The Good News, The Bad New, and Just The News
First the bad news: Louie Gohmert wants to put war ships on the Rio Grande and shoot little children. Customer Anne put it best …
So the click-bait link says “America’s Dumbest Congressman compares migrant children to D-Day invasion, demands “Ships of War”, and I thought good heavens, finally! Someone dumber than our own Louie Gohmert.
I clicked.
And there was our very own Louie Gohmert.
In an ironic twist of fate, I’m gonna tell you a story that’ll make you smile. Tom DeLay tried to save himself from indictment and conviction by building a community of houses for foster children. There were eight gorgeous fully finished homes, a chapel, a full sized gym, a swimming pool, and a fishing pond with a dock. Long story. Short story. After raising $6 million from his corporate political donors, Tom opened Rio Bend to much fanfare and glory.
He still got convicted.
The next week, he and his wife began to throw families out of the place unless they subscribed to his weird brand of religion. Lutheran charities, who had originally agreed to run the joint, pulled out. Those 8 beautiful homes sat empty and the grounds went fallow for 5 years until Catholic Charities agree to take over if the DeLays weren’t involved at all.
“What a milestone in our journey,” said Bonna Kol, president and CEO for Catholic Charities. “The Rio Bend community will allow our agency to serve truly vulnerable children who are in need of care, love and guidance. At full capacity, we will be caring for 48 infants and children from the state foster care, trafficked children and orphans from other countries such as Burma, Congo, Ethiopia and Central America.”
So the houses that Tom DeLay built for merely self-aggrandizement will more than likely house refugee children from Central America.
I bet his head explodes.
Thanks to Anne and Lorraine for the heads up.
Time for some John Lennon:
Instant Karma
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/instantkarmaweallshineon.html
1Perhaps his next political opponent could use the line “… even exacting a tax on interstate commerce …” to say that Gohmert wants to raise taxes. That’s supposed to be death for any Tea Party type.
2oth international and American law, Esperanza and Angelica Ramirez have a strong case for asylum in the United States. But the United States has a particular moral responsibility in the Central America refugee crisis that goes even deeper. Americans, especially young Americans, probably know more about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda than they do about how their own government funded murderous right-wing dictatorships in Central America back in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s violent and immoral policy included $5 billion in aid to the military/landowner alliance in El Salvador, which prolonged an awful conflict in which some 75,000 people died—a toll proportionally equivalent to the casualty rate in the American Civil War. But once shaky peace agreements were signed in the 1990s, the United States walked away, leaving the shattered region to rebuild on its own.
In response to today’s exodus, President Obama is showing little concern for international law, and none at all for Washington’s own historic responsibility in Central America. Instead, the administration announced on June 28 that it is asking Congress to change the law so America can deport the refugee children more quickly.
It seems that Central America was another failed rw policy that a Democrat has to fix ans Dems get the blame for wingnut mistakes.
3O my God! What twisted piece of metal this guy is! Putting caveats on charity. Guess what, Tommie Boy! Karma is watching and she is a bitch. At least the property finally came to some use for victimized children.
We are having a big family visit here. One of us piped up last night and asked why this country ever had only one Ellis Island. Why weren’t there more such places built all over our geography? Well, for one thing there was the odd notion that once the massive European wave of immigrants was over, that was it. There would never again be such a thing. Well, shucks. We had the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba, the wave of VietNamese after the fall of that country to Ho Chi Minh for example. Sprinkled in all this were people from all over arriving in discreet batches seeking asylum and refuge under our own refugee laws. We did not have this much of a wave of people from south of the border before cuz those countries down there were pretty much lock down tin hat dictatorships. Now those same countries are grade b movie versions of themselves as narcoterrorist states with death squads aimed at any citizen who even looks if they are going to backsass the powers that be.
But even narcoterrorists know that bullets cost $$ which they would rather spend on lavish lifestyles. It is easier and way cheaper to pepper the countryside with posters that tell the suffering populace that the U.S. will take in anyone who makes it to their borders. Economist magazine is very good with the reportage and pix. Under a law signed by GWB, these children have to be taken in and cared for lest they become fresh meat for the human sex traffic that is openly rampant south of the border.
And JJ, you bet I wouldn’t get my bod to the border to see what is going on. Not that long ago a Mexican government helicopter overflew our border and fired on one of our Border Patrols. Nuff said.
4Yes, our own Louie Gohmert continues to plumb the Depths of Dumb. And where Louie is concerned, there is no bottom that sewer.
5Makes DeLay’s prancing about on Dancing With the Stars even more reprehensible.
6Excellent! Especially the way you tell it, Juanita Honey.
7I guess the warship on the Rio Grande will be Randy Neugebauer’s yacht? And we all know he’ll want the tax deduction for it’s use, right?
8If Louie wants to compare that to the D-Day landings does he realize that puts us in the position of the Germans?
9If DeLay’s head explodes, I sure hope somebody gets it on YouTube, along with the reason why. It’s the best he deserves.
10It has been many a decade since I last saw the Rio Grande, and maybe that was on a slow day, but as I remember there was hardly enough water to float a canoe–certainly not enough for a warship.
But Gohmert is from Texas, and he seems to believe (I started to write “think”) that warships can sail up and down the Rio–perhaps his info is more current than mine.
Glad to hear that DeLay’s fake charity will at last get some good use.
11maggie, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay was the Ellis Island of the West. From 1910 to 1940 it processed 165,000 immigrants, mostly from China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_Station,_Angel_Island
12Yes, Origuy. Heard about Angel Island. Could never understand why it never got the press Ellis Island did. Can maybe somebody explain that to me?
13Angel Island is another horrible footnote in our history, maggie. Chinese immigrants were detained and deported from there. Whereas Ellis Island is the ‘proud’ entry point of our European Heritage. Forget about the the ugly days of “Irish Need Not Apply” and those other decades of anti-immigrant spirit aimed at “other” groups. In the us is them paradigm of the bigots, white immigrants are acceptable and their ‘history’ would tell us white immigrants built this nation. Forget about the contributions of Asians, Africans, pan-Pacific people or anyone not considered white European.
There’s reality, then there are the sanitized history books the bigots would like to impose on our schools and national ‘thinking.’
Just more of the “we’re here, shut the door” bigot nonsense. Inconvenient facts? Not to worry; nothing a trip up their River Denial won’t fix for them.
For another sickening comparison, consider the treatment of German POWs which was relatively humane. Then, compare the treatment of Japanese-American citizens and how they were stripped of their property and treated in the detention camps.
14I learn a lot of history here. It’s really time for everyone to find their oldest relatives and ask for their stories and record them somehow. So maybe they spice them up a bit. We need to hear from old folks who were there or who had parents who were there.
15Hey now Marge Wood, a lot of us young guys were ‘home schooled’ in history by our grandfathers and the grandfathers of our friends. My grandpa landed in Normandy on D-Day and stayed to liberate the concentration camps. One of my friend gramps ran a detention camp for German POWs in Kansas.
Makes me wonder who schooled Dick Cheney to think shock and awe would result in us being treated as “liberators.”
WWII per my mentors was a lesson in decency and the rule of law, mostly; but with a whole lot of wrong, too. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Japan. As for Germany, had first hand experience there from elder men who loved the Americans and shared their thoughts with me. That love came from decent, humane and legal treatment.
Reagan and Bush1 spent a lot of our money to destabilize Central America for their nefarious plans and the benefit of their resources and oil buddies.
But all of that is politics and history. The here and now is that our CIA created the circumstances that have forced parents and relatives to send the children north. In the short term, we need to embrace the children. In the long term, we need to offer humanitarian assistance, not weapons to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Food, education and health. It would work here at home and I see no reason it won’t work world wide.
Message to pRick Perry, your neocon buddies broke Central America and we have a responsibility to fix our foreign policy errors. Or, we can do it your way and spend $millions to fail.
16DeLay’s head won’t explode. The slow leak it’s been suffering from for years will prevent too much build up of pressure.
17maggie, Angel Island didn’t get the press that Ellis did for the same reason that San Francisco Giants got less press than New York Giants did. East Coast media has always tended to ignore anything west of New Jersey. Plus what PKM said about Europeans vs Asian.
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