Congress needs to refocus on helping nation

Stopgap spending measures not an acceptable solution

Thank you, Washington. Finally, after months of discussion, debate and dragging your heels, the House and the Senate came together to pass a bill that will fund the government through Dec. 9 — a bill that includes emergency aid funding to fight the Zika virus.

The upside is public health officials will have funding to proactively work against Zika, efforts that range from on the ground measures against the mosquito to working on a vaccination to protect the population against the virus.

And with this bill, the threat of a government shutdown is delayed, at least until Dec. 9.

The downside? As usual, our officials in Washington only managed to pass a stopgap measure.

We know that Congress has the ability to agree.

Just this week, Congress approved an override of a veto by President Barack Obama. The president had vetoed a bill that would allow family members of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, according to the Associated Press.

So as usual, it’s a bit baffling that our elected officials in Washington can’t set their differences aside, and work toward comprehensive funding legislation.

This has become a ritual of sorts in Washington — how close to the deadline can we get?

As the threat of a government shutdown looms over our nation, few seem to notice anymore, or to care at all, unless their jobs are directly impacted by said shutdown. The threat has lost its impact. But still, it reflects so poorly upon our elected officials, who seem absolutely incapable of setting aside partisan politics and working toward common solutions.

Politics always has the potential to be contentious. That’s the nature of politics and negotiations. But it should be a give and take process with one end goal in mind — the good of the nation. Somewhere, we have lost sight of that. Deep down though, we know Congress is able to agree. They proved it in their override of the president’s veto, just this week.

Now, let’s see if they can take that principle a step forward, and apply it to the federal budget for more than just a stopgap measure.

DO YOU AGREE WITH THIS OR NOT?

Social media is the bane of civility. What a person writes, impulsively, can define her/his character.

There is no security or limited broadcast for an audience certain. Cyberspace is for all to review. So, choose your words carefully.

Venting on social media may haunt you hereafter as we are seeing this political season. What you think you said/wrote may not be read the way it was intended!

Examples: As the FBI has said “without intent, there is no case” regardless of evidence found of Hillary Clinton. And that Howard Dean apologized for his mis-characterization of Donald Trump.

And there are many, many more examples you will find.

On page A6 of the Yuma Sun, Tuesday, Sept. 27, under the section, “Nation and World Glance” there appeared this item from the Associated Press, “Official: One-third of calls to VA suicide hotline roll over.”

The article states that, “because of poor work habits,” some workers handle fewer than five calls per day and leave before their shifts end, even though crisis calls have increased sharply in recent years.

“An average of 35 to 40 percent of crisis calls received in May rolled over to backup centers where workers have less training to deal with veterans’ problems.”

So our Congress sprung in to action with the House unanimously passing a bill requiring the VA to ensure that all telephone calls are answered in a timely manner by an appropriately qualified person.

Phew. I was afraid that the article would say that some folks had been disciplined, or maybe even fired for not doing their jobs.

Oh well, at least it was just veterans, rather than Senators or Congressmen, not getting proper medical treatment.

I do find Mr. Washington’s letter (9/29/2016) rather humorous. In it he tells us “to think critically instead of letting fatuous windbags who don’t think, but simply react with their emotions, manipulate your emotions to do your thinking for you.” The first half of his letter is nothing but emotional filled rhetoric telling us to make a decision based on his knee jerk emotional response. By using terms such as “farce”, “phony”, “feel-good idiots”, “sham”, etcetera, he doesn’t really explain why we should accept his argument.

He does bring up several facts that do need clarification in that they can be quite misleading in how they were presented. Yes, the earth does go through regular warming and cooling cycles over millions of years (notice he didn’t mention which time scale?). The problem now is that our current heating trend is not matching the previous patterns. It is unexpected if we base our explanations solely on natural events (i.e. ignoring anthropogenic activities). It is interesting to note is that some of the heat from our sun gets trapped on earth due to our atmosphere which contains greenhouse gases (known for their heat-trapping properties), such as carbon dioxide. It is also well known that the combustion of fossil fuels over the centuries since the industrial revolution have pumped carbon that has been trapped underground for millions of years back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (and other gases) and as a consequence will shift our climate. Unfortunately this shift in human-caused change in climate is not something humankind or many species have encountered before.

To critically think about this concept one would need to attempt to understand what the science says. Perhaps picking up and reading an earth science textbook, taking an introductory course in climate science, or even inviting a climate scientist to give a talk to the community explaining what it is that they do and why it has led them to their conclusions. I think these would be much better sources than reading blogs or politically-inspired news outlets.