We seem to be stuck in bad contracts with people who were, somehow, smarter than us when it came to business.

I'm not sure who thought stop light (and later speeding) cameras were a great idea, but our mayor sure trumpeted them a few years back when they first were turned on.

Millions of dollars in fines later, we find out, kinda, that while there are fewer people running red lights at most of the intersections with cameras, there are also more rear end collisions caused by cars stopping short.

But the city can't turn the cameras off. They can't do anything because their contract with the company that owns the cameras and processes the tickets (who wrote the contract? oh yeah, the company that owns everything) says we can't until the contract is up. In a few years.

It's kinda like what I hear about cell phone contracts. Most of the good deals come with two year contracts. Meaning you can't move around from network to network without a penalty. I'm sure most of you out there understand this cell phone contract thing more than I do., but the concept is the same.

At the company I used to work for, they cast about for a while looking for someone to put a website together. Eventually it went to a company formed by a friend of one of the sons of the owner. The sons don't really work for the company, but they are paid well for their blood. And one of the sons was probably just trying to help out his friends. But after they built the site, our company wanted some changes.

The website company wanted more money. And in the contract it said the web company owned the website (even though our company paid for it), and any changes would require more money. Thousands more. And, since they ingeniously hold the virtual keys to the website, our company paid a little more and then rarely changed the site. Which meant this "dynamic" new Internet thing would lie dormant and mostly unused.

In 2002, we the people of the United States (and the world) were told we had to go to war with a country that had done little to us. They weren't responsible for the terrorist attacks (although the administration did try to tie them together in a big old terrorist blanket). They didn't have much of a military (because we'd already decimated most of it about ten years before). All they had was a blowhard who ran the country with an iron fist. Unfortunately his fist also controlled lots of oil. And he'd tried to assassinate our President's father (failed...that's how good this tyrant was at implementing his "big" plans of world domination).

So we the people were sold a bill of goods because our President and his administration wanted to go to war. You know the story. It was gonna be quick (probably just long enough to be wrapping up around election time so Bush'd get back in). Those Iraqis were gonna love us (we get to be liberators again!). And it wouldn't cost much. Maybe 100 billion. No more than 200.

We've made some pretty bad deals in the last decade or so. And, probably, going back years and years. It ain't about the deals anymore. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet. Take your losses, pay a fine and start over.

If there's one thing a new President needs to do it's this: break all these bad deals and fix these messes all over our floors.

This is change. And this is what we need.

Isn't it kind of funny that, after spending a trillion or so dollars halfway across the world for--something we're not quite sure of, that now the government is thinking about spending 150B on us. I'm not saying I won't cash any check the government sends me, but this isn't fixing anything. It's kind of like a month's worth of hush up money.

What we need is change. Not chump change, but real change. Fixing the stuff that's broke.

And, in case anyone was wondering, that's what we're voting about this year.

I'm not sure how we can tell shit from shinola in this race, but that's my best advice: vote for the best fixer upper. Cause our house is in pretty bad shape.

Matt Worley proposes a chicken in every pot.