By Neil Munro
Castro, a former housing secretary in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, announced his innovative promise to cut voters’ wages via a friendly interview in the Washington Post:
Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro offered a far-reaching plan to remake the nation’s immigration policy Tuesday with a new call to end criminal penalties for migrants entering the country without permission and a plan to remove detention as a tool for most immigration enforcement.
…
By repealing the criminal code that allows the Trump administration to prosecute people who enter the country, Castro would remove the mechanism that previously allowed the administration to separate asylum-seeking parents and children after detention. Trump has since stopped those prosecutions, though single adults continue to face criminal penalties. Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refugee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing those with criminal records.
Castro also wants to amnesty the population of at least 11 million illegals in the United States, to accelerate the chain-migration of foreigners into the United States, to boost the inflow of refugees, and to end construction of a border barrier. He would also block the power of ICE to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, so further reducing the already small threat of repatriation for the growing population of at least 11 million illegals in the United States.
Overall, Castro’s policy would explode the population of non-Americans in the United States and so further expand opportunities for Latino politicians and power-brokers. In February 2019, Breitbart reported Castro’s political roots in Latino identity politics:
Castro’s mother, Maria del Rosario Castro, or Rosie Castro, was a major leftist organizer who co-founded La Raza Unida, an extremist third party separatist group in the 1970s. La Raza Unida literally translates to “The Race United,” and the group sought to create a new country in the American Southwest called Aztlan. Breitbart News has run a number of pieces over the years on this group and the Castro family’s connections to it, but perhaps the most interesting thing about Castro’s presidential campaign launch is that he did not shy away from this radical upbringing; he embraced it.
The Washington Post reporter, Michael Scherer, did not ask Castro how Americans voters would gain or lose amid of flood of blue-collar and white-collar labor. The reporter did not address how a massive rise of the immigrant population would help lower-income Americans keep their homes in neighborhoods that are already seeing rising real-estate prices, such as New York and Los Angeles.
Instead, Castro and Scherer treated the migration issue merely as a matter of the migrants’ welfare. This skew hides the greatest economic impact of migration — the transfer of blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries earned by ordinary Americans and legal immigrants up to wealthy, older recipients, including investors, CEOs, and real estate owners.
Also, Castro and Scherer treated the migration as only a humanitarian crisis, and portrayed the migrants as helpless victims, which are described as “asylum-seeking families.” Castro told Scherer that “We see this administration’s approach to immigration is a total failure. Instead of marching forward with cruelty, I believe we should choose compassion.”
That approach dismisses the strong evidence that the migrants are rationally exploiting the many legal loopholes which are being held open by Democrats, judges and business lobbyists, to win jobs and residency for their children in the peaceful, prosperous United States.
Scherer did not reply to questions from Breitbart News.
The focus by Castro and Scherer on the migrants’ welfare and on humanitarian concerns also echoes the bipartisan claim that the United States is a “nation of immigrants,” not a nation of and for Americans.
The voting public is likely to strongly oppose Castro’s open-borders and cheap-labor policy.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. But the federal government then imports approximately 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.
This federal policy of flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor is intended to boost economic growth for investors. This policy shiftsenormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts children’s schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
But the Washington Post article also put a racial, class, and regional skew on the rational public opposition to elite support for cheap-labor migration:
Some Democratic strategists are wary of turning off white voters in swing states of the upper Midwest who Trump has been able to sway with anti-immigration rhetoric.
Those views of “white voters” have been validated by President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy which has raised wages in 2018 by limiting the inflow of new workers in 2017 and 2018:
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
By
It turns out the Russia Collusion Hoax even included the attempted coercion of a Supreme Court justice by two Obama administration intel officials.
READ THE FULL REPORT: HOW OBAMA, HILLARY, AND BRENNAN CARRIED OUT THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY
Both Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-VT) rushed to Biden’s defense over the weekend, claiming that a single sexual harassment allegation — even if credible — shouldn’t immediately and irreparably derail a blossoming presidential campaign.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that Durbin told NBC that a single, unproven sexual harassment allegation — like the one leveled at Biden by a former Nevada gubernatorial candidate last week — shouldn’t mean Biden should pack up his campaign offices before his bid for the presidency even gets off the ground.
“I can tell you that Joe Biden is a friend and a seasoned veteran when it comes to political campaigns. I know nothing about the allegations that I also read this morning, as well. I think all of us should take such allegations seriously and with respect,” Durbin said. “I took Joe Biden’s statement to say just that, exactly.”
“Yes, I think he’s ready if that’s his decision to move forward in this presidential campaign,” he added.
When asked whether the claim “disqualified” Biden, Durbin replied enthusiastically.
“Certainly one allegation is not disqualifying, but it should be taken seriously,” he said.
Bernie Sanders, who is Biden’s major threat in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, was also oddly deferential to Obama’s former Vice President, telling CBS’s Face the Nation that, while he believes Lucy Flores, the woman who accused Biden of touching her inappropriately at a campaign stop in 2014, he also believes Joe Biden should get a second chance.
“I think that’s a decision for the vice president to make,” said Sanders, when asked whether Biden should continue to seek the nation’s highest office. “I’m not sure that one incident alone disqualifies anybody.”
Instead Sanders, who has faced sexual harassment problems of his own recently when several female former staffers revealed that they were treated poorly on Sanders’ campaign, and that Sanders and his top aides did nothing to address their concerns, said Biden’s issues are simply the result of a world that continues to embrace patriarchy and oppress women.
“I think what this speaks to is the need to fundamentally change the culture of this country and to create environments where women feel comfortable and feel safe,” Sanders said.
Of course neither lawmaker was as deferential during, say, now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh‘s confirmation hearings when the judge was accused of a single incident of sexual assault which took place several decades before when he and his alleged victim were both in high school, even though no evidence was presented to verify Kavanaugh’s accuser’s claim.
Biden, for his part, says he does not view his encounter with Ms. Flores as problematic.
“In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort,” Biden said in a statement over the weekend. “And not once – never – did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.”
Unfortunately, it appears more women may come forward with stories. A breaking news alert late Monday indicates that at least one other woman, a female campaign staffer, believes she was treated inappropriately by the former vice president. There may also be others; the sudden wave of concern over Biden’s past behavior — which went ignored while Biden and President Barack Obama were in office — seems to be conveniently timed to derail an early April announcement, and could be the work of another campaign.
With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report clearing President Trump of colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election, the focus among anti-Trump types in the media and in Washington has now shifted to pushing for access to the full contents of the report, including its underlying evidence. Surely, they argue, there must be a speck of collusion in there somewhere.
Attorney General William Barr, who released a summary of its findings last Monday, has promised to turn over as much of the report as possible, “consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.”
According to Maddow, “it’s hard to believe” that Mueller would allow Barr – a Trump appointee – to pick through the report himself, deciding what passages need redaction. “They wouldn’t leave that to Barr,” she said on Sunday night. But Barr, she continued, is doing that “all by himself.”
Except he’s not. In a letter sent to Congress on Friday, Barr explicitly stated that Mueller is “assisting us” in making these redactions. Even Maddow’s own producers flashed this newsline across TV screens, as Maddow argued the opposite.
In the two years Mueller has been investigating Trump, Maddow has stood out as one of the mainstream media’s most fervent Russiagate conspiracy theorists, starring in her very own detective thriller every night on live TV. Trump, she said, was “curiously well versed” in “specific Russian talking points.” The Kremlin, meanwhile, was running a “continuing operation” to steer the US government from within, and could “flip the switch” at any time if discovered, shutting down the entire US power grid.
As Maddow saw ‘Reds under the bed,’ MSNBC covered Mueller more than any other cable network, mentioning the investigator-turned-savior of democracy almost every day last year.
Could it be that the network’s producers are finally tiring of Maddow’s tinfoil-hat proclamations? If so, it’s about time.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
By
The accusation against Biden marks one of the first major direct accusations against Biden during this campaign cycle, but insiders believe many more are coming. Big League Politics learned about the impending accusation Wednesday night and monitored the situation as Lucy Flores came forward with her bold first-person essay in New York magazine. BLP has not spoken to Flores directly but now we have her own words describing the disturbing encounter at a campaign event with Eva Longoria, via New York mag’s “The Cut”:
“In 2014, I was the 35-year-old Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in Nevada…As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.
By then, as a young Latina in politics, I had gotten used to feeling like an outsider in rooms dominated by white men. But I had never experienced anything so blatantly inappropriate and unnerving before. Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.”
Flores passage ends
Vox follows up on Flores’ story with the headline “Lucy Flores Isn’t Alone. Joe Biden’s Got a Long History of Touching.”
Flores’s experience isn’t unique. It is no secret in Washington that Biden has touched numerous women inappropriately in public. It’s just never been treated as a serious issue by the mainstream press.
Biden’s been caught on camera embracing a female reporter from behind and gripping her above her waist, just below her bust. At a swearing-in ceremony for Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Biden put his hands on the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, Carter’s wife, and then leaned in and whispered into her ear. (He’s whispered into many women’s ears.) He’s also touched women’s faces and necks during other photo ops. Once at a swearing-in ceremony for a US senator, he held the upper arm of the senator’s preteen daughter, leaned down and whispered into her ear, as she became visibly uncomfortable. Then he kissed the side of her forehead, a gesture that made the girl flinch.
It’s all out in the open. News outlets wrote about these incidents. But the stories ran under light-hearted headlines like, “Photo of famously friendly Joe Biden goes viral” or “Here’s Joe Biden being Joe Biden with Ash Carter’s wife” or “Joe Biden: Sex symbol?,” a piece that I edited and now regret.”
Tom's Blog 