“Walker Eyes Border Wall … For The Other Border”: A Nutty Idea, Even By The Standards Of GOP Presidential Candidates
When far-right politicians endorse the construction of a massive border wall, they rarely specify which border, because it’s simply assumed they’re not overly concerned about Canadians.
When it comes to border security, it’s only natural to wonder why Republicans seem vastly more energized about our neighbors to the south than those to the north. I was delighted to see NBC’s Chuck Todd ask Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) about this yesterday.
One issue he plans to fix if elected is the terrorist threat posed by the nation’s porous borders, and he said while he’s most concerned about the southern U.S. border, he’d be open to building a wall to secure the northern border as well.
“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire. 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,” he said.
And I’ll be eager to hear what the far-right candidate comes up with after he “looks at” building a northern border wall – because the idea is a little nutty, even by the standards of GOP presidential candidates.
For now, let’s put aside the issues – the costs, the needs, etc. – related to a building a giant wall along the U.S/Mexico border. Let’s instead consider Walker’s apparent concerns about Canada.
As the Republican governor may know – his home state is roughly along the northern border – the United States and Canada don’t simply share a lengthy land mass. There are these things known as the “Great Lakes,” which the two countries share. Even trying to build a giant wall through them would be … how do I put this gently … impractical.
The alternative, of course, is building a water-front wall along U.S. states that border the lakes. Some folks might not like the view, but we’re either going to take border security seriously or we’re not, right?
There’s also the not-so-small matter of Alaska. Even if a Walker administration takes up a plan to build a wall from Seattle to Maine, let’s not forget that the United States actually has two borders with Canada: one along Canada’s southern border, and then another along Canada’s northwestern border. Indeed, the border Alaska shares with British Columbia and Yukon Territory (about 1,500 miles) is almost as long as the border the continental United States shares with Mexico (about 1,900 miles).
Depending on how serious the Wisconsinite is about this, we’ll probably have to talk about some maritime borders, too, since we run the risks of terrorists and undocumented immigrants showing up along American shorelines in boats.
Given the Republican Party’s general hostility towards investing in American infrastructure, it’s important to note that these border walls would likely carry an enormous price tag. Nevertheless, Scott Walker considers this “a legitimate issue for us to look at,” so let the debate begin.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 1, 2015
“Republicans Aim For Their Own Feet”: An Unerring Genius For Alienating Exactly The Demographics It Needs
What do women want? Republicans are trying to answer that question and, as usual, they are getting it wrong.
The party has an unerring genius for alienating exactly the demographics it needs to win the White House. Republicans have made it harder for students, urbanites, and minorities to vote. Many of their presidential candidates are competing over who can deport the most immigrants and build the best border wall. Why should the GOP approach to women be any different?
Donald Trump, who has been flamboyantly insulting to immigrants, isn’t helping Republicans with women, either. His history of crude insults about female appearances led NBC’s Chuck Todd to ask him, “Why do looks matter to you so much?” He still talks in weird generalizations and 1950s stereotypes about women (see: “I cherish women” or “women love me” or “I understand the importance of women”).
You’d think Carly Fiorina, another presidential contender from the business world, and the only woman in the GOP field, would have a better handle on this. But she has become a lightning rod because she opposes a requirement that businesses offer paid leave to new parents. She wants it to be a perk companies offer to attract workers.
The United States is the only advanced country that doesn’t give employees paid parental leave, as President Obama has noted repeatedly. But Fiorina says requiring paid parental leave discourages the hiring and promotion of women. Besides, she asks, who would pay for it?
Fiorina’s position, however, carries its own health and monetary costs. Mothers who don’t take leave are less likely to breastfeed or bring a baby to doctor appointments. And low-income workers who take unpaid leave to care for an infant often rely on government help. “When a low-wage worker cannot even have a sick day or a paid leave day after the birth of an infant, she is far more likely to go on assistance, public assistance,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sponsor of a bill requiring paid leave, told Fortune magazine. The upshot is that taxpayers foot the bill, she added.
As for the politics of paid leave, Fiorina’s stand is a loser. Polls show 60 to 80 percent of Americans support requiring paid leave for new parents. That 80 percent figure, from a CBS/New York Times poll in May, includes 71 percent of Republicans and 85 percent of women.
Now abortion is preoccupying the GOP, thrust there by conservatives who secretly filmed Planned Parenthood executives talking casually and graphically about the mechanics and costs of donating tissue from aborted fetuses for research. Republican candidates have grabbed at the chance to demonstrate their credentials as cultural conservatives — emphasizing their opposition to abortion and demanding an end to federal funding of Planned Parenthood, even if that leads to a government shutdown. Some 50 advocacy groups are co-sponsoring protests in nearly 300 cities this weekend to highlight what the Family Research Council calls “Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and selling of aborted baby parts.”
Ohio governor John Kasich explained the rising prominence of the abortion issue this way recently on CNN: “Now that the issue of gay marriage is kind of off the table, we’re kind of down to one social issue.”
The nature of the GOP primary electorate requires that Republican candidates take as hard a line as they can against abortion and explain in great detail their positions on exceptions, restrictions, and any shifts in thinking they may have undergone. They may be convinced that this won’t hurt them with women or moderates in a general election. Gallup found in May that 21 percent of Americans would only vote for a candidate who shared their view on abortion. That’s an all-time high in the 19 years the question has been asked, but they were about equally divided on both sides of the issue.
So does that make it a wash? Probably not. For one thing, the tide seems to be turning in the other direction. Half of Americans told Gallup in May that they were “pro-choice” on abortion compared with 44 percent who said they were “pro-life.” Analyst Lydia Saad wrote that was the first statistically significant lead for the “pro-choice” position in seven years. In addition, polls show pluralities of Americans have positive views of Planned Parenthood and oppose cutting off its federal money.
That hasn’t stopped various Republican hopefuls from calling for a Justice Department investigation into Planned Parenthood. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, has even vowed to sic the IRS on the group. The crusade is a classic example of overreach that could backfire in a general election. Republicans are their own worst enemy on this, but here’s the real problem: They are jeopardizing health care for low-income women who need birth control, cancer screening, or — yes — an abortion. The potential political bonanza for the Democratic nominee is not worth that price.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, August 20, 2015
“OK, This Trump Thing Isn’t Funny Anymore”: Shouting ‘White Power’ At Rallies, Endorsed By The Daily Stormer, The Joke Is Over
It has been more than two months since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, and slowly but surely the entertainment factor as been on the wane and the fear factor has been on the rise.
As his poll numbers steadily keep him in a comfortable first place in the crowded GOP field, and he packs stadiums—receiving raucous applause in Alabama and along the Mexican border—his fiery and divisive rhetoric has taken on a new meaning. His positions have now become the focal point of the GOP field and all candidates must respond to Trump before they can proceed.
What he and his supporters say can no longer be considered a joke. During his rally in Mobile, Alabama, screams of “white power” could be heard from the audience. And last week, two white ex-cons from Boston beat up a homeless Hispanic man, and upon their arrest they told the police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”
In response to the attack, Trump said, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.” He did not initially decry their actions, but later stated on Twitter that he thought the attack was “terrible.”
The joke is over. The horrors of a Trump presidency should not be lost on anyone. His immigration plan calls for the deportation of the estimated 11-12 million undocumented immigrants who have entered via our southern border. This position has definitely stoked the fire of Americans who are not pleased with our immigration policies, but an America that rounds up and forcefully removes a race or class of people is most certainly a dystopian nation that encourages lawlessness and anarchy.
If these policies were enacted, what would prevent American citizens from destroying the documentation of legal Hispanic immigrants, and forcefully deporting them or using the threat of deportation as leverage for rampant abuse? Arizona already has the “show me your papers” provision of SB 1070 that essentially treats Hispanics as illegal until proven innocent.
This reality might seem farfetched, but in fact America has traversed this territory before. My forebears in South Carolina were free persons of color since the late 1700s and lived as second-class citizens, but in the 1860s prior to emancipation, certain municipalities started requesting that FPCs show their papers or be forced into slavery. Many FPCs had never needed papers before, so they regularly went about their lives without documentation.
But overnight this changed. Without papers you were assumed to be a slave, and white America would see to it that you were “returned” to a life of slavery. Additionally, it was illegal to educate blacks in South Carolina, so some FPCs were illiterate, and therefore even if they had documentation it was difficult for them to prove the papers’ legitimacy. Many FPCs ran for their lives, and attempted to flee the state, but countless of them were rounded up and forced into slavery.
Essentially, even though 150 years may have passed, too many Americans are still advocating for oppressive, segregationist, and pre-Civil War policies. But this time these Americans may have decided to direct most of their hatred towards a different shade of people.
When you examine Trump’s unilateral and authoritarian foreign policy positions more red flags are raised. Invading a country to take its oil is something America has already attempted with dire consequences. Does he honestly think that he can force Mexico to pay for the construction of a wall along our border?
Concerning women’s issues and basic respect for another person he is equally troubling, and the rekindling of his vile and sexist war of words with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly shows this. He again called her a bimbo and demeaned her physical appearance. If these were merely the comments of a clown, we could brush them off and ignore them. But when it is a billionaire clown that is the GOP presidential front-runner, we all should be incredibly concerned. If this man had the authority to create and approve laws, what would his policies regarding women’s rights look like?
Even his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” stokes a nationalistic fervor that makes some Americans—predominately conservative white Americans—feel as though they are under attack from ruinous anti-American elements that need to be defeated. Yet if American greatness existed prior to the 1960s, I am sure that countless other Americans would not want to return to that era, which sure wasn’t very welcoming for them.
In another time and another place we would probably view Trump’s rise to prominence along a fascist trajectory similarly to the European movements of the early 20th century and discuss his every move as a cautionary tale, but as of yet we have not. But we should pay attention when the Daily Stormer, a conservative, Neo-Nazi and white nationalist publication, endorses Trump for president, as it did Tuesday.
This is alarming. Yet I wonder if this lack of alarm exists because his language is not foreign to American society. We have always proclaimed ourselves to be a meritocratic society where anyone can work his way to the top with hard work, but parallel to this narrative was the reality that persons of color have always had limited opportunities for advancement. Therefore, it has always been commonplace to demean the poor and/or persons of color because they supposedly had “earned” their lower station in life due to an assumed predisposition toward sloth or some other negative activity.
As long as America ignored its oppressive structures then people had an unlimited license to demean and ridicule people who they felt had “earned” less than they. It now became acceptable to fabricate negative narratives to explain an oppressed group’s lower station in life, and Trump is invoking this cultural trait to a dangerous effect.
Trump is rallying his supporters around a narrative of nationalistic pride, collective frustration, and dehumanizing language regarding persons of color and women, and this cannot be a platform American society can embrace again. Our collective fear concerning his candidacy should be about what era of America’s past he wants to return us to in his quest to “Make America Great Again.”
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, August 27, 2015
“Donald Trump — Man Of War”: Do The Trumpeteers Actually Listen, Thoughtfully And Carefully, To What Trump Says?
We should all give thanks to Donald Trump’s reality-TV-show run for the Republican presidential nomination because of what it reveals about his fan base.
Assuming Trump’s supporters have actually listened to what the narcissistic real estate developer has been saying, what they want is multiple ground wars, an America that steals from other countries, an America that kills people because of their religion, and a massive police state constantly checking people (especially Hispanics and Latinos) to determine whether they’re undocumented and should be arrested and deported, and even have their citizenship taken away.
These Trumpeteers evidently want a president who believes his duties include humiliating anyone who asks questions he wishes had not been asked or whose business decisions he dislikes.
On a personal level, they want a president whose family values included years of keeping a mistress, Marla Maples, and who, after not having marital relations with his wife for more than 16 months, flew into a rage, tore hair from her head, and allegedly violated her sexually. Ivana Trump, after her testimony came out, said she did not mean “rape” in the sense that her husband should be prosecuted for a crime, but she has never wavered otherwise from her description of that violent bedroom assault.
Trump also abandoned his daughter with Maples, providing financial support but not much more, according to the girl’s mother. (If anyone has photos of Trump and daughter Tiffany taken in the last year, please send them to davidcay@me.com.)
The Trumpeteers also want a president whose own words indicate he is at times delusional, seeing demon-like changes in the face of Fox News personality Megyn Kelly. Her calm visage was visible to anyone watching the debate, yet Trump has said repeatedly that “everyone” saw Kelly become so visibly angry she had “blood coming from her eyes.”
Of course all of these observations rest on the assumption that the Trumpeteers actually listen, thoughtfully and carefully, to what Trump says — and that they understand our Constitution.
Trump has sold himself like a bottle of Coke – all fizz and fun with no substance. And my fellow journalists at the five major newspapers, the major broadcast outlets, and other news organizations have failed to vet the candidate — with minor and tepid exceptions.
The Donald’s marital violence has gotten some mention, for example, but with an emphasis on obfuscations by him and her fudging on the word “rape.”
Likewise, his extensive ties to the biggest Mafia figures in New York and Atlantic City, his history of cheating workers and vendors, and other unsavory aspects of his biography go largely unreported. I laid these out in an earlier National Memo column, but the major news organizations have tended to ignore skeletons in Trump’s closet — again there are exceptions, namely Michael Smerconish on CNN; Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC.
Trump gets a free ride because it’s cheap and easy to cover what candidates say, but takes actual work to examine what they have done. And work costs more.
Let’s start with war-mongering, because if Trump gets his finger on the button, that is exactly what we will get – not just a war, but multiple wars. He says we must have American troops on the ground in Iran, Iraq, and the “Islamic State” in parts of Syria and Iraq. This also means vast occupying armies, though Trump never mentions this fact and journalists fail to ask about that necessary step, if we are to steal the oil and install puppet regimes.
Trump has been urging war for almost 30 years. On Meet the Press in 1987, he said we should use the firing of a single bullet as a reason to invade Iran, seize its oil, and, as he put it, “let them have the rest” of their country.
As a presidential candidate, Trump has said he stands by those remarks and added that he wants American troops to invade the Middle East both to suppress the religious government emerging in parts of Syria and Iraq and to steal oil.
“I am the most militaristic person there is,” Trump proudly declared Aug. 10 on Morning Joe.
This assurance comes from a man who assiduously avoided the Vietnam-era draft, ultimately claiming “minor” bone spurs made him 4-F, though his accounts raise questions about his fidelity to facts. Trump has also said he opposed the Vietnam War, so his promotion of war as policy came only when other young men faced hostile bullets.
Trump has long walked with a bodyguard or two, and has an aversion to shaking hands with other people. (I have seen him go immediately wash his hands after he had no choice but to grip another person’s hand.)
Trump claims he speaks plainly, but he never says he wants to “steal” oil from other countries. Instead, Trump has repeatedly said over the last four years that America should “take the oil” of sovereign nations. In this context “take” and “steal” are synonymous.
Trump is not alone among Republican candidates in favoring another ground war in the Middle East — explicitly a religious war, waged against a modern caliphate (a theocratic government run by a presumed successor to the Prophet Muhammad).
For example, John Kasich, the Ohio governor who is always reminding us of his Christianity, also wants a ground war for the explicit purpose of destroying the emerging caliphate.
As with Trump’s preposterous claim that he can make Mexico pay for an impenetrable wall along the U.S. border, he shows no respect for the fact that Earth has about 200 sovereign nations. Instead he sees other countries as subservient to America and promises to dispatch ground troops wherever he thinks a country needs to be brought to heel.
Trump also seems unaware that no wealthy country has ever managed to keep ambitious poor people from entering it legally or otherwise, a lesson the Romans learned long ago.
His plans would require vast increases in government spending. So why do self-identified conservative Republicans, who want to pay less in taxes and enjoy a smaller government, favor his plans?
Creating a smaller government and lowering taxes is logically inconsistent with waging multiple wars while rounding up and deporting people who either entered the country illegally or stayed after their visas expired.
The long-term costs of more ground wars in the Middle East would run into the trillions of dollars with bills coming due well into the 22nd century as pensioners, widows, and the disabled children of veterans collect benefits for probably many decades after everyone old enough to read this is dead.
Worse, these unnecessary wars of plunder are likely to turn allies and nominal allies into enemies, inviting even more wars and, thus, more costs. America would be seen not as a beacon of liberty and opportunity, but a selfish, thieving, and dangerous pariah state.
The taxpayer cost for rounding up anyone perceived as an illegal immigrant could well be $200 billion. On top of that, there would be disruptions to business — adding billions more to the nation’s tab. And that doesn’t take into account the human cost of turning America into a police state where people turn in neighbors, perhaps for financial rewards or to avoid prosecution for misprision of a felony.
So yes, we should be thankful to Trump. His campaign is revealing just how many people in this country want America to become a modern Sparta, run by a president who demonizes others, wants to limit their personal conduct, seeks to control business decisions, and supports a massive expansion of the police powers of the state — which includes building a wall that will not keep people from coming to America uninvited.
What Trump’s rise in the polls tells us is that many Americans have no idea what our Constitution says, and wrongly believe that sovereignty is only for America. They do not know, or care, that the men who founded this country believed in the common defense, but never in attacking other countries, especially not to steal.
Of course all this assumes the Trumpeteers have actually thought through the reasons they support Trump, and have taken the time to understand what he has said and what he has done. Let us hope for the sake of our liberty and peace that is a wrong assumption.
By: David Cay Johnston, Featured Post, The National Memo, August 22, 2015
“Some Americans Should Not Have Equal Rights?”: The Racist Roots Of The GOP’s Favorite New Immigration Plan
The year 1866 was an alarming one for xenophobes: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…to be citizens of the United States.” Though explicitly intended to grant citizenship to African-Americans, who’d been denied it by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, wouldn’t the law also “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” wondered Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan. “Undoubtedly,” responded Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the act, he too raised the specter of the Chinese and “the people called Gypsies.”
Congress overrode the veto, and went on to enshrine the principle of birthright citizenship in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Needless to say, fears about the children of the gypsies proved unfounded. Yet the idea that people with certain types of parents should be denied citizenship—and the associated rights—persisted. Late in the nineteenth century the government tried to withhold citizenship from the children of Chinese immigrants, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924. These days the target is Latino immigrants and their children. And thanks to Donald Trump, the nativist argument against birthright citizenship has moved from a sideline item to a centerpiece in the Republican primary.
In a set of immigration policies released Sunday, Trump called for an end to birthright citizenship, which he described as “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” Trump’s invocation of the fictitious “anchor baby” phenomenon isn’t particularly original. But what’s striking is that his implausible call for reinterpreting or rescinding the 14th Amendment has been taken up by so many of his competitors in the Republican field, including Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul. Chris Christie said recently that birthright citizenship should be “reexamined.” The much shorter list of those not in favor includes John Kasich (who previously advocated for revoking birthright citizenship), Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio, who stated that he is “open to exploring ways of not allowing people who are coming here deliberately for that purpose to acquire citizenship.”
The issue of birthright citizenship resurfaces every so often in Congress, but it’s never gotten much traction. Most recently Louisiana Senator David Vitter warned of the “exploding phenomenon” of “birth tourism,” and in March proposed to limit citizenship to those who have at least one parent with a green card or who’ve served in the military. Though bids like Vitter’s are more demagogic than actionable, some US-born children with undocumented parents already face hurdles related to their citizenship rights. Texas, for instance, recently began refusing to issue birth certificates to parents who use a photo ID from the Mexican Consulate as their only form of identification.
Kelefa Sanneh points out that, bluster aside, Trump is actually forcing a substantive policy debate. The substance is extreme: Walker, for instance, once supported comprehensive reform legislation that including labor rights and a pathway to legal status; now he is “absolutely” in favor of ending birthright citizenship. (So are 63 percent of Republicans, according to a 2010 Fox News poll.) While the GOP was once wondering whether Romney’s promotion of “self deportation” went too far, now candidates are pandering to the base’s racial anxieties with talk of undoing what historian Eric Foner characterizes as one of the Republican Party’s own “historic achievements.”
The irony is that doing so would dramatically increase the number of undocumented people living in the United States. (As has the militarization of the border.) Denying birthright citizenship to children with undocumented parents would bring the population of unauthorized people to as many as 24 million by 2050, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The result, according to MPI, would be the creation of “an underclass of unauthorized immigrants who, through no fault of their own, would be forced to live in the margins of US society.” In other words, undermining the 14th Amendment won’t solve the (nonexistent) problem of “birth tourism.” It would, however, do what the denial of citizenship has done since the era of Dred Scott: strip civil rights from a racialized group, facilitating their exploitation.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, August 19, 2015
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