Tag Archives: zero tolerance

national news

Same old song: GOP is tough, Dems are weaklings

If only the president of the United States would stop his stereotyping of political foes.

Such as what he did on thisTwitter message: When people come into our Country illegally, we must IMMEDIATELY escort them back out without going through years of legal maneuvering. Our laws are the dumbest anywhere in the world. Republicans want Strong Borders and no Crime. Dems want Open Borders and are weak on Crime!

Hang on a second.

I happen to align with the Democratic Part. Do I “want Open Borders” and am I “weak on crime!”?

I beg your pardon, Mr. President.

I happen to support the president’s desire to invoke “extreme vetting” of immigrants. I also want to see border security increased, updated, modernized.

I do not favor building a wall along our southern border. I do not favor separating children from their parents. I do not favor Donald Trump’s desire to deport illegal immigrants immediately.

None of this seems to deter Donald John Trump from inflaming passions by his mischaracterization of his foes’ motives. It does fire up the base, which is the only audience that matters to the president.

As for his desire to toss all immigrants out without going through a legal process, I find that to be inherently un-American.

It’s the kind of rhetoric one hears from autocrats and, oh yeah, dictators.

national news

Settle down, Rep. Waters

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters needs to settle down.

The California Democrat needs to develop a sense of decorum and decency in this overheated political climate. I know it’s hard, but it can be done.

She said the following Saturday at a rally. She was commenting on White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave a Virginia restaurant because Huckabee works for Donald J. Trump:

“For these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president ‘No, I can’t hang with you, this is wrong, this is unconscionable and we can’t keep doing this to children.'”

Waters is inciting potentially harmful — if not dangerous — confrontations.

She is angry over the president’s policy that took children from their parents at the southern border. I share her anger. It’s an outrageous effort to demonize illegal immigrants. It is punishing children because of something their parents have done.

The White House press secretary does not deserve to be hassled, harassed or hectored while she is in a public place with her family. Yes, Waters has walked back her comment just a bit. She says protest is a “democratic” process as long as it is peaceful. Fine. Protest in all sorts of ways.

However, the idea that she would encourage such confrontation of other Trump administration officials only inflames passion, drives deeper divisions between factions and creates even more hard feelings than those that exist already.

The president himself has shown himself to be the master of division and discord. There is no need to mimic what he has done to sow the seeds of anger among Americans.

Hassling officials from the administration while they are off the clock is no way to unite the nation.

International news, national news

Due process? Who needs it?

Donald J. Trump, the champion of due process and the rule of law, has decided, um, that he wants to toss it all out the window in his quest to rid the United States of every single person who comes here illegally.

The president launched another Twitter tirade today in which he suggested rounding up every illegal immigrant he can find and then sending them back immediately to their country of origin.

“No court cases,” he said. “No judges,” he added. Just round ’em up. Get rid of ’em.

This kind of red — and raw — meat plays well with his base. That’s his audience anyway. The rest of us? He doesn’t care.

According to The Washington Post: “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” Trump wrote. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents.”

The president continued in a second tweet, “Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit — we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!”

There he goes yet again. He is painting every illegal immigrant with the same broad brush, presuming that every one of them is here to bring havoc to Americans, that they want to kill us, rape us, sell us illegal drugs, kidnap our children and then peddle them as sex slaves.

Due process? U.S. immigration law gives illegal immigrants certain rights, such as the right to have their cases heard by a judge. The president doesn’t give a damn about that.

Get rid of all of them, he said.

His posture is not going to “make America great again.” It is going to make us a pariah state.

Disgraceful.

religious news

What do evangelicals see in POTUS?

Of all the elements of Donald Trump’s base of support, the one that baffles me in the extreme is the evangelical Christian movement.

I keep hearing how religious leaders, such as the Rev. Franklin Graham, have parted company with the president over the “zero tolerance” policy that yanks children from their parents’ custody at the southern border of the nation.

What I’ll never understand is how Trump managed to garner their support in the first place. He is not a Godly man. He isn’t associated in any demonstrable fashion with any religious organization. Trump has never been attached to, say, Habitat for Humanity, American Friends or any other faith-based non-government organization.

Yet the evangelical Christian movement aligns itself with this guy.

He’s a serial philanderer. He has admitted to grabbing women by their, um, whatever.

Still, despite all this — and more! — he maintains this base of support.

How in the world does that happen?

State news

Stand tall, Speaker Straus

Joe Straus offers living, breathing, demonstrable proof that not all Texas Republican politicians have gone around the bend, that they all aren’t bat-crap crazy.

Straus, the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives — until the end of this year, when his term ends — has emerged as a leading GOP opponent of Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration.

The speaker, who is not seeking re-election, wrote the president a letter urging him to end the program that allows for children to be snatched from their parents’ arms at the southern border and sent to, um, somewhere apart from Mom and Dad.

As the Texas Tribune reported: “I know that members of Congress from both parties have proposed various ways to address this issue in the form of legislation, and while I applaud their attention to the problem, I also know that congressional action often does not come quickly,” the speaker told Trump in a letter. “In order to at least begin addressing this issue, there is no need to wait for Congress to act. That’s why I respectfully ask that you move immediately to rescind the policy that [Attorney] General [Jeff] Sessions announced in April and any other policies that have led to an increase in family separations at the border.”

There’s more: In the letter, Straus also rejected arguments by the Trump administration that the policy could be used as leverage against Democrats in Congress. “It is wrong to use these scared, vulnerable children as a negotiating tool,” Straus wrote.

Straus hails from San Antonio. While the state’s second-largest city isn’t on the border with Mexico, it is close enough to be considered near Ground Zero of this still-boiling crisis. The city has a huge Latino population, comprising many recent immigrants. Speaker Straus is listening to them as well as the better angels of his own conscience in seeking relief from this hideous policy.

I want to add, too, that Straus is no stranger to political sanity in a state that at times veers into fits of partisan hysteria.

Gov. Greg Abbott called the 2017 Legislature into special sessions to consider, among other items, that goofy “Bathroom Bill,” which required people to use public restrooms in accordance with the gender assigned to their birth certificate. The bill was clearly discriminatory against transgender individuals.

It passed the Senate — which is led by GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — on a partisan vote. Speaker Straus, as the Man of the House, would have none of it.

Through the speaker’s leadership, the Bathroom Bill ended up dead and buried. Which is where it should remain now and forever.

Straus is turning his speaker’s gavel over to someone else in 2019. I do hope, however, that he remains a clear voice of reason among Republicans whose hearts, minds and souls have been captured by the lying carnival barker/flim-flam artist who in 2016 got elected president of the United States.

Texas needs Joe Straus to continue speaking out, as does the nation.

media news

‘These aren’t our kids’

1 Comment

Brian Kilmeade needs a serious whuppin’.

The “Fox & Friends” co-host said this today while defending Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which the president ostensibly ended with an executive order that stops the practice of yanking kids from their parents along the southern border of our nation.

“Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they’re more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.”

Let’s hold the phone, dear reader. Time out! Take a breath and digest what this clown has said on national TV.

Has anyone, ever hinted, implied or suggested — let alone say it out loud — that the young immigrants at the center of this immigration firestorm are “more important than people in our country”?

Kilmeade was trying to make some sort of cheap point, I reckon, when he blurted out that misstatement.

It is false. It is yet another lie. He has demonized in one of the most hideous examples we’ve heard in all this tumult the critics of the Trump administration policy that has swept the entire globe.

If the president is going to go after the mainstream media for telling lies, right there is a glittering example of “fake news.”

national news

Now you’re lying, Mr. AG

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t yet shake the malady that afflicts the president of the United States.

He is now lying through clenched teeth, just as Donald J. Trump does with such ease.

Sessions told the Christian Broadcast Network that the administration “never intended” to separate children from their parents as part of the government’s “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration.

Yep. That’s what he told CBN’s David Brody.

Oh, but wait.

Just the other day he stood before the nation and cited Romans 13 — from the New Testament — as justification for doing the very thing he said he and his colleagues “never intended” to do. Romans 13 tells us how the Apostle Paul admonished others to obey the government; follow the law to the letter. Therein lies the justification, as Sessions cited it, for the policy that results in the arrest of illegal immigrants and the separation of children from their custody.

If you enter the nation illegally, he said, you will be arrested. If you smuggle children illegally with you, the government may take them away

How can the nation’s chief law enforcement officer lie so recklessly?

Hold on a second! I almost forgot. Donald J. Trump — the nation’s Liar in Chief — selected him for the job.

national news

Nothing ‘phony’ about these tales of woe, Mr. POTUS

1 Comment

I am slapping myself silly out of frustration, outrage and anger at the president’s utter ignorance.

He fired off this little ditty this morning via Twitter:

We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!

Where do I begin? Or end, for that matter?

Democrats aren’t telling “phony stories of sadness and grief,” Mr. President. Yet that’s the message that Donald J. Trump sought to deliver.

No, sir. Nothing “phony” is going on at the nation’s southern border. The children are in distress. So are their parents. Yes, they should enter the United States legally. On that point, I am with the president. However, their reasons for seeking entry are as complex as the problem that has erupted.

Many of them are fleeing brutality, gang violence, poverty. They want a better life for their families. Why is that so difficult for the president to understand? He implies through his tweets and other public statements that every illegal immigrant is “infesting” this country intent on doing something evil. He suggests they are bringing “crime” into the United States.

This is nothing short of a disgraceful display of bald-faced prejudice and bigotry.

Phony stories of sadness? Hardly, Mr. President. These tragedies are real and they need answers — not recrimination.

national news

Illegal immigrants ‘infest’ this country? Really, Mr. POTUS?

Count me as one of those Americans who is troubled by the use of the term “infest” when referring to human beings.

Yet, that is how Donald J. Trump referred to illegal immigrants. They “infest” this country by trying to sneak across our border illegally.

Never mind their motive for seeking entry into the Land of Opportunity. Search for a better life? Escape from persecution? Reuniting with family members already here?

Nope. They are seeking to “infest” this country.

This is the individual who attached a moral equivalence between white supremacists/KKK members/neo-Nazis with those who protested against them in Charlottesville, Va., this past year. Do you remember how he said there were “fine people … on both sides” of that hideous riot?

This man, the president, once called for the death penalty for five young men who were exonerated for the crime of beating and raping that woman in Central Park, New York City.

Let us not forget how he continued to foment the lie that the nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, was born in Africa and was not qualified to run for he office to which he was elected twice.

The common denominator? Race.

Now he is saying that those who enter the United States illegally from Latin America are seeking to “infest” this country. What in the name of human decency is he saying here?

To my ear, he is labeling every single immigrant — yes, those who are undocumented — as coming here to commit violent crimes, to engage in rape, murder, human trafficking.

At minimum, the president is casting these individuals in starkly unfair terms. My fear is that he knows precisely what he is saying and that the term “infest” comports with his deep, dark and sadistic view of what lures these fellow human beings to the United States of America.

national news

It’s all right, really, to say you made a mistake

Donald J. Trump’s famous resistance to saying he’s sorry for anything has come into play once again.

The president signed an executive order that rescinds his policy that allows the separation of young children from their parents at the border. It was part of his “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration.

He had said repeatedly that he couldn’t do it. He said Congress was the only authority that could change the policy. He blamed Democrats for enacting a law — that doesn’t exist!

But … today he walked all of that back. The executive order was done by one man: the president.

So, why doesn’t he just acknowledge he was mistaken? Why doesn’t he tell us that he had the authority all along?

He doesn’t want to look “weak.” He doesn’t want to give anyone any ammo to shoot at him — politically, of course.

But you know what? His refusal to acknowledge the obvious only gives his foes even more grist to use against him.

Donald Trump wants to be seen as a strong leader. However, the president’s insistence on looking strong only weakens him.

Go figure.