Well we both know I would be in favor of that, but even that’s irrelevant. A country can have borders while still not prioritizing border security and instead focusing those resources elsewhere. From the economic evaluations I have read, this seems like the best route.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Well, you bring them in, and I'll give them amnesty!

Look, I'm with you on a "one world, we're all brothers" philosophy on a theoretical level. I just don't see how that works practically and I'm almost certain that allowing whoever wants to come into the United States will result in a place that you and I don't want to live.

It's similar to the concept of property rights. In theory, I find the idea that a man can "own" a portion of the planet to be immoral. And borders are really just property rights writ large. Everybody believes in borders if we get down to a small enough level. I'm pretty sure if you went into Chuck Schumer's house tonight and demanded to eat in his kitchen and sleep in his bed, he wouldn't call you a "Dreamer". He'd call the police. There would be no sanctuary.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

Both political parties have turned a blind eye to immigration in order to keep a free flow of cheap labor running across the border for jobs.

Any other chatter from politicians is misinformation.

_________________

And I’m equally certain that’s not true. Agree to disagree I guess.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Why did McConnell object to paying the military?

Maybe I'm missing something, but seems like that should shatter the narrative that his side is real upset that the shutdown is affecting military.

The ostensible reason was because he wanted to get a permanent agreement rather than a short term one and thought that would be better facilitated in the absence of such payments. The more subtle reason is because he wanted to stick the Democrats as being the ones against paying for the troops as a direct consequence of their complicity in the shutdown.

Feel like the Dems should be pounding the hell out of that video and objection. It would play well for them, imo.

Oh well.

It could also be because he thought he would get a deal Saturday to reopen things so why let the Dems win a talking point.

Well, there seems to be some cognitive dissonance on the American Left when it comes to this subject. On the one hand, there is the idea that everyone has the right to come to the U.S. for a better opportunity while at the same time there is the insistence that America is not exceptional.

I think if we're going to go to bat for foreigners who want to enter our country we should acknowledge just why they want to enter it. It's a purely economic question in most cases. (People actually fleeing oppressive regimes are a different matter. Regardless, the fact that they are fleeing to the U.S. suggests the U.S. is better than where they came from.)

You'll often hear the platitude that "diversity is our strength". I don't really believe that to be the case. Diversity is an obstacle that America has done a wonderful job in overcoming. That's what "E Pluribus Unum" is all about.

The default is not people sitting around celebrating their differences. The default is people grouping themselves into tribes. That's why the Democratic Party's encouragement of identity politics is so cynical and really, anti-American.

So if we agree that the reason that an immigrant comes to or wants to come to America is to make a better life for himself and his family, it goes without saying that America is a better place than whence he came. Or at least that the immigrant believes that is the fact.

And if the immigrant believes that America is better, what would be the point in recreating the worse place that he came from in a different location? But inevitably that will happen if there aren't controls on immigration. And that's why there always have been. America has to have the ability to absorb the immigrants and make them Americans. We have to have a common language, some core common beliefs, and real loyalty to certain concepts. Otherwise, America, a nation based on assertion of citizenship rather than citizenship based upon ethnicity or race like every other place in world history, simply won't work.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

JORR why is your ire almost always directed towards democrats and the left?

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

I've almost always voted for Democrats, though I would never consider myself a member of the Democratic Party. But I feel as if the Democratic Party has lost sight of the things I always believed it stood for. Primarily that would be that it was the party of the working man.

America is in its second "Gilded Age" right now. We have dangerous income disparity with far too much wealth controlled by very few hands. Zuckerberg, Brin, and Bezos are the new robber barons. But unlike Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, et al, these modern barons are all ostensibly liberals. This has resulted in the Democratic Party becoming the bastion of the professional managerial class, as Tall Midget likes to call it. I mean, who would have ever believed in 1950 that one day a union-buster like Rahm Emanuel would be a leader of the Democratic Party? But that's where we are today.

I think the Democratic Party has betrayed its roots. So has the Republican Party to a somewhat lesser degree. Say what you will about the Tea Partiers, but they have a clear vision of what the Republican Party should be that is based on tradition. That's why so many of them were "Never Trump".

When is the last time you heard a Democratic leader sincerely talk about the American worker? Usually, they are sneering and scolding him.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

Very well said JORR.

As someone who comes from a long line of noble, union Democrats, I wonder where the inability of MANY to see these facts that you posted, arises from.

Fear is the only answer I can come up with.

_________________

Those people you named and the majority of the professional managerial class are Rockefeller Republicans.

Democrats rhetoric (not results) on social issues turned off MANY working class whites. They can stomach the social shift as long as you wink at them too. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden and Bernie understand this and all have talked to these voters. Biden and Bernie are loved by MANY of them. Reality is that the demographic change the country is seeing will make it easier to continue to ignore them over the next 10 to 20 years.

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Yeah, but there's another side to that and you're obviously aware of it since you used the words "rhetoric (not results)". I have no doubt that many Democrats care more about social issues particularly with regard to minorities than Republicans. I certainly think someone like Patty Murray or Elizabeth Warren is kinder than Paul Ryan or Donald Trump. But you can't feed your family with intentions. I know you were offended by Trump's "what have you got to lose?" question, but really, if whatever he does helps black people or gay people or whatever, what difference does it make what his intentions are? We've often made jokes here about "what's in his heart". Frankly, his heart can be as small and mean as the Grinch and who cares as long as his policies- as scattershot as they may be- are helping Americans?

Anyway, back to your question regarding my current contempt for the American Left, to me "Left" and "Labor" were always synonymous. That's clearly no longer the case. "Left" now is a lunatic fringe that concerns itself with silliness like "microaggressions" and transgender bathrooms.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

That's a nice notion, but in large part it never really was the case imo, at least in many union members' backyards. (Or on the other side of the tracks) Getting a real shot at admission into many of the locals was a pipe dream in many city neighborhoods. On a macro scale, unions embraced progressive ideas, but the locals' doors on the near west side remained closed to non-whites until the unions became toothless and irrelevant.

And it seems to me that the main people who use the term "left" any more are the kind of people overly inclined to hysterics by meaningless words like microaggressions(created by useless trolls like Frank Luntz) or transgender bathrooms.

_________________
There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

I don't know who created the concept of microaggressions, but the concept does exist and is being pushed on college campuses. And transmania is absurd in light of the fact that truly gender dysphoric people comprise a tiny fraction of the population.

Anyway, Seacrest is always willing to point out the corruption in unions, but acknowledging that such corruption exists isn't an argument to allow business to run roughshod over its workers.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

But there is no longer room for those folks in the Republican party. At the middle class level, these are the folks in educated but working class suburbs and Chicago neighborhoods who voted for Rauner over Quinn.

The other issue is that any "states rights" based on "intrastate commerce" is constitutional but becoming as usable as a collect call. When my dad, who is 83, wants me to go order him a book he saw at the library from "that amazon thing on my little machine (e.g. his tablet)" and then goes and buys his yogurt at Walmart, then intrastate commerce is basically dry cleaning and eating at taquerias. And I say that as somebody who grew up as a Rockefeller Republican with a belief in local government and less federal intervention. So the political class of Republicans have had to pivot to something else, and sadly many have chosen limiting access to foreigners.

_________________
"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Completely agree. Without union muscle we've seen wages dramatically decline and the rich get richer over the past 30 years. Outside of a couple social issues the country continues to move right.

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Which policies do you think specifically would help minorities so far? What are these swell things that people should definitely give Trump a chance about? Your defenses of Trump always refer to these various vague possibilities (see also: The Democrats should try to make a deal with Trump on healthcare because Trump loves making deals!), but rarely is there any substance. The mere fact that the Democrats have failed to improve the material condition of many people for years doesn't mean the Republicans should deserve a chance to do so by default, particularly when much of their rhetoric indeed suggests making material conditions worse for many people.

I think the Democrats have failed people of all stripes for years and hate preening lesser evil lecturers as much as anyone, but there is definitely something to be said about the Trump administration normalizing the kind of blatant racism pushed by Bannon, Sessions, et. al, and that kind of rhetoric becoming salient absolutely can and does have policy implications.

This is most certainly true.

_________________
Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

read (clap) Thomas (clap) Frank (clap) and (clap) also (clap) Barbara (clap) Ehrenreich

_________________

Right. And there is no longer room for what I would call the average middle class person in the Democratic Party either.

We've talked a lot about how and why Trump got elected. I don't think economics or racial hatred were driving forces, though maybe if we drill down deep it really is economics. I mean economics is the driving force behind everything. I just don't think that was top of mind in this election. People didn't know what they wanted other than they didn't want what they had. It was a change election and people from both parties feel disenfranchised. The entire political and media Establishment had to put up a tremendous effort just to get their chosen candidate to beat Bernie Sanders, a guy MANY would have called a lunatic just a few years earlier.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

So....no federal taxes taken out of our checks since they are shutdown and not paying anyone right?

_________________

I have never made a defense of Trump in this forum and if you want to have a real discussion you should stop suggesting that I have. Otherwise, when I see your name I will just put you in the DannyB and Baby McNown category.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/05/news/ec ... index.html

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

I think reducing the election to being about change is just as unhelpful as saying it was about race or economics. Obama would have mollywhopped Trump if he could run for a third term, and he's the one guy who would've represented even less change to the status quo than Hillary. Same for Biden. Hillary was just a uniquely terrible candidate who ran a uniquely terrible campaign and as a result saw her numbers drop in the areas she needed them. Trump meanwhile didn't really get any surges comparable to previous Republicans; Hillary was simply unpopular enough that standard Republican numbers were more than enough to clinch him the states he needed.

Not every city can be like my sanctuary. We're the big swinging dick of the world. The politicians are just the pussies and the American workers are the assholes that we stick our dick into.

It seems people are forgetting that. So now our big swinging dick is going to swing harder...and faster, until we take off like a motherf—king helicopter!

_________________
Just look at this place, it's motherfking ccksucking magnificent! WOW! It's a brand new day, Wisemen.

Obama was a special guy as the first black president. He was going to galvanize the black vote and get those voters who often stay at home out to the polls. There are all kinds of people who dislike Obama's policies and were disappointed in his presidency who would have voted for him again simply because of who he was and what he represents. I think making that comparison is less helpful and more simplistic than anything I said above. And I highly doubt Biden would have beaten Trump. But we'll never know because he didn't run.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

I'm sorry for construing your perpetual whataboutism in the face of Trump criticism as constituting a defense of him. I don't think my interpretation of your repeated efforts in this regard is the least bit uncharitable, considering how many other people have read such rushes to bring up the Democrats similarly (e.g., your debacle of a performance in the Girther thread).

I asked you about specific policies benefiting minorities. What do you attribute to Trump for the unemployment rate? What specifically should blacks and other minorities be celebrating here?