Congressman Steve Chabot the Lemming on Capital Hill

“I take very seriously my charge to protect the unborn and have worked diligently during my time in Congress to be an advocate for these babies so their voices are heard. I am committed to working on legislation that protects these sacred lives and offers important legal protections for doctors and other health care providers who refuse to perform abortion procedures to which they are morally opposed.”-Steve Chabot

Let's see now...
Congressman Steve Chabot, my representative in the House believes in the sanctity of life. I'm taking him at his word since I pulled the above quote directly from his website. Despite all evidence to the contrary, every vote he takes points to the exact opposite of what comes out of his mouth. Every vote Chabot takes has been an attempt to choke the life out of all those sacred little lives preventing their voices from ever being heard.

Yesterday he voted along with 216 other members of Congress to cut $40 billion from the Federal food stamp program, otherwise known as SNAP. 
 
Says he is saving we the taxpayers money and being oh so fiscally responsible. Guess I'm supposed to pat him on his back and yell “well done, Steve-O.” Well guess what, Stevie, I'm not happy about the vote. 
 
It wasn't right. It wasn't just. It wasn't fair, it wasn't necessary and it certainly wasn't Christian, which Congressman Chabot claims to be to anyone within hearing distance. During the myriad of times that I've seen him in public and shaken his hand, he always is quick to let you know two things...he's Christian and he used to be a teacher. 
 
Scary thought people like Congressman Steve teaching kids. No wonder the school system is screwed up.
Cutting this money from the program means that 30 million poor people are gonna have to scrounge around for food and health care or starve and die. Millions of kids can now look forward to going to school hungry, great way to jumpstart learning-on an empty stomach.

(Wonder if Congressman Steve knows that pregnancy and giving birth remains the number one killer of women in America.) We certainly know that he doesn't care.

Women, pregnant women, since men can't get knocked up, will now have to find other places, if they exist, for prenatal or neonatal health care for all those unborn babies. Or maybe they have to figure out a way not to get pregnant since Congressman Steve is also against giving birth control to poor people as well. (He hates those nasty little foil-wrapped condoms, apparently.)

Not a stretch in logic since yesterday's vote was also a vote to defund the Affordable Care Act.
And don't laugh.

Congressman Steve is not only picking on poor people, by the way. He's after what's left of the middle class and sorta rich people, too. His vote yesterday was also designed to trash the country by not funding the government and causing it to default on our debt.

A move tried unsuccessfully several times in the recent past for the sole purpose of destroying the Black Man in the White House.

Because that is what this is all about. It's not about sanctity of life. It's about fear of the Black man. If the Black man is for it and it works for the people...all people...then it's no good and Congressman Steve and his cronies try to trash it. Nevermind that the GOP may have originally created the program in the first place. It was theirs until the Black man said he liked it and let's put it into law. 
 
How many times has Steve and company voted to defund Obamacare...40 times? Damn! 
 
Persistent little buggers aren't they. But somebody needs to tell em that doing the same thing over and over is tantamount to running a 10K on a hamster wheel. 
 
But it is September, and here we are again, doing the same old dance. Listening to the same old arguments, from the same old people.

Still waiting to hear something about jobs, guys....

Guess I shouldn't pick on my Congressman Steve. He's not one of the vocal ones in the House. He's not that other Ohio Congressman from up the road...Boner..er...Boehner...yeah..the dude from West Chester, originally from Reading Oh High O...Grew up in a bar ( Some things never change).

Congressman Steve just basically does what he's told to do. That keeps him employed and on the good side of Boehner, and Cantor and the corporate puppetmasters who really run Capitol Hill.. 
 
A do-nothing Congressman from a do nothing State who is trying to destroy the country.
Sounds like another day in the USA.

And by the way...

Hey Christian er Conressman Steve...saw this on your website too;

“I also believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I will continue to defend its sanctity.”-Steve Chabot

Does this mean you're going after heterosexual adulterers sometime soon? Just askin'

9/11 Hindsight

20-20 hindsight kicking in when it comes to the events of September 11, 2001, the day the Trade Towers in New York were destroyed by Saudi Arabian men taking orders from the now dead Osama Bin Laden.

Most of us had never heard Bin Laden's name prior to that time. He was apparently a major player in the world of USA haters, but we Americans didn't know it. US citizens were and to a great extent, remain cloaked in naivete when it comes to the rest of the world. The “them vs us” mentality still dominates American group think.

To be sure there are new cracks in that group think. It was very apparent last night with President Obama attempting to convince we the people that it is again necessary to deploy the military option against some other country, this time named Syria, for the purpose of....what? Still don't have an answer to that question...Why and for what?

The rationale presented by the President,...we need to strike Assad and Syria to protect “us” from “them.” It's the same rationale used by Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, et al going back a couple of hundred years, leading up to the events of 9/11. When you look at our war history, we've been damn lucky. Most other nations on the face of this earth would be happy to be able to point to just one incident on their land, as its lone brush with terrorism.

We the people don't have a clue about navigating through a regular day of living, wondering where the bad guys/good guys, hid the IED.

Killing people...we the people are very good at killing people...we've got a magnificent army, the best weapons, 12 WMDs for every person the face of this earth, airplanes, boats, and now President Obama has given us drones, unmanned death from the sky, fired by guys in a bunker somewhere in America at a target thousands of miles away. No need to look them in the eye when you kill them now. Clean, bloodless killing. However, we're not so good at being killed...dying on our own soil or while asleep in our own house or walking to the grocery store around the corner.

9/11 woke us up to that fact. It ain't fun being hit back once you've started something. And make no mistake about it, we did start this fire and have been stoking it for years and years. It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to hit back. 9/11 was a sucker punch answer to our preemptive strike mindset. Now we've got to finish it, bring it to conclusion before somebody decides to use the really bad weapons in their arsenals, probably purchased from us, The United States of America or one of our many government sanctioned military corporations.

Our government calls Saudi Arabia an ally, yet the virulent form of Islam practiced by most so named terrorists comes out o Saudi Madrasas. The men who flew the planes on 9/11 were mainly Saudi nationals. Osama Bin Laden was Saudi. The Saudis have said they will take up the monetary slack if America pulls its aid from Syria. In fact the US just sold the Saudis 60 billion dollars in weaponry. Weapons that more than likely will end up being used against us sometime in the future in some unforeseen way.

We've got to stop this merry go round. If nothing else, 9/11 has proven that our attempts to play all ends against the middle and get rich while others suffer and die, are coming back to haunt us. It is only a matter of time before the world gets sophisticated enough to once again use our own weapons against us.

We the people seem to be waking up to this lesson, displaying overwhelming disapproval of using a military option to seek peace in Syria floated by the White House last week. Seeking peace at the end off a rifle, does not work. It's never worked and never will.

There are other options in the 21^st century. It's time we used them.

No more 9/11....no more war...

What I said:

5 years after 9/11: http://skeptikone.blogspot.com/2006/09/911-looking-back.html

10 years after 9/11: http://skeptikone.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-10-family-conversation.html

Syria-NO NO and NO!

Good morning Mr. President.

To be perfectly honest, there is nothing that you can say that will change my mind about planned limited strike intervention in the Syrian civil war.

There are not enough pictures of the dead bodies of children to affect my thinking on this subject, because as a country, we do not and never have had the moral ground on this issue. Our national war policies have always been dictated by money, not humanitarian concern for our brothers, and certainly not for our brothers' wives, women and children.

Past history has shown repeatedly that if the American masters of the universe can't turn a quick buck, then the American corporate puppets who claim to represent the people, turn a blind eye pretending that the problem belongs to someone else. And I am surprised that you, Mr. President, have joined the warmongering neocons that citizens voted out of office in 2008, resulting in your ascendency to the Oval Office. You said you would end these senseless global police actions, and I believed you. Instead, what I am seeing is a half assed attempt at promoting American Exceptionalism, as it is called these days, without naming it officially.

Your WWII analogy is an apples to oranges comparison that falls flat. We didn't enter WWII to save the countless Jews, Roma, and gay men and women swept up in that genocidal holocaust. History shows that America knew about the holocaust long before officially admitting it. We didn't end Jim Crow segregation because we cared about the rights of Black Americans, some of whom were in the process of dying for this country. The dead were collateral damage, in the very same way that the US now turns a blind eye toward modern day Israeli atrocities and apartheid routinely and regularly committed against the Palestinians by the descendants of that very holocaust.

The US totally ignored the genocide of Rwanda which still rages today, just as other than platitudes, the US chooses to ignore the genocide of black men and boys raging right here in America. A genocide camouflaged by talk of second amendment constitutional rights, that not even the killings of little white children in white suburbia USA, have been able to move the conversation forward.

Your tears for the 400 Syrian babies are not enough, Mr. President. In order to command the moral ground, you must cry for all of the children nationwide and worldwide, not just the ones who die where it is financially feasible to take a stand.

If news reports are correct, the US recently sold Saudi Arabia 60 billion dollars in bombs, guns and planes. Why not let them deal with the problems in their neighborhood. The Saudis are on record anyway as saying they will take care of Syria if America won't. Let's take them up on that offer. Our days of supplying all the weapons as well as rebuilding once the war is over, should end now. There is always the move toward peace and like the journey of a thousand miles, it begins with only one step. Why not take that one step now, Mr. President?

And what about Plan B, Mr. President? What do we do after the limited strikes are over? Do we arm the rebels, like we did in Afghanistan? Do we do another Iran-Contra trade thing? Do we work to overthrow another government, like in Iran and countless other Central and South American countries, again? Do we send in the troops, the boots on the ground, like in Vietnam or Iraq? Do we initiate another shaky cease fire like between the Koreas and then wait for it to blow up in our faces, again?

What do we do, Mr. President? What do we do while you pour our money down another sand hole by bombing to oblivion another Middle Eastern country, so that after strafing it into submission we can swoop in and build it up again, while our own cities go bankrupt, our schools disintegrate and our utilities and infrastructure fall into ruin.

Why do Americans have to die again, Mr. President because the rich want to make more money? Why are you so happy to appease them instead of showing concern for those who elected you? I say that because you have already implied that you will go against citizens' wishes and bomb anyway, should you lose the vote in Congress. You do have that power, thanks to George W Bush and the Patriot Act.

But even though your predecessor gave you the power, we the people put you in position to use that power, and we are asking you to work for us, for a change. We the people, don't want another senseless military action.

We want peace, Mr. President, a lasting end to the needless violence that goes on and on and on.

Be the change, that you promised us you are. The polls show that we've changed. Now it's your turn.

Respectfully,

Syria-Intervention or No

An open letter to Steve Chabot,

My Dear Representative,

I am totally and completely against intervening in the Syrian Civil War, either for regime change or as our President says, to teach President Assad a lesson. The man was wrong to gas his own people. I am not disputing that. However, the Syrian conflagration is not the only one burning across the globe. It is not the only place where women and children are dying because of the whims and power grabs of money hungry dictators and despots.

The poor, women and children, suffer right here in the United States, thanks in great part to the very laws and regulations put into place by this Congress, which is now debating who has the moral ground. They suffer and die daily in Africa because Hutus and Tutsis continue to fight the colonial wars begun a hundred years ago by white conquerors bent on raping the continent of its vast natural resources. Past illegal wars have nearly bankrupted our country, while making a few men rich from the spoils of oil. We don't have the moral ground when it comes to humanitarian principles, Representative, despite what our President would like us to believe.

My first concern is the President's call for “limited engagement.” He says the hit will be a surgical strike designed to punish. All recent past actions have been described as limited, yet here we are struggling to disengage from both Iraq and Afghanistan years later and at a monumental cost to taxpayers, as we watch our own cities fall down into decay. Limited engagement by Bill Clinton resulted in the attack on the Trade Towers on 9/11. Limited strikes in Somalia resulted in yet another deadly fiasco. The so called punishment strikes only seem to punish us. Considering that nearly all of the Republicans who voted to support President Bush's calls for war are still in place, I don't believe that anything will be kept at “limited.” The president aligning with John McCain, the very man calling for regime change dating back to the past election bothers me greatly. If I wanted John McCain to represent me, I would have voted for him.

And let me be perfectly honest, I am very disappointed in President Obama. I voted for men and women whom I thought would keep us out of war, not jump to get into another one. I voted for men and women whom I thought would use those billions of dollars dedicated to war, to healing unemployment, low wages and other major problems affecting our country.

I also think the time has come  for the United States to listen to its people as well as the international community. I think acting without UN sanction or NATO is a big mistake. I mean what happens if sometime in the future Russia or China decides to jump in behind one of their allied countries?

I hold no illusions about Congress' love for the people it purports to represent. A congress ready willing and more than able to attempt to derail healthcare, medicare, social security and education while our cities decay, doesn't give a damn about its people and I'm probably wasting time writing this letter. But I've got to try to make you understand what kinds of hell you continue to inflict upon the people while attempting to stand on moral ground.

Congressman Chabot, bigger men and women would stand up for a peace process. Bigger men and women would take into consideration the sacrifices already made by the people before asking them to make more.  We don't need bullets or missiles. We need talk and communication. We need time to heal. 

I hope that when the time comes you will not be stampeded into voting for another war action that benefits the few rather than the many.

Respectfully,