Miz Lindsey has boldly declared that pardoning the violent J6 defendants was a mistake. However, he’s siding with Trump on birthright citizenship. “I think it’s a cheap way to award citizenship,” he said. “You should not be a citizen simple because you were born here.”
So how did you get to be a citizen, Miz Lindsey? Is he proposing that nobody gets to be a citizen until they’ve passed some kind of qualification test?
Of course, what he’s complaining about are the parents, not the children. Through most of U.S. history all kinds of odd people showed up here without being sorted into “legal” or “illegal” piles. But until the 14th Amendment citizenship was assumed to belong only to white people.
Do read What ending birthright citizenship could look like in the U.S. in the Washington Post. We’d need a whole new bureaucracy to check out birth records. And it would create a huge pool of undocumented, and probably stateless residents. It’s a “solution” to a non-problem that would cause many bigger problems.
Update: Trump is picking fights with Colombia because Colombia refused to allow two U.S. military planes presumably full of Colombian nationals being deported from the U.S. to land there. (The Biden administration was using chartered commercial jets to fly people being deported back to their countries of origin, which I understand is actually a lot cheaper.) Colombian President Gustavo Petro appears to have been primarily objecting to a U.S. military plane flying into his country without advance notice. Why Trump is insisting on military planes and not chartered flights isn’t clear to me. Maybe he thinks military planes are more cool. Anyway, Mexico refused to allow a U.S. military plane to land yesterday, but apparently that issue was smoothed over. The issue may have been that Trump didn’t get permission in advance to land the plane.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced he had blocked two US military flights carrying migrants heading toward the country and called on the United States to establish better protocols in its treatment of migrants. Petro also left the door open to receiving repatriated migrants traveling on civilian planes.
Following Petro’s announcement, Trump criticized him on social media while announcing a slate of new sanctions and policies targeting Colombia, including a 25% tariff on all imports from the country, a “travel ban” for Colombian citizens, and a revocation of visas for Colombian officials in the US along with “all allies and supporters.”
Anyway, instead of just working out some arrangement that was more comfortable for Colombia, Trump is throwing fits and punishing Colombia for not doing things his way.
According to Google’s AI overview, which I don’t entirely trust, “The primary imports from Colombia to the United States include crude petroleum, coal, coffee, cut flowers, gold, refined petroleum, vehicles, machinery, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural goods like corn, with the US being the largest importer of Colombian goods overall.” It mentions corn, but the big one is COFFEE. More than 25 percent of the COFFEE we drink here comes from Colombia.
So, living and working in and alongside deep red state, um, folks, is a pain in the ass. The propaganda is, um, irritating because the Magats are sore winners, addicted to scrolling, and do not know how to distinguish internet psyops slop from actionable or useful information.
My solution is to not be influenced by the media stream and be smarter about my information intake. There is too much, now official, psyops and propaganda that rots the brain. Social media is dead: too many trolls, state agents, and AI bots to be useful. Boycotting media is a first, small step because the media is the problem. We are served unhealthy internet slop and expected to like it and praise the tech bros for being so smart for their toxic blends.
Maha, thanks and thanks for your forum, I trust you as a, um, news outlet so keep up the good work and stay sane. Please take down your facebook and twitter links, those mediums are useless. Perhaps replace them with a Bluesky link (less toxic)? I have been a web developer since, um, 1994 so give me a hollar if you need a hand with internet stuff.
I was surprised to see the Miz on Sunday A.M. TV. Not because he is not a regular but that he might not get the emperor's OK to do it. I guess he retains some trust at least now that he converted to bat shit crazy with the rest of the party. It was not that the party drove him crazy, he was always as they say, "close enough to walk".
Once upon a time I recall a Monroe Doctrine that was used to meddle a lot in the affairs of Central and South America. It was always billed as sort of benevolent and cooperative to our friends and neighbors to the south as I recall. Now I see a United States at odds and manipulative about this whole continent and no mention recently at all of the Monroe Doctrine of yore. Quite the strange change in policy, it seems to me. Are we now acting like the foreign power we once claimed to be protecting them from?
I don't know if China will, but if they buy what the US was buying it seems to me that the impact could be minimal. Consumers will notice when coffee jumps in price. The demand from Columbia was not the cancellation of deportation flights but it was for the humane treatment of the people being deported. Of course, cruelty is the point.
This will be the defining line in the sand, not just in Columbia. These are people, not cattle. They must be fed, housed, and given medical treatment. And if you are talking about millions of people being detained, it could get expensive quick. Congress will have a hard time appropriating funds for mass deportations without equivalent cuts in the budget.
Project 2025 looked beautiful to the Nazis who drew it up. In reality, it's not going to be easy.
Please. Don't use "Google's AI Overview".
Use Wikipedia.