Congress

 “Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity...After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians?”  -Adolph Hitler, persuading others that The Holocaust would be tolerated-                

 This Week 

The Congressional Foreign Relations Committee, by a vote of 23-22, approved a resolution condemning the 1915 slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “genocide”. The resolution was passed despite a last-minute Obama administration effort to derail it, which has put a chill on America’s relations with Turkey.

As a result of that vote, Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Washington, a move it pulled when a 2007 committee passed a similar resolution. It worked for Turkey in 2007 and the resolution did not pass. So, indications are that the current resolution has an uncertain future in Congress, despite the fact that it is a Democratic Congress and Obama promised as a Presidential candidate that he would support such a resolution.

We are fast approaching the end of President Barack Obama’s first year in office.  The banks, Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex have looted the US Treasury, and our leaders have created a multi-trillion dollar debt that they placed on the shoulders of American taxpayers. There is also news that the Democrats want to create a new Amnesty Bill, so that illegal immigrants can fill the jobs that "Americans don’t want" in an economy where we wonder if those jobs still exist. In short, under President Obama's leadership (with Democrats in control of both the Senate and the House), if things have changed, it's for the worse. 

Yesterday, at the National Press Club, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pointed out that tough economic times call for “political courage.” In an opening salvo lobbed at lawmakers, Trumka shared that the courage necessary for that economic salvation of the country and its citizens wasn’t clearly evident in American leadership:

“Too many people in Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed out the banks, everything will be okay."

A lot has been going on in the world lately and I've been wanting to write about it. A blank word processing document has been open on my desktop for days now, residing behind Safari pages, but only now do I feel compelled to write something. The topics of interest have been jobs, the stock market, and the economy; Iran, Afghanistan; Obama, Congress, and ClimateGate. This is a busy time of year so it's hard to keep up. To keep things simple, I'd just like to list the topics with a brief comment on each.

Jobs, Market, Economy

The new unemployment numbers came out today and they were much better than expected. Only 11,000 jobs were lost in November and the unemployment rate declined to 10%, down from 10.2% in October. Job losses for a couple of preceding months were revised downward. The trend is certainly encouraging but it'll be a while before we're out of the woods.

Though it may not seem like it, we're living in a golden age that's about to come to an end. This is the Golden Age of healthcare, the best in the world. Maybe the longest recession since WWII is coming to an end but it'll take years to get back to where we once were in terms of jobs and personal wealth.

This is indeed a great golden age in many respects but only in comparison with the future in store for us, thanks to this president and this Congress. During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Obama said, "America is the greatest country in the world and together, we can change it!" Now, we have a clear idea what he meant.

The current House and Senate healthcare reform bills now before Congress amount to massive tax increases and do nothing to reduce costs. The main reason the public ever wanted healthcare reform was lower costs. Why, then, is any effort to reduce costs blocked by the Democrats? These bills are the opposite of what the people want because they actually would cause an increase in costs and deficits, according to the CBO. There would a great shortage of doctors, there would be rationing of care, and a big increase in inconvenience. Healthcare as we know it today would devolve, resulting in higher death rates and misery.

The Story:

On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to strip Acorn (a community organizing group with deep ties to the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama) of more than $1.6 million in federal money. The vote followed the action taken last Friday by the U.S. Census Bureau to end its relationship with the organization after new revelations about ACORN were exposed by Fox News.

ACORN had been hired by the bureau along with other community organizations to conduct the coming census. Secretly recorded videos involving employees in Acorn's Brooklyn, N.Y., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md. and San Bernardino, Calif. offices have been televised on Fox News and released over the Internet. The most recent and perhaps most damning was a video recorded by two independent filmmakers who posed as a prostitute and a pimp. They pretended to be planning importation of underage El Salvadorian women for the sex trade and sought help from the Brooklyn-based ACORN. Their video shows they asked for and easily received information on getting a government subsidized house loan and advise on evading federal taxes.

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Cut to the Chase:

It's over folks so get over it.  Of course my favorite season is fall.  That's common here in New England where we like cold nights and cool crisp days.  Much better for apple picking in the orchard out back and extremely better for Land Locked Salmon fishing in Maine.

My one never skip vacation is the end of this month when I'll be way the feck up in northern Maine fly fishing with my son.  No bugs, no humidity just lots of catch and release fishies with a changing backdrop of red and gold leaves.  That pic to the left is from a trip back 5 or six years and the wide body is an old friend.

So as I write this his Oliness is preparing to speak to the kids.  TOTUS is all cleaned up with all bad words removed.  If he sticks to the speech as written and released last night then I have no problem at all with the President encouraging kids.  It was that dumb ass first lesson plan that was the problem all along and that seems to have been fixed too.

Newsweek Issue of April, 6, 2009

Hillary Clinton is now the second member of the Obama administration to be shot down on talk of once again banning assault weapons.  The first was Attorney General Eric Holder.  Both of these honest officials have stated what they know in their hearts but the administration of no lobbyists, the candidate of no special interests have asked them to effectively shut up so as not to offend the NRA.

After meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderón, Clinton said that reinstating the U.S. ban on assault weapons—which was passed in 1994 and expired in 2004—is one step this country could take to curb the flow of guns to Mexico's drug cartels. "These military-style weapons don't belong on anybody's street," Clinton told NBC. Within hours, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that he was unaware of "any plans" to push for such a ban—even though Obama had backed one during last year's campaign.

But wait.  Obama wouldn't back off a campaign promise would he?

The more things change; the more they stay the same, at least that's how I feel after reading this story at uk.rueters.com (http://uk.reuters.com/article/UKNews1/idUKTRE51600G20090207):

 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic and Republican senators are close to agreement on a $780 billion (528 billion pound) economic stimulus package that would include 42 percent tax cuts and 58 percent new government spending, Democratic Senator John   Kerry said on Friday.

"It appears as if there's a deal," he told reporters. "Forty-two percent of this is tax cuts ... the differential is the spending. It's a good balance."

Democrats, who had proposed a $937 billion stimulus package, said they were moving towards agreement on the $780 billion figure after it was put forward by moderate lawmakers from both parties as a compromise on Friday.

The only change I see is in my purse, and I'm watching every penny of it.