Showdown In Pig City...

"You should pass this jobs plan right away..." - President Barack Obama

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas -Until Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers launched his first pass shortly after 8 p.m. last night, the week had been filled with strange and crazy politics. It was a night for wondering about the upcoming National Football League season and about the very existence of the country.

The Packers did well, whipping the scrappy New Orleans Saints 43-34 in the league's inaugural game.

Miles to the east, President Barack Obama did his best a bit earlier in the evening to shake the heads of a few Republicans that just can't seem to bring themslves to do something positive for the struggling country.

Obama, a Democrat in the third year of his term, addressed Congress with the main idea of his speech being his desire to float a plan calling for $447 billion in tax cuts and government spending to boost the nation’s lagging economic recovery. Bridges and roads and schools would be built; workers would be hired.

It was an okay speech, under the circumstances.

The president currently oversees a wildly-divided land. His party is pretty much comatose and the opposition is flinging red meat at the antsy masses. What's a nation to do when its representatives go insular and openly say they are for us and not for you? It will sink, that's what.

And that is why 18 million Americans are still in the sack this Ayem, Americans with no job and nowhere to go get one. It is a damned shame and, from the perspective of the unemployed, it does have to be said that it is unusual to die of shame. So, they suffer the malaise brought on by a Congress fighting itself for power.

The president's speech was a bit better than those slobs sitting in the Republican aisles deserved. They have opposed every measure aimed at helping stir the economy in moves that smack of partisan politics.

One thing did bug me about Obama's speech. He referenced Republican President Abraham Lincoln and his struggles during the American Civil War. That was a fair, but slightly skewed correlation.

Lincoln had his problems financing the war, but he did not have assholes from the South to deal with in making decisions to move the country against the pro-slavery clowns fighting for the ill-omened Confederacy...

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