Blaming Obama should be good for around 5 or 6 years. That’s about how long Democrats blamed Bush for everything after Obama was elected. It’s an excellent diversionary tactic for taking the heat from a sitting President, far too useful a tool to be not taken advantage of. And sometimes it’s even justified, although the longer you use it the less justified it becomes.
Because, of course, all such claims are equally grounded in fact. :rolleyes:
Obama said that climate change was a bad thing and we need to cut emissions. So now people are staying home in droves and refusing to travel. QED.
It will take Team Trump a while to fix up this mess that Obama made, and let the world know that everyone is welcome in America*.
- Muslims, Mexicans, and Australian authors of children’s books excepted. Also any foreigner that looks suspicious, which unfortunately is most of them.
This is how the CNN article begins – emphasis mine for added effect:
Manchester, Ohio (CNN) Smokestacks rise up through a swipe of naked trees under a gray sky. Nestled between two coal-fired power plants, Manchester is a mass of closed storefronts, a smattering of broken windows and a couple of restaurants and one bar along the Ohio River.
Doesn’t that just make you want to move there right away? I mean, the part about “nestled between two coal-fired power plants” is like something out of an idyllic children’s fairy tale – something that Mem Fox might have written.
I couldn’t help wondering about health in this wonderful place, nestled between two coal-fired power plants. So I did a quick unscientific study. Here’s a start: deaths and respiratory diseases attributable directly to fine-particle emissions (only) from the Killen plant alone.
Here’s another. If you zoom in on Ohio on that map, and look at Adams County where Manchester is located, there is a great big black circle of death at the precise location of Manchester indicating 25-75 deaths a year directly related to coal-fired power plant emissions, and considering the low population density (Manchester is a village of some 2000, and the entire county population is less than 30,000), Manchester sounds like a contender for Death Capital of the US in terms of per-capita incidence of cardio-respiratory disease and premature death.
Do actual economic factual data mean anything at all to you? Are economic conditions now pretty much exactly the same as they were in early 2009?
In other words, do you have a fucking clue?
By five years in, I think we were largely just blaming the Koch brothers. You know, the guys Bush and Gingrich worked for? Oh, and Bob Rubin.
Apologies if I missed this elsewhere in the thread, but the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t see eye to eye with His Orangeness about the danger of Moos-lims (this from the New York Daily News, which last time I looked wasn’t exactly a bastion of leftist journalism).
I expect to see more than a few DHS intelligence analysts “leave to pursue other opportunities” in the not-too-distant future.
And Trump’s new National Security Advisor has told his staff not to use the phrase “Radical Islamic Terrorism”.
(But I thought those were the Magic Words that would keep us safe!)
Fashion is suject to all kinds of ridiculus fluctuations, so who’s to say? They may be right. Maybe people didn’t know this happened before, and now they are finding out, they will stay at home. My sympathy for the Welsh would be greater if it wasn’t that the UK has a long-standing reputation for doing the same kind of thing.
Anyway, border turnbacks really make me feel sick, wheniver I heare about it being done by Aus immigration and border protection. (Perhaps because getting from anywhere to Aus, or Aus to anywhere, is such an expensive excercise.) Whatever the justification for the foreign citizen ban, that’s what visas are for. Turning people back at the airport after you’ve given them a visa is lying. Do you want to be a liar? Do you want your country to be known as a country of liars? It’s just an evil thing to do.
The rhetoric of the President seems to have given a certain kind of border official the idea that all the foreigners born in the wrong places are for targeting, as the known French historian Roussou as the France 24 reports, also detained for 10 hours and subject to bad treatment.
There is no doubt the fad effect in the wildfire way these stories are spreading, but it is also seeming the case that the aggressive actions seem to have highly escalated.
The widening image of the USA as becoming an unreliable place to travel, not helpful even if exagarated. The price to pay for a leader who is making wild statements and encouraging indirectly the lower levels segments with bad judgments to act like he does.
Not the first Author to get in trouble at a US border:
Ian McEwan: (British, 2004) “British author detained 24 hours at border” British author Ian McEwan detained 24 hours at U.S. border (YVR) - FlyerTalk Forums
and
Peter Watts (Canadian, 2009):
(Insert joke about dangerous intellectuals)
He might want to wait to unpack the boxes, because he may not be in his new office very long.
The past generation, and for all I know, long before, individual American Customs agents and TSA have had the capacity and willingness to turn back any alien traveller on the agent’s own decision, without appeal, for any reason — which they are not obliged to share with anyone…
Doesn’t matter if one has a visa, doesn’t matter if one is from a Visa Waiver Program country, doesn’t matter whether you are carrying $0 or $10,000, doesn’t matter if one has a return ticket, doesn’t matter if one is due to deliver an important academic speech or if one plans to pick fruit on one’s holiday, doesn’t matter if one will be slain if returned. One customs agent decides all.
*One of the questions on the paper was, “Are you an anarchist?” To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, “What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist” along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes atheist. Then there was the question, “Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?” Against this I should write, “I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.” The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, “Are you a polygamist?” The answer to this is, “No such luck” or “Not such a fool,” according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, “Shall I slay my brother Boer”–the answer that ran, “Never interfere in family matters.” But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, “I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.” Or, “I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into your President at the earliest opportunity.” Or again, “Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.” There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies. *
I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.
G. K. Chesterton — What Is America
U.S. detains and nearly deports French Holocaust historian
Apparently others were given worse treatment:
I can’t wait to be told by right-wing assholes that the problem was that Obama said the phrase “radical islamic terrorism” TOO MUCH.
That would be par for the course for these brainless shitheels.
So, when will it stop being justified for Bush? Most Americans will never recoup the ground lost during the Great Recession. The typical American family’s savings haven’t yet gotten back to pre-Crash levels, let alone gotten back up to where they would have been absent the Crash of 2008.
And once again, a Dem hands over a reasonably sound economy to a Republican, who will proceed to fuck it all up. And when the next Dem gets elected, s/he will spend most of two terms cleaning up after the goddam elephants.
You know what really disappoints me about the election results? It would have been so great to see what a Dem could do in office, when she didn’t have to start off by cleaning up after someone else’s mess.
School boards across Canada are grappling with decisionsabout whether or not to cancel trips to the US.
Mainly, there is now increasing uncertainty about how current or future US travel bans will affect students and chaperones. I think that it is good that these decisions are being made at the board level, so that individual schools will have clarity about policy.
Personally, I think all schools should cancel any future trips to the US. There is the uncertainty factor - what happens if one or two chaperones are turned back, or a student who must be accompanied back? This would leave students in a bad position of not having enough adults.
Also, there is the moral/ethical message - should students go on a fun trip, and leave behind their Muslim classmates? I say no.
Finally, there is overall safety. Students safety must be paramount, and there are increasing worries that the US is becoming an unsafe place to travel.
Ah, give **aldiboronti **a break. He was a toddler during the first Obama administration and doesn’t remember any of this stuff first hand. He’s only read about it.
“We know you’re up to something! Why haven’t you been caught yet!” :dubious:
Behind all their tough talking bullshit, they’re a bunch of scaredy yellow cowards.
And in the Elections forum, Velocity, Pantastic and Rick Sanchez are trying to tell us that it is the Liberals who are the real racists. :smack:
“Please Daddy, tell us the story again about how in the South, all races lived in peace and harmony and everyone knew their place until those evil libruls came in and gave the negroes ideas above their stations.”