Skip to main content

Rex Hammock's Weblog

rexblog: My Warholian 15 45 minutes: I’m writing this in a cab on my way to BWI for a flight back home to Nashville. I just walked out of the Old Executive Office Building where four other “real people” and I sat down for a 25-minute chat with the President of the United States. Then the five of us stood behind him while he told a room full of people why the tax cuts he has championed should be made permanent. (That's me on the right in the picture.)

I happen to agree with his sentiment strongly. I was there as a representative small business owner who is using the increased capital expensing provisions of the Bush tax plan to invest in a wide range of hardware and software for my business. I’m also a proponent of the common sense logic that Congress should make the death tax repeal permanent.

But here, I’m just blogging what the experience was like…and I won’t be debating policy in this weblog. Not my thing. (You can read about the policy statements here. A press release is also on the Hammock Publishing website.)

I’ll talk a little about the logistics of visiting with the President later, but first I wanted to give my impressions of the experience. The President sat with us at a conference table between me and a young stay-at-home mother of two whose husband is a police officer (and, like me, a expat Alabamian). Across from the three of us sat two other young women and an older man, an apple farmer from Gettysburg, Penn. One of the women was a single mother of two who works full time and takes graduate school classes online. The other was a mom who works fulltime.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings : "BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to ...

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia : NASA penalized the contractor that maintains and operates the space shuttle fleet $45.2 million for its role in the shuttle Columbia accident, according to a letter NASA released Thursday. The United Space Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had to forfeit the money even though NASA said the contractor did nothing specific to cause the accident. But a letter from a NASA official said the contractor was "an integral member" of the "team that reached flawed conclusions about the relative safety of Columbia and crew before and during the flight." The letter from NASA deputy associate administrator Michael Kostelnik was sent Jan. 7 to United Space Alliance president Michael McCulley, a former astronaut. The contract spells out performance bonuses based on safety, cost-effectiveness and other factors. For Oct. 1, 2002, through March 31, 2003, the alliance was eligible for $81.2 ...