True Left

Vice President Kamala Harris commented on the verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse's homicide trial, suggesting it showed the criminal justice system is not equitable, apparently contradicting President Joe Biden's remarks.

In a tweet Friday evening, the vice president and former prosecutor said: "Today's verdict speaks for itself. I've spent a majority of my career working to make our criminal justice system more equitable. It's clear, there's still a lot more work to do."

While Harris' comments seemed to condemn the outcome of the trial, Biden had stood by the jury's decision earlier Friday.

"I stand by what the jury has concluded. The jury system works and we have to abide by it," Biden told reporters on the White House lawn.

President Biden is making the same mistake President Obama made in his first term: catering to xenophobes while performing compassion toward immigrants.

The strategy lays out the red carpet for Trumpism 2.0.
...
Obama tried and failed. By ramping up deportations to historic levels while claiming he was focused on felons, he conflated immigration with criminality in the average mind. Nativists then used his decision not to deport Dreamers — people brought to the U.S. as children — to paint him as an open-borders president.

No matter what Biden does, Republicans will attack his policies as “open borders.” No matter how few people make it to the U.S., Fox News will send cameras to conjure a border apocalypse. Neither Biden nor the Democrats can control that. What they can control is whether they take the bait by playing into and promoting anti-immigrant panic.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took the bait during a visit to the San Ysidro Port of Entry, insisting: “I cannot communicate this message too strongly: that individuals should not put their life savings in the hands of smuggling organizations.” He added: “The border is not open.”

The statement stood in absurd contrast to his celebration minutes earlier of the port of entry’s reopening to non-essential travel for foreign tourists. He defended the continued use of a Trump-era public health rule to expel most asylum seekers. Apparently, only people fleeing persecution can bring COVID to the U.S.

Mayorkas insisted that the administration is committed to “respecting the dignity” of asylum seekers. He blamed the reinstatement of another Trump policy, “Remain in Mexico,” on a court order and said the program — which has resulted in hundreds of **** and kidnapping of asylum seekers in Mexico — “does not reflect our values as a country.” Yet the administration has chosen to expand the program to include Haitian asylum seekers, which goes beyond the Trump policy.

Cowardice and a lack of imagination are to blame for Democrats’ failure to come up with a cohesive counter-narrative to Republicans’ fearmongering.

Rather than pressing Biden about his promise to protect millions of undocumented essential workers and community members, many reporters are following the Fox News formula of fixating on the numbers at the border. This spring, Media Matters for America found that Fox News steadily drove the border-crisis narrative, which cable networks CNN and MSNBC then seemed to adopt.
...
Republicans understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the agenda. On that, they have benefited enormously from media outlets actively normalizing anti-immigrant hysteria.

This is the danger of bumper-sticker politics.... — BOTFC

In a remarkable statement after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he would not vote for President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act, the White House said Manchin's comments were "at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances." CNN's Joe Johns and Suzanne Malveaux discuss the fallout of the senator's decision. #CNN #News

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed the possibility of Indonesia normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel in meetings with officials in Jakarta last week, Israeli officials say.
...
The Biden administration is trying to build on the Trump-era Abraham Accords, and in this case, looking beyond the Middle East to the largest of the countries that don't recognize Israel.
...
Flashback: Indonesia was one of the countries the Trump administration tried to bring into the Abraham Accords, but the negotiations hadn't matured by the time Trump’s term ended.

Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Judith (Frehm) and Donald M. Blinken, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary.[5][6][7] His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews.[8]
...
Blinken has asserted that "[Biden] would not tie military assistance to Israel to things like annexation or other decisions by the Israeli government with which we might disagree".[100] Blinken praised the Trump administration-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.[101][102]
...
Blinken is in favor of continuing non-nuclear sanctions against Iran and described it as "a strong hedge against Iranian misbehavior in other areas".[101]

Santa struggled this holiday season: He was short of elves.

Our ports didn’t have enough workers to unload the ships that were stuck offshore full of gifts. Trucking companies couldn’t find enough drivers to deliver the goods. Stores needed shelf-stockers. Restaurants couldn’t hire enough cooks.

And yet, to our south, thousands of people clamored to get into the country to do jobs like these.

Our response, year after year? We spend millions of dollars trying to keep them out.
...
People in Central America save money from meager incomes to finance their trips, sometimes paying criminal gangs to help them. They face abuse and even death on their trips. If they don’t get in or are deported, they often try again and again. Then they live on society’s fringes, doing jobs Americans don’t want, to send money to relatives back home. They attend church. And they have been shown to commit fewer violent crimes than American citizens — perhaps because they are too busy working.
...
We need to find a legal way to admit the resourceful, hard-working people our labor force needs. We ought to pay them fair wages, allow them better living conditions and let them stop hiding.

Upon signing the act at a ceremony held beside the newly-refurbished Statue of Liberty, Reagan said, "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."[2]
...
In 1987, Reagan used his executive authority to legalize the status of minor children of parents granted amnesty under the immigration overhaul,[5] announcing a blanket deferral of deportation for children under 18 who were living in a two-parent household with both parents legalizing or with a single parent who was legalizing.[6] That action affected an estimated 100,000 families.
...
Nearly three million people applied for legalization under the IRCA.[7] There were two groups of applicants. Aliens who had been unlawfully residing in the United States since before January 1, 1982 (pre-1982 immigrants) were legalized under Section 245A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) while Aliens employed in seasonal agricultural work for a minimum of 90 days in the year prior to May, 1986 (SAWs) were legalized under Section 210A of the INA. Nearly 2.7 million people were ultimately approved for permanent residence.