The Queen is dead. Long live the King!
The question remains; what kind of King will Bonnie Prince Charley be? I, for one hope he will be more involved in international politics. We all know he has been a climate advocate and we can only hope he will continue as such. There is no more important issue on the plate of humanity.
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The border crisis has erupted again, and it brings new insight into how the major parties treat problematic situations. The Democrats, under the Biden administration, have already created and passed more legislation than any administration since Roosevelt but are struggling to come up with a workable, affordable solution to the thousands of migrants, mostly Venezuelan, flooding into the country. Part of the problem is that you can’t just turn them away. They are not illegal aliens. They are migrants fleeing oppression and aggression in their own countries and therefore they must be treated like anyone seeking asylum. That means we must find them a livable place until each individual case has been seen by an immigration court, all of which are currently drastically undermanned.
Amidst all the other areas in which the administration is involved, this one came out of left field, and frankly they haven’t handled it terribly well.
The Republican’s, on the other hand, have reacted exactly as one would expect, ignoring the plight of the migrants and using them as political cannon fodder. They take these people, who are doing the same thing as our parents or grandparents did, shove them on busses or planes and ship them to various locations around the country where they will make the loudest political noise without consideration of their feelings, safety or abilities, or in fact of the distinct possibility that they might actually be of great help to the current manufacturing crisis, caused by our inability to fill empty jobs, for which these people might be perfect.
It’s easy to condemn the DeSantis decision in Florida because he took advantage of helpless migrants simply for political gain. His actions were ill thought out and for the most part, backfired. Instead of establishing that the administration was screwing up at the border, he ended up the painting a picture of himself as a cruel, meanspirited, creep. Because of this stupid stunt, there are now a lot of GOP Latinos in Florida that won’t be voting Republican anytime soon.
As far as the claims that the administration doesn’t want to deal with immigration; you can kill that notion simply by looking at the financial figures that the President put in his budget for Homeland Security to deal with the border crisis. This will enable them to hire more border security people, more people to deal with the processing of migrants and it allows them to put in reforms that would enable them to deal more efficiently with Trump’s insane system that appeared only to be in place to insure failure of the entire immigration system.
Republicans like to campaign on immigration, but they don’t really like to do anything about it, as can be seen with the failure of the House or Senate to get sufficient GOP votes for any attempt to move the Dreamer legislation ahead.
And just to prove that DeSantis isn’t the only self-serving pig in the GOP, Jared Kushner was on the Tube, stating that it was wrong and cruel to use migrants as political pawns while apparently forgetting that it was his father-in-law, the Trump monster himself, who tore babies from their mother’s arms and threw them like garbage into some unknown dumpster, never to see their grieving families again.
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People are always talking about the fact that congress can’t seem to get out of its own way, but the problem is not congress it’s the GOP in congress. With the exception of a few brief Democratic interludes, the past few decades have seen only the combination of idiotic or non-existent GOP platforms and grossly incompetent membership that have all but crippled the institution. The only thing congress passed during the Bush years were declarations of war. When Obama took over with a Democratic majority enough legislation was passed in his first two years to save us from the Bush recession, but Obamacare was too difficult for the Republican base to understand and that led to the infestation of the Tea Party.
Once the Tea Party infiltrated congress it was the end of any intelligent legislation. Trump managed to pass his tax bill, but that only made the rich richer and the poor destitute.
It wasn’t until Joe Biden swept into office dragging a Democratic majority behind him that congress was able to pass any serious legislation, and they did it with a vengeance.
This Congress, with the guidance of this President, has delivered the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second largest healthcare bill since Johnson and the biggest climate change bill in history.
They also passed the first gun control bill since Clinton and put the first ever African American woman on the supreme Court. But this was all done with a Democratic majority in both houses of congress.
It is blatantly clear that if those majorities change in the upcoming election the work of congress will once again disappear into the dumpsters outside the capitol, and that my friends, is what we must fear the most.
There are three realities that appear to be driving the GOP in their attempt to bring down our Democracy. First is the influence of Donald Trump, the criminal sociopath who scammed his way into the White House and seems unwilling to leave the spotlight even under threat of years in prison. The second is the complete lack of a GOP platform or seemingly any plan for the nation; without which, there is little or no hope of accomplishing anything that will help the American people. The third is the almost universal lack of any moral structure among the GOP congressmen and women.
History clearly tells us that this is not the first time we have had dishonest, self-serving incompetents in congress. But it sure seems like we have more of them, and they are way more incompetent.
The concept of service, which drove many of our best legislators throughout history, appears to be almost completely missing among the GOP legislators. At a time when a Senator can pull down a quarter of a million bucks in salary and benefit from all kinds of perks, it’s clear that politicians can make a hell of a living, so the job attracts people with lower standards. It happened in a tidal wave in 2010 when the Tea Party swept into office bringing a majority of “know nothings” who had no political experience but great expectations of making big bucks. If that’s all they can bring to the table, we don’t need these blood sucking swine. Even if you agree with some of their twisted political opinions you must recognize that most of what they are telling you is a lie and it’s hard to believe that even the least functional among us want their nation’s form of government to be based on a lie.