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FROM AP: Quotations of the day
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Creating a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants still hasn't cleared two formidable roadblocks in Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Like the Texas Republican Party, Cornyn and Cruz have come a long way from their relatively progressive stances of only a decade ago.
The Southwest is a place of great opportunity, enchantment, and grandeur, and yet, also a place of poverty and inequality in the United States. Through its children, it is also a place that will play an expanding and critically important role in either the successes or failures of our nation.
Upon hearing of his passing on Monday morning, the one thing that immediately came to mind for me was the day in 2005 when he took a stand on the Senate floor against pseudo-historian David Barton.
If the GOP stands squarely in the way of reforming the "broken" immigration system, many political careers will be crushed in the wake of this vote.
What's at stake in the immigration reform bill is whether or not we continue to perpetuate the harsh and short-sighted policies of our current immigration laws.
The DREAM Act may have been controversial before, but it is considered a safe bill on both sides of the aisle now: border security is where the controversy has migrated to after the DREAM Act has been so thoroughly accepted by the American public.
Texas is indeed going blue. The only question is when. If Republicans sabotage immigration reform, Texas Democrats may not have to wait for a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.
The April 17 Senate debate was a public embarrassment in which a minority employed insults to logic to thwart the will of a vast majority of the nation.
"Your heart weeps for their suffering," said Sen. Ted Cruz, who toured the disaster area on Friday with Sen. John Cornyn. It feels wrong to talk politics when they're still looking for bodies, but a respectful silence would only reward Cruz and Cornyn for their putrid hypocrisy.
I admit that I have no idea as to how these miscreants got their guns, but I am willing to say without reservation that there's something seriously wrong in a country where private citizens own 300 million guns and are still bitching that their 2nd Amendment rights are being threatened.
As a group of eight senators work together to make progress on immigration reform, there's one senator not in the group to keep an eye on. His name is John Cornyn. Cornyn is famous for posing as reformer even as he works to derail reform.
Today, schoolchildren peer through dusty museum glass at the stuffed carcasses of the Dodo bird. By actually supporting comprehensive immigration reform, John Cornyn can avoid casting his political career and the future of the Texas GOP into an ultimately irrelevant museum relic.
On the dawn of sequestration, Republicans are still in deep disagreement over how it will affect our military, and in even deeper disagreement over how to handle it. One thing they do seem to agree on, though, is that they aren't willing to close corporate tax loopholes to avoid it.
Consider what the Senate, which once dubbed itself "the world's greatest deliberative body," and a news media, which has greater access to information than at any time in history, didn't deal with just in the last few days of the anti-Hagel filibuster.
Seeking bipartisan support, President Obama today called for tighter controls on individual purchasing tactical nuclear weapons. The president asked Congress to approve a three-day waiting period prior to purchase, during which the individual would need to present evidence that he is not Iran or North Korea.
Hopefully, our elected officials will eventually pass legislation that at least ensures that military rape victims will have access to the same health care benefits available to the civilians they help protect.
