Letter 2 America for August 8, 2014

Dear America,

Sorry I was late with Tuesday's letter, but our internet and phones went down courtesy of AT&T.  We now have Cox, and we'll see if its an improvement.  But while I was posting my letter for August 5 I referenced for your review a new portion of Speaker Boehner's website about "jobs bills" that are languishing in The Senate...Harry Reid's Senate, as Boehner and other Republicans put it.  So, I went to the site, which you can too at www.speaker.gov/jobs, and this is what I found in the way of purported jobs bills passed by Boehner's House: HR 890, which would prohibit waivers of some welfare reforms; HR 624, which requires the federal government to share cyber security technology with designated companies; HR 1406 allowing employers to give 1.5 hours compensatory time instead of money for overtime worked up to 160 hours; HR 45, Michelle Bachman's bill to repeal "Obamacare"; HR 3, which would approve the Keystone Pipeline; HR 1613, which allows congress to approve some international agreements not deemed to be treaties, and expediting the exploitation of oil reserves that run across borders; HR 5 allocating funds for education while prohibiting the federal government from overseeing local education, such as with common core testing; HR 28 diminishing regulation of the coal industry by the federal government; HR 1582 prohibiting the EPA from passing any regulation that costs American business more than $1 billion to implement; HR 2879 prohibiting bonuses for federal employees and allowing agencies only 45 days to investigate federal employees without taking action; HR 2009 prohibiting the IRS from enforcing the fine related to the Obamacare individual mandate; HR 367, which ups the ante of HR 1582 by requiring congressional approval of EPA regulations costing American business $100 million rather than $1 billion...that's where I stopped reading.  I assume that Boehner would have posted the bills actually related to job creation first, but since there wasn't a one of them in the first twelve that I read--and I read the acts, not just the self-serving titles of the acts listed by Boehner--I figured that there was no point in wasting any more time giving Boehner's claim fair consideration.  There aren't 43 bills from congress about jobs on Harry Reid's desk.  There isn't one, and that is the quality of the Republican obstruction of the Obama administration's initiatives.  If Boehner's disingenuousness is an indication of the veracity of the Republican Party as a whole, there is no doubt that no one should vote for them, but unfortunately, someone like the author of the article I referenced doesn't care about verity and candor.  He is apparently a dogmatic conservative and a Republican in the bargain, and the truth therefore is irrelevant.

Of course, he would probably say the same thing about me.  The difference is that I actually looked at the very source of his claim that there were jobs bills that the Democratically controlled Senate isn't acting on and gave out the Republican website at which everyone could find out for himself, and it turned out to be as vapid and false a claim as Newt Gingrich's advocacy for the claim by that Texas congressman Louie Gohmert that the EPA had passed a regulation banning dust from the dirt roads on farms.  And if a Republican presidential candidate, a self-proclaimed sage and futurist, can be duped by such a preposterous claim from a man who makes nothing but preposterous claims, how can we expect more from party operatives.  That's the quality of the "loyal opposition" in this country, and unfortunately, we all have to pay the price.  Of course, we are fortunate in that we have the right to vote, but considering how many Republicans there are in congress, it seems that nearly half of us are squandering that right.  The sources of those bills I read were people like Michelle Bachman, who thinks that government action is a violation of everyone's rights, and who never encountered a measure sponsored by a Democrat of favored by President Obama that she felt she could vote for (that may be an exaggeration, but you get the point).  If we don't start voting to replace people like Bachman, we are in danger of complete reversion to our natural state, which hasn't served us well in the past.  In fact, until the second half of the last century, many people were being denied the right to vote because of color, and it hadn't been that much longer ago that women couldn't vote either.  Business hired children to populate factories until the federal government began regulating child labor early last century and monopolies were preying on us all.  The list of the advantages of government of and by "The People" is almost endless, and the call of socio-political Luddites like Bachman to prevent it is a call to the primitive past rather than a viable claim of right.  We have to do something.  Vote.

Your friend,

Mike