Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Wednesday's tweets from Telesur, Brazil, Alaska, Cubans and CNN Townhall



Tags: Alaska 1867, Cubans at US Mexico border, CNN town hall before Wisconsin, Telesur and Argentina, Brazil and economy  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!
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Israel Ortega writes about the trip to Cuba

My friend Israel Ortega has written a great article about President Obama's trip to Cuba.   Here is the full article:

Barack Obama is making history this week by becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island of Cuba in nearly nine decades. This despite the fact that when Obama ran for president in 2008, he insistedthat normalizing relations with Cuba would require the “liberation of all political prisoners and some basic steps toward freedom, including freedom of the press, political parties, labor unions, etc.”
Sadly, none of this happened. Yet normalization efforts with the Communist island continue apace.
The White House is portraying the visit as a way to bolster freedom, prosperity and democracy on the island. But here are five reasons why the president’s visit are not our country’s best interests:

1 
Cuba Provides Safe Refuge to American Fugitives

Precise numbers are scarce, but there is no denying that Cuba has been providing refuge to American fugitives for decades. According to Ana Quintana, Policy Analyst for Latin America at the Heritage Foundation, among the fugitives living on the island include Guillermo Morales, a member of a Puerto Rican separatist group who tried to bomb a U.S. military installation, and JoAnne Chesimard, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper.

2 
Cuba’s Chummy Relationship with North Korea

A few years ago, a routine inspection at the Panama Canal uncovered a Cuban Hellfire missile bound for North Korea. The Cuban government later tried to play down the discovery, saying that the missile wasobsolete and was headed to North Korea for routine repairs. It’s more likely that Cuba was trying to help the Hermit Kingdom evade U.N. sanctions. During a recent visit to Havana, North Korea’s foreign minister conveyed a message from Kim Jong-Un that he looks forward “to expand[ing] and strengthen [ing]” the excellent relations between the two countries.
By the way, North Korea is the same country that celebrates “Hate America” month.

3 
Cuba is BFFs with Iran

As if being close to North Korea weren’t bad enough, Cuba is also friendly with Iran — the same country that does not recognize the state of Israel and whose supreme leader recently took to Twitter to call for itsannihilation.. There are reports that Iran is working with Venezuela to export its vicious ideology to the Western Hemisphere by strengthening ties with Cuba.

4 
Turning a Blind Eye to Attacks on Religious Freedom

According to Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow, Cuba has been ramping up its attacks on churches and believers of all faiths and denominations. Citing a report by the Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Bandow recounts how “there were 220 specific violations of religious liberties in 2014, but 2,300 last year,” many of which “involved entire churches or, in the cases of arrests, dozens of victims.”
By visiting the communist island, Obama is legitimizing the same Communist regime that is systematically persecuting people of faith and terrorizing places of worship.

5 
Cuba’s Human Rights Abuses Are Absolutely Awful

Like the attacks on religious freedom, independent observers, including Human Rights Watch portray a vicious picture when it comes to human rights on the Communist island. According to a recent report: “The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and discourage public criticism. While in recent years it has relied less on long-term prison sentences to punish its critics, short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and other critics have increased dramatically.”
In fact, just a few short months ago, the Castro regime imprisoned around 100 peaceful protesters in the island on Human Rights Day. The imagesare chilling.
It is sad that one of the lasting legacies of the Obama administration will be to help prop up a Communist regime that embodies the opposite of all America holds dear, including human rights, religious freedom, democracy and economic freedom.
***Israel Ortega is a Senior Writer for Opportunity Lives. You can follow him on Twitter @IzzyOrtega.

Tags: Obama to Cuba trip  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!
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How much is Trump’s immigration approach going to cost or work?



Let me assure you that I hate illegal immigration as much as Mr. Trump. Illegal immigration mocks the rule of law, from the employer taking advantage of his competitors with cheap labor to document fraud to a border that is a national security concern. In other words, it is a bad system that we’ve allowed to get out of control.   
Donald Trump proposes deporting people. He has not really explained how he would do it but my friend Israel Ortega believes that it will expand government a lot:
Start with Trump’s call to forcibly deport an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants, including children and the elderly. When pressed on specifics, Trump says he intends to do deport people humanely and orderly. But even taking this statement at face value, Trump is proposing nothing less than the creation of the largest police state in our history. As the scholars at the American Action Forum have recently pointed out, the federal government would need to spend from $400 to $600 billion over 20 years to remove the current undocumented population. Of course, that number is subject to change considering the scant exact numbers of a population largely living in the shadows.
The AAF study also estimates that in order to prevent future illegal immigration, the federal government would need to commit to an additional $315 billion toward border security over the same period.
Trump tells us that a country needs borders and he is correct. He says that people should respect our immigration laws and he is correct again.   
However, there are smarter ways to fix the problem than exploiting our fears.   
Go ahead and build the fence. It will actually help both sides, even if the Mexican political class does not admit it publicly.   
Go after employers and make it really costly to hire someone without papers. Send repeat employers offenders to jail and you will see illegal immigration stop very fast.  
Finally, offer people here a guest worker visa that allows them to work. It would not be not a path to citizenship and  would require be renewal from time to time based on our economic needs. It makes more economic sense, as Israel Ortega explains in the aforementioned article, than having police officers drag out women and children from their homes.   
 
Illegal immigration is bad and I repeat that Mr. Trump is right. However, proposing real solutions is what we expect from our leaders. Sorry, but we are not hearing any real world solutions from Mr. Trump.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

Tags: Immigration and Mr Trump  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!
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A chat with Israel Ortega about immigration, Trump and the 2016 election




Tags: Immigration and 2016 election, Trump  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!
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