All smiles at the White House, for a moment anyway
Earlier today President Barack Obama signed a law about prison sentences for possession of crack cocaine and powder cocaine and the photograph of the smiling group of people who supported the legislation gave us a brief pause.
The Democrats and Republicans gathered around the president in the Oval Office rarely agree on anything. Let’s take a minute to dissect this photograph.
There’s Attorney General Eric Holder (pictured second from the left), a close confidante of Obama’s. But he has drawn intense criticism for his plan to prosecute the five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in a criminal court in the heart of Manhattan (now highly unlikely). He also has been lambasted by Republicans for affording full legal rights to terrorism suspects who have been arrested on U.S. soil.
Next to him is Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy who has been the president’s man shepherding through the Senate his two Supreme Court justice nominees. The second nominee, Elena Kagan is expected to win Senate support but with only a handful of Republicans backing her.
Then just over the president’s left shoulder is Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Obama’s home state of Illinois. He has been a big proponent of bringing terrorism suspects to trial in traditional criminal courts and even housing some of the suspects at a prison in his state (can we say jobs during a recession?).
Now it gets interesting because just next to Durbin, sort of lingering in the back is Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, a leading critic of the president and his buddy Eric Holder.
Senator to USAID: Stop your high-flying ways
An influential senator warned the official U.S. overseas aid agency: come down to earth with the impoverished people or see your funding cut.
Senator Patrick Leahy said he was concerned that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had become “distant from the trenches,” sometimes more eager to deal with foreign elites than the suffering masses who had no voice.
Leahy’s opinion matters because he chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees the budget for USAID, which the Obama administration hopes to transform into an important tool to boost the U.S. image abroad.
“There is a disturbing detachment between some USAID employees at missions overseas who spend much of their time in comfortable offices behind imposing security barriers, living in relative high style — and the impoverished people they are there to help,” Leahy told the agency’s administrator, Rajiv Shah.
“USAID needs to change its culture, and change the way it does business, if it wants the kind of money you are asking for,” Leahy said during a hearing on USAID’s budget request, which is roughly $21 billion for the fiscal year starting in October.
Shah told reporters after the hearing that he saw Leahy’s remarks as “comments of support” from someone who wanted to help make USAID “the primary development agency around the world.”
USAID has thousands of workers in 82 countries, and “the vast majority of our people are both hugely committed and make tremendous personal sacrifices,” Shah said. Some, as in Afghanistan, were “taking huge personal risks.”
With all due respect to Mr. Zamora, I think the Senator got it exactly right. I base that opinion on 34 years of working on development programs, 25 of which were with USAID. There are some very dedicated, hard working people in USAID, like Mr. Zamora. Far too many,however, are expensive drones that live a very comfortable lifestyle inside fortified bunkers. In the name of security they are cut off from the people they are supposed to be helping. This is true even in Washington, D.C. Try visiting the Ronald Reagan Building without a badge to see what the American people experience when they try to interact with an Agency they are funding.
Will Obama get a Senate Christmas gift?
Senate Democrats are confident they will pass a sweeping healthcare overhaul and give President Barack Obama a significant victory on one of his top domestic priorities. But will they do it by Christmas?
It will be hard. Right now the bill is hung up over a Democratic amendment that would allow patients and pharmacies to import cheaper prescription drugs from other countries, including Canada. Democrats are also waiting for an official cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office on a proposed compromise that would drop the government-run public option from the bill.
The compromise would call on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to contract with insurance companies to provide non-profit health plans that would be offered on proposed new insurance exchanges. The compromise would also allow people 55 to 64 to buy into the Medicare health program for the elderly.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid would have to begin the process for a final series of procedural votes by the end of next week if senators have any hope of passing the bill by Christmas. That is a tall order.
Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy has already given up the idea of spending Christmas in Vermont. He’s having his tree shipped to Washington where he says he’ll be spending the holiday.
The Senate also has to pass a major spending bill and increase the debt limit so the government can continue to borrow and make interest payments.
The Senate will be holding a rare weekend session, the second in a row, to vote on a spending bill that will fund much of the government through September.
Defcon86
Health care is an area where money must not be a deciding factor. It’s not that difficult to understand that life and good health are far superior in value to the money used to pay providers. Healthy people contribute to the overall health and prosperity of society as a whole.
Cutting universal health care out because of short term upfront costs is ridiculous when you consider that we spend all kinds of money for war, and for saving banks.
Human life is more important than war or the banking industry and yet the argument of cost is used as a reason not to provide for an improvement in the quality of that life. If we stopped our war, and stopped giving bonus money to bankers, we would have more than enough to implement a single payer system. It’s a matter of priorities. Human life is a greater priority than money.
Senator Leahy takes Obama to task over landmines
With President Barack Obama poised to order more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, a senior U.S. senator hammered the administration Tuesday for not joining an international treaty banning landmines.
“I think the Obama administration has made a dramatic mistake in this area,” Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, said in remarks on the Senate floor. “This is not what we expected from this administration.” The Vermont senator, a longtime supporter of the 10-year-old international Mine Ban Treaty, said one argument the Pentagon made for opposing the accord was that it wanted to preserve its option to use landmines in Afghanistan.
“Yet we have seen how civilian casualties in Afghanistan have become one of the most urgent and pressing concerns of our military commanders, where bombs that missed their targets and other mistakes have turned the populace against us,” he said.
“Can anyone imagine the United States using landmines in Afghanistan, a country where more civilians have been killed or horribly injured from mines than any other in history, a country which, like our coalition partners, is itself a party to the treaty?” he asked.
“Landmines cannot distinguish between an enemy combatant, a U.S. soldier, a young child or a woman out hunting firewood for her family. They do not belong in the arsenal of any modern military.” Leahy’s remarks came as a 10-year review conference on the popular Mine Ban Treaty got under way in Cartagena, Colombia.
Later Tuesday, Obama will unveil his new Afghanistan war strategy, which is expected to include the deployment of 30,000 additional troops.
Some 260 square miles of Afghan territory are contaminated by landmines, according to the 2009 Landmine Monitor, a report of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize for its work to outlaw the weapons.
Wallace 167, you can not extrapolate that land mines are protecting people around the world. Land mines are meant to kill people. Does the term oxymoron mean anything to you? Yet we plant them where civilians tread. This is the problem with using military forces for civilian matters.
Farmers and children are still dying from mines and blasting caps in the fields where WW I was waged in France. It would take hundreds of years with current technology to clean up that mess. I seriously doubt any comprehensive review of landmine deployment has or ever will be done.
By all accounts the use of drones to bomb Taliban forces on the Pakistani border has only served to widen the conflict into Pakistan. The Taliban have now gone to Pakistan to fight. Over a million Pakistanis are now refugees as they cannot return to their homes safely. Perhaps a comprehensive review of the use of military forces for diplomatic and political objectives by the United States is in order.
Sotomayor hearings begin, lines drawn
The political lines are drawn.
The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee wasted no time in setting the battle plans for the debate over the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
After all is said and done, she is expected to be confirmed to the highest court in the United States — a lifetime appointment.
But to get there, she must listen to senator after senator talk about whether she is qualified for the job, with her family sitting behind her in the hearing room, and in full public view on televised proceedings.
Senator Patrick Leahy, committee chairman, described Sotomayor as a “success story” in which “all Americans can take pride.”
He pointed out that in past confirmation hearings, other justices were subjected to questions based on their ethnicity or religion.
Thurgood Marshall was asked whether he was prejudiced against Southern whites, Louis Brandeis was asked about “the Jewish mind,” and a Catholic nominee (we believe Leahy was referring to Roger Taney) had to overcome an argument that his views would be dominated by the Pope.
as someone who lived through a similar time in political history when a ultra leftist government came to power with a similar socialist mandate,there are unbelievable parallels.i stated before the bankruptcy of GM in a posting that the unions would because of their support for obama receive preferential treatment.the nomination of a activist judge is a minor event incommensurable,as high unemployment will causes the obama regime to crumble.the next prediction ,the census that will be organized by acorn will proclaim that unlike what we thought the high unemployment figures are totally false,and are not in middle double digit figures but only half that,watch for this development.these events will be a rallying point for a resurgent of personal freedom again, allowing people work and maintain the prosperity that we are used to.
It must be a joke ’cause they are all laughing. Can you lie while you laugh?