SITREP - January 16th, 2016

Statement

Just a quick recap for you of a very eventful week. First off, the President delivered his final State of the Union address. If you've seen any of the other ones, you probably could have skipped this one. As I told the press afterwards, seventy percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, even the President's biggest supporters have trouble defending his foreign policy decisions, and the threats just keep getting worse. Instead of taking some responsibility, he just did what he always does – lecture, lecture, and… lecture. The most striking thing was actually seeing the television coverage panning the room showing virtually every congressional Democrat looking tired and bored. It was a pretty sad sight for our country. In any case, the speech happened and I am sure it was a big deal somewhere.

In other news, ten American sailors were captured by Iranian forces. We're still not sure exactly what happened. I expect to know more soon. Bottom line, the Iranians boarded the American vessels, arrested our personnel, then paraded them around in front of the cameras and clearly had a good time doing it. This came right on the heels of the Iranians flagrantly violating UN Security Council resolutions with their ballistic missile tests. The White House indicated they were going to reapply sanctions, then they back-peddled, now they might do the sanctions again. As for the arrests, Secretary Kerry had nothing but nice things to say about how the Iranians treated our sailors. See above reference to questionable foreign policy decision-making.

Also in the news, a refugee from Syria blew himself up in the tourist section of Istanbul taking the lives of nine Germans and one Peruvian. The bomber's fingerprints were scanned and he was "vetted" by checking those prints against the mythical, non-existent Syrian databases (which we have been saying for weeks won't work for refugees here either). Another suicide attack went off in Jakarta, Indonesia. Meanwhile, back home, two Palestinian refugees were arrested in America on charges of providing material support to ISIS and lying to cover up terrorist activities. Those two individuals were in communication with one another.

All in all, it wasn't a very confidence inspiring week on the strong Commander-in-Chief / strong national security front. That needs to change… and soon.

On a completely unrelated note, I wanted to highlight something I've been involved with recently that I think merits community-wide awareness. Some weeks ago, a young lady in her eighties came to see me in DC. As she explained, a medical condition requires the use of a wheelchair and fairly regular medical visits. She noted that she lives directly across from her health facility (not a coincidence) and directly across from a shopping center where she can get food and other essentials without needing to drive. She explained that she has been trying desperately to get a crosswalk installed so that she can safely cross the street, but the county won't budge. In addition to the lack of a crosswalk for this community, the sidewalk in front of her house also inexplicably dead ends into a grass patch instead of making it all the way to the street.

Now this is very definitely a local issue and I have exactly zero legal authority here from the federal level, but Wendy and I were so fired up about the apparent inaction from the county that we decided to visit her home and see for ourselves. Sure enough, it was exactly as she had described it. So, I sent a series of letters to each of the county commissioners and to the county administrator asking what was causing the holdup. That was back in the middle of November. I've heard crickets since then. We followed up with voicemails and finally got a call back today saying that the sidewalk is in the "planning stages", that they're looking for a "funding mechanism", and they hope for this short little section of sidewalk to "be constructed in 2018". In the meantime, they are going to relay information about "alternative routes" for this community to use to access the store and health facilities. I'm about to lose it. A local scout troop could tackle this project in a weekend and the county is ignoring it instead of solving it.

If this were my mother, simply trying to safely cross the street, I would hope that the county would do the right thing. As I said, I don't have the power to make the sidewalk decision myself, but I do have a big megaphone and I intend to use it.

For now, I'm not going to say which county it is. I'm going to give them one more chance to get this right before the public pressure starts building. And in any case, when we start showing up at their commission hearings with a horde of angry residents and a contingent of local television news reporters, you'll know exactly which county I've been talking about.

That's all for now. More to follow next week.

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