According to definition, heuristics is a decision process that may or may not yield practical results, may involve trial and error, intelligent guesswork, “seat-of-the pants” reasoning, “rules of thumb,” a lack of an organized decision procedure centered around an hypothesis, and other imperfect decision short-cuts.

A heuristic approach to making decisions might be applied when there is no decision algorithm that can be applied to lead to an expected outcome. It is in short, an attempt to reach conclusions that may or may not be sound, but must be made because of the absence of a reliable decision algorithm.

If a person does not understand diamonds, the heuristic that higher price equates to higher quality in diamonds of the same size leads to a conclusion that may or may not be correct in a given application.

You don’t touch a hot stove because as a kid you learned the algorithm that the outcome will be getting burned. 

In your first experience with a hot stove as a child you may have tried a heuristic approach and learned by trial and error that you would get burned.

This groundwork leads to a short discussion of government heurocracy. The Obama campaign promised us economic solutions as if the algorithms to restore the economy were known to him and results were guaranteed if only he were elected to office so he could save us all by pressing the right buttons. Now we hear that it is going to take much longer to fix and the cost is high and unknown.

The Democrats did not have an algorithm that would lead to predictably desirable results. It does not exist. If it did there would be no disagreement among economists.

If the Democrats thought they had the magic medicine they were foolish. If they thought they might have it but weren’t sure they should not have raised false expectations.

There was hope all right – the hope they might get lucky and something would work.

But let’s tell it like it is. Having a solution was not the priority. Getting elected was.

Many situations in life don’t have predictable outcomes. War is one, yet Obama and his cohorts, who are now taking a heuristic approach to fixing the economy are the same people who decried the lack of predictability of events in the Iraq war. A student of the subject knows that it was specifically the lack of predictability that prompted McNamara and his WWII whiz kids in the development of the branch of probability known as game theory. One wartime application of this was to estimate how many bombers had to take off for a given number to get through the flak and the Messerschmitts to deliver their payloads.

So now we are being led by a government of clueless heurocrats who convinced the American people that they had the answers and could solve the problems, but who, in reality wanted to take a shot at making their own guesses and trial and error attempts at solutions.

There is one huge difference between America’s present economic situation and the preceding hot stove example. The Washington heurocrats will try to find economic solutions through heuristics. It will be the American people who get burned.

During the campaign Barack Obama got piqued because of criticism of his wife.  Her past comments, including the infamous "proud for the first time," and racially-tainted college thesis, were tip-offs to her true feelings and beliefs.  These "put her in play."

Now, if she takes an active part in pitching government policies she will put herself in play again and President Obama may again complain.  As before, he will have no right to.

Unlike Sarah Palin, who was viciously attacked for actions of her family that were not of her own, Michelle Obama was, and will be, criticized because of her own actions.

It's not going the way you thought it would, is it? You can't just open your mouth and have every American swoon as did your liberal supporters inside and outside of the main stream media.

You blame Congressional Republicans for holding America back from your vision of economic salvation by not falling in lockstep with you on your march toward socialism. 

Their ears are deaf to your soaring rhetoric because socialism is an anathema to them. They know they can’t solve a problem by creating a bigger problem. I pray the Republicans stand their ground.

You promised clean programs, not laden with pork. Your party's economic stimulus program is packed with pork, and that's one source of partisan conflict. Cognizant voters understand what's happening. Democrats got elected and now it's time to start paying back debts and making good on promises to special interest groups.

You promised that you could improve relations with Iran. Ahmadinejad responded to your overtures by launching a satellite to demonstrate his rocket power. Rockets plus nuclear capability makes Iran an international threat. What are you going to do about this before it’s too late? The time is now.

You promised change in government, yet you recycle the same people from earlier Democratic administrations. This is not change we can believe in. It is not change at all.

You seem to count on Americans having short memories. Perhaps your supporters do. At any rate, your support came more as the result of affect than cognition.

It sounds like you're starting to lose patience and your true temperament is starting to show. What a pity? You wanted this job. If you didn't know what it entailed then you were naive. Every president has had to convince the opposition. So don't complain about it now.

You spoke many times of the "failed politics" of the last eight years. President Bush could have legitimately blamed the housing crisis, plus Global Crossing and Enron misdeeds on the Carter and Clinton administrations, during which they were seeded, and the Social Security funding problems on earlier Democratic administrations.

He could have legitimately blamed 9/11 on our failure to respond to earlier terrorism attacks during the Clinton administration.

But he didn't. He took full responsibility and worked to solve them. This is what a leader does. This is what a President does.  This is what an adult does.  In the words of your Biblical paraphrase, "It is time to put aside childish things."

If the problems besetting Bush had been as easy to solve as you seem to think don't you think they would have been solved?

When you won the election by a popular vote of 53% to 46% that is not a mandate as you have claimed.

Forty-six percent represents 60 million people who do not agree with you and didn't want you to be president. Their representatives in Congress oppose your programs. Those 60 million people who don't have a thrill run up their leg when they hear you speak are about equal to the combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

You outspent your opponent by $168 million, or 48% yet only won by a voting margin of 15% over your opponent. Your margin of victory cost $17.53 per vote.  Did you ever account for the sources of that money, by the way? 

If you were truly preferred by the electorate why didn't you get 48% more votes than your opponent? This would have equaled your margin of spending.

Here's where you were fooled. You associated with the likes of communist William Ayers, black liberationist/Marxist Rev. Wright, members of the pseudo-intellectual liberal far left, and Oprah Winfrey and the Hollywood crowd. They all thought like you.   Even in college when you sought discussion with far left professors, as you said you did, you were garnering reinforcement, not challenges, to your beliefs. No wonder you think socialism is the solution for economic problems. You were not confronted with different socio-political philosophies during the formative stages of your beliefs.

I suggest to you that a tenured professor is poorly qualified to recommend an economic system because tenure provides protection from economic consequences. He doesn't even have to teach to keep his job. A professor can afford to be a socialist. What does he care? If he wants to settle for what he has, he has it made.

You shouldn't be surprised at your rude awakening. As a lecturer in Constitutional law you are certainly acquainted with the concept of checks and balances in government.

What's going to happen to you? You are already on your way to being a one-term president, leaving office sorely rejected as was Jimmy Carter by the voters.

Your economic and defense programs will lead to disaster. You won't be able to "pay your bills" in terms of what voters expect and behind-the-scenes supporters are owed. The polyglot Democrats will self-destruct from within as factions attempt to "pay their bills" by promoting selfish provincial agendas, many of which conflict with each others' goals, your goals, and the priority needs of America.

As has happened in good times and in bad, the American voter will suffer the consequences of your poor administration, pick up the pieces, and hopefully make a better choice next time. I take heart remembering our history that four bad years of Jimmy Carter laid the groundwork for eight great years of Ronald Reagan.