The “Focusing Resources, Economic Investment, and Guidance to Help Transportation (FREIGHT) Act of 2010” was introduced this week by U.S. Senators Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Maria Cantwell (D-WA). The Act would create a grant program for freight-specific infrastructure projects, such as freight rail capacity expansion projects, and highway projects that improve access to freight facilities.

A national debate, and a new executive agency focusing on freight movement alternatives and environmental impacts, could have a strong impact on the 710 Tunnel proposal.

While Obama dissembled on the topic, Glendale concluded an outstanding program of events highlighting the importance of human rights and genocide recognition. Its annual April focus on Man’s Inhumanity to Man, and the culminating Genocide Commemoration at the Alex Theatre, was praised by the Armenian Consul General in Los Angeles as a unique civic program in the United States.

More Glendale voices on genocide recognition: In an April 24 KPFA radio interview, Zanku Armenian said that both Turkey and the U.S. need to get past this issue. “In order for a country like Turkey to truly join Western civilization, it will have to come to terms with its history. It isn’t about Armenian rights, its about human rights.” Saturday’s Fox LA news report on the Alex Theatre Genocide Commemoration showed Congressman Adam Schiff at the event, and featured comments from GUSD Board member Nayiri Nahabedian, and Glendale Mayor Ara Najarian.

At Sunroom Desk, notes from the April 22 program on Modern Day Slavery are still on hand. Human trafficking, sex trade victims, and forced labor practices uncovered even in Los Angeles had members of the audience reflecting on similar crimes during the Armenian Genocide and asking, “What can be done?” The CAST representative on hand urged us to look for and purchase “Fair Trade products”. More on Fair Trade practices and products in an upcoming post.

Piling up under the Paperweight are more commentaries on how to change or not change the U.S. health care system than I would attempt summarizing. I regularly check the site Real Clear Politics for interesting commentaries; each day its main page features about 30 links to major media news stories, editorials, and transcripts. In just the last week, it featured at least five major news articles and editorials on U.S. health care system reform each day.

Whether you are diagnosed with fear of overreaching national policy disorder, or with a physical disorder too expensive to treat which your insurance will try to avoid paying for, the arguments back and forth on a number of points could induce dizziness, anxiety, or anger. One problem is who to listen to: insurance companies, doctors and health care professionals, pharmaceutical companies, large employers, Republicans, Democrats, individuals, the uninsured?

My Glendale, California family pays for its own health insurance, and the premiums rise, steeply, each year. I resent that a rapidly increasing percentage of my family income is sent monthly to a company that counts our fear of catastrophic illness in its profits. I further resent that proposals to address this and many other imbalances in the health care financing system probably won’t apply to those who will enact them – that is, members of Congress.

So, I’ll repeat: Citizens should require members of Congress to participate in any health care plan that is ultimately approved.

For those who want to read other perspectives, here are the Real Clear Politics links from last week:

Fixing health care
One Nation Under Medicare
Head-banging time on healthcare
5 keys to getting health care deal
Prognosis: Debt
WHY DOCS FEAR GOVERNMENT ‘HELP’
Health Care Showdown
Carroll: U.S. health care is not inferior
CALLING THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY’S BLUFF
The President Tries to Change His Health-Care Tune
On Iran and Health Care, Obama Careful to Keep His Options Open
ObamaCare: Kiss Your Access Goodbye
Act Fast on Health Care, Obama
Spouses in Health Care Affect Members’ Views
Obama Turns to Grass Roots to Push Health Reform
THE ASTROTURF DRIVE FOR OBAMACARE
George F. Will Admits Public Option Will Cut Costs
Obama’s Thinking ‘Evolves’ on Health Care Requirements
How health care ‘reforms’ will mess with your coverage
Deja Vu on Health Care? Maybe Not
U.S. Doesn’t Need the Ultra-Liberal Public Option
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124580516633344953.html
Not In My Health Plan
The Sickening Addiction That May Ruin Reform
ObamaCare Isn’t Inevitable
Don’t overdose on health care reform
The Prescription From Obama’s Own Doctor
Government Health Plans Always Ration Care
Obamacare not as easy as ABC
How ObamaCare Threatens Your Health Plan
Not Enough Audacity
Health Care Faces the ‘R’ Word
Busting the Adminstrative Cost Benefit Myth
Short of the Magic

Earlier in the week, the Evangelical Outpost discussed President Obama’s mortgage plan and reminded readers of an ancient Roman senator’s skeptical outlook on the redistribution of income. Quoting from Cicero:

“When politicians, enthusiastic to pose as the people’s friends, bring forward bills providing for the distribution of property, they intend that the existing owners shall be driven from their homes. Or they propose to excuse borrowers from paying back their debts.
“Men with those views undermine the very foundations on which our commonwealth depends. In the first place, they are shattering the harmony between one element in the State and another, a relationship which cannot possibly survive if debtors are excused from paying their creditor back the sums of money he is entitled to. Furthermore, all politicians who harbour such intentions are aiming a fatal blow at the whole principle of justice; for once rights of property are infringed, this principle is totally undermined.”

In Chicago there is quite a bit of skepticism and frustration over the stimulus package and the mortgage modification plan. CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli issued the infamous televised rant last week that elicited a direct White House response. Sunroom Desk filed Dennis Byrne’s Chicago Tribute column, The Slow Drip of Financial Ruin, in its links. Byrne says:

Reason is the facility of the mind used to intelligently form judgments, make decisions and solve problems. Emotions are feelings, desires, fears, hates and passionate drives–all of which are the tools that Obama deployed to sell the stimulus package to a gullible public. Endeavor to go through all 1,100 pages of this stuffed piggy and you’ll find little rational connection between the nation’s problems and its solutions–other than if we throw enough money out there, some of it will stick to the wall.
The lightning-like passage of this colossal spending package (amounting to more than the Iraq war) took just three weeks. Congress is supposed to be a deliberative body, making decisions judiciously, openly and unhurriedly. This was steamrolled.
Worse than the insult to the democratic process, however, is the substance of this lunacy. Our national debt will nudge close to 100 percent of gross domestic product, something that hasn’t happened since World War II when the threat to our country was external, mortal and real, and not of our own making.