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Some Families Are More Equal Than Others

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Sunday morning, after trying to hail a cab for far too long, I finally got to Grand Central and boarded the Metro North train to Connecticut with my Mother’s Day gift bag in one hand, a Starbucks’ coffee and muffin in the other and my backpack on my shoulder. Shortly after grabbing a seat on the crowded holiday train a family of five (young boy, young girl, mom, dad, and dog) spread out and grabbed various non-adjacent seats near me. I grabbed my weekend New York Times for cover.

Mom and son were right across from me, and her entire conversation with the five-year-old seemed focused on this choice or that choice. “Do you want your book now or candy now?” “Do you want the book about the train or the book about baseball?” An elderly passenger asked the boy how old he was. “Five and three quarters!” “Oh, you’re going to have a birthday soon! Are you going to have a party?” To which mom chimed in, “Well, he and his sister haven’t decided yet if it’s going to be Chuck E. Cheese or pizza.”

Of course the family-of-five got me thinking about how families have changed, so on the way home when I came across the Times piece, “Immigration Status of Army Spouses Often Leads to Snags,” I thought I was ready.

What I wasn’t ready for was the huge hypocrisy I was about to read.

It seems in today’s military, there are a fair number of servicemembers married to immigrants who are in the country, for one reason or another, “illegally.” (While I hate that term, in this context it’s fitting.) The military, it seems, is hard at work, on a case-by-case basis, trying to obtain legal status for some spouses.

Now, let me say this first: I think if someone is prepared to lay down their life to protect mine, they should be paid a lot of money, given free health care and college tuition and a job, for life. And if their spouse needs citizenship papers — or if they do — it should be automatic (unless they’re a convicted felon, perhaps.)

So, hooray for the military, trying to do the right thing. I hope they extend this treatment, given the excessive tours of duty our armed forces are being forced into, for wars we should not be fighting.

But the naked hypocrisy is mind-blowing. The Times explains,

Immigration lawyers and Department of Homeland Security officials say that many thousands of people in the military have spouses or close relatives who are illegal immigrants.

Today the issue is not only personal. “It is an issue of readiness for the American armed forces,” says Representative Zoe Lofgren, the Democrat from California who leads the House subcommittee on immigration. “We have many Americans who are afraid to deploy.”

Lieutenant Tenebro would like to make a career in the military, including new missions to Iraq or Afghanistan, but for now he is not stepping forward for an overseas deployment. “Our situation has kept me at bay because of the constant worry that something might happen to my family while I am away,” he said.

The issue is not only personal, it is an issue of readiness for the American armed forces. And there are far more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender servicemembers – an estimated 65,000 — who are stepping forward, I might add, and serving in fear, not of their spouses being deported, but of dying and their not-illegal, just not-legally-recognized, spouses not knowing because their mere existence would be grounds for termination.

(There is, of course, also the matter of same-sex couples having one member in the armed forces, and the other an “illegal,” and because they are same-sex, there are few opportunities for them to marry. Even if they do, married same-sex couples are not recognized by the federal government, so their union will not stop a deportation from taking place. More hypocrisy and injustice. And another reason why so many same-sex couples are giving up their citizenship and moving to countries that do recognize their relationships.)

Picture the city cop on a beat whose wife knows every day he goes off to work he may not come home. Think of the daily fear she has of there being a knock on the door, and two officers standing outside. Now imagine what it must be like for a military wife, knowing that the last time she saw her husband, months ago, may have been the last. Then imagine that her “husband” is a woman, and the military won’t even contact her because she isn’t legally allowed to exist.

Imagine your husband or wife being killed for serving your country, and your country not ever even knocking on your door.

Yes, in today’s military, if you are a man married to woman who is “illegal,” the armed forces will work to obtain citizenship for your “illegal” spouse, but if you are a man in a relationship with another man, the military will fire you if they find out.

Imagine the Hell America puts its 65,000 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender soldiers and their families through every single day.

There’s that lovely MetroNorth family-of-five, swimming in choice after blissful choice. There’s the dutiful, dedicated family serving their country, one spouse legal, one spouse not.

And then there are the 65,000 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender soldiers serving their country, dutifully, dedicated, and what do they get?

A discharge.

This is just a small part of the tyranny that is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We must act, now, to repeal this law that unfairly treats so many thousands of honorable soldiers who are working to protect America.

Yes, in today’s America, some families are more equal than others.

Act now! Visit Veteran’s Lobby Day for more information, and contact your Senator!

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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5 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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8 hours ago

on

May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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