Posted on 11/07/2009 8:20:24 AM PST by Zakeet
President Barack Obama will leave the country for a four-nation tour of Asia starting Wednesday despite a host of domestic concerns, including the massacre at Fort Hood, a sharply rising jobless rate, his health care legislation stalled in the Senate and his Afghanistan troop decision still pending.
He planned his Nov. 11-19 trip around the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Singapore, but added stops in Japan, China and South Korea. The itinerary reflects the growing importance of East Asia — especially China — to everything from financing U.S. debt and powering the global economic recovery to climate change, disease control, and containing nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.
Asia's importance in global affairs rose over the past decade as U.S. foreign policy was dominated by the war on terror, and as U.S. domestic spending and borrowing from foreign countries spiraled.
"These phenomena have persuaded many Asians that the U.S. is overextended and distracted" and a declining power, said Jeff Bader, the National Security Council's senior director for East Asian Affairs.
Obama intends to use his trip to counter those doubts.
[Snip
The Asia venture will bring to 20 the number of countries that Obama has visited in his first year in office, a new presidential record.
It also will come weeks before an international gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, to seek a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcclatchydc.com ...
Civil war in 2010? A few more blunders and Obama will suffer the fate of Charles The First of England...The loss of a head.
And don't bother returning. Stay there.
Surely they can’t be the best have to lead us?
Ok, I have to ask, Do the chickens have the run or the home?
Will they refer to him as a chigger or a bog?
Heh heh...no. I’m assuming you’re talking about me freeping with my chicken Benny Hen? She would sit quietly on my lap (and never poop) when I was holding her, but if she had the run of the house, she’d poop.
So, no...I would hold her in the house sometimes but they had their own chicken run in the back yard...her and three other hens. A neighbor’s dog dug under the fence several years ago and killed them.
Benny Hen was as sweet as a puppy.
I see that he is NOT stopping in Taiwan. Gosh I wonder why —could THE BOSS get upset if he did...?
Thanks for clarafying, I was a bit bewildered.
I’ve seen folks bring their pot bellied pigs, deer, monkeys even small young children in to their homes but never chickens.
I was hoping to see the diapers.
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