Here is a gift for all the Republican governors who are announcing that they will not allow any refugees from the civil war in Syria and Iraq to resettle in their states.
And here is some theme music for the rest of us.
I hate cowards in leadership positions most of all.
Like Ebola. Scared shitless. Fear. Fear. Fear.
What else have they got to sell? Plus, half of Democrats buy this swill as well.
“Plus, half of Democrats buy this swill as well.”
This is proving to be false.
Look at the list of Governors who are asking their constituents to PANIC:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/11/update-16-governors-including-one-democrat-ban-obamas-syrian
-refugees/
24 Republicans and one Democrat. Hmm…
Look at the list of Governors who have stated publicly that they will respect our Federal system and welcome immigrants from Syria:
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/16/us-states-to-turn-away-syrian-refugees.html
6 Democrats and no Republicans. I see a trend.
Look at the recent state of play within the Congressional caucuses:
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/254215-homeland-chairman-wants-congress-to-vote-on-syria
n-refugee-plan
“(In September), the White House said it would increase the annual cap for refugees in the next fiscal year, to allow at least 10,000 Syrian migrants in to the country.
The announcement yielded mixed reactions on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers in both parties blasted the move as too little, too late. Some Democrats have suggested the proper number ought to be 10 times as high, and the Obama administration has declined to rule out increasing its limit.
Several Republicans, however, have been far more hawkish. Among them, McCaul has repeatedly warned that a flood of refugees could easily lead to an influx of extremists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Opening the U.S.’s doors, he has said, could expose the U.S. to new terror attacks.
“
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/gop-lawmakers-syria-refugees-215936
“A cascade of Republicans on Monday implored the Obama administration to scrap plans to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States next year, saying they pose an unacceptable security risk in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
And, in a dramatic twist, the sudden standoff is raising the possibility of a government shutdown next month.“
Is there a single Congressional Democrat who has asked the Administration to halt its plans to admit Syrians to the United States?
Look at the commentaries from the POTUS candidates on each side, one after another. Governor Kasich and Senator Graham have now reversed their previous support for our acceptance of Syrian refugees, joining the rest of the GOP pants-pissing brigade.
Have any Democratic POTUS candidate called for the suspension of plans to accept Syrian refugees into the U.S.?
Have to wait until the polling of Democrats is down before we’ll know if my comment was an exaggeration. Perhaps I should phrase my comments more carefully — such as “Up to half of Democrats” — to avoid having you pounce when I’m dismissive of Democrats.
Here’s the thing — as long as the aggregate partisanship in the US breaks down 50/50, any defections or silence from Democrats means that the right wins on any freaking issue. So, doesn’t really matter if they aren’t the same as Republicans if they continuously lose.
You balance risk and reward. A small risk, but zero reward. These governors won’t do anything for the people of their own state. Why would you expect them to do anything for someone half a world away?
What’s really special is, they have very little say in the matter.
Need more dunce caps.
From the link:
Resettlement is difficult enough even with the piddling resources that come from the states in which refugees are settled. Without those resources, it becomes even more difficult.
Wondering their response the question that some of the refugees are Christian.
Some republicans have already called for taking only Christians in, and Obama condemned it as a religious test today iirc.
It was Ted Cruz that called for Christians. Czechs have the same position.
Well, so much for claiming to be from the nation with all that “…land of the free and the home of the brave…” these conservative clowns claim is an American’s birthright. They and their ilk shame the rest of us. When did conservatives become such cowards? They’re blowhards being led by the biggest blowhard of all these days, The Donald. Nothing they say about themselves is close to the truth.
Is that covered by Obamacare?
If this had happened to the GOP a few decades earlier, we never would have survived the Cold War.
spink
Actually it was rather hard to emigrate here from the USSR unless you were prominent like Svetlana Stalin or a defective scientist or officer with intelligence.
defecting of course.
How did Oswald go back and forth?
He was CIA.
No he wasn’t. Not saying that he couldn’t have ended up being an asset for some cabal in Dallas, but there’s no way the CIA would have hire anyone as uneducated (at best a ninth grade education), of average intelligence and possibly dyslexic, psychologically disturbed (he had a horrible upbringing), and erratic/uncontrollable/unmanageable as Oswald.
My opinion has always been if Oswald was involved with CIA at all it was as a manipulated dupe who was ignorant if the situation.
The problem with the “manipulated dupe” assessment is that LHO distrusted everybody with the exception of Marina some of the time and de Mohrenschildt. And no evidence has ever emerged that de Mohrenschildt wasn’t continuously in Haiti from May 1963. (I can imagine that de Mohrenschildt put the bug in LHO’s ear to go to New Orleans earlier in the year and possibly for the CIA to check LHO for some potential use. If so, it was determined that he was useless.)
What followed in Dallas was either LHO acting on his own or a serendipitous hire by the conspirators. If the latter, difficult for me to accept that his job included the kill shots — too risky given his marksmanship and crappy gun as Mrs. Kennedy was not to be hit (old school gallantry).
http://www.redstate.com/2015/11/16/john-bel-edwards-wont-fight-syrian-refugee-placement-lagov/
Edwards’ initial equivocation ultimately led him to alter his position, while Vitter jumped in front of the issue and took a clear position he’s not going to move from.
That’s what you do when the voters believe you’re correct.
Edwards actually had the chance to perhaps sew up the election by calling Obama out in no uncertain terms and demand a stop to any resettlement efforts in Louisiana. He didn’t. He asked for information. But Vitter, who has worked on the issues of immigration and uncontrolled borders for years, didn’t hesitate or equivocate.
And resettling Syrian refugees is not going to be a popular idea in Louisiana. At all.
unless Edwards runs the cowardice argument. he is a vet, after all.
We’re swallowing undigested RedState offal now?
Is it sooooooo terrible to ask for information about policy decisions?
“But Vitter, who has worked on the issues of immigration and uncontrolled borders for years,…”.
Despite this glowing review from our conservative commentator, Vitter apparently knows nothing about the perpetrators of this year’s terrorist attacks in Paris. All participants appear to have been citizens of European countries.
So I will get blasted for this: but simply saying we should Syrian refugees without addressing the legitimate fear that within that group may be a small number of potential terrorists is a losing proposition.
That’s just the general anti-immigration argument with a country flag attached to it.
Instead of “Immigrants, eeeek!!!”, it’s “Syrian refugees, eeeekkk!!!”
Did I mention before that DAESH has Slavic troops fighting in Syria? Not that people should be afraid of Slavic immigrants either.
I don’t know how to help bigots stop being cowards. Especially when the GOP is pouring gasoline on the fire.
Non-sense, these are refugees from an area with an active terrorist organization that has announced its intention to attack the west, and just carried out a spectacular attack in Paris.
This makes them very different from the those from Latin America (that are not being talked about).
You aren’t listening – you are just saying everyone is a racist who disagrees with you.
We are going to get killed with that attitude on this issue.
We need to be addressing reasonable security questions specifically and carefully.
So…terrorists can’t fly to Latin America before they come here?
Look, the Syrian war wasn’t directly started by the US – that would be the Iraq War – but we played a significant role in its origins, have been pouring weapons into the conflict from the beginning, and have now added saturation bombing to the mix. The US has a fairly significant moral responsibility to those caught in the middle, not that such things have much concerned us in the past.
As a result of this conflagration, there are now millions of refugees, of which Obama’s 10,000 is a drop in the bucket. But even that’s a huge number compared to the fewer than a dozen people who carried out the Paris attacks. So far as we now know, all of those people were European nationals. Two of them apparently came back to Europe embedded among Syrian refugees. The rest didn’t. Europe could somehow bar the legal entry of every single refugee from Syria, and it would not have prevented those attacks. Such a gesture in the US, or in bedwetting red states, is even more pointless, except to deepen the misery of that many more people who have nowhere to go and can’t do anything about it.
Scapegoating people who have nothing – in this case, literally – is one of the oldest, easiest, and most dishonorable political tricks around. Don’t go there.
Of course Syrian refugees should not be scapegoated and reasonable logical people won’t do that. The issue is our electorate is neither reasonable nor logical. that means that the Ds are going to be on the wrong side of the electorate when it comes to this issue UNLESS they can some how address those fears.
That’s how I read fladem’s argument from the start anyway.
Exactly.
Thank you for saying what I didn’t I guess.
At least half of the attackers in Paris were French or Belgian nationals. The Paris prosecutor has not identified the following attackers:
Guardian: The men who attacked Paris: Profile of a terror cell
Look at the profile. Look at the frequency distribution in the profile. Focusing on refugees alone would have been idiotic in this case. Doing that just because focusing on the real elements instead of the demographic elements alone of the profile is too hard sets you up for attack. By now, that should be obvious. Both with terrorism and with ordinary crime.
Above and beyond the ramifications of this incident there seems to be a headwind worldwide against liberal immigration policy which it may be counter-productive to resist. Perhaps better, for progressive aspirations, to let it blow over and find other issues to defend in the meantime. I’m thinking mostly of Europe and others, such as Australia, where it is a losing electoral proposition at the moment.
Did’t a Cuban terrorist put a bomb on a plane and blow it up….yet we let Cubans with wet feet freely immigrate when the show up on a Fla beach.
The Republican Gov. do not have the resources to take in any immigrants. They can ever keep their rural hospital open or maintain public health infrastructure to take care of their own citizens.
What is the vetting process now? If I have heard correctly from the teevee, it’s pretty rigorous already. What more to make people comfortable? They already have terrorists in their midst (abortion doctor murderers, church arsonists or shooters, etc.). But they’re going to protect their people this way? And back to the original question if someone cares to answer: What is the vetting process now?
Daesh changes strategy; why? Perhaps because Obama was right and they are losing the previous strategy’s war. Props to Vox for the ‘unconventional’ (reality based) analysis.
Wake up, America. It’s not always about you.
Cruz is accelerating down his ‘lane’. Can’t say you weren’t warned.
It at least bears considering that the Paris attacks (and the other recent attacks such as the downing of the Russian passenger jet) are in response to the increased military pressure being exerted on the ISIL statelet in eastern Syria/western Iraq. They are weekly being forced back, losing ever greater portions of their Kurdish territory. Their strategists may see this as the handwriting on the wall, as Obama maintains.
So ISIS has “escalated” to civilian terror attacks, not out of any real strength, but long term weakness. It is hard to see how they think deploying civilian terror attacks against France and Russia will gain them very much or workout in the favor long term. Surely they learned the results of 9/11, but then Osmama’s strategy appeared intended to draw America into a ground war against Islam. That does not seem a propitious strategy for a militarily weak group attempting to form a new Sunni state with definite borders, etc.
They clearly felt they needed to “do something”, which is precisely what the mass of Americans are now demanding of Obama (daily air attacks and Green Beret coordination of various militia groups against ISIL territory is apparently “nothing” to militarist Repubs and most Americans.) Only a massive crusade of US/French/NATO ground forces is “enough”–no matter that another western invasion of the Sunni world solves not one thing having to do with Sunni political disaffection and despair….
One thing is clear, the ISIS change in strategy will be a boon to rightwing politicians in the West.
No refugees participated in the attack based on current evidence:
Also a good read on the motivations of Daesh fighters, worth a few minutes of your time.
That really is an outstanding piece