The United States has been having problems on its southern border for at least the last twenty years. The last president saw a way to attract racist votes by metastasizing those problems. He blew them up by promising a wall that would cost billions and accomplish nothing and by tightening our immigration policy enough to allow for the ripping of children from their mother’s arms and locking them in cages. This worked if the aim was to end immigration but we need immigration. It is part of our overall economic structure and a major means by which we expand our work force. We are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, even our Native America population.
Trump seems to have forgotten this. He conveniently forgets that his grandfather came to this country and started the Trump fortune by opening a whorehouse in California. He figured that by attacking new immigrants who are brown people he could attract enough racists to keep him in the White House. His vicious, inhuman plan worked and most immigrants stayed home in Central America.
But people also waited in Mexico for their turn at gaining entrance to the US, and that became a tragedy. These poor people, already forced to flee their countries because of poverty and crime were now faced with more of the same, Mexican style. They became the prey of every dishonest cop, federale, drug dealer, coyote or criminal gang. They were kidnapped, raped, their money stolen, and the women and children trafficked, all with the Trump administration’s approval as long as they were kept out of the U.S.
But Trump and his degenerate swine weren’t satisfied with breaking the immigrants, they continued to pull down the whole system, dismantling our entire immigration structure and trashing its remains In Mexico and the nations in Central America they closed down our programs that were helping to solve the problems at their root. Then, as if to prove they really could do more damage and cause more pain, they refused to cooperate with Biden’s transition team, thereby allowing no lead-time to deal with the oncoming disaster.
Now the GOP, which has done nothing constructive since before the Raegan Administration, is attacking Biden for not having the whole immigration problem under control. Really? Maybe if Trump and his incompetent clowns had done anythingright, this situation would not exist now. But it does and given an acceptable time frame Biden and his people will get functional camps built for the kids and set up a system that will be able to process them quickly and get them to family members who are already established in the States.
Meanwhile the media is whining, not because the Trump administration created and left behind this grotesque mess, but because they can’t get pictures of crying children to run on their cover pages. Any journalist who really doesn’t understand what has happened and what caused it, needs to get a job for which they are better suited, like cleaning toilets at Mar-a-Largo
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I watched and recorded a good number of the cable news shows this weekend and one thing is becoming very clear. The hosts of these shows do not know what questions to ask their guests regarding the obstreporus approach of the GOP to matters that involve solving the problems of the nation and the people who inhabit it. It was really easy to see that Trump was a sociopathic criminal and quite possibly insane, but now that he’s gone we find GOP congressmen, some of whom opposed Trump, taking stances that seem to be wholly illogical and that lead to decisions which are not just opposed to the wants of the Democrats but also to the needs of their own constituents.
This was obvious in the GOP vote against the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, which was backed by 76% of the population many of whom were Republicans. It’s also true about any number of bills which the Democrats have put forth dealing with infrastructure, gun control, immigration, the environment and a host of other issues.
One wonders how the GOP expects to get its people elected in 2022? I know they would like to kick everyone except racist whites off the voter rolls but that’s really not practical. Where do they expect to get the votes when they are against everything that will help the majority of the people of this country? Sure they will continue to lie but they are starting to wear out that rug. Too much of what they have said has turned out to be provably false or just the ravings of the insane.
Our media seems to have lost its ability to call a lie, a lie. Faced with a guest who is spewing out volumes of false facts, they sit mesmerized; apparently unable to extract the core untruth these liars are using to build their false narratives.
When some sycophant babbles about Trump’s Operation Warp Speed policy and how it saved America from the COVID virus, hosts must, if they are to be honest, also point out that the nation was in crisis because of Trump’s inability to deal with any part of the pandemic on any kind of functional basis. They must also point out that Warp Speed was the result of the Trump administration’s need for something to brag about amid the chaos caused by their failure to deal with the pandemic on any kind of realistic level. Finally they must also make clear that the Trump administration’s failure to cooperate on the transition put the delivery of vaccine behind by over two months, causing tens of thousands to die unnecessarily. I have heard this from opposing political speakers but not from hosts who are supposed to be responsible for the veracity of their program’s content.
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Roy Blunt, R- Missouri has announced that he will retire, thereby adding to a growing group of Republican congressmen who will not compete in 2022. That’s unfortunate for the GOP because all of the men in this group are moderate Republicans who might, given the right circumstances, be able to negotiate with the Democrats, achieving Joe Manchin’s dream of a bi-partisan congress.
At precisely the same time that moderate conservatives from the GOP are leaving government, rabid Right Wing, white supremacists are moving in, led by the likes of the trio from hell, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorne, an infection of young talent that wants to eliminate our Democracy and turn this nation into a dictatorship. That influx is accompanied by moves instigated by Donald Trump, a former Democrat who ran for and won the presidency as a crazed Republican and served as a would be criminal/dictator. Now he wants to influence the Republicans from his posh bunker in Florida by refusing them the use of his name or image in their fund raising efforts. This is just the former liar-in-chief’s way of showing he cares for no man or no situation that doesn’t pay him personally.
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Joe Biden had the first press conference of his presidency on Thursday and what a difference! No bragging, no attacks on the media and no lying to us about how much he won by. It was just a guy who didn’t think he was God telling us what he wanted to do to help this nation get back on its feet after the twin disasters of COVID and TRUMP. He stuck to what he wanted to do and dropped in a little of what he has already done in two short months. He gave us examples of function we haven’t seen in far too long and he dropped some numbers that hinted at vaccination figures that far outstrip even our most optimistic estimates. Even more importantly, he sounded like a guy who understands he’s got a job to do and is figuring out how to do it. Every time I watch Joe Biden I experience a sense of relief, brought about by having a man in the White House who isn’t always trying to impress me but who is doing the job that needs to be done.
That doesn’t mean everything that needs to be fixed is going to get taken care of in the first hundred days. The former clown-in-chief left behind such a pile of broken parts that it will take serious time to get everything back on track but Biden’s pushing in the right direction on most things. There are a few that he doesn’t seem to have figured out yet and one of the biggest is gun control. Not answering a direct question on it made it clear he doesn’t yet have a viable solution and doesn’t want to jump in until he has something that will work. No matter what he comes up with it will face big time opposition. There will be a huge push against any restrictions from the “take the gun from my cold dead hand,” assholes. It should be so easy.
The problem is that the number of fatalities, which have been pretty impressive no matter how you look at it, have been made to look insignificant by the numbers from the pandemic. We have become inured to death. When a police officer decides that the bad part about killing eight people is that the perp was “having a bad day” we are way past taking guns away from people who are too stupid or too unstable to own them.
But no matter how important this problem is, right now it looks like Joe doesn’t have a viable answer to it and is going to push it aside until he can achieve what he needs to get done in health, immigration, infrastructure and the environment, none of which, along with guns, foreign policy or anything else have seen any progress in almost five years.
It would help if just some of the GOP elected officials saw fit to follow the leads of many GOP voters when it comes to getting stuff accomplished that will help the country and the people who live in it. Maybe if they take another significant beating in the Senate and lose the seats they gained in the House, the GOP will get the hint and finally look to do something to earn their salaries after almost 40 years of inaction and mismanagement.