January 28, 2017, Let the games continue
A federal judge right here in Brooklyn (I was just at a rather spirited rally outside the courthouse) just issued a nationwide temporary emergency stay of the "controversial" immigration ban on nationals of seven Muslim majority countries issued by the President earlier in the week. Protests had broken out all over the country over an ill-advised and poorly drafted order intended to implement the Trump campaign promise made to White supremacists at his Nuremberg style rallies to ban all Muslim immigrants.
The order, which took effect without notice so that people literally in flight were effected, is deliberately intended to affect nationals from all Muslim countries not doing business with the Trump organization, notably refugees from Syria, and all immigrants from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, nations with well over 130 million people among them, but more to the point, around 500,000 persons with visas, or green cards, or otherwise, a legal entitlement to enter the United States.
Say this for the new President: he has no sense of the incremental. He went right for a sore point, and in a yuuuuge way.
The real question is, where the f*** are business leaders? And where the f*** are grownups within the GOP? What he is proposing is a f***ing disaster for American business-- we need talent to be able to enter the country to keep our dubious economy running. We won't even think about the fact that many people Trump intends to shut out have American citizen dependents, not to mention families, jobs and lives here. We'll forget about what this says about us as a nation... and the amazing thing is, there is no particular emergency involved-- the emergency is that we have elected a petulant asshole to the presidency who is too stupid to know what he doesn't know, i.e., the scope of his legal authority in the immigration area, for example. Where the f*** is American business, on the phone with Mnuchin and Ross and the money people, to say "keep this up and your party is dead to us." Where. the f***. are. they?
Just asking. The games will continue until morale improves. This man has been in the Trump White House just over eight days, and he has already soured relations with our southern neighbor, abused hundreds of thousands of hardworking honest people who just want to make their lives here, threatened the health insurance of tens of millions, proposed re-instituting torture, and quite probably driven our Pacific region partners into the arms of China (and that's when he wasn't ordering his flacks to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd and threaten an investigation into non-existent voter fraud in an election he won)... all for no reason other than he is a small man (with small fingers and all that goes with that) and he is a huge bigot. And also because all of these policies are really good for Russia, a country to whom he is personally in debt for hundreds of millions of dollars and with whose oligarchs he partners with in a number of businesses.
Is a grown up going to come forward? I doubt it will be from the GOP... but you know who you are...