Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts

Friday, January 13

Migrants Can Use Moblle App to Gain Entry in USA


WASHINGTON/MEXICO CITY, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border can now use a mobile app to schedule a time to approach a land port of entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed on Thursday, a move intended to reduce unauthorized crossings but which has sparked concerns over privacy and access.

The app, called CBP One, is available in English and Spanish and will allow migrants in Central and Northern Mexico who upload biographical information and a photo to request an appointment at one of eight ports in Texas, Arizona and California, according to a fact sheet.

The administration had announced it would expand its use of CBP One, giving asylum seekers direct access to enter their information as a pre-screening step before an appointment. Launched in 2020, the app has previously been used to allow people crossing legally at land ports of entry to submit their information beforehand and for non-governmental organizations to request humanitarian entry for certain migrants.

U.S. President Joe Biden's administration touts the app as a more regulated, potentially quicker alternative to crossing the border. But advocates worry asylum seekers will be required to submit personal information without being guaranteed entry and that some may not have access to a cell phone or internet.

The app rollout comes after Biden last week announced his administration would expand COVID-era "Title 42" restrictions to quickly expel Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border back to Mexico while opening up legal pathways for those who have U.S. sponsors and enter by air.

Biden, a Democrat who intends to seek re-election in 2024, has been criticized by Republicans for what they consider permissive border policies amid record crossings.  READ MORE...

Monday, October 24

NO Television for Trump Testimony


WASHINGTON (AP) — Raising the stakes on its extraordinary subpoena to Donald Trump, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot indicated Sunday it would not consider letting the former president testify live on television about the direct role that congressional investigators say he played in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee is demanding Trump’s testimony under oath next month as well as records relevant to its investigation. To avoid a complicated and protracted legal battle, Trump reportedly had told associates he might consider complying with the subpoena if he could answer questions during live testimony.

But Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, on Sunday rejected the possibility. She said the committee, which makes its major decisions with unanimous consent, would not allow Trump’s testimony to turn into a “food fight” on TV and she warned that the committee will take action if he does not comply with the subpoena.  READ MORE...

Friday, October 21

Biden Attempts to Ease Gas Prices


CNN —President Joe Biden on Wednesday formally announced the sale of an additional 15 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in December as he looks to lower gas prices ahead of the crucial midterm elections.

“With my announcement today, we’re going to continue to stabilize markets and decrease the prices at a time when the actions of other countries have caused such volatility,” Biden said in a speech from the White House. “And I’ve told my team to be prepared to look further – look for further releases in the months ahead if needed.”

The President also revealed the administration’s plan to purchase oil to refill the emergency reserve, which is now at its lowest level in nearly 40 years, when prices fall to $70 a barrel.  READ MORE...

Saturday, October 15

Causes of Inflation


WASHINGTON (AP) — What keeps driving inflation so high? The answer, it seems, is nearly everything.

Supply chain snarls and parts shortages inflated the cost of factory goods when the economy rocketed out of the pandemic recession two years ago. Then it was a surge in consumer spending fueled by federal stimulus checks. Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted gas and food supplies and sent those prices skyward.

Since March, the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates to try to cool the price spikes. So far, there’s little sign of progress. Thursday’s report on consumer prices in September came in hotter than expected even as some previously big drivers of inflation — gas prices, used cars — fell for a third straight month.

Consumer prices, excluding volatile food and energy costs, skyrocketed 6.6% from a year ago — the fastest such pace in four decades. Overall inflation did decline a touch, mostly because of cheaper gas. But costlier food, medical care and housing pointed to a widening of price pressures across the economy.  READ MORE...

Wednesday, June 22

China Conducts Anti-Ballistic Test


China successfully conducted a mid-range anti-ballistic missile test late Sunday, its defense ministry said.


The land-based test “achieved its expected objectives” and was defensive in nature and not targeted at any one country, according to the statement.


The country conducted a similar test in February 2021 and brings the tally of publicly announced Chinese land-based anti-ballistic missile technical tests to six, state media Global Times reported.


The test could add to tensions in an already volatile region, where Beijing and Washington are vying for influence. Neighboring North Korea has also ramped up its missile tests in recent months, prompting South Korea and the US to respond to its provocations.





Friday, February 25

Fighting Child Poverty in America


It was heralded as a game-changer for America's social safety net. It dramatically reduced child poverty. But, last month, the enhanced Child Tax Credit — a kind of "Social Security for kids" — expired, and millions of American children sank back into poverty.

In March 2021, President Biden and congressional Democrats revamped the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Rescue Plan. They restructured it, so that parents could get a monthly check from the government. They increased the credit's size, allowing parents to claim as much as $3,600 a year per child, or $300 a month. And they made the credit fully refundable, so that even super-low-income families who don't pay much — or anything — in federal taxes could get it.

For those primarily concerned with ending child poverty, these changes were a resounding success. Scholars at Columbia University found they reduced child poverty by about 30%. Another study found the enhanced program cut household food insufficiency by 26%.

But President Biden's efforts to renew the credit have been thwarted by opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans. They disliked how much the program cost and how generous it was, and they worried that it would encourage parents to stop working because it did not have a work requirement.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the beefed-up Child Tax Credit would cost around $225 billion per year (about $100 billion more per year than the original version, which is now back in effect). For context, that's less than a quarter of the annual cost of Social Security, about a third of the cost of Medicare, and about the same as the budget for the Department of Agriculture. A report from the Urban Institute finds that even with the enhanced Child Tax Credit, America spent only about 7% of its federal budget on kids in 2021 — and that is now projected to decline.

As for how many parents stopped working as a result of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, estimates range from about 300,000 to 1.5 million. There are about 50 million working parents in the United States, so even if we accept only the highest estimate, more than 97% of parents continued working after receiving the payments. That makes sense because 300 bucks a month is hardly enough for most families to live on.

The failure of Washington to renew the enhanced Child Tax Credit continues a long tradition in America: Our welfare system has long spent generously on the old, but it has consistently skimped on the young. While America spends about as much, or even more on the elderly than many other rich nations, it spends significantly less on kids. Among the almost 40 countries in the OECD, only Turkey spends less per child as a percentage of their GDP. It's a big reason why the United States has a much higher rate of child poverty than most other affluent countries — and even has a higher rate of child poverty than some not-so-affluent countries.

In a new paper, the economists Anna Aizer, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Adriana Lleras-Muney explore the reasons why the United States is such an outlier when it comes to fighting child poverty. While they acknowledge the reasons are varied and complex, they focus their analysis on one factor: American policymakers, influenced by economists, have dwelled much more on the costs of social programs than their benefits.  TO FIND OUT THE COST OF FOCUSING JUST ON COSTS, CLICK HERE...

Saturday, February 19

Russian Nuclear Drills

Fighter jets of the Russian and Belarusian air forces fly in a joint mission during the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military drills in Belarus, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. Russia has deployed troops to its ally Belarus for sweeping joint military drills that run through Sunday, fueling Western concerns that Moscow could use the exercise to attack Ukraine from the north. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)



KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia announced massive nuclear drills while Western leaders grasped Friday for ways to avert a new war in Europe amid soaring East-West tensions, after unusually dire U.S. warnings that Moscow could order an invasion of Ukraine any day.

Immediate worries focused on the volatile front lines of eastern Ukraine, where an upsurge of recent shelling tore through the walls of a kindergarten and basic communication was disrupted. Western officials, focused on an estimated 150,000 Russian troops posted around Ukraine’s borders, fear the long-simmering conflict could provide the spark for a broader war.

The drumbeat of warnings that a larger conflict could start at any moment continued Friday after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Washington saw no signs of a promised Russian withdrawal — but instead saw more troops moving toward the border with Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. believes Russia could launch an attack “any time” and also said he still had seen no sign of the promised Russian pullback. He will hold a call Friday with Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Even as Russia claimed to be pulling back troops from extensive military exercises that had sparked fears of invasion, the Kremlin sent a reminder to the world that it has one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals, by announcing drills of its nuclear forces for the weekend. The muscle-flexing overshadowed Russian offers this week of continued diplomacy to defuse the Ukraine crisis.

NATO allies are also flexing their might, beefing up military forces around eastern Europe, but insist the actions are purely defensive and to show unity in the face of Russian threats.

The U.S. announced the $6 billion sale of 250 tanks to Poland, a NATO member that has been occupied or attacked by Russia over past centuries. Announcing the deal, Austin said Russia’s military buildup had only reinvigorated NATO instead of cowing it, as Moscow had hoped.

Meanwhile, world leaders meeting at the Munich Security Conference warned that Europe’s security balance is under threat. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that the situation is “calling into question the basic principles of the European peace order.”

“Even steps, millimeters toward peace are better than a big step toward war,” she said.  READ MORE...


Wednesday, February 16

Russia Ready to FIRE

Provided by Global News...


A senior Russian military official said on Monday that Russia was ready to open fire on foreign ships and submarines that illegally enter its territorial waters, the Interfax news agency reported.

Any such decision would, however, be taken only at the “highest level,”, Stanislav Gadzhimagomedov, deputy head of the main operational department of the General Staff, was quoted as saying.

The comment came two days after Moscow said a Russian naval vessel had chased away a U.S. submarine in Russian waters in the Pacific. The United States denied it had carried out military operations in Russian territorial waters.

Tensions between the two countries are running high, with Washington warning that Russia could attack Ukraine at any time. Moscow denies any such intention, despite massing more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, and has accused Western governments of hysteria.

Monday, January 31

The Disillusionment of a Young Biden Official

By Jonathan Blitzer
January 28, 2022

In the spring of 2019, Andrea Flores, then a thirty-one-year-old associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., received an e-mail from the head of an organization called National Security Action. Its mission sounded lofty and urgent, and also typical for the time: “advancing American global leadership” and “opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” What distinguished National Security Action was that it would soon become a laboratory for the Biden transition. Flores, who’d worked in the Obama White House, was seen as an expert on immigration and border policy. She was also still young by the standards of the profession. Consulting with National Security Action put her in Ć©lite company. “It exposed my ideas to a much broader group,” she told me. “Usually, you work in your field and share your ideas with mentors. I never thought to diversify in this way.”

Over the next year, she wrote position papers and participated in strategy sessions over conference calls. At one point, while sitting at home on a Zoom call with Madeleine Albright, it occurred to her that she might get a position in the next Presidential Administration. Last January, Joe Biden entered office having made concrete promises to humanize American immigration policy. Flores was hired as the director of border management on Biden’s National Security Council, an influential body that was traditionally white and male. For Flores, it was a source of pride to be one of the few high-ranking women of color. “There’s an expectation, too often, that all the Black and brown people go to domestic policy and that they don’t understand these other issues,” she said. “It was a dream role for me.”

Her first task was to fulfill one of Biden’s explicit promises on the campaign trail: to end a Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or M.P.P., which had forced more than sixty thousand migrants to wait in Mexico after they applied for asylum at the border. In effect, migrants who had fled violence and poverty in their home countries had become stuck in some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico, where criminals and extortionists targeted them with impunity. During the next seven months, Flores orchestrated a process that allowed thirteen thousand migrants, many of whom had spent the better part of two years in makeshift encampments, to enter the U.S. “No one heard about it because it ran so smoothly,” an Administration official told me. Another White House official said, of the effort, “This was how government was supposed to work. Andrea was in charge, and it was beautiful to watch.”

But before Flores could finish the job she was called off. In August, 2021, a lawsuit filed by two Republican attorneys general reached a Trump-appointed federal judge, in Texas, who ordered the government to reinstate M.P.P. Biden’s Department of Justice appealed, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, reissued a memo laying out the case for terminating M.P.P. (It had “endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address root causes of irregular migration,” he has said.) But the effort was rebuffed in the conservative Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. By the end of the year, D.H.S. had reinstated the policy. To Flores, the rush to comply seemed to betray a willingness on the part of the White House to reassert tough measures at the border. “Why launch it before you devise new and creative housing solutions for migrants?” Flores wondered. “Why launch it before you have a case-oversight mechanism?” (A White House spokesperson said it was “false and wrong” to imply that the Administration could have taken more time to deliberate. One of the Republican attorneys general, he said, had filed an additional motion “arguing that the Administration was not acting quickly enough.”)

Flores had already begun looking for work elsewhere. If she stayed at the White House after the court rulings, her new task would be reimplementing, rather than dismantling, a policy that she despised. Since the program was restarted, more than two hundred asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico. Roughly ninety per cent of them are from Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba. Other migrants are being expelled under a different Trump policy, called Title 42, which prevents people from applying for asylum altogether on the ground that they would pose a health risk during the pandemic. Public-health experts roundly oppose Title 42, but Biden has decided to leave it in place.

From the start of Biden’s Presidency, Republicans have accused him of being too lax at the border. Last year, as apprehensions by Border Patrol increased, the attacks intensified. Some White House officials began to question the political wisdom of the President’s agenda. Plans made during the transition to restart asylum processing at ports of entry were put on hold. At one point, the White House deputy chief of staff was tasked with conducting analyses of how much political fallout Biden could sustain if he angered his base on the issue.

This past fall, Flores left the Administration; other high-profile departures followed. According to three current and former Administration officials, the resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions came from the very top of the White House chain of command: Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser. “None of them is an immigration expert,” one of the officials told me. “The immigration experts who were brought in—all those people are not the ones controlling the policy direction. That should tell you something right there. The ones who are at the highest level are political people.”

After Biden’s election, I tried multiple times to convince Flores to speak with me about the Administration’s immigration policy. I knew her only by reputation. During Trump’s final year in office, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, overseeing its portfolio on the border. Word that she was serving on Biden’s transition team generated optimism among sources I knew, who saw her role in the Administration as a sign that the President was serious about charting a new course. For the next ten months, though, Flores ignored me. We finally met only after she’d left the White House, for a wary drink at a tiki bar near the Capitol.

Flores is short, with dark, curly hair and a relaxed, extroverted manner. Her speech—casual, chatty—is inflected with the argot of the Washington policy circuit. (“There’s a big delta between the political expectations and the policy choices,” she told me, over a piƱa colada.) Her rationale for opening up was bittersweet. She’d recently started a job in the Senate, as the chief counsel to Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, which meant that she was no longer constrained from sharing her views. And yet the freedom of her job with Menendez—a senator with a respected track record on immigration policy and a reputation for outspokenness—was nevertheless a reminder of how far she now was from the levers of executive power.

Anyone working in public policy has to weigh a sense of principle against the realities of political influence. For Flores, striking that balance has defined her entire career. The daughter of a psychiatrist and an educator, both of whom are Mexican American, she grew up in the borderlands, in a small city in New Mexico called Las Cruces. She went east for college—to Harvard, where she became the first Latina to be elected student-body president—determined to return home and work in state politics. Her first job after graduation was for Harry Teague, a Democratic congressman and former oil executive who represented a conservative district in the southern half of the state. What Flores remembers most about her time there was how frequently she was pulled over and questioned by Border Patrol agents en route to work.  READ MORE...

Thursday, April 22

TEAR IT DOWN!!!!!!!!!

 

Mount Rushmore is a National Monument in the Black Hills region of South Dakota...  It was completed in 1941 under the direction of Gutzon Borglum and his son and depicts US Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln... 


We know that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners and while Lincoln did not own any slaves his wife's family owned slaves.  However, most historians will agree that Roosevelt was a racist and had no problems sharing his views with others...

CONSEQUENTLY...  this National Monument is the wake of the CANCEL CULTURE and the WOKE Mob needs to be torn down IMMEDIATELY...  otherwise, we will have a crisis on our hands that will negatively manifest itself as more and more blacks become aware of this national monument.

I would not have thought about this until the BLACKS brought it to my attention...  NOW, every time I think about Mt. Rushmore, I am going to think about my ancestors and how bad they treated blacks back then...  even though I do not know if my ancestors even owned slaves...  I am still going to feel bad for blacks...

If blacks want PITY from me because of what their ancestors endured through slavery...  then PITY they will have...  but, nothing else...  the rest they can earn by themselves...  PITY IS FREE...