Either side of the fence is fine...

I'm a bit confused.

In this post Rep. Tim O'Brien went on a tirade against Wall Street and said, among other things, that we should be refocusing our spending on creating manufacturing jobs. I called him out in my last post for some of the deceptive tactics used in the graphic he selected as well as problems in his argument. But at least Mr. O'Brien was taking a stand on the issue. In his response to my last post he said

"[T]he loss of our manufacturing sector to a paper economy is the cause of our current economic troubles ... the sooner the policy-makers of our nation start acting on this truth, the sooner our country will be back on the right track economically."

Personally I disagree with his conclusion. Our GDP has continually grown from 1959 till today and we are by far the world leader.

But at least he has taken a stance!

At least that was until July 1, 2010 when he made this post. In which he calls for the state to spend the recently accrued budget surplus. Given his previous statements that the policy makers of our country have to spend change focus to manufacturing I expected he would have wanted the money to go to some type of plan to bring manufacturing back to Connecticut. However, he decided that now we need to focus on the service economy of education. He argues that "years of neglect by City Hall" (hopefully he's including his pals Michael Trueworthy, Phil Sherwood, and the democratic super-majority in that bunch) "left the local schools under already tenuous conditions."

Now the fact that O'Brien wants to put a focus on education is admirable, but what does that say about his previous position? Was he just beating up on Wall Street because they are the popular punching bag at the moment? It is not like we weren't aware of a surplus on June 2nd when he made his post decrying Wall Street. It just carries an air of political opportunism, saying what the crowd wants to hear, that bothers me. Maybe this Fall we can finally get a State Representative who will stand by his statements, even if they may be unpopular. I am an optimist enough to believe that we can.