In 1984 I came back to El Paso from Israel, but the tension did not go away. I brought the war home with me. Or maybe there had always been a war here and I just hadn’t seen it before. The concrete barricades at the Santa Fe Street bridge. The barbed wire. The Border Patrol checkpoints. The surveillance cameras and sensors along the river levee. The hovering helicopters. The floating bodies in the Rio Grande. Before, it had all seemed so normal to me that I hardly noticed. But I had come back with new eyes and now understood how abnormal everything was.

— David Romo, A River Runs Through It: Texas Monthly June 2010 [via]

Well, there’s a push to push this HR 2499. I see it as part of a four pronged plan that I see to really change the environment here in the United States of America. Amnesty for people who are here illegally, voting rights for criminals and felons. They wanted D.C. voting rights, something, got this little thing called the Second Amendment got in the way. They weren’t willing to put it forward, but they certainly wanted to do something I believe was unconstitutional and give Washington D.C. voting rights. And now this 2499, which is the Puerto Rico statehood bill which is being pushed by the new progressive party in Puerto Rico trying to create a federally sanctioned; that is, a U.S. sanctioned vote that they say is nonbinding but would give them the legitimacy to then come back and try to seat people in the United States congress.

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Congressman Jason Chaffetzof Utah, Glenn Beck: The 51st State?

Idk if y’all subscribe to Glenn Beck’s email newsletter (which, uh, I definitely do because I am really into talk radio as an institution) but I thought this discussion was kind of interesting.  I have become really interested in PR over the last few months and I am intrigued both by this discussion and HR 2499.

Honestly, having read the whole thing, I can’t even see why anyone in the United States would be upset about PR wanting to be a state (if they even want to be a state) unless the prob is more brown people who can vote for national reps and president.

The Democrat-written law has plenty of champions. Yep, like Fidel Castro. Welcome to communism folks.

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The Communist President is Near commenting on Companies must soon provide private space for mothers to pump breast milk: Health Care Fact Check

Obv providing a private room/time to pump is the first step down the road to totalitarian government. I guess really freedom loving women should either stay at home (OBVIOUSLY) or formula-feed.

Or pump in the bathroom, where every good meal is prepared!

What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.

— Minutemen and Klansmen [via]

Either we all have the right to choose or none of us has it.

— The Answer to the Stupak? Overturn Hyde Now [via]

It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may be distorted by the pressure of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.

— Leon Trotsky, “Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events”, April 25, 1940 [via]

One of the major disagreements I had with Troskyists (and oh did we have a lot) was whether old positions are worth defending. Sometimes they aren’t, and I think it seriously weakens your position as a radical to bend over backwards defending, you know, the Soviet Union. Not everything the working class does is good, either. They are not a privileged and infallible class. You grow as a person and as a movement by abandoning positions that were poorly thought out or unsuccessful, and pushing forward with new ideas and methods.