I don’t know. Do you think businesses like restaurants and hotels should be able to turn away people based on race/religion/etc.? I think such a position is racist (or supports and eases racism), since it means that sundown towns can freely and legally proliferate once again (rather than hide in the shadows, as they do now with places like Vidor, TX).
We’ve discussed voter ID many times, and I don’t think your position on the issue is racist, but I think supporting plans like the one in NC that evidence showed was specifically designed to disproportionately harm black voters is supporting/easing racism, and I think Sessions would likely support such plans.
Sessions has opposed various efforts to advocate removal the Confederate flag from state houses. I think the Confederate flag is reasonably seen by most black Americans (and many white Americans) as a symbol of white supremacism, and opposing its removal from government buildings shows, at best, a highly troubling (to me) indifference towards opposing symbols of racism.
AFAIK the WS did admit that Sessions exaggerated, it can indeed be said that as the one overseeing the department those are actions that he had to take.
Everybody opposes illegal immigration. The disagreement is in how to address the issue, with opinions ranging from Reagan style amnesty to spending billions of dollars to track down and deport illegal immigrants.
To understand the context of this a bit, I’d recommend reading this HuffPo article:
I think the “I have heard him referred to as” fundamentally alters the quote, and has quite a bit of a different meaning than he ‘called a white civil rights lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for defending the Voting Rights Act’. For example, I could say “I have heard Jeff Sessions referred to as a racist”, but that’s not at all the same thing as me calling Jeff Sessions a racist.
Yes, it was a joke, intended to get the thread started off in a more cordial direction than most debates about race seem to go.
DeNormalizing: Any prior President who nominated a candidate for any cabinet or senior post, especially one dealing with the law or human services, who had so much as been found to participate in a blackface skit in the 1950s would not only be castigated for nominating such a terrible person, but lose a good bite of their honeymoon luster as well.
TrumpVision: So he might of been kind of racist before. This is *now *and it’s just the AGUS, fer chrissakes.
Do you know which former colleague(s) said he used the n-word back in 1986? I don’t, but I’d like to know more. Up until now, I thought the worst he’d said was “boy” and “I have heard him referred to as a disgrace to his race”.
I think the KKK-marijuana joke has been addressed already in detail.
I don’t. At least, not with as hard as legal immigration is now. I think illegal immigration is a pretty big part of how our economy works. And I think that non-immigrants won’t accept the work.
If someone comes here, and, despite being possibly deported, finds that living here is better than their own country, I can’t very well say they are being evil. And, if they aren’t being evil, then I oppose laws that punish them.
If immigration were set up where you just come here however you can, apply for a green card, stay for a while, and eventually become a legal citizen, then I guess I would oppose illegal immigration. But not as it is now. Illegal immigration is a lot of poor people’s only real choice.
Well there’s really only two solutions to the problem of illegal immigration, and we can’t talk about either one in this country.
1> Criminalize hiring illegal aliens. If corporate managers and executives start getting prison sentences for hiring undocumented workers, it will stop in a hurry. Of course, this will also cause some rather large ripples through our economy.
2> Lets face it. They’re coming here for the economic opportunities, because there aren’t any where they came from. As long as our southern neighbors are poor and less developed, there will be a steady flow of people coming here by whatever means they can, to find a better life. And NOTHING will change that, even #1 won’t make much of a dent, until they no longer feel the need to do so.
Why do you think it would require prison sentences? If we just levied large fines against companies that hired illegals, they’d probably stop just as quickly as if the threat were to imprison their CEO.
Large fines (paid by the company and not the individual) are not nearly as effective as a deterrent. Your company having to pay a fine is not at the same level of *you *having to report to prison.
Then you must also oppose lots of other laws…seatbelt lays, helmet laws, zoning ordinances, etc. You can say that they take jobs that citizens could hold (and be off of assistance) and they depress wages.
I can well believe that Sessions was careful to disclaim the “disgrace to his race” comment by attributing it to unspecified other persons. And he may be telling the truth about that.
But given the number of people who testified that they had heard Sessions himself say racist things, I don’t find Sessions’ own disclaimer sufficient evidence to prove that his version is true.