Representative Ryan Zinke (R) introduced a bill that would revoke the visas and refugee status of a number of Palestinians…
The Safeguarding Americans From Extremism Act would require the Department of Homeland Security to refrain from issuing visas or granting refugee, asylum, or temporary protected status to anyone holding a passport issued by the Palestinian Authority. It would also revoke visas and refugee or asylum status for anyone who was granted it on or after October 1.
The bill also directly orders Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove those who lose their lawful status in the country under the new criteria.
“This is the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen and it’s well deserved,” Zinke said in a statement that conflated all Palestinians with Hamas…
-The New Republic, November 3 2023
I appreciate that some of my liberal/progressive friends here (and elsewhere) are aghast over what is happening now in Gaza. I’ve been appalled at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for decades. But if you want to blame somebody for this, I’d suggest Putin because this has his fingerprints all over it. And…more generally…American evangelicals, who are some of the most anti semitic people you will ever meet (but in a very pleasant southern I’ll pray for you way), but need Israel to exist for their end times theology.
Jewish people have a right to exist. They have a right to keep to their faith and live in peace. So do Palestinians. What do you suppose is going to happen to either of these here in the United States when Stephan Miller gets his grimy hands back on the levers of power? When a president beloved of white supremacists gets back into the White House? When the MAGA brownshirts are free, free at last to act out their fantasies on the streets of this country…while chanting You will not replace us?
These last few weeks, it was mostly speculation. There was suspicion that most Americans supported him but I could hope that it was wrong. But now that hope is gone. And I have to feel differently. I have to feel like maybe most Americans don’t want me here. And I feel like no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be part of the community. And even if they’re friendly to me, or if they invite me to Thanksgiving, deep down they believe that America is a country that belongs to white people.
…then remember everything that followed. The attacks on Muslims. The attacks on Jews. The kids yanked from their parents at the border…
Toddlers standing before an immigration judge. ICE agents taking patients from hospitals, workers from the fields, children from their schools… Hispanics who have lived here almost all their lives suddenly deported to Mexico…and then killed by gangs…
News Item:
On June 4, just days after protests began in Wilmington regarding the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, a Sergeant Heflin was conducting monthly video audits — a routine part of her job — when she came across what was labeled as ‘accidental activations’ from Piner’s car….
Here’s what they found being said during those accidental activations…
“We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fu—– ni—–. I can’t wait. God, I can’t wait.”
-Port City Daily (Wilmington Delware) June 24, 2020
…three extremist supreme court justices and all the Trump judges now in the federal courts. The coup attempt on January 6.
Trump is already talking about weaponizing the Justice department.
Who do you think Trump will put into all those military promotions Tuberville and the republicans are holding open for him? He’s talking about invoking The National Emergencies Act immediately after taking back the White House. With his people firmly in place I don’t think keeping the senate and winning back the house is going to help much. But you can dream.
We are in a knife fight for the existence of our democracy. Results from last Tuesday’s elections are promising, but that all goes out the window if Trump gets his hands back on the levers of power. Find another Nader or Stein if you want, but you will not escape the calamity that follows if Trump wins anymore than the rest of us will, by saying the democrats didn’t give you a good enough reason to vote for them.
Some time ago I saw this in my Twitter feed and immediately thought of Fred Clark and his amazing series of reviews of the Left Behind books…
This is an angle the writers of various tribulation stories always overlook, because for some reason the AntiChrist needs to always to be portrayed as a smooth operator. An international celebrity whose words and deeds completely hypnotize the masses into doing his bidding. But imagine a different take…
…Imagine for a moment, the AntiChrist as a reality show buffoon. A transparently bogus swindler, a cheat, a carnival con artist. A bar stool bigot who isn’t fooling anybody. It’s the AntiChrist not as a smooth operator with a silken voice and impeccable manners, but a loudmouthed ignoramus, a second rate swindler. He’s not impressive, he’s pathetic.
And yet civilization falls.
Then, in the midst of all the wreck and ruin, have Satan appear and declare that this buffoonish Antichrist was his final gesture of contempt for humanity and the God that created it. Oh, he knows what’s coming…he knows he cannot win…it’s all preordained. This is his final middle finger at God Almighty. The world ends, civilization is defeated, not by a master liar and clever manipulator, but by a babbling bragging buffoon even a half wit could see through, and that so many were willing to follow anyway, not because they were deceived but because he validated them.
“…It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead…with stories. In these stories it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame.”
Fear of guns is not irrational, the way homophobia is. Guns are dangerous. They’re weapons. That is their purpose. To say same sex marriage is dangerous to society, the nation and humanity is beyond ridiculous, it is perverse.
To love and accept love from another, and everything that goes with it, being trustworthy, honesty, kindness, sympathy, without these things all we have is the jungle. They say that love makes the world go ’round, but it’s the very things that love cultivates in a person, that make civilization possible.
There’s a tombstone in Washington DC that reads: When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one. It took a lot of hard work and struggle, but now they’d have given him and his boyfriend a wedding if that was in the cards for them. And every time I have to choose between the politician who would let me have a gun but not a wedding, versus a politician that would let me have a wedding but not a gun, I will, with some regret but unhesitatingly vote for the wedding over the gun. To regard guns as dangerous things is not irrational, it is obvious. To regard same sex love and romance as dangerous is deranged. Too many people are these days.
Seeing Events Through That Other Planet You Were Raised On
I’ve been pretty open about being raised in a Baptist household. Sometimes I even joke about it. But those are my roots and there are times, like now as I’m reading the story of Kevin Spacey and Anthony Rapp, that I find myself more than a little glad it was what it was when I was a boy, and wishing it left me with better eyes for understanding this world better than it did.
Mom, to her dying day, never once swore in my presence, never drank while I was growing up, and never once touched tobacco, let alone anything else. I remember going to a friends apartment for the first time and seeing his mom walk into the dining room and light up a cigarette and the shock of it, go ahead and laugh, is still something I can recall vividly. I didn’t know moms smoked, and there right in my presence was the living proof that some did. I felt uncomfortable being in his apartment after that. Later in her life, retired, content in her little southern Virginia apartment, surrounded by family and friends, I came to understand that mom would happily have a glass or two of wine every now and then. Amused, I often wondered if she did it knowing full well her mother was rolling in her grave. To her dying day, she never touched a drop of alcohol in front of her son. And even back in the day, those early 70s teenage days of parties with all sorts of things being passed around, I never let myself get drunk or stoned in front of her. At 17 I was beginning to see how lucky I’d had it, even accounting for our low budget lifestyle, and the fact that so many of my grade school teachers just assumed I would be a problem child because I was the Product Of Divorce. Behave in front of your kid, the way you want them to behave in front of others. And she did. Always.
That upbringing put something into me…not only a sense of how I as an adult needed to behave, but also how adults behave around kids. Not so much out of a cheap sense of propriety and decorum but because one of the line items at the very top of the job description of ADULT is you keep the next generation healthy, safe, and prepared for their own adult lives. And what I’ve learned, from mom, and from walking through my adult life with my eyes wide open, is you do that almost exclusively by becoming the adult you want them to grow up to be. Preach all you want and it just goes in one ear and out the other. But they watch. You live it, and that will take. How much of all the crap we wade through in the news every day lately, is the end effect of adults saying one thing to kids and doing another.
So I’m reading all this about Kevin Spacey and how fourteen year old Anthony Rapp was there at a cast party, watching TV in a bedroom, and Spacey walks in drunk, hits the bathroom then comes out and picks the kid up, plops him down on the bed and lays on top of him. And the kid squirms away, runs into the bathroom, then after a while comes back out and gets the hell out of there. I appreciate that Spacey has apologised and said he was drunk at the time and doesn’t remember it. Spacey needs to appreciate something the ancients knew: in vino veritas.
As I’ve grown older, and sat down in my share of bars, and downed a good amount of alcohol, I’ve come to find the I Was Drunk defense a bit puzzling…because if alcohol did anything to you it was to pull the curtain aside and let the inner you out. Maybe that was the person you were always hard wired to be. Maybe you let yourself become that person. But…whatever…in vino veritas. It wasn’t the drink. It was you. Spacey needs to ask himself how he became someone, some Adult, who could do those things, and especially to a kid at the age where sexual urges are just beginning to emerge.
Starting with…how could you just walk stinking drunk into a room with a teenager in it and not be deeply embarrassed? How do you even get that drunk at a party where there are kids. I’m sure a cast party can involve a lot of uncorking and letting go of stress and that’s fine. But that obligation to set an example never goes away just because it is inconvenient. Welcome to Adulthood! Arrange some adults-only get together for later, celebrate with the kids in the cast now, make it a memorable experience for them, send them off with visions of the future…and then retire to the grownup club and get it all off your chest There.
If it seems like I’m fixating on the drunkenness over the sexual abuse it’s because it’s one of those telling little details that, at least for me, snaps the rest of the picture into place. He didn’t care there was a kid in front of him…and all the tomorrows that will ever be so long as there are kids to behold them. The way we treat children is our verdict on the human race. And…ourselves. As nice as it would have been to just let go and drink himself into John Barleycorn bliss at that cast party the instant Spacey walked into it and saw kids there he needed to be an adult and he couldn’t be bothered. There’s the problem. The rest of it was all of a piece.
If Trump wins, don’t blame me I voted for… won’t cut it. Don’t blame me I voted for the democrat, I tried to stop him…, is only marginally better. But this is our country, all of us. We are all to blame for what it becomes. In a time like this, it is not enough to wave the flag and strike a pose.
I appreciate how it is that involving yourself in politics can make you feel morally dirty. Perhaps this is why the old time protestant fundamentalists here in America so ostentatiously kept themselves out of worldly matters. But for those of us who care, and who cannot look away at injustice, that is not our destiny. At its best politics is still mostly compromise and consensus and you are presented with choices that you probably don’t like, but can live with, in order to get one small good thing accomplished. At its worst it is a bitter knife fight in the human gutter where you find yourself making decisions and backing choices you desperately didn’t want to make, in order to save ground you know you absolutely cannot afford to lose.
But that is our lot in life. If the fight to make this a better world isn’t making you feel dirty, you are not in the fight.
…We Admitted That Our Lives Had Become Unmanageable…
Put the bottle down. Please. For everyone’s sake…
The polls were not skewed. Nate Silver was not making things up. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He did not raise taxes. The unemployment figures were not faked. Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. Climate Change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Christians are not being treated like Jews were in Germany in the 1930s…
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