lot of people I know (naturally), so it was no surprise to see so many familiar faces. Senator Clinton gave a good, and thankfully fairly short, speech, touting all of the things that Obama will do when he is President, but what people fail to realize is that, with the massive budget deficits that our next President will inherit, whoever he is, he won't be able to deliver on all of those lofty campaign promises. There is simply too much red ink on the books to be able to do much of anything, so he'll be fairly hamstrung, whoever he is, to be able to do anything until the deficits are cut way down. And no President can deliver the goods he promises without the cooperation of Congress, and if they aren't in the mood to go along with the President's wishes, they won't. They'll see all that red ink and doubtless override any of the President's wishes. So whoever wins the race in November, their first priority, and what will doubtless consume their entire first administration, is to pare down the debt and cut the budget to do so. No soaring government programs, no promises of millions of good jobs, no universal health care, until the debt is managed. And that's going to mean some major reining in of excess government spending and fiscal discipline. The first thing we need to do is to end the war in Iraq and concentrate our energies where it's really needed, and that's Afghanistan, where we need to finish what we started there and stabilize that country so that it becomes less of a terrorist threat and a magnet for extremists. Iraq, sadly, is now a haven for terrorists as well, thanks to our ill advised invasion of that country, so it's going to be a tough job for any future President to deal with those two difficult foreign policy issues as well. So whoever wins, whichever party takes the White House, is going to need to tread lightly and work with Congress to cope with our massive financial instability first and foremost. Once we get our budgetary house in order, we can go on to do all the other things that need to be done, but we must balance the overdrawn checkbook first. And that, my friends, is doubtless going to take generations to accomplish, and probably won't happen in any of our lifetimes.