------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Hope this posting is correct now--somehow, the whole thing ended up in title and I had to remove it the first time around.] I recommend the following article, written by the parent of a Peace Corps volunteer, that appeared in the Raleigh Observer in North Carolina,
Bravo to Sen. John McCain in the twilight of his
career for doing the right thing in voting against the Republicans’ so-called
health care bill. He has been considered a maverick because of his sometimes
quirky statements and actions, but the maverick came through heroically this
time. Notice that while Senator Murkowski and her whole state are being
mercilessly berated and threatened by Trump, he has made no such threats
against McCain or against Arizona—very hard to personally attack a war hero,
former Republican presidential candidate, and now probably terminally ill popular
elected official. Meanwhile, besides the Trump administration keeping the
health care market in a turmoil of uncertainty, the ACA website continues to
trash its own product by posting complaints about “Obamacare” and not
providing helpful information, in line with the Trump effort to sabotage
federal agencies and programs from within—let the fox into the henhouse, then
complain that the henhouse is not secure. It’s probably too much of a stretch
for Republican lawmakers to actually heed McCain’s call to reach across the
aisle to improve the flaws in Obamacare.
See a nice message below from a hospital nurse, where
I no longer work as a Spanish interpreter because they switched to a much cheaper
service making it not worth my time to work for the amount the new
interpretation agency is offering. The new pay scale allows a native
Spanish-speaker working their way up from child care and house cleaning to
interpreting, particularly a non-citizen, to take my place and be satisfied
with a lower payment, so more power to those taking over my position (though
these new interpreters are not tested for their ability, especially in
English and for knowledge of medical terms). I still am interpreting
elsewhere, but after 13 years at that hospital, I do miss working there.
It was such a pleasure working with
you. You were so good to us and most importantly our patients. You will
be missed. I know that you will provide excellent services for those who need
you. You should also be paid more because you are worth so much. Please let
us know how you are doing.
The young man who came through Mexico alone as an unaccompanied minor,
for whom I interpreted at an asylum interview, was not approved, so now must go before an immigration judge. His
lawyer said these days, fewer asylum requests than before are being granted.
Here’s
one of the main arguments I made in my Confessions
book about Latin American leaders’ support of Fidel Castro, stated
cogently by commentator Jose Azel in the Miami
Herald:
Given the abject failure of Cuba’s socioeconomic model, the
sycophancy of Latin American leaders towards the Cuban leadership is perhaps
best explained as a petulant form of anti-Americanism. It is not that the
Cuban revolution has accomplished much for the Cuban people; it has not. It
is that the Castros have successfully confronted the goliath of the North.
That seems to be what Latin American leaders’ value from the disastrous Cuban
experiment.
The
Cuban military, which already controls most of the economy, is moving
further. The experiment with licensed self-employment seems on the wane. The
Cuban military has already dispossessed the license holders in the lucrative
central Havana tourist area and now new self-employment licenses are not
being issued.
As Amnesty Int’l USA’s volunteer Caribbean coordinator, I have had 2
cases of Cuban asylum applicants being held in Immigration detention since
the end of wet-foot/dry-foot. The case I am testifying for right now was sent
to the USSR to study, then later became disaffected. His brother, also a
dissident, died under mysterious circumstances. This man also once helped
Oswaldo Paya, a prominent Cuba dissident (whom I once met) who also was
killed under suspicious circumstances. Raul Castro has been doubling down
against so-called self-employed licensees, no longer granting licenses and
driving them out of central Havana so the Cuban military can take over that
lucrative tourist market. Meanwhile, Venezuela, Cuba’s oil benefactor,
continues to implode under directions from Havana, periling Cuba’s oil
subsidies. The Cuban leadership in Venezuela is cutting off its nose to spite
its face.
|
State
Dept, is considering removing “democracy promotion” from its mission statement:
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Having a gun in hand seems to make it more likely that anyone—including a
police officer—will use that gun. It sounds as though the woman in
Minneapolis killed by a police officer might have startled him when she
approach the police car and apparently hit the side. Although tasers can
occasionally be lethal, that’s much less likely, but they can still disable
someone temporarily, so police should use a taser first and a gun only as a
last resort. While perhaps personal civilian gun possession has been declared
a “right” (though not so considered until fairly recently), isn’t protection from being killed or injured by a gun
also a right? What about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Trump needs to learn about probabilities, if, at age 71, he is capable of
learning anything at all, since he thinks already knows everything and
considers himself “very smart.” Any outcome is a matter of probabilities--never
100% certain. Yes, sometimes an undocumented person has killed an American
citizen, but does that mean all undocumented or even a significant number are
potential killers? The likelihood of a US-born person killing someone is
statistically much greater. Likewise, while occasionally a male college
student is falsely accused of rape
and should be exonerated, many more college rapes occur that are never
reported or where no action is taken. While an infinitesimal number of people
may have voted illegally (and may have even voted for Trump!), many more
potential voters have been turned away or discouraged from voting.
Stephen Colbert went to Moscow to the hotel room where Donald Trump is
rumored to have engaged in “pee-pee” or a “golden shower” with Russian
prostitutes, something filmed that could be used by Putin to blackmail Trump,
although Trump supporters are so diehard that they would probably dismiss it
as “fake news.” When I first heard about this alleged event, I thought it
meant the prostitutes let Trump urinate on them, but now, it seems, it was
the other way around, them peeing on him as lay on the bed or maybe he had
another role while watching them pee on the bed (let’s hope they changed the
mattress later).
A more likely blackmail threat to Trump from Russia beyond just sex
hijinks would be revelations about business contacts and involvements.
A former Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, Greg Andres is now part of
Mueller’s investigation team.
Certainly, things have been interesting—even entertaining—with Trump in
the presidency, though with some dire consequences for the country and the
world (and for the Republican Party). If Trump actually told the truth about
anything, would we even believe him?
Can Trump legally pardon all his family members and associates and even
pardon himself? The latter seems like a stretch. Could Nixon have pardoned
himself? Or Bill Clinton have done so, for that matter? Of course, Trump
doesn’t care how that would look if he did try to do it. He is impervious to
outside opinions of his own actions, which, in his eyes, are always
successful anyway. And he doesn’t seem capable of planning ahead or doing
strategic thinking. For example, he has simply told Republican lawmakers to
fix the health care problem, but he had no plans or ideas about how to do
that, nor does he seems to care what (Republican) governors want or about
Congressional Republicans’ reelection prospects. Probably in his businesses,
he simply told his underlings to go “fix” things and if they did not, they
were fired. That may be what will happen to Sessions, despite support for him
from Gingrich and others (Gingrich is also promoting his new book about
Trump).
A foul-mouthed, uncensored Anthony Scaramucchi combined with an unfettered
tweeter like Trump, now there was a nasty combination. General John Kelly seems
to have taken charge now by getting rid of Scaramucchi. So maybe “Mooch’s”
wife can withdraw her divorce filing.
Whew! Trump has announced that he is going on vacation—after all, he’s
“worked” so hard! That may give us a respite, thank goodness. I wish the rest
of his folks would take a long vacation.
Life is already hard enough—why let a deliberately vengeful minority make it
worse for everybody else? I have never seen a gang so mean, nasty, and
vindictive, so gratuitously cruel and just plain liars. Like reality TV,
which was Trump’s training for the presidency, not everything said is even
remotely true and real.
One happening under Trump for which he may deserve some credit, is that
not only did the stock market not fall, as some pundits had predicted, but in
anticipation of possible tax breaks, it actually has risen.
A local high school soccer star told Immigration about his college sports
scholarship and, within days, he and his brother were deported to El
Salvador. https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/f24dbf41-ea46-33fe-9af4-61113f1bd04d/ss_brothers-deported-to-el.html
Some of us--myself included--might like to imagine a future scenario
whereby these egregious deportations (happening in every state) might be
reversed under some special amnesty, though I agree that’s just wishful
thinking and really farfetched. While
some folks might cheer “getting really tough” on refugees and immigrants,
many more of us are appalled and hurt. What about majority rule? We might even
stipulate that as a condition of their return, these folks would have to
spend a certain amount of time in a region that is losing population,
including some of the strongholds of “deplorables.”
That way, the latter might find they have some common ground with immigrants.
What’s the point of most of the Trump administrations actions? How do they
benefit the rest of us? I could not feel very sorry for Jeff Sessions when
Trump was running him down because Sessions has been so relentlessly racist,
so devoid of human sentiment, playing to the worst instincts of Trump’s
shrinking base. He’s a funny-looking little man with no power of
communication or self-confidence who nonetheless managed to be elected to the
Senate and now has glommed onto Trump, hanging on for dear life. Must the
rest of the American people remain hostages of what Hillary Clinton rightly
called the “deplorables”?
This is cute spoof of Trump immigration policies, featuring the statue of
liberty, a French woman who doesn’t speak English spreading pro-immigration
propaganda.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/white-house-accuses-french-woman-of-spreading-pro-immigration-propaganda?mbid=nl_080317%20Borowitz%20Newsletter%20(1)&CNDID=38182798&spMailingID=11619202&spUserID=MTMzMTg0NDQ3MTgyS0&spJobID=1220268245&spReportId=MTIyMDI2ODI0NQS2
Most Americans remain hopeful about the future, despite Trump’s
assumption of the presidency. Many of us are looking forward to the day when
he will be gone from office, the sooner, the better. A huge cheer will go up
in the US and around the world when that happens. Until then, his faithful
supporters may still be expecting his promises to be fulfilled.
As both an adoptive and a birth parent, and a life-long Democrat, I agree
that the Democratic Party should have a “big tent” on the abortion issue.
Although I participated in the January women’s march in Washington, DC, I am
not a “right-to-choose” militant. Contraception, morning-after pills, frozen embryos—no
arguments there, but certainly after the first trimester, there would have to
be a very strong reason (in terms of mother’s or fetal health) to undertake
an abortion, a position that the majority of Americans support. If the
Democratic Party wants to win (or win back) Hispanic and Catholic voters,
they have to become less self-righteous and rigid on the abortion issue.
|
Anna Adams, whom I have known since were both age 14 and living in
Colombia, has just died. We, her friends, knew she was seriously ill, but we
were planning to celebrate her 80th birthday in Providence, RI,
where she lived, later this month. So sorry she didn’t make it as she had made
elaborate plans which we, her friends, were trying hard to fulfill. I, at
least, hoped the pending birthday party might give her the will to survive that
long. She visited me in Honduras when I was in the Peace Corps there and twice
she and I went with other friends to spend time in Provincetown at the far end
of Cape Cod. Despite COPD that required her to use a respirator, Anna remained
upbeat and hopeful and mentally sharp. She miraculously survived being run over
by a vehicle belonging to her assisted living facility, spent two years in the
hospital recovering including the amputation of a leg, finally won a settlement
against the assisted living facility, and now has died of cancer.
Unfortunately, the other side stalled in going to trial, probably hoping she
would die first, but she outsmarted them on that score. Yet, their stalling
meant she didn’t really have much time to benefit from her settlement. She was a
valiant and loyal friend.
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