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Please bear with me, but I feel a pent-up rant coming on and simply cannot suppress it any longer.

Let’s begin with the so-called Super Committee. This archetypal Washington, D.C. brainchild was charged with the most widely anticipated Don Quixote-like mission of the new century: agreeing on a bipartisan recommendation to trim $1.5 trillion (a mere $150 billion per year) of debt over the next decade.

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As a kid, I was a bit of a history nerd, drawn to the legacy tales of America’s titans of industry and innovation — Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Herbert H. Dow, Will Keith Kellogg, George M. Pullman and John D. Rockefeller, to name but a few.

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Perhaps I should title this rendition of Parting Shots as a “Letter from the Original Guy” in recognition of my brand new position with MiBiz: Former Editor & Publisher. While abdicating my long-held, lofty-sounding role — along with sole ownership of the paper — may have come as a surprise to some, the underlying rationale is really quite simple. As I often quip to family and friends, “Twenty-three years is quite a run for a guy with a seven-year attention span.”

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Few if any MiBiz readers will ever be drafted to help test or prioritize much less take a whack at obliterating any of the vast expanse of federal regulations contained within the 157,000 page Code of Federal Regulations.

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On a separate but related topic, it is common knowledge that America’s public safety authorities are not permitted to ask for the identification papers that entitle any person to simply exhale within our country’s expansive borders. To do so, argues the PC crowd, would surely constitute profiling and a violation of one’s constitutional rights.

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Quietly mirroring the Johnson Controls-Saft celebration of accomplishment, a short stone’s throw from the President’s stage in Holland Township, has been another pioneering West Michigan-born company — Zeeland-based Gentex Corp.

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It remains a mystery to me why the United States Senate, in existence since the 1780s, still to this day holds hearings in an attempt to understand the value of manufacturing to our nation’s economy.