A 2015 Thanksgiving message for our friends and listeners

A 2015 Thanksgiving message for our friends and listeners......Listen in now at https://t.co/mRVnog4aKq. #BlogTalkRadio

— Silvio Canto, Jr. (@SCantojr) November 26, 2015

A president, a turkey pardon, and talk of amnesty?

For the record, I like the "turkey pardon" tradition.  It's a fun moment in a much too darn serious town.

This year, President Obama tried to make a connection between the "turkey pardon" and the executive order that he signed.  It went like this:

"I know some will call this amnesty," Obama said, "but don't worry, there's plenty of turkey to go around."

Frankly, it was not funny.

First, President Obama has the authority to pardon.  It's in black and white in the U.S. Constitution.  Every president has done it going back to President Washington.  It's not an issue, unless President Clinton pardons a man like Marc Rich and people scream a little.  The other controversial pardon was the Nixon pardon from 1974 but most historians credit President Ford for making the right callafter Watergate.

Second, the executive order to stop deportations is not a presidential power.  It is an overreach, even if some of us agree that "DREAMers," or others who've worked here for many years, should be provided a path to legalization after meeting certain conditions.   

The difference is rather clear.  He has the authority to pardon – even a turkey.  He does not have the authority to change or make law, as he told us for several years when he addressed Hispanic audiences on immigration.

Finally, why would he use a "turkey pardon" moment to take a shot at his critics?   The answer is that President Obama is very thin-skinned and does not take criticism well.  He seems unable to understand that some people have honest differences of opinion.

The other answer is that he is angry and bitter that the next two years will not be any fun.  After all, even Dana Milbank now writes that "Obama is turning into Bush."  It won't be any fun sending ground troops back to Iraq or watching Obamacare implode.

P.S. You can hear CANTO TALK here.

Happy Thanksgiving: Go Cowboys & thanks to all of the mothers for making the turkey!

We take a day off from the politics to wish you and your family a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday.

As we've posted, Thanksgiving is a unique US holiday. 

I can still recall our first Thanksgiving in the US in 1964.  It was a wonderful moment.  It was a treat to read about it in school and to enjoy the meaning of the holiday with everyone.

Of course, our first Thanksgiving was truly a moment to say "thanks" for the opportunity to leave communist Cuba and live in the US.

So enjoy the day.  We will do the same.

Of course, it will be a perfect day if Dallas wins today.

So go Cowboys!

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

Why all of the turkey posters? My first Thanksgiving in the U.S.

Back in 1941, President Roosevelt made it official:

Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga.

In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution.

However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally. 

With a few deviations, Lincoln's precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president--until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt's declaration.

For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941, he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.

In my case, I did not know a thing about Thanksgiving when our family settled in Wisconsin in the fall of 1964.  I began to detect that something was coming when the kids in school started putting "turkey posters" about the upcoming holiday.  

Finally, Miss Jones, that wonderful 6th-grade teacher I was blessed with, sat me down and explained the story, from the ship crossing the ocean, to the landing at Plymouth Rock, to the terrible first winter and eventually a day to say thanks for everything.

It did not take long for me to get into the Thanksgiving mood.  

Today, it's my favorite American holiday for two reasons:

1) It demonstrates the role of faith in the early days of what would become the United States.

2) It confirms that this land was settled by self-reliant people who faced adversity and grew stronger.

As I told a friend years ago, you cannot understand American exceptionalism unless you get familiar with the Thanksgiving story. 

P.S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.

President Kennedy: It happened in 1963!

     
Back in 2013, Dallas remembered the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  We had large crowds, parades, speeches and personal recollections of that awful day when Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy.

It was probably the last big remembrance of the assassination in Dallas.   I'm not saying that people will forget what happened in Dallas.   What I'm saying is that more and more people will remember it as a historical footnote rather than something that they lived through.   It happened in 1963 after all.  Most people today have no personal recollection of that day.

On the morning that President Lincoln died, someone said that "now he belongs to ages".  Today, we say that President Kennedy now belongs to historians.  They will analyze his brief presidency and speculate about what would have happened if he had survived or not killed that day.

Would Vietnam have been different?   Would President Kennedy had passed the civil rights legislation that President Johnson successfully completed?   Would VP Johnson have been on the 1964 reelection ticket?  

Historians will take it from here because there are less and less people who remember what they were doing when they got the news that President Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

P.S.  You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.  If you like our posts, drop a dime here.

 

A communist shot JFK in Dallas

As a kid in Cuba, I sat with my father and watched Fidel Castro on Cuban TV talk about the Kennedy assassination.  I don't remember what he said but my dad told me later that Castro was very nervous.  I guess that he felt that President Johnson would use the assassination to correct the mistake of The Bay of Pigs.  A few days later, I heard my father and some of his friends say the same thing over a little Cuban coffee and cigars.   

It was a very tense time in Cuba because the Castro regime was locking up dissidents, such as my father's cousin Dr. Ignacio Segurola who spent 14 years in prison without a trial.   My mother told me recently that she was afraid that my own father would be picked up because he refused to take a job with the newly created national bank that replaced all of the privately owned banks expropriated (or as they say "nationalized") during that time.

Over time, I've heard all of the conspiracy theories, watched a few documentaries and even that idiotic Oliver Stone JFK movie that came out in 1991.   

Can we finally call it?  President JFK was killed by a crazy guy who was hanging around with communists and supporting the Castro dictatorship in Cuba.

Yes, there were angry right-wingers in Dallas.  Some of them behaved poorly.  However, do you think that one of these groups would have "contracted" a head case like Oswald to kill anybody?.  My guess is that most of these right wing groups would have given Oswald a bloody lip for his communist ideas if they ever had a chance to run into him. 

A few years ago, James Piereson put the nail in all of the conspiracies, especially the nonsense that right wingers in Dallas or the "let's get into Vietnam" military industrial complex.

Mr Piereson tells us about Oswald, the communist who killed the president of the US:

"The facts are that President Kennedy was a martyr in the Cold War struggle against communism. The assassin was a communist and not a bigot or a right-winger. Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing when he did so that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He returned to the U.S. with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet communism but without giving up his Marxist beliefs or his hatred of the U.S. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro's communist regime in Cuba.  

In April 1963, Oswald attempted to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as he sat at a desk in his dining room. Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration and his demand that the Castro regime be overthrown. The rifle Oswald used in the attempt at Walker's life was the one he used to shoot Kennedy.  

Dallas police would not identify Oswald as Walker's would-be assassin until after the assassination of Kennedy, but Oswald, fearful that he would be identified for the Walker shooting, fled Dallas for New Orleans. 

In June 1963 he established a local chapter of Fair Play for Cuba, a national organization dedicated to gaining diplomatic recognition for Castro's regime. Oswald was filmed by a local television station in New Orleans circulating leaflets on behalf of the Castro government and was jailed briefly following a street altercation with anti-Castro Cubans. Soon thereafter he appeared on a local television program to debate U.S. policy toward Cuba.  

In late September, Oswald left New Orleans to travel to Mexico City in pursuit of a visa that would permit him to travel to Cuba and then to the Soviet Union. As documented in the Warren Commission Report, he took along a dossier of news clippings on his pro-Castro activities to establish his revolutionary bona fides with personnel at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in the city. 

Oswald returned to Dallas empty-handed after being told that his application would take months to process. He was still waiting on his application six weeks later when he read that President Kennedy's forthcoming visit to Texas would include a motorcade through downtown Dallas and past the building where he worked.  

The assassin's motives for shooting Kennedy were undoubtedly linked to a wish to interfere with the president's campaign to overthrow Castro's government. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy pledged to abandon efforts to overthrow Castro's regime by force. But the war of words between the two governments continued, and so did clandestine plots by the Kennedy administration to eliminate Castro by assassination."

Last, but not least, I have spoken to Cubans living in New Orleans in 1962-63 who got into heated arguments with Oswald over Cuba.  They will attest to the fact that Oswald was a "Castro loving communist," or exactly the kind of jerk who would kill the president of the US.

The right did not kill JFK.  The bloody communist did!

P.S.  You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

1957: Aaron NL MVP

On this day in 1957, Hank Aaron won the NL MVP award.   It was a great year for Aaron:  .322 average, 44 HR & 137 RBI.  Two months earlier, the Braves beat the Yankees in the World Series.

P.S.  You can listen to my show (Canto Talk).  If you like our posts, drop a dime here.

 

2015: The leaders are not the only ones getting old in Cuba

(My new American Thinker post)

For people like me, watching the reality of Cuba is painful. It does not compare with the Cuba that my parents remember. It was not a perfect place by any means but it did not have many of the problems that we see today.

Cuba has a very serious birthrate problem, as we read this week in the New York Times:

By almost any metric, Cuba’s demographics are in dire straits. Since the 1970s, the birthrate has been in free fall, tilting population figures into decline, a problem much more common in rich, industrialized nations, not poor ones.

Cuba already has the oldest population in all of Latin America. Experts predict that 50 years from now, Cuba’s population will have fallen by a third. More than 40 percent of the country will be older than 60.

The demographic crisis is both an economic and a political one. The aging population will require a vast health care system, the likes of which the state cannot afford. And without a viable work force, the cycle of flight and wariness about Cuba’s future is even harder to break, despite the country’s halting steps to open itself up to the outside world.   

“We are all so excited about the trade and travel that we have overlooked the demographics problem,” said Hazel Denton, a former World Bank economist who has studied Cuban demographics. “This is a significant issue.”  

Young people are fleeing the island in big numbers, fearful that warming relations with America will signal the end of a policy that allows Cubans who make it to the United States to naturalize. Until recently, a law prohibited Cubans from taking children out of the country, further discouraging many from having children to avoid the painful choice of leaving them behind.

Over the last few years, I have spoken to young Cubans who have escaped the island. They tell me that getting married and having children means dealing with milk and diaper shortages. As one Cuban young woman told me: “Why bring a baby into this misery?” They tell me that most young Cubans want to leave because there is no future and no hope that things will get better. They refer to “los viejos” or the old men who run the country.

There are a couple of other reasons for Cuba’s birthrate problems.   

The first one is a health care system that provides abortions for free. I heard from one of these young Cubans that hospitals in Cuba have more abortions than births. Abortion is hailed as part of a woman’s health care package. The result is that very few women are choosing to have babies.

The second factor is that the regime marginalized faith or the church. As we see in the U.S., religious young men and women aremore likely to get married and have children. My parents’ Cuba was a very Catholic and traditional country. Today’s Cuba is nothing like that!

We often talk about the dinosaurs who run Cuba, or the 80-something Castro brothers and all of those aging members of the political class.   Needless to say, they are not the only ones getting old.  

The entire island is a demographic disaster!

P S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

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