Insecurity and Distraction

A couple days ago, Sean Spicer, our WH Press Secretary, was confronted in an Apple store by an admittedly "impolite" critic of the President, a young woman of Indian descent, born here, no discernible accent, seems like her heart's in the right place, who asked him some annoying and rude questions, saying Trump is a "fascist" and so forth, and at one point Sean Spicer said this:  "It's such a great country that allows you to be here."

Now, I understand how annoying it can be to visit one of those telecom stores.  My wife and I have a scheme for dealing with it.  We play sane shopper/insane shopper.  They can either deal with her quickly and give us the best deal they have, or, I act like a silly lunatic in the store, creating distraction and chaos, and getting the other customers to join in, without actually bothering anyone, just creating General Disarray, but forcing the salesperson to hurry up and get us the hell out of there.  Learned it from my Dad.  I am fun to shop with.

So, I can imagine being confronted in one of these stores, and getting a little flustered with the lady asking the rather crude, lumpy questions about Russia and Treason and Fascism, but Spicer's response was very telling...

Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa long known being a One-Trick-Pony (immigrant-bashing), tweeted, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."  And he doubled down... 

And King himself refused to back away from the tweet. On CNN Monday morning, King said, "I meant exactly what I said," and that he'd "like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective."

There have been large shifts in the demographics of the world over the past couple-thousand years.  We are still in the midst of this shifting.  The US is a very recent product of this shifting.  We are a country made up mostly of immigrants.  During certain periods in our history, we had unprecedentedly high levels of upward mobility, and most always more than the rest of the world.  We absorbed new, usually rather poor, immigrants as the last wave moved up.  Now that upward mobility is down, below that of Europe, irony, the Right blames the immigrants and minorities, irony of ironies, for that lack of upward mobility.  In case you don't know, immigrants and minorities, pretty much by definition, only hold so much power.  They are not politically capable of holding back those above the mobility-ladder from them, and it is not in their interest to hold down themselves.

The Grown-Up Question raised here should be, "How do we increase upward mobility?"

Well, here's how not to do it...

The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill.

“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let (Obamacare) implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump said to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price,... “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”

..both the new president and some of his closest allies have expressed both a strong opposition to net neutrality and a profound ignorance of what the concept actually means.

 America's infrastructure is close to failing.

And it just goes on...

You can blame immigrants and minorities if you like, but if you don't want to have the babies, and you don't want to build the roads, and you don't care if you can get proper health care, maybe you should just get the fuck out of the way and let someone "else's" BABY take care of things.

JMJ 

Promises, Promises...

I always really hated this song... so, listen to it, LISTEN TO IT AND SUFFER LIKE WE ALL HAD TO IN THE EIGHTIES!!!

So, back to Crazy Promises...

Crazy Promise #3:  Banning the Muslim Immigrants

On Dec 7, 2015, the anniversary of the "day which will live in infamy," then-candidate Donald Trump and his team pronounced a demand that was essentially a ban on all Muslims entering the United States, much to the delight of the his devotees and right-wing pundits, without much of a further thought on the subject, let alone that little anniversary thing, beyond digging the hole deeper.

By May of the following year, it was "merely an idea, not a proposal."

So then, on Jan 27 of this year, President Donald "Wow, didja' ever imagine that?" Trump signed Executive Order 13769, banning travel from seven mostly poor, troubled, war-torn (including war-torn by us!) and mostly Muslim countries.  It was done with people banned already in flight to the US.  Banned in mid-air.  The Trump people said it was intentionally done as such - wouldn't want to give a heads-up to the ter'ists, DUH!  Not that many ter'ists ever came here from any of those countries, as opposed to from say, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, or any of the more developed and "friendly" (with friends like that...) nations we have over there.  It included people who had risked theirs and their families lives to collaborate with the US on our completely failed "Mission Accomplished" in the Middle East.  Lawsuits followed quickly, Trump had to fire the acting-AG and others as they couldn't comply on ethical and legal grounds, and the courts found the ban violated the Establishment Clause, harmed the States, and had to be re-written in a competent and Constitutional way.

So, today, March 6th, we have a new Executive Order.  It's certainly more polished than the Cuneiform  product we got last time, so we'll see how it stands up.  But it's the same idea.

It doesn't "ban all Muslims," folks.  Just one's from some really poor, screwed-up places.  At least he had the decency to remove Iraqis from the list.  That was just horrible on soooo many levels.  But the name of the order, "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES," is a crazy promise that is not here kept.  Expect the courts to be swept into this again shortly.

JMJ