Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Occupy Congress, SOPA, SC Primary, and more DC Adventures

For those of you who have either willingly followed this blog or have been mandated to because of Dr. Anderson's class you know that I have not said much about the current events taking place in national politics thus far. Well that is what is different about this blog post. Today began the occupy congress movement on capitol hill. Needless to say it made for an interesting work day around the office building with protesters inside and outside of the building. As an intern my higher ups in the office informed me to not speak to these people no matter what, and what was meant to be nonviolent protests resulted in 6 people so far being arrested for overstepping their protest boundaries. Now to speak on the SOPA act that has been in the works through congress, I am not allowed to say much about it just yet, but after reading through some of the legislation I am not entirely sure that I can completely agree with it either but the public's reaction to it is uncalled for. Much of what people have been reading has been misinterpreted due to some of the wording in the legislation. As congress goes into session this evening the conflict will be resolved and the censorship act should play no serious role as a piece of legislation. With the South Carolina primary coming up rapidly I have a few thoughts on the candidates and the outcome. First off I feel that it will be a repeat of the Iowa Caucus. Since Rick Santorum has raised the majority of his funds in SC and has raised more than any other candidate in the state, especially from the evangelist groups he will definitely be a strong contender. Newt Gingrich also has a long list of supporters to back him up, but if we have learned anything in this election so far it is that Mitt Romney is the true favorite of the GOP and in my opinion he will be the candidate elected to try to push President Obama out of the white house and make him a one term president. Now onto the topic of what I have been up to aside from work in our Nations Capitol. Over the weekend one of my roommates and I decided to see what there was to do out on the town, and the conclusion we made was that unless you're 21 or older the options are extremely limited. However, we prevailed and found a piano bar that is quite the hot spot around the capitol hill area. On sunday we went back to the Eastern Market and explored a little more of that. For those of you who like to wear designer brands and high end clothing there is a vendor there known as "Buy My Tie" which gets clothes from major CEOs either donated to them or sold to them at incredibly low prices, so I took up the opportunity and purchased a brand new, with the tag still on, Brooks Brothers shirt for only $20, and they even offered us a weekend job after talking with the vendor for a while. On Martin Luther King day since we had the day off we took a tour by ourselves around the capitol because our staff IDs allow to access the tunnels and the capitol building by ourselves. After we toured the capitol we made our way over to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum which is a must see if you are ever in the area. That's about all I have to blab about for now but please feel free to comment on the post to express your questions and opinions about any of the current events in politics that I have mentioned in the beginning of the post, or if you have any questions about DC in general.

Until my next post...Thank you and God bless,

Gage Nicholas

1 comment:

  1. I think it is amazing that you get to work with people who will be running the country. The opportunity to network and get a feel for what working in politics is like in DC sounds like an amazing experience. It is so cool you got to walk thru the House Chamber and assess tunnels with your staff ID.

    ReplyDelete