Walker trying to out-Trump Trump!

Wisconsin Governor and GOP Presidential nominee hopeful Scott Walker has raised the bar for outrageous border statements, set only days earlier, by Donald Trump. We, of course are talking about building a wall on our border, but this time, not just a 1,954 mile border with Mexico, but a wall over twice that long with our northern neighbors Canada.

 Speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press” Walker said some people in New Hampshire have asked the campaign about the topic.

“They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.” Walker said.

So, the party who would balance our budget would also like to spend over a Trillion dollars on building a Border fence on both our northern and southern borders.

I guess with this latest salvo in the bidding wars for the GOP nomination, the next person has to up the ante with building a wall on our eastern and western coasts, creating a National Castle, if you will.

Anyone want to live here then?

 

 

GOP tries to blame Obama on immigration reform

The Republicans, who have refused to put the latest immigration bill up for a vote, are using their old, tried and true tactic of blaming Obama for the lack of immigration reform movement. Are you tired of this argument too?

The battle for the 14th Amendment

For as long as our constitution has been around, certain members of our community and their hired guns in Washington have tried to change our immigration laws in an effort to “keep our country white.” The 14th amendment has been under attack since it’s inception during the civil war.

This infographic helps to demonstrate the effects on such an attack.

14th Amendment2

GOP needs a dictionary

Ever get tired of hearing anything you want to do to help those less fortunate is a form of socialism? Let’s take a look at what the dictionary says about

 socialism:

1- any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2- a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.

So let’s be clear. If we are to be judged by how well we treat our fellow man, using the “socialism” card as a means to keep the government out of such endeavors is really just a cheap shot.

Should we start calling the GOP Fascists?

fascism:

1: often capitalized :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2:  a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>
So, as the Republicans want to control female reproductive rights and limit resources to gays, take away money from the aging and the poor and limit who can vote by enacting rigorous voting qualifications that leave out many of the poor, I would say that they are much closer to that definition than their opponents are to socialism.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/thats-not-what-socialism-means

In a World. . . where Republicans rule supreme.

Where Democrats don’t have much say in government and are left to sit on the sidelines and complain about what could have been.

 

A young man gets shot by someone who bought a gun and some ammo at recent gun show and robbed him of his cell phone and wallet. The hospital bill is in the tens of thousands of dollars, even though he was released that same day, because the Affordable Health Care Act was repealed and Medicare has been gutted to barely care for some of the necessities of senior citizens who cannot afford their own private medical insurance.

He goes home and fixes the same thing he eats every day—Ramen noodles. Sometimes, for a special occasion, he will add a few Ketchup packets he boosts from the fast food restaurant he started working at, ever since all the immigrants got deported, creating a vacuum in the economy and causing chain layoffs as companies lost people who could afford their products. Job choices are slim since many other college graduates have flooded the foodservice, hospitality, homecare and other menial job markets.

This bright, intelligent, 26 year old man is thinking it might not be too late to join the military, the only healthy industry left after the Republican dominated government cut all the “parasitic social services” in order to create tax breaks for the rich and reduce spending to balance the budget, not to mention motivate those people “addicted to government subsidies.” Balancing the budget was supposed to be the main goal, but with all the other problems with the economy and the new wars breaking out with the Russians, Chinese, Chechens, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Afghans and those pesky Pakistanis. America understands it’s hard to think about the budget at times like these, so they will wait until times are better and they can afford to focus on such things. Until then they will support an ever growing military budget and still find room to blame our overspending on the few remaining social programs that are struggling for survival.

A woman he met at a party a few weeks ago comes to his home and informs him she’s pregnant, having lost any access to birth control services she previously used, and since abortion is outlawed, they must have the baby. They both struggle to figure out how they are going to be able to support their child, let alone each other.

The day is not a total loss as they are both invited to a going away party for two of the young woman’s gay friends who are leaving for Europe, where Gay relationships are not so harshly punished and they will even be able to get married and enjoy family benefits. They are both excited at the prospect of possibly scoring some food at the party, or at least a few beers.

At the party, the main discussion makes its way to the usual topic of late; life in America and how it changed so much in just a few years.

With his wallet gone, he’s without a license, so he won’t be able to vote in next week’s elections. Everyone at the party agrees they would vote for someone other than a Republican, except they keep producing these great video promos that play all the time and really convince everybody that things will get better and we, as a society, are returning to a better, more “pure” America, just like in the good ol’ days.

Everyone can hardly wait.

An American Iron Curtain

We are creating an American Iron Curtain

US Mexico border fence with barbed wire

When I was a boy growing up in the sixties and seventies, the only places we got our news was radio, TV & the newspaper. Being young, I wasn’t much on reading because I was having a difficult time learning the language. English is not the easiest language in the world to learn. Some of the rules still don’t make much sense, so, as a kid, I mainly just stuck with TV, and even then I wasn’t much interested in the news. Grown-up TV was scary.

The John F. Kennedy assassination, then the Bobby Kennedy assasination, Martin Luther King & Malcolm X murdered too, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the civil rights riots, the Black Painters.

And that was just in this country.

The news coming out of Russia was even scarier. People who disagreed with the government disappeared, the KGB was out to get everyone, The Gulag or forced labor and torture camps sounded like hell on earth,  their highly censored media, and severely restricted travel and career paths. Our freedoms were as countless as the stars at night and you could thank heaven for growing up in this wonderful country.

For a long time (all throughout the Cold War) it seemed as if our whole national identity revolved around how superior we were to the Soviet Union, the number 2 world power at the time. We compared ourselves to Russia in almost everything: who had the most gold medals in the olympics, the first man in space, the first satellite in orbit, the first man on the moon, the most nuclear weapons. . . and of course, we compared our cultures; we had freedom– they didn’t.

In America, you could go anywhere you wish, freely, and without restriction.  In the USSR,  you needed travel papers before leaving your state, or entering another. In the USSR if you were born into a farmer’s family, you would grow up to be a farmer too. In America you could grow up to be whatever you wanted to be.

In America our society thrived on diversity. We imported some of the best minds from around the globe and became a super power because of it. In the USSR their lack of diversity, and their rigid control of everything, kept growth, innovation, and prosperity to a minimum.

berlinwall

In the USSR there were very scary structures like the Berlin wall, that symbolized their leader’s fear of freedom and transparency.

This wall served two physical purposes:

  1. To keep their own people in,
  2. To keep meddling westerners and their ideas out.

The wall had social, emotional, psychological and philosophical effects on those living on both sides of the border too. Families were separated, many people were unable to return to their jobs or their homes, and the desire to leave grew more intense for those who found themselves trapped within.

In the USA we can come and go as we see fit. The world is our playground.

iron-curtain-europeIn the sixties and seventies we were told, in school and in the news, that people trying to get in or out through the Berlin wall were shot and killed by guards in towers. They had bright search lights to find people trying to get in or out in the dark of night. The images we were shown were cold and loveless and this wall, as well as all the other walls set up to segregate the west from the USSR, were given a cold and loveless name, “The Iron Curtain.” Just the sound of it coming out of the TV was enough to create nightmares in your dark and silent room at night. This was definitely something we would never do to our people.  This wall was evil, and so were the controlling ideologies behind it.

It was something that should be stopped.

Growing up in the USA may have given me a slightly biased point of view regarding much of what we were told and shown, but many of the facts were quite visible; such as the Berlin Wall itself, its guard towers, search lights, and armed guards, barbed wire, dogs, minefields. A lot of thought, time, energy and money went into the creating and maintaining of this security system.

Today I find the news equally as disturbing as when I was a child. Millions of Americans are living nightmares that we are creating for ourselves. We are building a fence between our country and Mexico for many of the same reasons the Russians did in East Germany and all along the Soviet Union’s borders with NATO countries. Today we are deploying more than just armed border agents, some dogs and a big fence. We also have ground sensors, spotlights, double walls separated by many yards of open space, barbed wire, and even drones. There is talk of sending the National Guard to the border. The techniques of the past with the weapons of today.

We are spending more per year on border security than in any other single government agency. We aim to keep people out of our more prosperous nation and protect ourselves from the percieved negative influences of Mexico and beyond.

us-iron-curtain

We, too, are dividing families and communities that once moved freely back and forth from Mexico to the US and back again. Many migrant workers who used to come north during harvest season and go back home to Mexico when the harvesting is done, are now forced to either stay here in the US for fear of not being able to return to work when the picking seasons start up again, or stay in Mexico and search for new places to live and new means of sustaining the family.

Going back to the early sixties and seventies and the Berlin wall, even with all of the money and effort and labor that went into that fortification, it was far from 100% effective. It is said there were around 2,000 people who escaped through the wall. There were always people looking for ways to get something in, or smuggle something out. It is estimated that around 200 people were killed trying to escape.

So far, aside from the anonymous postings of hateful cowards, few people have publicly said they were in favor of shooting people trying to immigrate to the United States like they did in Germany and in various other countries in the Soviet bloc. “Joe the Plumber”  is a notable exception, and some so-called Patriots on the Mexico-American border. Herman Cain spoke of electrifying the border fence, but he quickly back-pedaled when called on it.

Someone should tell Joe, Herman, and all those “Patriot” nuts at the border that the Berlin wall has come down. It was viewed as a testament to the failure of Communism as well as the relentless attraction of Democracy, a sign that all men seek freedom and self-determination as a meaningful and important part of human nature that cannot be separated from us by any man made object.

President Ronald Reagan gave a speech shortly before the wall was taken down. He criticized the wall and pushed for its destruction. In that speech was a simple philosophy behind such idea:

“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”

6/12/87 President Ronald Reagan

That would also mean it would be analogous to say prohibiting human liberty would be anathema to world peace, too.

Are the anti-immigration reform people opposed to World Peace, because a good part of their platform doesn’t seem to support that idea very much.

The old Soviet Union is far from the only country that tried and failed to overly control it’s citizens. There are many other examples of a failed fortified stance against immigration/emigration.

Every day there are news reports of security breaches in the Israel-Gaza wall, the Egypt-Gaza wall, and once in a while someone infiltrates or escapes from North Korea.

No wall ever built has been 100% effective at keeping people in or out.

berlin-wall-soldier

The great wall of China, arguably the largest, longest living, and most expensive border security barrier ever built, failed to keep many invaders out. It is a living testament for the entire world that erecting barriers to keep people out of one area or another does not work, and it stands as proof positive that you can spend all the money you want and take centuries to build something, but you still won’t prevent the entry of people who are determined to get in. Not even the walls and moats surrounding relatively tiny pieces of real estate, such as castles and forts kept people out who were highly motivated to get in. We have tried for aeons to fence things off and keep people out or keep them in. Prisons have escapees. Alcatraz was hugely successful, having a strong current and  hundreds of yards of bay surrounding their fences and guard towers, yet a few people escaped from there too.

Even if we were to figure out how to build an Alcatraz like system all along the 2000 miles of border between the US and Mexico, and even if we had the money to build it, that is not the only access point that is vulnerable to people wanting in or out of our country. We have airports, shipping ports, thousands of miles of coastlands, as well as our border to the north with Canada, and our Hawaiian Islands as well as the thousands of Islands in and around our country. It would take generations of Americans working full-time and many trillions of tax dollars to fortify all of our access points. It would take untold billions of dollars to install security systems capable of monitoring every person’s movement, and billions to install devices on each citizen or visitor within our country to ensure they have a right to be here.

Which brings up a very important question: What would a 100% secure America look like? Prison? East Germany? The Gaza strip? Israel? Would you want your children to grow up in a place like this? Would you want to live in even a colorful, sunshiny prison? Where would we vacation, on a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by high fences with concertina wire and armed guards in towers with spotlights at night?

If the old USSR isn’t a good enough reminder for us that isolation is a nation killer, we will surely follow in their footsteps, walling off our nation and isolating ourselves from much of the outside world, stifling innovation, killing our economy and relegating us to the land “formerly known as the USA.” We will have to watch as a new super power emerges to lead us into the 21st or 22nd century.

Is this the legacy we want to leave behind?

us-medico-border-barbed-wire

Do we want to be known as the generation that lead to the end of our status as the leader of the free world?

If you would like to prevent this from happening, please enter your email address and become a part of the movement that seeks to end this un-American ideal. Join me and the thousands of other people working to ensure we leave a healthy, vibrant country to our children and grandchildren. They will thank us for it.

 

Rick Perry– Immigration Zero

Texas Governor Rick Perry is sending the National Guard to help stop refugee children from reaching our borders.

So, let me get this straight, he’s using an army of 1000 National Guard troops to stop little children who are escaping drugs, gangs, exploitation and death, and sending them back to the horror they are escaping. And he’d like to rewrite a law that allows them to come here–a law approved and passed by a Republican president.

So this makes him a good person? How? What on earth could be going through is mind?

Would he like to stand there and slap every little kid in the face for even thinking about coming here and escaping death too?

How far can the Republican party sink?

And the Democrats. . .

Where are the screaming and energized politicians voicing their strong opposition, ridiculing them for such poor judgement? Silent too eh? With leaders like these, America is in a world of shit. What more can be said?

At least Nancy Pelocy has the cajones to stand up against this ugly threat.

Sen. Jeff Sessions- immigration zero

Sen. Jeff Sessions is this week’s immigration zero.

Senator Sessions is a Republican from Alabama, and he has organized a movement in opposition to the GOP leadership’s (short-lived) immigration efforts. This guy is working overtime to combat immigration reform. Clearly an immigration zero. We need less people like this in office and more people willing to take a stand and help fix our country’s problems. Immigration reform has been an issue for decades and too many politicians, like Sen. Jeff Sessions, have stood in the way of progress, keeping our nation in chaos and controversy.

 

The Republican gift that keeps on giving

Republicans refusing to discuss immigration reform is the gift that keeps on giving. The Wall street journal, a conservative publication itself, ripped the Republicans for promising an immigration compromise, and then promptly denying its even possible.

I don’t know what the fuss is all about. I’ve been saying the Republicans feign interest in immigration reform when they need to, but then retreat to ultra-conservative party lines when the rubber actually meets the road.

In standard Orwellian fashion, the Republicans have shot themselves in the foot again, this time not even waiting until the end of the term to announce that immigration reform will not happen this year. That shows America they planned to sit on this issue, no matter how much it divides the country, until they think they can get it done the way they want it to get done. The old Republican refusal to negotiate stands as true today as it ever has.

Gridlock in Congress? The Republicans may well try to blame the Democrats, but I don’t thing they’re fooling anyone. How can anyone buy the “we refuse to negotiate and it’s the Democrats fault” excuse? Do the Republicans really think we’re that stupid?

I try to be impartial about politics in general. I don’t really care one way or another about Democrats or Republicans–Neither of them can seem to get anything done. What I do care about is what is being said, who is saying it, and how does that affect my family, and millions of other Americans like me, when it comes to keeping us all together. If the Democrats, or Peace and Freedom party, or the Green party, or anyone else, were pulling all this refusal to fix this system crap, I’d be angry at them. It just so happens that the majority of the stalemate in Washington, at least when it comes to the immigration fiasco, has Republican fingerprints all over it.

 

Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte- Immigration Zero

Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia has drawn a line in the sand

by repeatedly stating he will not vote for any immigration reform that leads to a path to citizenship for the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country.

He told a town hall meeting in the Shenandoah Valley in August, 2013, that,

“the House must chart its own course on immigration even if it never results in a bill President Barack Obama can sign.”

To further clarify his point, he said that,

“he’ll do everything he can to ensure the House never takes up the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill, which includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.”

If you read the full article you will see he also places the blame for not passing immigration reform squarely on the Democrats by stating,

“The folks who want to have a path to citizenship have held everything else hostage.”

So, by his rationale, anyone who insists on something being in the future immigration reform bill is holding the legislature hostage, doesn’t that also apply to the Republicans for having the exact opposite position? After all, if you state you “will not vote for any immigration reform that leads to a path toward citizenship, and are going to make sure the House never takes up the Senate bill,” aren’t you, by the same standard, doing the exact same thing? And by refusing to put the Senate bill to a vote, isn’t that just like shooting the only horse in the race? It is, after all, the Democrats, along with a few Republicans, who have been working tirelessly to propose an immigration bill that the Republicans could get behind. All the Republicans have done is refuse to bring it to a vote.