The Invisible Wall

Recently Trump claimed to have begun building his big beautiful wall and even had a plaque dedicating this section to himself as the first section of his border wall.

Now, as a point of fact, this section of the wall was built in place of an older barrier that was dilapidated and in need of replacement and was ordered to be rebuilt by then President Obama, who also authorized the funds.

This is not a new wall.

This was not his victory.

Since we cannot trust what Trump says, let’s look at what he’s actually done.

Trump has taken money from the military budget, against the objections of the Pentagon, and is trying to repurpose those funds to build the border wall. My mother taught me that when you take something that doesn’t belong to you, without being asked, It’s called “stealing.” It also makes you wonder how much of the new and highly expanded military budget, money the Pentagon didn’t even ask for, might also be “taken” to build his wall in the future.  I thought the whole big idea of building the wall was that Mexico was going to pay for it. That’s where he got his big applause. Apparently, that line was just a ruse. We are going to pay for this wall, and we aren’t going to have a say about it.

I guess we’ll just send Mexico an invoice or something.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration cannot be trusted.

Trump has put up some pretty impressive invisible barriers, though, while at the same time built a big beautiful door to which he invites conflicts on the world stage, including the possibility of wars on various fronts.

He has reduced funding to the United Nations, tried to leverage our allies, you know the ones we worked with to keep fascism from taking over the free world for 70 years or so, into contributing more toward the UN based on his vast and highly unsuccessful Real Estate experience. The United Nations is what you would call an invisible barrier, stopping would-be dictators and fascists from invading and taking over other nations. Russia, obviously, isn’t a member.

Trump also withdrew the US from the Human Rights Council, an organization that America used to pride themselves as being a part of to make the world a better place to live. This actually paved the way for America to befriend dictators and despots who live outside the law.

Which brings us to the fact that Trump has insulted and infuriated our allies, while at the same time tried to build relationships with the world’s most notorious dictators.

Talk about a destabilizing influence.

Another invisible wall Trump has recently torn down is his threat to withdraw Hundreds of Millions of dollars of aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with the expressed purpose of trying to get them to stop the asylum caravans coming to our southern border.

Trump, if there was a fire in your kitchen, would you turn up the heat to the stove? Grab a can of gasoline, perhaps?

People are fleeing these countries because of poverty and crime. Taking money away from these governments will NOT make this problem go away–it will make it WORSE!

What we should be doing is giving more money or support to these countries. If we could help train their police departments and help them reduce crime, while also increasing investment in these countries to fight poverty and promote a happy and thriving middle class, then fewer citizens of these countries will want to walk for months to get here. Let’s face it, walking for thousands of miles is not anyone’s Plan A–it’s a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

The money we send to these countries is an invisible wall, keeping other nations out of our back yard. Right now, without our support, these countries are open for business to any other country that wishes to help support them in their effort to create a better economy.

Now that this invisible wall is collapsing, we are going to have Chinese and Russian influences and whoever else wants to encroach upon our sovereignty at our southern border, and our former allies are going to watch from the sidelines because you told them our “Patriotism” was all we needed and they could just go jump off a bridge.

Nice Trump. What are you going to do for an encore, play the fiddle as our nation burns to the ground?

AS you can see, international relations, or a lack thereof, form an invisible barrier to threats from foreign nations. We had some pretty good ones, but Trump doesn’t like those. He likes the ones he can touch and put his name on. The problem is, those kinds of walls don’t work like you think they will. Just ask Rome, China, or Germany, and all the other countries that tried to build physical barriers to keep threats out. Invisible barriers work better than physical ones. They also make more friends, and that’s one thing we could sure use more of these days.

 

The Real National Border Emergency: Brought to you by Trump & GOP

There is a real national emergency at our southern border with Mexico, but it’s not the one Trump is promoting—it’s the one he is creating himself. The fact that the GOP is backing him up on his wild lies makes them complicit.

Many news reporting agencies have documented that in 2018 the Trump administration introduced a “zero-tolerance” policy calling for the prosecution of all individuals who illegally enter the United States. The devastating effect has been the following:

  • Parents have been separated from their children.
  • There was no plan to reunite children with their parents until after a major backlash from the public.
  • Minor children were locked up far longer than legally allowed.
  • More than 4,500 incidents of child abuse against minors in immigration custody have been reported.
  • Twenty-two immigrant deaths in US immigration custody in the past two years has also been documented.
  • The emotional effects of this separation and abuse on these children will be revealing itself for decades to come. Traumatized children tend to exhibit mental and emotional problems as adults. This horrific abuse will likely affect their entire lives.

As if these tragedies weren’t bad enough, the Trump administration continues to persecute immigrants and asylum seekers by:

  • Reducing the number of courts and judges that hear asylum cases which increased incarceration periods and reduced asylum approvals to hereto unheard of numbers.
  • Denying an overwhelming majority of asylum seekers cases making it almost impossible for asylum seekers to achieve protection against threats back home.
  • Sending asylum seekers to a foreign country that we have no control over housing, feeding, medical care or even communications to await their status hearings.

The thinking of the Trump administration with this policy shift was that by destroying families, the will of people to come here would be reduced. Breaking this logic down, it reads—if you are afraid for life as well as that of your children, don’t come here.

The big question is; since when did women & children become a threat to national security? 

Well, they aren’t, which is why Trump makes up lies about MS13, drugs and human trafficking adding into the mix. To gain more support for his border wall, he tries to frighten us with the bogeyman. 

No one cannot trust a pathological liar for a President. But he is much more than that. He is also a Hypocrite, just like all the other sons of immigrants who call for an end to “Chain Migration.” 

If Chain migration is so bad for America, as Donald Trump states, then as our elected leader he should be willing to send his wife Melania’s parents back to their home country. That is what great leaders do; lead by example. The fact that he won’t ever do this proves that either he is not the great leader he thinks he is, or Trump does believe in uniting and protecting families. Instead of promoting an immigration policy that is in conflict with his personal history and making him look untrustworthy, Trump should embrace family-based immigration policies. 

Trump also employed many undocumented workers at his golf courses, and probably in his construction crews as well, so his stand against illegal immigration falls flat. If it’s okay for him to do it, why should it be illegal for others? The fact that he fired these immigrants recently is only for damage control. He has never even apologized to the American people for the “oversight”. Let’s forget it ever happened, right Donald?

Donald Trump has stated on many occasions that our immigration laws are highly broken. Focusing on a wall instead of immigration reform is just a political ruse. 

Walls don’t work. Ask China or the Romans, two famous examples of militarizing borders. Walls didn’t stop the Huns from invading China or the Barbarians from invading Rome. We could also ask the Germans why they tore down their wall, the most fortified and guarded wall in recent history. Thousands of people escaped East Germany in spite of those efforts. All walls are breach-able. Building a wall won’t stop immigration by itself. Walls are tools, not solutions.

In truth; a set of fair and just immigration laws in conjunction with support for our neighbors to combat gangs and crime would go a lot further to slowing down immigration from our neighbors into our country. 

Improved investment in jobs and a stable economy would further reduce strain at our southern border. Families and a rich history with the geography that gave them birth are a huge reason most people love the countries they already live in. Why would anyone want to make a long and treacherous journey to live somewhere else if they could live free and happy lives at home?

America has spent Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives defending citizens of foreign nations from oppression and death around the world. We should be able to do better for our neighbors here at home for less money and with far less human casualty. 

We are the great United States of America. Shouldn’t we expect more from ourselves than just a simple wall?  

Even US military Generals agree there is no military threat at our southern border. On the insistence of Trump and with the full support of the GOP, the only military at the border is ours—we are literally at war with ourselves. 

Trump and the Republicans should be ashamed of themselves. Real people are dying, families are being destroyed, and young lives are being permanently damaged while Trump tells us that fictional bad guys are storming our borders and a wall will fix everything. Only an idiot would think that solving all of our immigration problems were really as simple as building a wall.

The national emergency at the border is real; Trump created it, the Republicans support it—only we can end it. 

An American Crisis of the Soul

For years now the far right has waged a war on American values in the name of American values in order to confuse their ideological goals with the very definition of what it means to be American. By now it is obvious to most of the people on earth that they have annexed the Republican party and are having their way with our nation.

The far right have used the GOP to beat Bill Clinton over the head with his affair with Monica Lewinsky and a supposed Whitewater real estate investment scandal that never produced any real evidence. They continue to impose a poor image on Hilary Clinton over these same issues, even though our current president gets a huge pass on hard evidence of worse offenses on the same issues.(Stormy Daniels & Trump Tower Washington & Moscow for just a few examples.)

The GOP rode Barrack Obama so hard during his 8 years in office that I was embarrassed for our nation. Donald Trump and his racist far-right “birther” movement tried to cast doubt about his citizenship and therefore authority to govern. Far-right racist cartoons casting President Obama and his wife in humiliating ways, Republican senators professing to seek to limit his term to 4 years almost immediately after inauguration. The GOP in Congress was so anti-Obama they were the least productive in history during his term in office, openly vowing to reduce his influence on America to as little as possible while at the same time blaming him for not getting much done in office. To this day Trump is erasing what little he did get done. (Blame Obama is a recurring GOP theme.)

Now we have a President who never gave us a look at his tax returns, keeping his past international and investment ties a secret unlike all presidents before him since 1976 except one. He has had multiple marriages, which would have been a non-starter before 2016, but somehow was forgiven, just like his infidelities and self-admitted sexual assaults. Trump’s verbal abuse of American Heros who “didn’t get captured” didn’t get him cut from the list of GOP hopefuls, although if Obama had said it, I’m sure someone else would have become president. There are so many verbal abuses and insults Trump has issued that I’m sure everyone else in America is aware of and is a shame to our national reputation. Also the fact that in his first months in office he has redefined our allies as delinquent bill payers and promoted autocrats and demi-gods as supposed well-respected members of society worthy of admitting into international organizations. Now, Trump is telling us that all the women and children fleeing death and destruction in their central American countries are a national crisis that needs our military and a huge wall to protect us from. Machine guns, tear gas, and barbed wire vs diaper wielding moms. Let’s not talk about our broken immigration system and how to fix it, though. A wall will do it all if you believe Trump.

Thanks, GOP. You’ve ruined my country. I won’t support you any longer until you start treating Americans as the people you are supposed to represent, not the people you can lie to and steal from. I would rather vote for a goat in a tree than a member of your shameful organization.

You’ve given this nation’s reputation a bruising, worse than a black eye, with all you’ve done to restructure the world’s relationships to your own liking, as well as lie to your country on a daily basis about everything that means anything to your people and use foreign nations to help you win your seat at the table. The fact that you keep bragging about “your base” really tells us everything we need to know about you.

We’re ALL supposed to be your base.

You are the President of the United States of America, but you are governing like the Divided States of Trump. You’ve given our nation social syphilis. Luckily there’s a cure if you catch it in time.

Donald Trump is a huge anti-immigrant President- Huge

Donald Trump is running headlong towards the Guinness Book of World Records for what the US administration that hinders immigration, legal or otherwise, into this country. He has done so much to undo our progress on the immigration problem in the year he has led our nation that it is anyone’s guess how far this man will go to make this country White again.

The US has historically produced some pretty horrific immigration legislation over the years, including; the 1798 Aliens and Sedition Act that required immigrants to have lived in this country for 14 years prior to being allowed citizenship, the 1892 The Geary Act that Prohibited the coming of Chinese Persons into the United States for an additional 10 years, the 1917 Asian Exclusion Act that created an Asian ‘Barred Zone” that excluded people from certain asian countries from coming into the US, and many more.

Don’t be surprised to see some of these ideas return to the discussion of what to do about our “immigration crisis.”

IT should stand to reason that this administration may want to actually roll back our immigration laws to 1790 and re-establish the 1790 Immigration act that establishes citizenship to free white persons who have established residency for at least 2 years and have committed no crimes.

How far will Trump’s insanity go towards changing our political ideology

Trump has influenced our current political landscape in so many ways its hard to keep track. Americans don’t seem to care if he knows what he’s talking about, or if he just makes things up in order to get his agenda across. There are websites dedicated to counting his many lies, The Washington Post has listed over 3000 of them, CNN too, as well as the Washington Post, NY Times and many, many more. Evangelicals,  like Rev Jerry Falwell Jr , Franklin Graham, and  others, who often used to keep politicians in line with theology on things like divorce, infidelity and honesty are now just fine with anything Trump wants to do that they don’t even whisper foul when he commits an act against the ten commandments, let alone morality in general.

But the reason many Americans can so easily overlook Trump’s many lies and indiscretions is simple: he’s only human (Republicans are allowed that, Democrats are vilified for it) and he’s not lying as much as he’s telling people what they already believe, so to them, he’s the only one telling the truth.

We have become a nation that no longer looks to the news for truthful information. We are now a society that looks to the news to tell us what we already believe. And the politicians know this, so they are free to lie to us all they want as long as they tell us what we already think the truth is, not matter how far from the truth that idea is.

So what is the next logical step? Americans hopping on the Trump bandwagon and boldly espousing hateful, prejudicial, un-American views.

Current Georgia Congressman hopeful Brian Kemp has just released the video below showing him holding a gun and espousing his Trumpian values completely unafraid of any counter reaction this may bring, just like his idol, Donald Trump.

And its only going to get worse. How much more is this going to spread before we stand up and say we’ve had enough?

America is uniting for immigrants

Labor unions, women’s movements, muslims and more are marching together to stand with their immigrant friends and relatives to show support against an antagonistic President who has recently enacted an unjust travel ban, ended Michelle Obama’s “Let Girls Learn” program and has just begun a push to build his oppressive and highly un-neighborly Wall.

The president seems to be trying very hard to disassociate America from so many of the people that make up this country one has to imagine what country he thinks he is the president of.

And the people of this nation are rising up against his idea of what makes America Great.

If you look at the makeup of people who are uniting against him, one thing is going to be certain; making America great will mean getting a new president.

Website illustrates impact of Trump’s immigration plan

A new website graphically shows the effects to our country should Donald Trump follow through with his campaign promises on immigration. It is one thing to make bombastic statements in order to get the attention of voters, but it’s another thing to destroy the country you pretend to want to “make great again.”

 

http://www.immigrationvoter.com/trump365

GOP cries foul when Obama does their job for them

The Republicans have repeatedly stopped immigration reform legislation from becoming law for the past ten years, so when President Obama made a move to allow a small subset of the immigrants awaiting changes to our immigration laws, the Republicans are throwing a fit.

The Republicans have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court and are trying to get Obama’s efforts nullified. This is the same Supreme Court that they are also trying not to allow Obama to fill an empty spot left by the passing of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The Republican’s friend of the court brief says,

“There is little doubt that [Obama] adopted the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (“DAPA”) program as part of an explicit effort to circumvent the legislative process,”

What the Republicans don’t mention is the fact that you can’t circumvent a legislative process that isn’t even happening.

The Republican’s promise of immigration reform has always been a lie. They keep saying they are for legal immigration and they want to reform the laws they know are broken, yet every opportunity to get something done in this area stops with them.

The real truth of the matter, is now completely obvious. They want immigration reform to be STRICTER than it is now, not more welcoming, or more efficient, or more useful to the nation as a whole. The Republican party views immigrants as threats and they want to slow down and make more difficult the importation of more new Americans, who will probably vote as Democrats.

The painful truth of that idea is that these new immigrants come from traditional Catholic countries and these new immigrants, if given the chance, would vote as conservative Republicans because of their religious beliefs, yet because of all the hate-mongering and harsh treatment of their predecessors, they are surely likely to vote as Democrats, who have been much more realistic and sympathetic to their plight.

If the Republicans could ever get out of their own way, they would be much more successful. But that’s like saying if Ferrari made their cars cheaper, they’d sell more of them. Both statements are obvious, true, but never going to happen.

Ann Coulter ignorant on immigrants

Adios-AmericaWhat Ann Coulter doesn’t understand about immigrants and immigration makes me wonder why she even bothers to talk about it at all. The fact that she can write a book and actually get it published, with all the distorted and untrue facts it contains, and then go on tour and speak publicly about this misinformation and speak about them as if they were true makes me wonder about our society. How far should we be allowed to abuse the term “freedom of speech,” and how far should we be allowed to go to defend this freedom when it contains so much that is blatantly untrue? Do we not have any responsibility to the public? Shouldn’t there at least be a warning label, “Caution, the ideas inside this book may not be anywhere close to the truth and any resemblance to real people and events may be purely coincidental.”

CNSnews.com recently wrote a piece about her book, “Adios America” and in it they stated,

“Coulter’s thesis is simple: Since Senator Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., rammed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America’s immigration system has transformed from a device for enriching the nation for both native-born and immigrants into a scheme for importing anti-American voters.”

One of the problems with that statement is there are 50 years of evidence to back up such a statement. All you would have to do to verify this information is add up all the years since 1965 that had Republican presidents (the party she purports to defend in all her ramblings) to see if un-American voters were messing with our government unfairly. I counted 31 years that the US had a Republican president out of those 50 years; well over half.

So the majority of presidents since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 were Republican. Does that mean she is making the statement that Republicans are “anti-American voters” or is her thesis completely and utterly flawed?

Not all of her book is based on severely inaccurate statistics. She also apparently throws in a large amount of racism, apparently to make her facts sound more accurate.

In that same CNSnews.com article was this Anne Coulter gem,

“What made America America, Coulter argues, was a particular blend of Protestant religion and European civilization that led to the rise of the greatest nation in human history. What will unmake America, she continues, is a deliberate attempt to poison that blend with a flood of immigrants with wildly different values.”

One would expect this type of statement to come from organizations like the Klu Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation. There is just no masking the point of a message like this. What she is saying is if you are not a white european protestant, your blood line will pollute the pure American gene pool and we must get rid of you. Sounds eerily similar to fascist dictators we’ve heard from before.

Coulter goes on to argue that the number of undocumented immigrants currently residing in the USA today is 30 million and not the 11 million or so that are currently thought to be here by more responsible estimates. This is so wildly exaggerated it appears that Ms Coulter has no problem with facts that are corroborated by independent studies, peer reviewed research papers, non-partisan surveys, government census data, or any other useful type of trusted information. She just chooses not to bother to use that type of content in her writing at all. Why bother with researching multiple sources of information to see if your thesis is correct when all you have to do is write down whatever you want and be done with it.

As far as what makes this country great is concerned, Ms Coulter doesn’t wish to recognize all the different religions and peoples we have imported since the 1600s that has actually made our nation great up to this point, or any other historic milestone this country has achieved in the past, for that matter. She only counts the Protestant ones from European countries. Somehow, everyone else in the history of the United States didn’t really matter, including the unfortunate black folks we thought we needed so badly we kidnapped and brought here against their will. I guess the builders of this great nation brought Africans here to keep themselves company. The white Europeans must have done all the innovating, constructing, planting, harvesting, manufacturing and conquering all by themselves.

One of my favorite Coulterisms is when she was on The View and called out for being a descendant of immigrants herself. She flatly denied she was related to people who came from another country looking for a better life. Her ancestors were SETTLERS. Somehow these were not people who came from other countries, but who just magically came here and founded this nation, making her a native American and all native Americans becoming American Indians.

How convenient for her to have skipped the whole “immigrant” word altogether. Ancestral magic sounds cool. Her ancestors didn’t have to kill or steal or lie or renege on treaties or any of that stuff that would need to be apologized for. No admission of harming others or doing wrong. No pesky restitution necessary either. Her family history has been cleansed by the immaculate inception.

I’m betting the Scientologists fear her, for they will probably soon have to give up the claim to the newest religion in this country. The Bible of Anne Coulter should be coming soon, which begs two questions to be asked:

  1. Will she photoshop a selfie for the cover and make herself look even whiter than she already is and 20 years younger?
  2. Will it be available in Spanish?

Trumpery is a 15th century word that means what you think

How could anyone in the 15th century know that Trumpery was going to be a thing in the 21st century?

 

Definition of TRUMPERY (Merriam Webster)

noun trum·pery \ˈtrəm-p(ə-)rē\

trumpery
1
    a  :  worthless nonsense
    b  :  trivial or useless articles :  junk <a wagon loaded with household trumpery — Washington Irving>
2
archaic  :  tawdry finery

The oxford dictionary defines it as:

“Practices or beliefs that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth.”

If used as an adjective to describe something, Oxford Dictionaries show:

 Showy but worthless and Delusive or shallow:

 

Other synonyms for Trumpery from Merriam Webster include:

Balderdash, baloney, blarney, blah (also blah blah), claptrap, crapola, folly, foolishness, hogwash, hooey, humbuggery, poppycock, rubbish, senselessness, silliness, stupidity, nonsense.

It’s profoundly ironic that a man named Donald Trump comes to us on the wings of public grandstanding with little substance to back up his words. “Trust Me,” or “Ill be the best you ever seen,” are the epitome of Donald Trump’s platform, and those words pretty much sum up classic Trumpery.

It’s almost like his hollow showmanship and the link to his name were planned.

So, who in the 15th century could have predicted Donald Trump’s rise in popularity under these very prescient ideas?

Well, Michelle De Nostradamus, for one.

nostradamus

“The high and tall, come into Milan, The Abbot of Foix with thofe of Saint Maure, Shall make the trumpery being cloathed like rogues.”

and

“No, I’ll not chalk my face or smear myself with phosphorus to amuse such trumpery.”

 

So, the next time Donald Trump opens his mouth, we can all celebrate his Trumpery, but we won’t be able to claim the word as our own. Apparently, it’s been done before, and has been for hundreds of years.