WASHINGTON (The Dissociated Press) - President Barack Obama completed the first full week of his term in office Wednesday, and Earth, with the exception of Iceland, is, as far as anyone has been able to tell, still rotating on its axis.
Mr. Obama undertook several key executive actions during the week, including signing orders to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, prohibit torture of detainees by the US military and intelligence services, and make federal income tax evasion a crime punishable by Cabinet appointment.
Timothy Geithner, Mr. Obama's choice to head the US Treasury Department, was confirmed to the Cabinet post Monday by a 60-34 vote in the Senate. Given the margin of Mr. Obama's electoral victory in November, his sustained personal popularity, and the dire economic circumstances in which the country currently finds itself, the level of support for Mr. Geithener was certainly weaker than the President had hoped for and, one could argue, weaker than what he'll need in his administration's upcoming attempts to right the economy.
Three Democrats - Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Robert Byrd of Happy Pappy's Appalachian Mountain Home for the Elderly - joined Vermont's independent senator Bernie Sanders and 30 Republicans in opposing Geithner's confirmation.
"What really turned me off to him was finding out that he was on Bernard Madoff's 'Fave Five' list," Harkin said.
Republican Orin "Down The" Hatch, one of 10 GOP members to support the President's nominee, said he was untroubled by whom Geithner took phone calls from.
"The more important factor to me was, who better to find the weaknesses in our failing Treasury department than someone who spent all that time ripping it off?!" Hatch said.
Feingold admitted that Hatch had a valid point, but asked, "What says that just because he can find the weaknesses, he's going to try to fix them?!"
In other economic "good news," twelve of the nation's largest companies announced over the weekend that they intend to lay off tens of thousands of people in other countries, even if they don't employ them, "because [the companies] are just about tapped out on jobs to cut here." Some members of Congress have suggested passing emergency immigration reform to bring in additional workers to fire.
Surprisingly (though not really), many conservatives seem unworried by the growing jobless rate in the country - which is approaching double digits in many states and is above 10% in Michigan - and continue to argue that tax cuts, not large infusions of government funds to industry and public works, are the proper way to stimulate the economy. But many of the people hardest hit by the economic crisis are skeptical.
"Tax cut!? That's crap!" said Tray Mitchelson, an unemployed steel worker in Youngstonwn, Ohio. "I'll tell you how to stimulate my economy! Wrap a $20 bill around my dick, and beat me off!"
Meanwhile, in foreign affairs, President Obama designated former senator George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East (where, after a 22-day bombing and artillery campaign, the Israeli military withdrew from "The Dust Cloud Formerly Known as Gaza," because its soldiers were finding it too difficult to breathe) and immediately dispatched him to Egypt, where he will meet with French, British, and Japanese diplomats to negotiate lower banana prices in Costa Rica.
"President Obama has especially emphasized that we are here, in Ethiopia, to listen," Mitchell told reporters aboard his canoe. "Quite often you think someone has said 'bananas' when, in fact, they've actually named an entirely different fruit!"
And, in Afghanistan, which President Obama has vowed to make the central focus of his effort to rid professional baseball of steroids...
Thousands of Afghan citizens took to the streets of Kabul Sunday protesting reports that a US air raid had killed 16 Afghan civilians the previous day. The protests followed reports on Friday that another American attack, north of Kabul, had killed over 2 dozen civilians. Local residents of the Tagab Valley disputed the initial claim by the US military that it had attacked Taliban fighters, saying that there were no militants in the area at the time of the attack.
The official US military response to the reports, issued Monday, was, "Whatever!"
This, as a new, independent tally released last week by the Afghanistan Rights Monitor said 4,000 Afghan civilians were killed by war-related violence last year, over a quarter of them by the US-led occupation. Another 6,800 were wounded, the report said, and 120,000 were displaced from their homes.
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