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The Blanche Report: The Shutdown, Alouette & Hurricanes






The United States government shut down last night at midnight. Although essential workers are still on the job, hundreds of thousands of government employees were told to come in to their offices today, clean them out within 4 hours and not to return until further notice – with no paycheck in sight.

What is happening there has a huge ripple effect. The woman who works for the government needs a babysitter to watch her children. Well, now that woman is also out of work. Those vendors who sell food and trinkets near the Statue of Liberty have to find somewhere else to sell their wares. It is interesting to note that more than 4 million people visit the Statue of Liberty annually at $17 a person. It’s a huge money-maker for the state of New York that is now empty.

For a country that is supposed to be the most powerful in the world, the fact that large swathes of their nation closed for business is humiliating. We have read in more than one newspaper about the agonizingly slow decline of America as a super-power.  This is just another nail in the coffin. Pretty sad, n’est pas? The Quebec Association of Health and Social Services Institutions  has declared its position against the PQ’s proposed Charter of Values.  This group represents more than 100 health institutions in the province, including hospitals and CLSCs says a survey among its members concludes there aren’t any problems regarding religious accommodations or symbols in their centres.

You may be saying whoppdidoo – what difference does it make? Well, if all the institutions and cities on the island of Montreal opt of her charter, then what? Is she going to send it the religious police together with the language police? They can come skipping into people’s offices singing alouette gente alouette while holding hands. Sounds ridiculous? So is this small-minded, bigoted government. Ah, but you could be living down south where Obamacare came into play today. Now that’s a mess. A combination of high demand and technical glitches seemed to overwhelm the online system early in the day.  Seems that although the site officially opened at 8:00 am, over a million people tried to get on at 7:00 am.

Let’s see now – this has been talked about for years. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the website would be flooded the first few days and a back-up plan should have been in place. Then again, it appears that those in charge of governments are the absolute antithesis of rocket scientists so they would never think of back-up plans.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are in the month of October and thankfully have heard of no hurricanes. As a matter of fact, the weather is simply unbelievable. Although we love a good snowstorm, it can wait until December or January.

We’ll talk…

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