Obama Ends Exemption for Cubans Who Arrive Without Visas

According to the NYT-- LINK to the story below: "[The President] Thursday said that he was terminating the 22-year-old policy that has allowed Cubans who arrived on United States soil without visas to remain in the country and gain legal residency, an unexpected move long sought by the Cuban government."

“Effective immediately, Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally and do not qualify for humanitarian relief will be subject to removal, consistent with U.S. law and enforcement priorities,” By taking this step, we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries.”

"The move places a finishing touch on Mr. Obama’s efforts as president to end a half-century of hostility between the United States and Cuba and to establish normalized relations and diplomatic ties with a government American presidents have long sought to isolate and punish."

MY COMMENT

I am not Christian BUT I love the humane side of the New Testament and also love the Beatitudes alleged to have been said by Christ. Again, born Jewish and matured into a significant agnostic my thoughts on this are NOT about religious dogma but they are about a standard I have set for myself many years ago. The Golden Rule is something I strive to live by as is Rabbi Hillel's teaching “That which is hateful unto you do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah, The rest is commentary." Those two religious sages for me cement my humane ideological bent. I run into difficulty when my belief runs up against, on this issue, the pitfalls of reality. 

Can the US accept all those carte blanch who need to escape national brutality or the forces of nature? Half the world would want to come to our shores and what nation could support those millions who are desperately in need of help. I want to help everyone who needs it but to grant that just to Cubans fleeing a miserable dictatorship if nothing else is unfair to those millions in, for example, Haiti who are devastated by grinding poverty, natural disasters and dying from medical neglect. 

This is, of course, for Obama a political decision relaxing decades of US alienation toward the Cuban government which I support. I try always to walk in another's shoes to see how they fit but if the shoes do not fit I am sometimes prohibited by reality to change them. Cuba is changing. Life, I hope, for Cubans will improve in their own nation!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/world/americas/cuba-obama-wet-foot-dry-foot-policy.html?emc=edit_na_20170112&nlid=75028030&ref=headline&_r=0

The Trumpian Tunnel

In the evening when I am the most upset about all of the Trumpian madness I get into a nice warm flannel sheet bed with a microwaved warmer and just lie there feeling the enveloping heat and try to shed my uber sadness about things political and worries about things to come.  I throw off the 500 pound weights that sit on my shoulders letting go all of the fear sweeping my mind free of it.  It works ... for me. That's my way of dealing with this political nightmare and the rest of the international nightmares I feel hovering overhead from it.

I turn on the news in the a.m. to learn Republicons, with pieces of stone for hearts, began to repeal Obamacare.  My heart sinks and I want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.  20 MILLION will be kicked off healthcare and, of course, the rancid Trump said yesterday that he will have the "best plan" to replace it. He is the best of everything and those who help him manufacture his evil, of course, are the best and the most wonderful of everything the Midasman of hyperbole says he touches.  It is his usual hyperbolic exaggeration and, naturally, he never gives the details of policy.  His dogs swallow the Trump steaks whole.  They love it no matter how hurtful or odious it will be for the country.  Those clapping allegedly were members of his team and not a horde of average fawners of everything Trump. It was no surprise brilliantly staged like his emergence onto the political scene by riding down the escalator of Emerald City.  The Wizard of Oz employed his cronies working behind the curtain to pay those who knew nothing of him and the utter racist divisiveness he would bring.  They stood then in ignorance, clapping and carrying Trump signs not understanding the extremist right wing terror he would unleash.  There are no words angry enough I can use to indict him or hostile enough to spew my contempt for this Beelzebub curse invading our nation.

I get tired of fighting, I get tired of the constant opposition and anger, tired of listening to racist deplorables regurgitating constant lies and stupid things.  Laughing, if it were not so sad, Trump rails about fake news but, in fact, he began the fake news of lies when he told for years of Obama's non-citizenship and said he had investigators all over the world finding, of course what else, "amazing" things about it. It was ALL lies.  He lies ALL the time.  He spews a blizzard of lies making it a whiteout of impossibility to challenge him on any of it IF he will even let media, whom he deems unfriendly or critical of him, utter a question to him about anything.  Even when he does answer his cerebral robotic computer is in campaign mode flooding us with staged volcanic feel-good-to-his-base non-answers but now the difference is he soon will be president.

I actually feel bad for the press.  He wants to negate the truth-telling many do well.  Some of the reporters covering him look tired.  Yesterday, one Republican representative collapsed and Senator Diane Feinstein needed a pacemaker placed in her chest.  Many, covering this Republican lunacy of Trump and the non stop Senate consent hearings for his often unqualified cabinet posts, look sad and fatigued, perhaps, even scared, at least to me. But part of our electorate -- millions -- follow him no matter how hurtful and mendacious he is. Now we know how Hitler arose ... no he's not Hitler ... but the comparisons to Fascism's advance in Europe dispel the incredulity I always had for its emergence in Germany.  If one controls dissent one controls everything and the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's henchman, stated just that and I quote: 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Yes, it can happen here.

I am sitting here, between writing, staring into space because I do not know what to do or how best to resist but continuing to write more of the many opinions I have written since 2004.  The nation, I fear, is dying, and trying to save it from so many Trumpian lies and conflicts assaulting it by the Master of Mendacious is difficult to perfect.  Perfect it, though, we MUST by any and all means legally necessary.  I plod on hoping beyond hope that the fire Trump sparked to kill our nation will eat itself and burn out.  We MUST RESIST even when the end of this dark Trumpian tunnel seems so far away.