If you’d like to join our family in welcoming Emma home to the United States, we’d love to have you. We’ll be arriving at Sacramento International Airport, Terminal A, late on the evening of Friday, January 1, 2010, just a few minutes before midnight (not on New Year’s Eve, but the following day).
If you could, send a RSVP e-mail to ak@aaronklein.com. I’ll see your message while we change planes in Minneapolis, and we’d love to know that you’re coming!
If you’ve been following us on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve probably already seen these, but just in case you haven’t, here you go. 
Meeting our little girl for the first time…
She loves her mama…
All smiles, giggling and playing with us…
A future Sierra College student, perhaps?
Many don’t even realize that Sierra College has a foundation, raising private sector funds to support student success and increase access to college. If you’re on Twitter, you should be following our energetic Executive Director Sonbol Aliabadi…her driving energy and determination have been a a big reason why the Sierra College Foundation is what it is today!
As the foundation begins its annual campaign, there’s a new way that you can support the mission of Sierra College, and it won’t cost you a dime.
Just go to OneCause.com, set up a quick profile and select Sierra College Foundation as your beneficiary. A long list of name brand retailers will donate a percentage of your purchases directly to the foundation! Retailers like…
What an easy and fast way to make a difference in the lives of many, and the economic prosperity of our broader community. Get registered at OneCause.com and then have fun shopping!
Note: This post will stay at the top of the blog the entire time we’re overseas. New posts (if and when we can post) will appear right below this one.
We’re on a trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (with a few days in Paris on the way) for the purpose of bringing our little girl, Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein, back home to the United States. Spencer is staying home for this trip, and enjoying every minute with Nana, Papa, Grammie and Pop.
If you want to “follow along” on our trip, here’s how you can do that:
We won’t have “perfect” access to your responses back to us. We’ll probably get most of our Twitter @ replies thanks to a couple of great friends. Please do comment, respond and tweet back, and at the very least, we’ll enjoy reading them when we return home!
PS: Can I take this opportunity to let everyone know that we won’t be sending out our Christmas letter until January this year? We haven’t forgotten you.
Looks like this prediction may come true:
Bottom line: I still think the White House may get their way and “a bill” will pass, because there are 60 Democrats who believe in passing a massive set of subsidies to buy everyone health insurance, and are willing to slash Medicare by $400 billion, and raise multitudes of taxes directly affecting the middle class, to pay for it. At the end of the day, they may water the bill down to the point that they do just that.
Looks like it’s only the hopes and dreams of the rabid left that are crashing and burning.
The ultimate outcome of the subsidized-health-care-for-the-uninsured bill currently crashing and burning in the United States Senate will likely be known while I’m out of the country.
This was my prediction on Twitter back on November 21: “Health insurance bill was dead, WH resuscitated it with two razor thin votes. I’ll predict now: hard left bill won’t pass.”
As it stands today, the public option is gone from the bill. The expansion of Medicare (just another way of doing the public option) is gone from the bill. Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) is pro-life and insists that he won’t vote to start funding abortion with federal tax dollars. Meanwhile, the far left is insisting they won’t vote to reform health care unless it can fund abortion with our tax dollars.
The rabid left has gone even further than that: now, many of them want to kill the bill entirely. Creating a multi-trillion dollar program to give away health care to anyone who can’t afford it isn’t good enough. If they can’t have the government also take over 1/6th of the American economy, they want to take their marbles and go home.
Meanwhile, the White House position appears to be that they would be perfectly happy if Congress passed a law providing enhanced veterinarian services to horses, as long as the name of the bill is “Health Care Reform” so they can claim victory.
The far left has turned on this President with a vengeance. “Mr. President…where are you? Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout,” said talk show host Ed Schultz. “The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers.”
In fact, many of the rabid left would probably find this Google ad ironic given that they are faulting the President for not introducing a plan of his own:
Bottom line: I still think the White House may get their way and “a bill” will pass, because there are 60 Democrats who believe in passing a massive set of subsidies to buy everyone health insurance, and are willing to slash Medicare by $400 billion, and raise multitudes of taxes directly affecting the middle class, to pay for it. At the end of the day, they may water the bill down to the point that they do just that.
But the government takeover of health care appears to be dead. And I will not be surprised one bit if I return home to find that the legislation has crashed and burned entirely.
The sad part of all of this is that we actually need serious reform to health insurance. The current escalation in health care costs and health insurance premiums is completely unsustainable. If you need some good background on that, check out David Goldhill’s article on the unsustainable design of our system for financing health care.
Here are some of the ideas we discussed on this blog back in October…
Lots of great ideas in this discussion. I have a couple of my own, and we’ll see if I can get to writing a post about them in the next few days. Airplane time has always been great for blogging in the past.
I promised to give away a copy of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem by Professor Regina Herzlinger (paper or Kindle edition, your choice).
Everyone who contributed a comment was included in the random drawing, and the winner was music2myear! I hope he greatly enjoys the book, and thank you to everyone for your participation!
So now, it’s prediction time. What do you think the outcome of this bill will be? Will the entire effort fail and nothing passes at all? Or will the basic core of the bill — paying for health insurance for the uninsured — make it out of the Senate? Use the comments below to make your prediction.
As most of you know, we’re in final countdown to leave on our trip overseas. We found out we were leaving just last week and managed to figure out a flight itinerary that got us where we needed to go at a semi-reasonable cost.
We’re in the odd situation of taking a four day vacation in Paris in order to save $6,500. I know. Please don’t feel too badly for me. That was the cost difference between flying directly to Africa on Christmas Eve versus flying to Paris four days earlier. With 120,000 Hilton HHonors points that I’ve accumulated, we’re staying for free on those three nights at the Trianon Palace in Versailles. Do not cry for me, Argentina.
After Versailles, we board an Ethiopian Airlines jet on Christmas Eve to fly into Addis Ababa. I am beyond excited about meeting my eight month old daughter on Christmas morning, and experiencing her native land in all of its beauty — and from everything I’ve heard, it’s an exceedingly beautiful country.
On Sunday and Monday, we leave the bustling capital city to travel south to the small village where she was born. We have a chance of meeting her birth mother there and we’d love to do that.
On Tuesday, we visit the United States Embassy to formalize her visa application. If all goes well, they issue said visa on New Year’s Eve and we embark that night on the 32 hour flight home to the United States with our little girl, arriving home on New Year’s Day 2010 with just a few minutes to spare.
I’m quite confident that, while on this trip, we will taste amazing French and Ethiopian food, drink unbelievably good Ethiopian coffee, see stunning artifacts of history, and experience amazing contrasts of riches and poverty. It will change and shape our lives for many years to come. I can’t wait to report back to you all the things that we have the chance to see, hear and learn.
The best way to follow along on our trip is via my Twitter feed. My posts there usually transfer over to Facebook in a timely fashion. I’m also working on some ways I can have them transfer to this blog too. But both of those methods rely on technology that may or may not be totally reliable, so if you want it straight from the source, check Twitter directly.
Just so you all know, I’ll have zero access to voice mail and extremely limited access to e-mail, especially after we leave France. After we arrive back home with our little girl and have a few days to get re-acclimated, I’ll be certain to respond to you if you’ve sent me a message during these couple of weeks.
Question: What should we “not miss” in either France or Ethiopia? What do you most want to hear about during our trip? Use the comments below to let us know!
My adorable two year old is all boy and wants to play “boom-booms” with his dad…
(Feed and e-mail readers, click through to the post for the audio.)
[Editor's Note: This week, in the midst of my preparation to leave for overseas, I'm excited to share one of the best short stories I've read in quite a while, written by my mom. This piece is all about our family heritage in Nebraska, where my grandfather grew up. I hope you enjoy it! I did.]
My father’s family farm was a novel to me. It was another place and time similar to Charlotte’s Web. I was a city girl from southern California, and I was nothing like Fern. Yet the few times I got Nebraska dirt under my fingernails were opportunities of discovery. The years may have altered our family farm, but the lessons I learned there were timeless.
Grandma and Grandpa Bell were strangers I knew from a black and white photograph. They were pictured next to three year old me as they witnessed the grandeur of the Pacific Ocean for the very first time. They were linked in my head to shoe boxes of homemade Christmas cookies and twin sized quilts with my name embroidered on them.
In a world where I struggled to fit into the image displayed for me to strive for, here were people who seemed to treasure me without really knowing me. Their love was evident in the quilt colors especially chosen because they were my favorites. My shoe box was wrapped and only for me, each cookie frosted and specially made with love.
Even with having spoken to these mysterious grandparents on the phone, along with being the recipient of their kind gifts, it was a shock when I finally remember meeting them. Traveling for days in the car, with my father and one sister, while listening to my mother complain about the trip was confusing to my young mind. I tried to mesh the negative remarks about country people with my prior positive associations of quilts and cookies. When I arrived, I suddenly was thrust into stardom. Over and over I was introduced as their pride and joy from California. The amazing thing was I hadn’t done anything to earn their affection.
The New York Times has more on the ineffectiveness of the $787 billion dollar stimulus package to stimulate much of anything except either government employment or temporary jobs.
When Congress approved the $787 billion federal stimulus package this year, Mr. Reed hoped it would help hard-pressed cities like his. But so far he has been underwhelmed.
In Washington last month, Mr. Reed delivered his message to White House economists and an audience at the Brookings Institution: the design and implementation of the stimulus package could not have been worse for Silicon Valley. The money it doles out in the short run has arrived in a trickle, too slow to do much. And for the long run, it does little to help generate permanent jobs.
“We have only received and spent six or seven million dollars,” Mr. Reed said in an interview last week. “You can’t expect a very big impact out of that.”
Ah, but there’s more. Here’s what that $6 or $7 million bought.
Officially, the audits say, 250 full-time equivalent jobs have been created. But 240 of those positions reflect 900 part-time summer jobs that were created for area youths. Since those were summer jobs and winter is nearly here, the jobs are already gone. The other 10 full-time equivalent jobs were part of an airport project to improve the screening of checked baggage. The city has spent $3.3 million of its own money on that project and has yet to see a dime of the promised reimbursement.
I am not predicting that the economy will not recover, or we won’t start having job growth at some point. I think the American economy is so resilient, it can recover in spite of almost anything Washington DC can throw at it.
But I can think of almost 787 billion other things to have done with this money.
