Today is the last day George W. Bush will be president. Recently I was thinking about the 2000 election. What brought it to mind is there is an electoral recount going on in my state for the office of US Senator. In my state, in contrast to Florida in 2000, the Secretary of State who manages the recount process is not also the chairman of one of the candidate's election campaigns. Although a Democrat like the presumed winner, he recently sided with our Republican governor in refusing to certify the results until the last lawsuit is resolved.

As we close in on the end of the Bush presidency, let's read two analyses of what went wrong:

Commentary: How Bush botched war on terror By Peter Bergen

Dick Cheney's fantasy world by Scott Ritter

As we head into the new one, let's not let our guard down. Barack Obama is still a politician. He, and the party that backs him, gets campaign donations from oil companies and defense contractors just like Bush does, if not in the same amounts. The dangerous idea that the United States should make a practice of invading countries and making them set up new governments is by no means dead or even not feeling well.

If posts stop appearing on truthspeaker.org, it's not because there is nothing to write about.*

That said, that a person of Barack Obama's ethnicity was elected president of the United States is not something I expected to see this early in the century. Attitudes and ideas about certain things, at least, have changed a lot in this country just in my lifetime. About damn time. Just as we can't allow ourselves to get complacent, neither should we lose sight of how far we've come.

*It's because, like the guy in the Sonic commercial, no one reads my blog but my mom.