White House: Unionist Murders No Big Deal

Making Republicans happy is apparently a far more important goal for the Obama administration:

The agreement, the second such deal with Colombia in four years, will still need to be ratified by Congress.

But with Republicans now in control of the House and pressuring Mr. Obama to move ahead on trade pacts that were negotiated by the George W. Bush administration, the Colombia trade deal now has a better chance of getting through legislative hurdles than it did earlier, trade experts said.

The United States trade representative, Ron Kirk, told the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday that negotiators have made substantial progress in narrowing differences over labor rules in Colombia, characterizing the talks as “very productive.”

Negotiations between representatives of the United States and Colombia intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by President Obama. Especially since the midterm elections, he has been eager to finish negotiations on three pending trade deals to show he is not hostile to business, to find common ground with Republicans in Congress and to help create jobs in export industries.

Even though President Bush reached the trade deal with Colombia back in 2007, Democrats in Congress — including Mr. Obama, then a senator and a presidential candidate — balked at ratifying the deal, complaining that the deal needed stronger protections for American workers hurt by trade as well as guarantees of an end to suspected human-rights abuses of Colombian labor leaders.

I'll have plenty of words on this later, right now I only have two: fuck off.