"After delivering a statement about his administration’s plans to deal with the current crisis at America’s border with Mexico Wednesday afternoon, President Barack Obama addressed for the first time the mounting criticism over his decision not to visit to border on his trip to Texas this week. In answering a reporter’s question on the controversy, Obama defended his decision by saying he was more interested in a substantive solution to the problem than a simple “photo-op.”
The president explained that his Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson will be making his sixth trip to the border this week and briefs him on the situation after each visit. “So there’s nothing that is taking place down there that I am not intimately aware of and briefed on,” he said.
“This isn’t theater,” he said. “This is a problem. I’m not interested in photo-ops, I’m interested in solving a problem.” [Source]
I hear you O, although the optics would have been nice. I guess your approvals can't get any lower so you are just riding with your gut on this one. I hope that Congress gives you the 3.7 billion you are asking for to help with our border crisis, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
Anyway, at least the Governor of crazyland decided to shake the president's hand. I bet he is still checking to see if the black rubbed off. "Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) was determined not to shake President Barack Obama’s hand when he arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth airport on Wednesday. But in the end, it appears he just couldn’t help himself.
As CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said while Obama was descending the steps of Air Force One, “I’m anxious to see if the governor Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, is there at the bottom of the stairs to receive the president of the United States.”
The anchor betrayed some surprise when Perry walked across the tarmac to greet Obama, shaking his hand and walking side by side to Marine One, where they would have a private meeting about the current crisis at the border.
Earlier in the week, Perry reportedly declined Obama’s offer to shake his hand with television cameras rolling upon his arrival in Texas. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Perry wrote to Obama:
“I appreciate the offer to greet you at Austin-Bergstrom Airport, but a quick handshake on the tarmac will not allow for a thoughtful discussion regarding the humanitarian and national security crises enveloping the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. I would instead offer to meet with you at any time during your visit to Texas for a substantive meeting to discuss this critical issue. With the appropriate notice, I am willing to change my schedule to facilitate this request.Following Perry’s letter, the Obama administration decided to invite the governor to join Obama at a previously scheduled meeting with faith leaders and elected officials in Dallas. Following that concession, Perry decided he would be comfortable greeting Obama on the tarmac, though he did not indicate whether he would deign to shake the president’s hand."
At any point while you are here, I am available to sit down privately so we can talk and you may directly gain my state’s perspective on the effects of an unsecured border and what is necessary to make it secure.”
American politics at its finest.
30 comments:
This is a refugee crises that the government wants to contain. But Mr. Obama, if he went to the border, as a gentleman he'd have to acknowledge it to be true, and it would explode. But instead, and as usual, the republiklan is trying to sabotage the national interest to score political points against Mr. Obama.
Dude had to decide whether or not to shake the President's hand? Really? This is beyond ridiculous. They're screaming about securing the border but it is more secure than it has ever been. There is more money spent, more agents and more deportations than ever before. I'm glad governor "I can't remember" decided to shake hands, the optic of him refusing to shake the first blah President's hand would have been bad, well maybe not to some but most.
Congress won't approve the money. I hear some making excuses already.
BTW since almost a billion of that 3.7 is supposed to go to the immigration courts to unjam the years long wait on hearings, and the administration is otherwise swimming in leftover homeland security money that can be shifted to cover essentials, I'm with the klan on this one. Lets keep the logjam in place and keep sending the refugee kids and families out into America to establish roots and facts.
Gotta give it to Obama though, he keeps trying to find ways to live up to his oath of office even on policies that go against his grain and philosophy while his opponents remain so opposed to him personally that they block him any way they can even in actions with which they agree. I'd let them win this one if I was him.
By win do you mean the money not getting approved?
"Anyway, at least the Governor of crazyland decided to shake the president's hand. I bet he is still checking to see if the black rubbed off."
Rick Perry has never given anyone a reason to think he is a racist or against Blacks. Throughout the history of Texas, not ONE fellow AA has complained or spoken out or even had ONE riot in all the centuries that Texas has existed.
Blacks are content, peaceful and happy in Texas. So you snide remark, "...to see if the black rubbed off", was racist and unnecessary.
Nothing like a "content peaceful and happy" Negro.:)
If only more Negroes could be like that.
*side-eye*
Two excellent articles on immigration from fivethirtyeight that blow QLB's arguments out of the water.
Illegal immigration levels off
But while the rhetoric has stayed largely the same, immigration hasn’t. The immigration debate, now as then, focuses primarily on illegal immigration from Latin America. Yet most new immigrants aren’t Latinos. Most Latinos aren’t immigrants. And, based on the best available evidence, there are fewer undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today than there were in 2007. Even the latest immigration crisis — a sudden influx of unaccompanied minors, for which President Barack Obama requested $4 billion in emergency funding to address on Tuesday — represents a break from past patterns: The children are from Central America, not Mexico, and are primarily escaping violence in their home countries, rather than seeking jobs in the U.S.
The immigration debate, of course, tends to focus on illegal immigration. There are in fact two separate debates about the undocumented: What to do about those who are here already, and how to prevent more people from entering the U.S. illegally. The two issues often get lumped together, but the data suggests the trends are very different.
Almost by definition, illegal immigration is difficult to track. But Pew has developed a well-regarded methodology for calculating the size of the unauthorized population, which essentially involves subtracting the number of legal immigrants from the total foreign-born population, subject to certain adjustments.5 According to Pew’s estimates, the undocumented population grew rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s, rising from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of about 12.2 million in 2007. The total dropped during the recession, however, and has been roughly flat since then at about 11.7 million in 2012.6 A narrow majority — about 52 percent — are from Mexico, although a growing share are from Central America and, increasingly, Asia.
In other words, the number of undocumented immigrants remains high, but illegal immigration — the number of new undocumented workers entering the country each year — has fallen close to zero. On a net basis — people entering minus those leaving or being deported — illegal immigration was probably negative between 2007 and 2012.
The question of what to do about existing undocumented immigrants remains highly relevant. There are nearly 12 million of them here, close to an all-time high. But at least for much of the past few years, the issue of securing the border has been all but moot: Between 2007 and 2012, more undocumented workers left the country than entered it.
Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/immigration-is-changing-much-more-than-the-immigration-debate/
The Latino population is growing quickly. More than 54 million U.S. residents identified as Hispanic in 2013, up 15 percent from five years earlier. Hispanics now make up 17 percent of the population, up from 15 percent in 2008.
But that growth isn’t due to immigration and hasn’t been for more than a decade. In 2013, according to the Pew Research Center, immigration accounted for just 22 percent of Latino population growth. The rest was due to “natural increase” (births minus deaths). For Asians, the numbers are nearly reversed: 61 percent of growth in the U.S. Asian and Asian-American population is due to immigration.
As a result, the share of U.S. Latinos who were born outside the country is shrinking. In 2007, about 40 percent of U.S. Hispanics — and 56 percent of the Hispanic workforce — were foreign-born, according to American Community Survey and Current Population Survey data. In 2012, immigrants accounted for less than 36 percent of the Latino population. And 2013, according to Pew, was the first year since the mid-1990s that a majority of the Latino labor force was native-born. (It’s worth noting that the U.S. Hispanic population has never been majority foreign-born, at least as far back as I could find records. In the 1850 census, conducted five years after Texas joined the union, only about a fifth of Hispanics were born outside the U.S.)
**
Political commentary often treats the issues of immigration and Hispanic ethnicity as two sides of the same coin. But U.S. Latinos are looking more and more like other Americans. Nearly 68 percent of U.S. Hispanics speak English fluently, up from 59 percent in 2000; more than a quarter report speaking only English at home. Latino high school graduates are now more likely than whites to enroll in college, although they are still less likely to graduate. Latinos are becoming less likely to be Catholic and choosing to have smaller families, and they more closely resemble the population at large on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. Nearly half of all Hispanics and about two-thirds of native-born Hispanics consider themselves to be “a typical American.”
Source:http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/immigration-isnt-driving-hispanic-population-growth/
Whatever you may object to in Obama's policies or failings, you gotta admit the guy has Class. Of course he knows that, by any measure other than the absolute one human = another standard, he's worth at least 40 Rick Perrys--in intellect, political judgment, compassion, toughness, perspective--and that may sustain him somewhat. But this Jackie Robinson of presidents is setting the standard for any and all minority presidents to follow him. Tough as nails, smooth as silk--you gotta take your hat off to him. I don't know what the faith healer conference had to do with any of this, and how that convince Perry to meet him after all, but it brought Mr. "Oops" to his senses and avoided yet another awkward (and completely silly) rebuff. It's about strategy, I'm sure, but also about self-worth—and Class.
We should learn from fivethirtyeight. They totally got Germany beating Brazil.
"Tough as nails, smooth as silk--you gotta take your hat off to him."
Gotta love Obamaholics. No matter the failures, the incompetence, the caricature Obama has turned into, Obamaholics still love him.
"the one thing we're going to do, during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women's lives are not determined by virtue of five white men."-Harry Reid
Hate it when the left gets caught up in their demagoguery.
Governor Perry obviously tried to make up for the handshake later on by sulking in all of the photos during his meeting with the President.
They all got their photo op.
And the immigration problem is nowhere closer to being solved.
@Anonymous ... guess you've never heard of "sundown towns" in Texas, like Vidor?
Missing from the discussion? How wingers helped bring this all on: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2014/07/right-wing-us-chickens-home-to-roost.html
While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case — and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/europe/spying-case-left-obama-in-dark-us-officials-say.html?_r=0
Obama is talking and is clueless that Germany has found out obama was spying on them.
Obama was kept in the dark because it's not important to him and his staff understand that.
Is this that smart diplomacy that democrats thought obama was capable of?
Gadfly said...
Missing from the discussion? How wingers helped bring this all on
How?
By not giving free birth control to every country on the planet?
Gadfly said...
Missing from the discussion? How wingers helped bring this all on
Yup. Leftwingnuts are so predictable.
Followed your link.
Like birth control.
Result? Guatemala having the highest birth rate in the Western Hemisphere. Honduras is second highest.
Yup.
It all comes back to democrat talking points.
Free birth control.
FN said...
Obama defended his decision by saying he was more interested in a substantive solution to the problem than a simple “photo-op.”
The only photo-ops for obama that night were with very rich white democrat donors at a fundraiser where the cost per plate were more than many americans earn in a year.
Not all photo ops are equal.
Throwback thursday-
“We can talk about what happened for two days in 2005 and we should. We can talk about levees that couldn’t hold, a FEMA that seemed not just incompetent but paralyzed and powerless, about a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground. Trying to provide comfort and aid.”
Seeing them from a plane is still seeing more than obama saw from his fundraisers.
But hypocrisy is mountainous, astounding, unbelievable, insurmountable, super human, other worldly.....on the right.
Pro life=pro death penalty. Makes sense to no one.
Holy shit, the stupid. Sister Sarah and Mr. "I can't remember" are speculation whether or not the prez is secretly sneaking the children into the country. No wonder she was voted the politician most people want to STFU. Why do the repubs let the dumbest among them speak the most? We all have that one crazy relative but we don't let them be the spokesperson for the family. Dear god, when those two speak libraries around the world implode.
PilotX said...
Pro life=pro death penalty. Makes sense to no one.
No sense.
How about being against abortion unless it's rape/molesting.
What about san fran being so pro-choice until it comes to choosing to end your own life, then san fran will spend $76 million to prevent choice.
I'm not really buying this argument:
"I guess president Obama will not be doing what Taco Bell used to tell us to do back in the day. Some pundits and politicians are saying that in order to avoid a W type Katrina moment, he should. (Barack Obama doesn't care about Mexican people.)"
President Bush didn't take a media beating for failing to visit New Orleans for a photo-op. He got called nasty names because FEMA was failing to do much of anything for the people trapped by Katrina's floodwaters. And by the time that criticism started, there really wasn't too much Bush could do differently -- his mistake had happened much earlier when he appointed his incompetent buddy, Michael Brown, to run FEMA.
Similarly, a photo op isn't going to change anything with the situation of these kids crossing the border. Most of them aren't asylum-seekers, per U.S. law; they're coming here for the same reason most immigrants come to the U.S. -- because they're poor.
And that means Obama doesn't have too many options in how he handles them, either. He's going to detain those kids and send them back to their countries of origin. Anyone who doesn't approve of that course of action isn't likely to be mollified by the president's taking a stroll down by the border fence.
"And that means Obama doesn't have too many options in how he handles them, either. He's going to detain those kids and send them back to their countries of origin."
Actually, I should have mentioned that Obama is doing one other thing, besides deporting those kids: He's running lots of ads in Latin America, which say, basically, "DON'T COME HERE -- YOU CAN'T STAY!"
http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/here-are-the-ads-the-us-government-is-runnning-in-central-am
"Throughout the history of Texas, not ONE fellow AA has complained or spoken out or even had ONE riot in all the centuries that Texas has existed."
LOL, seriously?
I know Texas is all "Beers, Steers, and Queers," and education only goes to about the fourth grade and all, so maybe your piss-poor knowledge of history is understandable. (You're probably one of those dummies who still refers to the Civil War as "The War of Northern Aggression," in which the North attacked the South for absolutely no reason.)
Brownsville Riots, 1906
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_Affair
Houston Riots, 1917
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Riot_(1917)
Longview Riots, 1919
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longview_Race_Riot
Beaumont Riots, 1943
http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/beaumont-race-riot-1943
Houston Riots, 1967
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/07/houston_101_tsu_shootings.php
Union Severs Ties With United Negro College Fund Over Koch Money
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/10/united-negro-college-fund-koch-brothers_n_5574635.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
Politics before helping black kids go to college.
Democrats have strange priorities.
I wonder if democrats think they are punishing the koch brothers by refusing to donate to the UNCF.
Hate of the Day:
Alex Jones becomes a Michelle Obama gender-truther.
Earlier, the ever-classy Joan Rivers had made a joke that she thinks Michelle Obama looks like a tranny. (Rivers herself looks a scary exhibit that escaped from a waxwork museum, so maybe she should just stop talking.)
Now, Alex Jones has decided that there just might be something to this tranny idea. Soon, I'm sure he'll be demanding Michelle furnish proof of having female genitalia.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/10/alex-jones-sinks-to-a-new-low-calling-michelle-obama-the-first-tranny/
PS: Jones also wants to warn everyone about chemtrails, and Agenda 21, and the Illuminati, and the universal currency known as the Amero, and OMG THE FEDS GON' TAKE YOUR GUN!!
Saw the following lunacy while looking at the Alex Jones story.
More Hate of the Day:
Obama wants to hold juvenile border-crossers temporarily in Michigan. So, of course, racist protesters show up (wearing surgical masks, cause Latinos got scary diseases) to argue that Obama should set up a "border minefield."
You can't make this crap up.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/10/watch-michiganders-panic-over-plan-to-house-immigrant-kids-call-for-border-minefield/
Chemtrails? Ha!
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