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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
A Texas neighborhood became a target of the right over immigration. Locals are pushing back
By JUAN A. LOZANO and PAUL J. WEBER
6 Oct 2023
CLEVELAND, Texas (AP) — Mario Carranza put a mobile home on a $28,000 lot in Colony Ridge, one of the biggest neighborhoods in Texas, lured by cheap land and the chance for his family to escape the crime he says was rampant around their apartment in nearby Houston.
“Here, we are good," said Carranza, 65, who now drives about an hour to his maintenance job in a Houston suburb.
But his quiet neighborhood is now in an unwelcome national spotlight. For weeks in Texas, conservative media and GOP activists have been pushing unsubstantiated claims that Colony Ridge has become a magnet for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and that cartels control pockets of the neighborhood.
There is no evidence to support the claims, and residents, local officials and the developer dispute the portrayals. The unsubstantiated reports have spread quickly and gained traction among Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president.
The attention has abruptly plunged Liberty County — a Republican stronghold that former President Donald Trump won by nearly 80% in 2020 — into the center of immigration politics hundreds of miles from the U.S-Mexico border. Republicans see immigration as a central issue in next year's elections and the unsubstantiated reports are coming at a time when large groups of migrants from Central and South American have been crossing into Texas.
The developer of Colony Ridge is Trey Harris, who has donated more than $1 million to Abbott’s campaigns. Driving around the neighborhood in a white Ford pickup on Tuesday, Harris bemoaned the claims and has invited lawmakers to see for themselves this week.
“I’m surprised and a little disappointed that (Abbott) didn’t reach out and make an attempt to learn more about the facts before he got on national television and started talking,” Harris said.
Abbott, whose office did not return messages seeking comment, asked lawmakers Thursday to address "areas like the Colony Ridge development” in a special legislative session starting next week but offered no specific proposals.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, DeSantis last month wrote: “I will end this.”
Laws do not prohibit non-U.S. citizens from purchasing homes. Although many in Liberty County acknowledge that undocumented citizens live in Colony Ridge, they pushed back on claims that they account for most residents and described their community as no different than many neighborhoods across Texas.
“It does bother me that people accuse my customers of being drug dealers and cartel and organized crime. Come on man,” Harris said. “These are families that want a better place to raise their kids. They want better schools for their kids. They want better opportunities for their children”
The development first broke ground 20 years ago, leaving some in Liberty County puzzled by the timing of the recent scrutiny. The area neighbors San Jacinto County, where in April a Mexican national allegedly killed five of his Honduran neighbors. Harris said he believes some of the criticism is related to “racial issues" he says Colony Ridge has previously confronted from a town adjacent to the rapidly growing development, which he estimates has about 40,000 residents.
Zayda Cerrato, 43, moved to Colony Ridge from California about six years ago at the urging of an uncle who lived there. She said she was drawn there in part because of the greenery and vegetation that surrounds the development, which has been carved out from the piney woods that blanket East Texas.
Some residents like Cerrato, who is from Honduras, have set up mobile homes on their land. Others have built permanent homes with manicured lawns that wouldn’t look out of place in a typical suburban subdivision. Harris said the community is still growing and has several new schools. New retail centers that will include such businesses as Pizza Hut and Subway also dot the development.
“My life here is very peaceful. I don’t mess with anybody,” said Cerrato, leaving a supermarket. “From my job to my house, from my house to my job. I visit stores only when I need to. I would describe it as very peaceful.”
The explosive growth of the area has not come without challenges. The school district based in nearby Cleveland is teaching nearly three times as many students as a decade ago and has struggled to create enough space. The local sheriff's office says it needs more officers to patrol the region but described the crime rates as not any worse than other parts of Texas.
“It’s the normal calls. It’s just the volume is higher,” said Billy Knox, chief deputy of the the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.
For Carranza, who is from Mexico and became a naturalized citizen a decade ago, the growing traffic has caused some of the streets to fall into disrepair.
If Abbott is going to address anything about Colony Ridge, it should be that, he said.
“Tell the governor to come here so he can fix the streets,” Carranza said.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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The playbook is alive and well. The author? Not so much.
Kevin Phillips, Nixon political analyst and prolific author, dies at 82
His 1969 book ‘The Emerging Republican Majority’ was viewed by some in the GOP as the blueprint to winning over Southern voters
Kevin P. Phillips, a political analyst and prolific author whose 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority” was read as an electoral blueprint for the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” to build a coalition of Whites who voted largely on social and racial issues, died Oct. 9 at a hospice center near his home in Naples, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Alec Phillips. Mr. Phillips lived in Bethesda, Md., for many years before moving to Florida in 2017.
A voting patterns guru who had been studying and drawing political maps since childhood, Mr. Phillips was working as a legislative aide to Rep. Paul A. Fino (R-N.Y.) in the 1960s when he concluded that electoral trends showed that racial tension and social problems were causing poor Whites in the South and voters from different ethnic backgrounds in Northern cities to shun the Democratic Party.
He began compiling his research into what became “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Early drafts made their way to Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign advisers.
“I got in to see campaign manager John Mitchell and basically said, ‘I’ve got a book which I think outlines what’s going to happen in American presidential politics and sort of where to put your chips and what’s happening,’” he recalled in a C-SPAN interview.
Nixon’s people were impressed.
He had a “house-by-house knowledge of voting sensitivities,” campaign strategist Leonard Garment said. Patrick J. Buchanan, another key Nixon adviser, wrote in his 2014 book about Nixon’s campaign that Mr. Phillips “knew more about ethnic blocs and voting patterns of the 435 congressional districts right down to the county level than anyone in our campaign.”
Nixon hired him. In campaign memos, Mr. Phillips suggested campaign tactics connected to the electoral trends described in his manuscript, coining the term “Sun Belt” to describe the Southern and Southwest states that were becoming prime targets for Republicans because of social unrest.
“The fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programing, and law and order,” Mr. Phillips wrote in a memo, adding that radio ads should feature movie star John Wayne emphasizing that Nixon is just “folks” who will end urban riots.
The idea, in essence, was to co-opt White Democrats by associating African Americans with the Democratic Party.
“The more Negros who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans,” Mr. Phillips told the New York Times. “That’s where the votes are.”
Mr. Phillips maintained that he was just describing human behavior. “The whole secret of politics,” he opined to author Garry Wills for his book about Nixon, is “knowing who hates who.”
In revealing the data and theses Nixon drew upon to beat Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey, “The Emerging Republican Majority” could “easily become a Republican bible,” syndicated columnist Clayton W. Fritchey wrote, calling the book “an original and absorbing inquiry into the volatile politics of contemporary America.”
Republicans were divided over its findings. Some argued that abandoning entire regions of voting blocs was shortsighted and that such a blueprint should be rejected. Others contended that the GOP did not need or want urban voters. Mr. Phillips argued that his book was not an electoral scheme.
“The book was not a blueprint of the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’ as some claimed, but a detailed, historically framed analysis of regional and cultural shifts that had already been in motion for a quarter century,” he wrote in the preface to a 2015 edition of his book. “It contained no instructions.”
Still, establishment conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. shunned him. He, in turn, began to shun them.
After leaving the Nixon administration in 1970, Mr. Phillips published newsletters covering politics and business affairs. He never worked in politics again, viewing himself as an independent populist who abhorred “country club” Republicans and the rise of evangelical conservatives.
He wrote 14 other books, including “The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath” (1990), in which he lamented the income gap caused by Reagan-era policies; “Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity” (1993), about the disappearing middle class; and “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (2004), accusing the Bush family of employing financial and social empires for personal and political gain.
His 2008 book “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” was heavily discussed in political and media circles. It argues, the Los Angeles Times said in its review, that “the emergence of hedge funds and ever-more exotic bundles of financial derivatives amounts to a ‘financialization’ of the American economy that has facilitated a ruinous expansion of private, as well as public, debt.”
“When you take into account how often he’s been right in the past,” the review continues, his new volume “in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming.”
Kevin Price Phillips was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1940, and grew up in the middle-class Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx. His father was chief executive of the New York State Liquor Authority, and his mother was a homemaker.
As a child, he became aware of ethnic and religious divides in his neighborhood and even in his own home. His mother was Protestant, his father Catholic. Mr. Phillips later joked that “my religion was reading the Sunday papers.”
While his friends compiled baseball statistics, Mr. Phillips’s boyhood hobby was studying demographic information and drawing voting maps. His parents enrolled him at the Bronx High School of Science, where he wasn’t much interested in the science but nonetheless became a National Merit scholar.
“I guess my after school study of ethnic political behavior was a natural progression from taking zoology in the classroom,” he told the New York Times.
In 1961, Mr. Phillips received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He spent his junior year studying economic history and geography at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964.
While working for candidate Nixon, Mr. Phillips was married in 1968 to Martha Henderson, an aide to then-Rep. Melvin R. Laird (R-Wis.), whom President Nixon soon named secretary of defense.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife; two other children, Betsy Khamdiev and Andrew Phillips; a brother; and seven grandchildren.
In a 1970 profile of Mr. Phillips in the New York Times, his wife revealed what drew her to him. In many ways, she was describing Mr. Phillips, the author and political commentator.
“He’s quite witty, you know, in a wry, caustic, cynical but pleasant way,” she said.
Related to the above. And of course the Washington Examiner downplays the racial aspect of the dog whistle. Of course.
OpinionThe GOP’s ‘southern strategy’ mastermind just died. Here’s his legacy.
“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”
That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades.
Though Phillips later reconsidered his fealty to the GOP, updated versions of the “southern strategy” live on in today’s Republican Party, shaping the political world we inhabit today. So I asked historians and political theorists to weigh in on Phillips’s legacy. Their responses have been edited for style and brevity.
Kevin Kruse, historian at Princeton University and co-editor of “Myth America”: Kevin Phillips was a prophet of today’s polarization. He drew a blueprint for a major realignment of American politics that is still with us. For much of the 20th century, Democrats dominated the national scene, because of the reliable support of the “Solid South.”
But the “Negro problem” of the 1960s, Phillips argued, presented Republicans an opportunity to take the South and Southwest, too, a new region he anointed “the Sun Belt.” All they had to do was appeal to the hatreds of White voters there, through racially coded “law and order” appeals.
Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”: Phillips helped shape how the Republican Party navigated the last 50 years of U.S. politics. His big contribution was the idea that White southerners could be potential voters for the GOP, because the solid Democratic South had become newly fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Phillips argued that the Republican Party needed to change the way it conducted politics to reach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.
Trump picked up this rhetoric. He launched his campaign on the ideas of Mexican migrant and Muslim criminality — that all these minority populations needed to be under much stricter surveillance.
The strategy that Phillips helped popularize worked just as well with some northern White voters as it did with southern White voters. It helped solidify the Republican Party’s base as almost exclusively White even as the nation has grown more diverse.
Bill Kristol, a former Republican turned Never Trump conservative: It was happening already in 1968, but Phillips’s book and his subsequent promotion of the southern strategy did have the effect of making that reaction to the civil rights movement more coherent. It gave politicians a way to think about shaping that reaction politically.
Newt Gingrich, who defeated lots of Democrats in southern House seats in the 1994 midterms, was in spirit a Phillips protégé. That culminated in 2010, when Democrats got obliterated, and in the red state-blue state divide today.
From Phillips to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, there is a through line. DeSantis, Abbott and others are operating in a world anticipated and partly created by Phillips. The reaction of much of the White working class and Republican politicians to Black Lives Matter and “cosmopolitan elites” is a close cousin of what Phillips predicted and helped shape.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner: I think Phillips was noticing what was happening rather than causing it to happen. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 49 to 50 percent of the popular vote in the South in 1952 and 1956; Nixon got nearly that much in 1960. When the national Democratic Party became more dovish, circa 1967, reacting against the Vietnam escalations of its own presidents, Southern Whites — always the most hawkish voters — turned away from national Democrats not so much because of civil rights but because of dovishness. It’s what Tom Eagleton later told Robert Novak: “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
Corey Robin, political theorist and author of “The Reactionary Mind”: Phillips understood that the old Republican Party establishment could not begin to take on the New Deal and Great Society until it developed a mass popular base. He saw that the White working class — not just in the South, but in the North — was growing disaffected with the New Deal on economic and racist grounds, and that Republicans could turn that dissatisfaction into governing majorities.
Beginning in 1972 with the reelection of Nixon, Republicans built this majority in the spirit of what Phillips imagined. George W. Bush, the last Republican president to get a popular majority, was the last spasm of that vision. The irony is that, under Phillips, the idea was to expand the Republican Party into a permanent governing majority.
But once the White working class diminished, the electoral return of that resentment dramatically dwindled. As a result, instead of relying on robust electoral majorities, the Republican Party, to win power, relies on the electoral college and the malapportioned Senate. Phillips’s blueprint made the heyday of Republican power — and ultimately unmade it.
See how much we respect teachers? As for some of the other imbedded stories, why would you name a pumpkin Michael Jordan when Fat Albert is available and who the hell is Leo and why do Home Depot shoppers want to take his shirt off? I need to get out of the basement more.
At breakfast, this group always leaves at least a $1,000 tip
‘I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,’ Richard Brooks wrote on Facebook
Roberto Rivas teaches Spanish full-time at a local high school, and on weekends, he waits tables at two restaurants, including an IHOP, so he can pay his bills.
Rivas had just finished serving pancakes and eggs to a party of 16 on a busy Saturday morning in Norwood, Mass., when one of the customers at the table called him over.
“We have something for you,” the customer, Richard Brooks, told Rivas. “The only reason we came to breakfast today was to give you this tip.”
Brooks pulled out a pile of $100 bills and counted them into Rivas’s hand, explaining that he and his friends were members of the $1,000 Breakfast Club. Each person had contributed $100 to leave for the server, $1,600 in all.
Rivas, 29, said he almost burst into tears that Saturday morning in June.
He said since his family immigrated to the United States from Venezuela in December 2022, he’d been saving money to buy his mother new hearing aids, and the tip now allows him to buy them. He and four family members have humanitarian parole so they can work in the United States until December 2024, he said. He hopes to get an employment or student visa so he can stay longer.
“This is a golden opportunity — I want to be able to contribute to society in the U.S.,” Rivas said.
He said he was shocked to receive such a large tip from the $1,000 Breakfast Club.
After a six-hour shift, he said he is usually lucky to take home about $200 in tips.
“Sixteen hundred dollars is unheard of,” Rivas said. “Servers work hard, but a tip this large is rare. I’m still amazed they wanted to surprise me like this.”
Brooks started the $1,000 Breakfast Club earlier this year after his brother, Justin Brooks, mentioned he’d gone to breakfast in California with a group that left a stack of $100 bills for their server.
“For years, I’ve given out single $100 bills to people at random in appreciation for a job well done, or just to brighten their day,” said Richard Brooks, 63, a lawyer who works in Boston. “More than anything, I’ve enjoyed watching the look on their faces as I hand them the money.”
When his brother told him about his own $100 bill outing, “It just hit me that this was a great idea and I should do something with it,” Brooks said.
Groups that leave large tips for servers have become more popular since the covid-19 pandemic, with 100 Dollar Dinner Clubs taking off in places such as Wyoming and Utah.
Brooks said the idea is long overdue.
While he was attending law school in his 20s, he said he worked as a waiter on campus at Boston University for five years to help pay his bills.
“I’ll never forget the first time I got a tip that was worth anything,” Brooks said. “Somebody gave me $20, and it just made my day.”
“I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,” Brooks wrote.
“The Thousand Dollar Breakfast Club. Anyone can go,” he continued. “We will find a small place where the server will be shocked to get $1,000. It will be a fun quick morning breakfast and will blow the mind of the server!”
Ten people — a few friends and some people he didn’t know who saw his post on Facebook — showed up at the first breakfast in March at an IHOP in Framingham, Mass., while another three who couldn’t make it each sent him $100, Brooks said.
“I chose IHOP since they take bigger tables and I also knew that breakfast was a time when waiters aren’t making as many tips because the bill is usually lower than for lunch or dinner,” he said.
When he thanked the server and handed her $1,300, “the look of surprise on her face and the happy look on everyone’s face at the table told me we were on the right track,” Brooks said. “It’s a great pleasure to give money to people you don’t know.”
He said group members decided they would continue to visit a different IHOP every few months in the greater Boston area and ask that a single server be assigned to their table at random so the money would have a greater impact.
“A thousand-plus dollars is a lot of money, but it doesn’t go as far if a bunch of people are sharing it,” Brooks said. “By giving it all to one person, you’re doing something that could make a difference in their life.”
About 20 people now belong to the club, but not everyone can make every meeting, he said. Some of the members didn’t know each other until they started bringing $100 bills to breakfast.
Brooks said he picks up the tab for the group’s meals.
“They chose to come and give away $100 to make someone happy, so it’s the least I can do,” he said.
He said it doesn’t matter if his group doesn’t get top-notch service.
“We don’t know what’s going on in the server’s day — isn’t that the kind of person you would want to help?” he said. “If bad service happens, we’ll give them the money anyway to help improve their day.”
Jeff Paris, a special-education teacher from Reading, Mass., brings his wife, Melissa, and their 1-year-old daughter, Eliza, to the breakfasts.
“I really love making new friends around the table — the camaraderie is incredible,” he said. “I don’t have the means to do something like this on my own, and most of the other people are everyday working folks, too. But together, what we do really adds up.”
“It’s a small effort for us, but the impact it has on those recipients is huge,” said Janet Meaney, 73, a club member who said she was among the first to sign up.
“It’s a wonderful way to thank hard-working people,” she said.
On the group’s third outing together, the giant tip recipient was Tulio Maldonado, a waiter at an IHOP in Saugus, Mass. Brooks counted out $1,300 and handed it to him on Sept. 23 while his reaction was captured by Boston’s WCVB Channel 5. Paris had contacted the TV station, thinking that the group’s story might inspire others to do something similar, Brooks said.
Paris said he was hopeful that people in other towns would copy the club’s idea and start leaving $1,000 tips.
“[Tulio] told us he was going to pay his bills with it, and that makes you feel good to know you helped make that happen for him,” he said. “We’re proof that you don’t need to be a celebrity or a millionaire to do this.”
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
I don’t even feel welcome there which is why I go right after the bridge and head down to far Rockaway to surf. Hahaha.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
I don’t even feel welcome there which is why I go right after the bridge and head down to far Rockaway to surf. Hahaha.
Rockaway has had surfers for years in the 80's and 90's streets. My father was one of the locals that surfed those street beaches. We used to fish, I still do , over in those areas.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
I don’t even feel welcome there which is why I go right after the bridge and head down to far Rockaway to surf. Hahaha.
Rockaway has had surfers for years in the 80's and 90's streets. My father was one of the locals that surfed those street beaches. We used to fish, I still do , over in those areas.
That’s awesome about your father! I love Rockaway , feels like a different world as soon as I cross that bridge. I’m mostly Between 67 and 73rd. 90 gets a little too crowded.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
I don’t even feel welcome there which is why I go right after the bridge and head down to far Rockaway to surf. Hahaha.
Rockaway has had surfers for years in the 80's and 90's streets. My father was one of the locals that surfed those street beaches. We used to fish, I still do , over in those areas.
That’s awesome about your father! I love Rockaway , feels like a different world as soon as I cross that bridge. I’m mostly Between 67 and 73rd. 90 gets a little too crowded.
So in another life we lived on 17th, 20th and 25th. I frequent those areas still for fishing and ride my bike down there.. On 73rd you know those brown raised comfort stations? I installed all the ramps connecting to those and my company did all the boardwalk railing from 33rd to 116th.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
Breezy point residents will surely welcome all of them in.
hahahahahaha!. The whitest part of queens. It is a cute area but the stigma around it stinks.
I don’t even feel welcome there which is why I go right after the bridge and head down to far Rockaway to surf. Hahaha.
Rockaway has had surfers for years in the 80's and 90's streets. My father was one of the locals that surfed those street beaches. We used to fish, I still do , over in those areas.
That’s awesome about your father! I love Rockaway , feels like a different world as soon as I cross that bridge. I’m mostly Between 67 and 73rd. 90 gets a little too crowded.
So in another life we lived on 17th, 20th and 25th. I frequent those areas still for fishing and ride my bike down there.. On 73rd you know those brown raised comfort stations? I installed all the ramps connecting to those and my company did all the boardwalk railing from 33rd to 116th.
BOO! And about those Obama phones, was Eric giving them away? His were seized, why not theirs? They’re coming to suck your blood!
John Hendrickson of The Atlantic was at Trump’s political rally in Hialeah, Florida, on Wednesday, where the former president railed against those “coming into our country,” people he compared to “Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional serial killer who ate his victims. Trump said that under Biden, the U.S. has become “the dumping ground of the world,” and he attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. He also attacked the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.
A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he’s no longer a citizen.
The Northern Virginia doctor was born in D.C. and given a U.S. birth certificate. At 61, he learned his citizenship was granted by mistake.
Siavash Sobhani is stateless.
The Northern Virginia doctor knows at least that much about his situation. He knows he is no longer considered a citizen of the United States — the place where he was born, went to school and has practiced medicine for more than 30 years — and that he also belongs to no other place.
“I’m in limbo,” he told me on a recent afternoon.
In the past few years, there have been many passport-renewal nightmare stories, with processing delays forcing people to beg, lose sleep and miss once-in-a-lifetime trips. But what Sobhani has experienced this year after trying to renew his passport is uniquely unmooring.
As he tells it, when he sent in an application for a new passport in February, he had no reason to expect he’d face any difficulties. He had renewed his passport several times previously without problems. This time, it was set to expire in June, and he wanted to make sure he had a valid one in hand before his family took a trip in July.
But he did not receive a new passport. Instead, at the age of 61, he lost what he had held since he was an infant: U.S. citizenship.
A letter from a State Department official informed him that he should not have been granted citizenship at the time of his birth because his father was a diplomat with the Embassy of Iran. The letter directed Sobhani to a website where he could apply for lawful permanent residence.
“This was a shock to me,” said Sobhani, who specializes in internal medicine. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been here all my life. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve voted for presidents. I’ve served my community in Northern Virginia. During covid, I was at work, putting myself at risk, putting my family at risk. So when you’re told after 61 years, ‘Oh there was a mistake, you’re no longer a U.S. citizen,’ it’s really, really shocking.”
Sobhani shared with me the letter he received from the State Department, along with personal documents that detail his life in the United States and letters he had sent to local lawmakers asking for their help. Taken together, those records show how the Georgetown Medical School graduate went from living a stable life in the D.C. region to standing on uncertain ground and asking questions that do not have clear answers.
Some of those questions: Can he still legally practice medicine? Will the money he has earned over his career count toward his Social Security benefits if his Social Security number changes? Will he get to attend his son’s destination wedding next year?
Sobhani was hesitant to speak publicly about his situation. He has applied for permanent residence, as instructed, and he doesn’t want to do anything that might upset government officials who hold his fate in their hands. But he also knows how slowly the country’s immigration system can move, and he worries that he could wait in limbo for years if top officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) don’t hear about his case and agree to help him. He said he has already spent more than $40,000 on legal fees and still doesn’t know when his case might be resolved.
“I’m waiting for an interview, but does that mean I wait another year for an interview?” he said. “Then another three years for the next step? Then another 10 years before I can travel outside of the country?”
At his age — he turned 62 this month — he had already started to think about retirement. He and his wife planned to spend this year exploring other countries in hopes of finding a community where they could buy a home. Now, he can’t even visit a friend in London who recently had a stroke, or his father-in-law, who lives in Lebanon and is seriously ill.
“If he passes away, I can’t even go to his funeral,” Sobhani said.
Sobhani uses the words “upsetting,” “frustrating” and “distressing” to describe what he has been going through. His language is gentler than what many people would use if they suddenly lost the freedoms, protections and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship — all because of a paperwork mistake that was made when they were too young to read.
The U.S. government didn’t take away Sobhani’s citizenship because of anything he did. The letter points to a bureaucratic reason: Those born in the United States to parents who have diplomatic immunity do not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
“As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States,” reads the letter. “As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.”
“But I did,” Sobhani said as he read that last line aloud. “They gave it me.”
They also reconfirmed he was a citizen over and over again throughout his life, every time his passport was renewed.
Sobhani said that after getting that letter, he started digging into his family’s history. He couldn’t ask his parents questions because his father is dead and his mother has dementia. What he discovered, he said, is this: His older brother, who was born in Kansas when their father was a military student, had a congenital condition that required surgery. To extend the family’s stay in the country for that surgery, their father obtained a temporary job at the Iranian Embassy and worked there in October and November 1961. A birth certificate shows Sobhani was born at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that November.
Sobhani said his family lived in Turkey for several years when he was a child but that he returned to D.C. to attend Georgetown Preparatory School. He received degrees from George Washington University and Boston College before attending Georgetown Medical School. He said he cannot safely live in Iran because he has spoken out against the government and his brother ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2012.
Sobhani wrote letters to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) requesting their help, saying he had “the utmost respect for the laws governing this country.” He also noted that he has dedicated his career to helping people in Virginia and the D.C. region and has been “directly involved in the care of tens of thousands of lives, currently with an active patient panel of over 3,000 patients.”
“I can only hope that the impact I’ve made in caring for our community of Virginians, your constituents, for the past 30 years will hold some weight in swaying your decision to intervene on my behalf,” he wrote.
He shared a letter that Connolly wrote to a USCIS official on his behalf.
“I trust that you can imagine how difficult it must be to believe that you were a citizen of the U.S. your entire life, just to find out you actually were not,” Connolly wrote. He added, “Our office is respectfully requesting all possible consideration in expediting this case in accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.”
Sobhani said he hopes his citizenship will be restored within six months, but he has no idea if that’s a realistic expectation. He has no idea if he will have a passport in time to attend his son’s wedding in Portugal next year or if he will get to make those retirement scouting trips with his wife anytime soon.
Old Floyd Bennett Field will now be a site for families. They will have walls for privacy.
Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
I never followed up on this.
Migrants were bussed over to Floyd Bennett and upon seeing the area they got back on the bus. This was last month. Well now they don't have a place to stay.
Fast forward to this month and migrants would stay there willingly if given the opportunity because there is no where else to stay. The hotels are a 30 day stay and then you get put out.
Floyd Bennett as stated is not ideal if you want to find work schools, etc. That was the initial rejection from the migrants and I get it. It's tent city and not the greatest conditions. If it's all there is though they had better take the offer.
Winter is coming and you can't have them out on the streets, they'll freeze to death.
First of all I'm not an US citizen, I'm just one of the lucky ones who's forever in debt to this country for the chance to live the American dream, not the dream about wealth (a big car and a big house), I'm talking about the BIG dream FREEDOM, I consider this country MY country, and as such i could give my life for this country.
But because I'm just a guest here i believe i don't deserve to express my opinions in any national matter, I believe that's a right only for the citizens of this nation. But anyway i would like the hear the opinions of the citizens of this country about the 1070 and immigration in general, I've read a thread that touched that matter but it wasn't the main point, so i ask you to please express your point of view about immigration (legal and illegal).
Thanks
Holy shit I created this post 13 years ago... and now I can be as loud and obnoxious as I want, I've been an American for a few years already LOL
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
First of all I'm not an US citizen, I'm just one of the lucky ones who's forever in debt to this country for the chance to live the American dream, not the dream about wealth (a big car and a big house), I'm talking about the BIG dream FREEDOM, I consider this country MY country, and as such i could give my life for this country.
But because I'm just a guest here i believe i don't deserve to express my opinions in any national matter, I believe that's a right only for the citizens of this nation. But anyway i would like the hear the opinions of the citizens of this country about the 1070 and immigration in general, I've read a thread that touched that matter but it wasn't the main point, so i ask you to please express your point of view about immigration (legal and illegal).
Thanks
Holy shit I created this post 13 years ago... and now I can be as loud and obnoxious as I want, I've been an American for a few years already LOL
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
Congrats. I'm surprised you're still around, lol. One of the OG big time PJ collectors.
First of all I'm not an US citizen, I'm just one of the lucky ones who's forever in debt to this country for the chance to live the American dream, not the dream about wealth (a big car and a big house), I'm talking about the BIG dream FREEDOM, I consider this country MY country, and as such i could give my life for this country.
But because I'm just a guest here i believe i don't deserve to express my opinions in any national matter, I believe that's a right only for the citizens of this nation. But anyway i would like the hear the opinions of the citizens of this country about the 1070 and immigration in general, I've read a thread that touched that matter but it wasn't the main point, so i ask you to please express your point of view about immigration (legal and illegal).
Thanks
Holy shit I created this post 13 years ago... and now I can be as loud and obnoxious as I want, I've been an American for a few years already LOL
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
Congrats. I'm surprised you're still around, lol. One of the OG big time PJ collectors.
Oh man, thanks.
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
First of all I'm not an US citizen, I'm just one of the lucky ones who's forever in debt to this country for the chance to live the American dream, not the dream about wealth (a big car and a big house), I'm talking about the BIG dream FREEDOM, I consider this country MY country, and as such i could give my life for this country.
But because I'm just a guest here i believe i don't deserve to express my opinions in any national matter, I believe that's a right only for the citizens of this nation. But anyway i would like the hear the opinions of the citizens of this country about the 1070 and immigration in general, I've read a thread that touched that matter but it wasn't the main point, so i ask you to please express your point of view about immigration (legal and illegal).
Thanks
Holy shit I created this post 13 years ago... and now I can be as loud and obnoxious as I want, I've been an American for a few years already LOL
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
There's something funny in here..."Becomes American; decides to be loud and obnoxious."
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
First of all I'm not an US citizen, I'm just one of the lucky ones who's forever in debt to this country for the chance to live the American dream, not the dream about wealth (a big car and a big house), I'm talking about the BIG dream FREEDOM, I consider this country MY country, and as such i could give my life for this country.
But because I'm just a guest here i believe i don't deserve to express my opinions in any national matter, I believe that's a right only for the citizens of this nation. But anyway i would like the hear the opinions of the citizens of this country about the 1070 and immigration in general, I've read a thread that touched that matter but it wasn't the main point, so i ask you to please express your point of view about immigration (legal and illegal).
Thanks
Holy shit I created this post 13 years ago... and now I can be as loud and obnoxious as I want, I've been an American for a few years already LOL
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
There's something funny in here..."Becomes American; decides to be loud and obnoxious."
LOL
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
You got a Harley to go along with that? Otherwise, not ‘murican.
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
You got a Harley to go along with that? Otherwise, not ‘murican.
I don't do guns or bikes, I'm more of a McDonalds 'murican.
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
You got a Harley to go along with that? Otherwise, not ‘murican.
I don't do guns or bikes, I'm more of a McDonalds 'murican.
Careful, you’ll blow up like a tick and need our expensive healthcare sooner rather than later. Have you heard of kale?
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
You got a Harley to go along with that? Otherwise, not ‘murican.
I don't do guns or bikes, I'm more of a McDonalds 'murican.
Careful, you’ll blow up like a tick and need our expensive healthcare sooner rather than later. Have you heard of kale?
I'm not a pussy, I'm not afraid of a little saturated fats, high sodium, and corn syrup.
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
C’mon, let’s see your USA! USA! USA! chant, say the Pledge of Allegiance and mouth the words to the national anthem after removing your cap and placing your right hand over your heart. And you better damn well stand up too. Otherwise, you’re not a‘Murican.
don't test me
You got a Harley to go along with that? Otherwise, not ‘murican.
I don't do guns or bikes, I'm more of a McDonalds 'murican.
Careful, you’ll blow up like a tick and need our expensive healthcare sooner rather than later. Have you heard of kale?
I'm not a pussy, I'm not afraid of a little saturated fats, high sodium, and corn syrup.
Now we’re talkin! Just get some tobaacky and some Budweiser and you’re goldenrod.
Comments
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
CLEVELAND, Texas (AP) — Mario Carranza put a mobile home on a $28,000 lot in Colony Ridge, one of the biggest neighborhoods in Texas, lured by cheap land and the chance for his family to escape the crime he says was rampant around their apartment in nearby Houston.
“Here, we are good," said Carranza, 65, who now drives about an hour to his maintenance job in a Houston suburb.
But his quiet neighborhood is now in an unwelcome national spotlight. For weeks in Texas, conservative media and GOP activists have been pushing unsubstantiated claims that Colony Ridge has become a magnet for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and that cartels control pockets of the neighborhood.
There is no evidence to support the claims, and residents, local officials and the developer dispute the portrayals. The unsubstantiated reports have spread quickly and gained traction among Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president.
GREG ABBOTT
A Texas neighborhood became a target of the right over immigration. Locals are pushing back.
After sending busloads of migrants to NYC, Texas governor visits city to fault Biden for crisis
Judge weighs Texas river barrier to block migrants
Texas moves large floating barrier on US-Mexico border closer to American soil
The attention has abruptly plunged Liberty County — a Republican stronghold that former President Donald Trump won by nearly 80% in 2020 — into the center of immigration politics hundreds of miles from the U.S-Mexico border. Republicans see immigration as a central issue in next year's elections and the unsubstantiated reports are coming at a time when large groups of migrants from Central and South American have been crossing into Texas.
The developer of Colony Ridge is Trey Harris, who has donated more than $1 million to Abbott’s campaigns. Driving around the neighborhood in a white Ford pickup on Tuesday, Harris bemoaned the claims and has invited lawmakers to see for themselves this week.
“I’m surprised and a little disappointed that (Abbott) didn’t reach out and make an attempt to learn more about the facts before he got on national television and started talking,” Harris said.
Abbott, whose office did not return messages seeking comment, asked lawmakers Thursday to address "areas like the Colony Ridge development” in a special legislative session starting next week but offered no specific proposals.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, DeSantis last month wrote: “I will end this.”
Laws do not prohibit non-U.S. citizens from purchasing homes. Although many in Liberty County acknowledge that undocumented citizens live in Colony Ridge, they pushed back on claims that they account for most residents and described their community as no different than many neighborhoods across Texas.
“It does bother me that people accuse my customers of being drug dealers and cartel and organized crime. Come on man,” Harris said. “These are families that want a better place to raise their kids. They want better schools for their kids. They want better opportunities for their children”
The development first broke ground 20 years ago, leaving some in Liberty County puzzled by the timing of the recent scrutiny. The area neighbors San Jacinto County, where in April a Mexican national allegedly killed five of his Honduran neighbors. Harris said he believes some of the criticism is related to “racial issues" he says Colony Ridge has previously confronted from a town adjacent to the rapidly growing development, which he estimates has about 40,000 residents.
Zayda Cerrato, 43, moved to Colony Ridge from California about six years ago at the urging of an uncle who lived there. She said she was drawn there in part because of the greenery and vegetation that surrounds the development, which has been carved out from the piney woods that blanket East Texas.
Some residents like Cerrato, who is from Honduras, have set up mobile homes on their land. Others have built permanent homes with manicured lawns that wouldn’t look out of place in a typical suburban subdivision. Harris said the community is still growing and has several new schools. New retail centers that will include such businesses as Pizza Hut and Subway also dot the development.
“My life here is very peaceful. I don’t mess with anybody,” said Cerrato, leaving a supermarket. “From my job to my house, from my house to my job. I visit stores only when I need to. I would describe it as very peaceful.”
The explosive growth of the area has not come without challenges. The school district based in nearby Cleveland is teaching nearly three times as many students as a decade ago and has struggled to create enough space. The local sheriff's office says it needs more officers to patrol the region but described the crime rates as not any worse than other parts of Texas.
“It’s the normal calls. It’s just the volume is higher,” said Billy Knox, chief deputy of the the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.
For Carranza, who is from Mexico and became a naturalized citizen a decade ago, the growing traffic has caused some of the streets to fall into disrepair.
If Abbott is going to address anything about Colony Ridge, it should be that, he said.
“Tell the governor to come here so he can fix the streets,” Carranza said.
___ Weber reported from Austin, Texas.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Kevin Phillips, Nixon political analyst and prolific author, dies at 82
His 1969 book ‘The Emerging Republican Majority’ was viewed by some in the GOP as the blueprint to winning over Southern voters
Kevin P. Phillips, a political analyst and prolific author whose 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority” was read as an electoral blueprint for the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” to build a coalition of Whites who voted largely on social and racial issues, died Oct. 9 at a hospice center near his home in Naples, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Alec Phillips. Mr. Phillips lived in Bethesda, Md., for many years before moving to Florida in 2017.
A voting patterns guru who had been studying and drawing political maps since childhood, Mr. Phillips was working as a legislative aide to Rep. Paul A. Fino (R-N.Y.) in the 1960s when he concluded that electoral trends showed that racial tension and social problems were causing poor Whites in the South and voters from different ethnic backgrounds in Northern cities to shun the Democratic Party.
He began compiling his research into what became “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Early drafts made their way to Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign advisers.
“I got in to see campaign manager John Mitchell and basically said, ‘I’ve got a book which I think outlines what’s going to happen in American presidential politics and sort of where to put your chips and what’s happening,’” he recalled in a C-SPAN interview.
Nixon’s people were impressed.
He had a “house-by-house knowledge of voting sensitivities,” campaign strategist Leonard Garment said. Patrick J. Buchanan, another key Nixon adviser, wrote in his 2014 book about Nixon’s campaign that Mr. Phillips “knew more about ethnic blocs and voting patterns of the 435 congressional districts right down to the county level than anyone in our campaign.”
Nixon hired him. In campaign memos, Mr. Phillips suggested campaign tactics connected to the electoral trends described in his manuscript, coining the term “Sun Belt” to describe the Southern and Southwest states that were becoming prime targets for Republicans because of social unrest.
“The fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programing, and law and order,” Mr. Phillips wrote in a memo, adding that radio ads should feature movie star John Wayne emphasizing that Nixon is just “folks” who will end urban riots.
The idea, in essence, was to co-opt White Democrats by associating African Americans with the Democratic Party.
“The more Negros who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans,” Mr. Phillips told the New York Times. “That’s where the votes are.”
Mr. Phillips maintained that he was just describing human behavior. “The whole secret of politics,” he opined to author Garry Wills for his book about Nixon, is “knowing who hates who.”
In revealing the data and theses Nixon drew upon to beat Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey, “The Emerging Republican Majority” could “easily become a Republican bible,” syndicated columnist Clayton W. Fritchey wrote, calling the book “an original and absorbing inquiry into the volatile politics of contemporary America.”
Republicans were divided over its findings. Some argued that abandoning entire regions of voting blocs was shortsighted and that such a blueprint should be rejected. Others contended that the GOP did not need or want urban voters. Mr. Phillips argued that his book was not an electoral scheme.
“The book was not a blueprint of the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’ as some claimed, but a detailed, historically framed analysis of regional and cultural shifts that had already been in motion for a quarter century,” he wrote in the preface to a 2015 edition of his book. “It contained no instructions.”
Still, establishment conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. shunned him. He, in turn, began to shun them.
After leaving the Nixon administration in 1970, Mr. Phillips published newsletters covering politics and business affairs. He never worked in politics again, viewing himself as an independent populist who abhorred “country club” Republicans and the rise of evangelical conservatives.
He wrote 14 other books, including “The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath” (1990), in which he lamented the income gap caused by Reagan-era policies; “Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity” (1993), about the disappearing middle class; and “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (2004), accusing the Bush family of employing financial and social empires for personal and political gain.
His 2008 book “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” was heavily discussed in political and media circles. It argues, the Los Angeles Times said in its review, that “the emergence of hedge funds and ever-more exotic bundles of financial derivatives amounts to a ‘financialization’ of the American economy that has facilitated a ruinous expansion of private, as well as public, debt.”
“When you take into account how often he’s been right in the past,” the review continues, his new volume “in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming.”
Kevin Price Phillips was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1940, and grew up in the middle-class Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx. His father was chief executive of the New York State Liquor Authority, and his mother was a homemaker.
As a child, he became aware of ethnic and religious divides in his neighborhood and even in his own home. His mother was Protestant, his father Catholic. Mr. Phillips later joked that “my religion was reading the Sunday papers.”
While his friends compiled baseball statistics, Mr. Phillips’s boyhood hobby was studying demographic information and drawing voting maps. His parents enrolled him at the Bronx High School of Science, where he wasn’t much interested in the science but nonetheless became a National Merit scholar.
“I guess my after school study of ethnic political behavior was a natural progression from taking zoology in the classroom,” he told the New York Times.
In 1961, Mr. Phillips received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He spent his junior year studying economic history and geography at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964.
While working for candidate Nixon, Mr. Phillips was married in 1968 to Martha Henderson, an aide to then-Rep. Melvin R. Laird (R-Wis.), whom President Nixon soon named secretary of defense.
In addition to his son, survivors include his wife; two other children, Betsy Khamdiev and Andrew Phillips; a brother; and seven grandchildren.
In a 1970 profile of Mr. Phillips in the New York Times, his wife revealed what drew her to him. In many ways, she was describing Mr. Phillips, the author and political commentator.
“He’s quite witty, you know, in a wry, caustic, cynical but pleasant way,” she said.
Kevin Phillips, Nixon political analyst and prolific author, dies at 82 - The Washington Post
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Opinion The GOP’s ‘southern strategy’ mastermind just died. Here’s his legacy.
“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”
That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades.
Though Phillips later reconsidered his fealty to the GOP, updated versions of the “southern strategy” live on in today’s Republican Party, shaping the political world we inhabit today. So I asked historians and political theorists to weigh in on Phillips’s legacy. Their responses have been edited for style and brevity.
Kevin Kruse, historian at Princeton University and co-editor of “Myth America”: Kevin Phillips was a prophet of today’s polarization. He drew a blueprint for a major realignment of American politics that is still with us. For much of the 20th century, Democrats dominated the national scene, because of the reliable support of the “Solid South.”
But the “Negro problem” of the 1960s, Phillips argued, presented Republicans an opportunity to take the South and Southwest, too, a new region he anointed “the Sun Belt.” All they had to do was appeal to the hatreds of White voters there, through racially coded “law and order” appeals.
Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”: Phillips helped shape how the Republican Party navigated the last 50 years of U.S. politics. His big contribution was the idea that White southerners could be potential voters for the GOP, because the solid Democratic South had become newly fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Phillips argued that the Republican Party needed to change the way it conducted politics to reach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.
Trump picked up this rhetoric. He launched his campaign on the ideas of Mexican migrant and Muslim criminality — that all these minority populations needed to be under much stricter surveillance.
The strategy that Phillips helped popularize worked just as well with some northern White voters as it did with southern White voters. It helped solidify the Republican Party’s base as almost exclusively White even as the nation has grown more diverse.
Bill Kristol, a former Republican turned Never Trump conservative: It was happening already in 1968, but Phillips’s book and his subsequent promotion of the southern strategy did have the effect of making that reaction to the civil rights movement more coherent. It gave politicians a way to think about shaping that reaction politically.
Newt Gingrich, who defeated lots of Democrats in southern House seats in the 1994 midterms, was in spirit a Phillips protégé. That culminated in 2010, when Democrats got obliterated, and in the red state-blue state divide today.
From Phillips to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, there is a through line. DeSantis, Abbott and others are operating in a world anticipated and partly created by Phillips. The reaction of much of the White working class and Republican politicians to Black Lives Matter and “cosmopolitan elites” is a close cousin of what Phillips predicted and helped shape.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner: I think Phillips was noticing what was happening rather than causing it to happen. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 49 to 50 percent of the popular vote in the South in 1952 and 1956; Nixon got nearly that much in 1960. When the national Democratic Party became more dovish, circa 1967, reacting against the Vietnam escalations of its own presidents, Southern Whites — always the most hawkish voters — turned away from national Democrats not so much because of civil rights but because of dovishness. It’s what Tom Eagleton later told Robert Novak: “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
Corey Robin, political theorist and author of “The Reactionary Mind”: Phillips understood that the old Republican Party establishment could not begin to take on the New Deal and Great Society until it developed a mass popular base. He saw that the White working class — not just in the South, but in the North — was growing disaffected with the New Deal on economic and racist grounds, and that Republicans could turn that dissatisfaction into governing majorities.
Beginning in 1972 with the reelection of Nixon, Republicans built this majority in the spirit of what Phillips imagined. George W. Bush, the last Republican president to get a popular majority, was the last spasm of that vision. The irony is that, under Phillips, the idea was to expand the Republican Party into a permanent governing majority.
But once the White working class diminished, the electoral return of that resentment dramatically dwindled. As a result, instead of relying on robust electoral majorities, the Republican Party, to win power, relies on the electoral college and the malapportioned Senate. Phillips’s blueprint made the heyday of Republican power — and ultimately unmade it.
Opinion | The GOP’s ‘southern strategy’ mastermind just died. Here’s his legacy. - The Washington Post
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At breakfast, this group always leaves at least a $1,000 tip
‘I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,’ Richard Brooks wrote on Facebook
Roberto Rivas teaches Spanish full-time at a local high school, and on weekends, he waits tables at two restaurants, including an IHOP, so he can pay his bills.
Rivas had just finished serving pancakes and eggs to a party of 16 on a busy Saturday morning in Norwood, Mass., when one of the customers at the table called him over.
“We have something for you,” the customer, Richard Brooks, told Rivas. “The only reason we came to breakfast today was to give you this tip.”
Brooks pulled out a pile of $100 bills and counted them into Rivas’s hand, explaining that he and his friends were members of the $1,000 Breakfast Club. Each person had contributed $100 to leave for the server, $1,600 in all.
Rivas, 29, said he almost burst into tears that Saturday morning in June.
He said since his family immigrated to the United States from Venezuela in December 2022, he’d been saving money to buy his mother new hearing aids, and the tip now allows him to buy them. He and four family members have humanitarian parole so they can work in the United States until December 2024, he said. He hopes to get an employment or student visa so he can stay longer.
“This is a golden opportunity — I want to be able to contribute to society in the U.S.,” Rivas said.
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He said he was shocked to receive such a large tip from the $1,000 Breakfast Club.
After a six-hour shift, he said he is usually lucky to take home about $200 in tips.
“Sixteen hundred dollars is unheard of,” Rivas said. “Servers work hard, but a tip this large is rare. I’m still amazed they wanted to surprise me like this.”
Brooks started the $1,000 Breakfast Club earlier this year after his brother, Justin Brooks, mentioned he’d gone to breakfast in California with a group that left a stack of $100 bills for their server.
“For years, I’ve given out single $100 bills to people at random in appreciation for a job well done, or just to brighten their day,” said Richard Brooks, 63, a lawyer who works in Boston. “More than anything, I’ve enjoyed watching the look on their faces as I hand them the money.”
When his brother told him about his own $100 bill outing, “It just hit me that this was a great idea and I should do something with it,” Brooks said.
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Groups that leave large tips for servers have become more popular since the covid-19 pandemic, with 100 Dollar Dinner Clubs taking off in places such as Wyoming and Utah.
Brooks said the idea is long overdue.
While he was attending law school in his 20s, he said he worked as a waiter on campus at Boston University for five years to help pay his bills.
“I’ll never forget the first time I got a tip that was worth anything,” Brooks said. “Somebody gave me $20, and it just made my day.”
In January, he decided to post on Facebook:
“I want to start a group to go to breakfast, 10 of us, and we each bring $100 to tip the waiter,” Brooks wrote.
“The Thousand Dollar Breakfast Club. Anyone can go,” he continued. “We will find a small place where the server will be shocked to get $1,000. It will be a fun quick morning breakfast and will blow the mind of the server!”
Ten people — a few friends and some people he didn’t know who saw his post on Facebook — showed up at the first breakfast in March at an IHOP in Framingham, Mass., while another three who couldn’t make it each sent him $100, Brooks said.
“I chose IHOP since they take bigger tables and I also knew that breakfast was a time when waiters aren’t making as many tips because the bill is usually lower than for lunch or dinner,” he said.
When he thanked the server and handed her $1,300, “the look of surprise on her face and the happy look on everyone’s face at the table told me we were on the right track,” Brooks said. “It’s a great pleasure to give money to people you don’t know.”
He said group members decided they would continue to visit a different IHOP every few months in the greater Boston area and ask that a single server be assigned to their table at random so the money would have a greater impact.
“A thousand-plus dollars is a lot of money, but it doesn’t go as far if a bunch of people are sharing it,” Brooks said. “By giving it all to one person, you’re doing something that could make a difference in their life.”
About 20 people now belong to the club, but not everyone can make every meeting, he said. Some of the members didn’t know each other until they started bringing $100 bills to breakfast.
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Brooks said he picks up the tab for the group’s meals.
“They chose to come and give away $100 to make someone happy, so it’s the least I can do,” he said.
He said it doesn’t matter if his group doesn’t get top-notch service.
“We don’t know what’s going on in the server’s day — isn’t that the kind of person you would want to help?” he said. “If bad service happens, we’ll give them the money anyway to help improve their day.”
Jeff Paris, a special-education teacher from Reading, Mass., brings his wife, Melissa, and their 1-year-old daughter, Eliza, to the breakfasts.
“I really love making new friends around the table — the camaraderie is incredible,” he said. “I don’t have the means to do something like this on my own, and most of the other people are everyday working folks, too. But together, what we do really adds up.”
“It’s a small effort for us, but the impact it has on those recipients is huge,” said Janet Meaney, 73, a club member who said she was among the first to sign up.
“It’s a wonderful way to thank hard-working people,” she said.
On the group’s third outing together, the giant tip recipient was Tulio Maldonado, a waiter at an IHOP in Saugus, Mass. Brooks counted out $1,300 and handed it to him on Sept. 23 while his reaction was captured by Boston’s WCVB Channel 5. Paris had contacted the TV station, thinking that the group’s story might inspire others to do something similar, Brooks said.
Paris said he was hopeful that people in other towns would copy the club’s idea and start leaving $1,000 tips.
“[Tulio] told us he was going to pay his bills with it, and that makes you feel good to know you helped make that happen for him,” he said. “We’re proof that you don’t need to be a celebrity or a millionaire to do this.”
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Brooks said he recently heard from someone in Atlanta who hopes to start a club like his, and someone in Chicago has also expressed an interest.
“We’d really love for this to catch on,” he said.
Rivas said that would be fine with him.
“Someday, I’d like to be in a position to give back to somebody else in this way,” he said. “The $1,000 tip. It’s brilliant.”
At breakfast, this group always leaves at least a $1,000 tip - The Washington Post
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Mayor Adams has also stated that the hotels will be a strict 60 day policy and have those people assigned for placement.
Floyd Bennett field is a big area with NOTHING within a short walking distance. You've got Breezy Pont over the bridge but nobody is allowed in unless u live there and stores are a hike away in any direction.
in.
John Hendrickson of The Atlantic was at Trump’s political rally in Hialeah, Florida, on Wednesday, where the former president railed against those “coming into our country,” people he compared to “Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional serial killer who ate his victims. Trump said that under Biden, the U.S. has become “the dumping ground of the world,” and he attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. He also attacked the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.
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NYC is way past the breaking point. Cuts have to be made if the Govt doesn't help fit the bill
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/nyregion/nyc-budget-cuts-schools-police-trash.html
The news channels were out in droves last night in front of the Roosevelt when I walked by. You can pick any one of them to get the story above.
A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he’s no longer a citizen.
The Northern Virginia doctor was born in D.C. and given a U.S. birth certificate. At 61, he learned his citizenship was granted by mistake.
Siavash Sobhani is stateless.
The Northern Virginia doctor knows at least that much about his situation. He knows he is no longer considered a citizen of the United States — the place where he was born, went to school and has practiced medicine for more than 30 years — and that he also belongs to no other place.
“I’m in limbo,” he told me on a recent afternoon.
In the past few years, there have been many passport-renewal nightmare stories, with processing delays forcing people to beg, lose sleep and miss once-in-a-lifetime trips. But what Sobhani has experienced this year after trying to renew his passport is uniquely unmooring.
As he tells it, when he sent in an application for a new passport in February, he had no reason to expect he’d face any difficulties. He had renewed his passport several times previously without problems. This time, it was set to expire in June, and he wanted to make sure he had a valid one in hand before his family took a trip in July.
But he did not receive a new passport. Instead, at the age of 61, he lost what he had held since he was an infant: U.S. citizenship.
A letter from a State Department official informed him that he should not have been granted citizenship at the time of his birth because his father was a diplomat with the Embassy of Iran. The letter directed Sobhani to a website where he could apply for lawful permanent residence.
“This was a shock to me,” said Sobhani, who specializes in internal medicine. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been here all my life. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve voted for presidents. I’ve served my community in Northern Virginia. During covid, I was at work, putting myself at risk, putting my family at risk. So when you’re told after 61 years, ‘Oh there was a mistake, you’re no longer a U.S. citizen,’ it’s really, really shocking.”
Sobhani shared with me the letter he received from the State Department, along with personal documents that detail his life in the United States and letters he had sent to local lawmakers asking for their help. Taken together, those records show how the Georgetown Medical School graduate went from living a stable life in the D.C. region to standing on uncertain ground and asking questions that do not have clear answers.
Some of those questions: Can he still legally practice medicine? Will the money he has earned over his career count toward his Social Security benefits if his Social Security number changes? Will he get to attend his son’s destination wedding next year?
Sobhani was hesitant to speak publicly about his situation. He has applied for permanent residence, as instructed, and he doesn’t want to do anything that might upset government officials who hold his fate in their hands. But he also knows how slowly the country’s immigration system can move, and he worries that he could wait in limbo for years if top officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) don’t hear about his case and agree to help him. He said he has already spent more than $40,000 on legal fees and still doesn’t know when his case might be resolved.
“I’m waiting for an interview, but does that mean I wait another year for an interview?” he said. “Then another three years for the next step? Then another 10 years before I can travel outside of the country?”
At his age — he turned 62 this month — he had already started to think about retirement. He and his wife planned to spend this year exploring other countries in hopes of finding a community where they could buy a home. Now, he can’t even visit a friend in London who recently had a stroke, or his father-in-law, who lives in Lebanon and is seriously ill.
“If he passes away, I can’t even go to his funeral,” Sobhani said.
Sobhani uses the words “upsetting,” “frustrating” and “distressing” to describe what he has been going through. His language is gentler than what many people would use if they suddenly lost the freedoms, protections and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship — all because of a paperwork mistake that was made when they were too young to read.
The U.S. government didn’t take away Sobhani’s citizenship because of anything he did. The letter points to a bureaucratic reason: Those born in the United States to parents who have diplomatic immunity do not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
“As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States,” reads the letter. “As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.”
“But I did,” Sobhani said as he read that last line aloud. “They gave it me.”
They also reconfirmed he was a citizen over and over again throughout his life, every time his passport was renewed.
Sobhani said that after getting that letter, he started digging into his family’s history. He couldn’t ask his parents questions because his father is dead and his mother has dementia. What he discovered, he said, is this: His older brother, who was born in Kansas when their father was a military student, had a congenital condition that required surgery. To extend the family’s stay in the country for that surgery, their father obtained a temporary job at the Iranian Embassy and worked there in October and November 1961. A birth certificate shows Sobhani was born at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that November.
Sobhani said his family lived in Turkey for several years when he was a child but that he returned to D.C. to attend Georgetown Preparatory School. He received degrees from George Washington University and Boston College before attending Georgetown Medical School. He said he cannot safely live in Iran because he has spoken out against the government and his brother ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2012.
Sobhani wrote letters to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) requesting their help, saying he had “the utmost respect for the laws governing this country.” He also noted that he has dedicated his career to helping people in Virginia and the D.C. region and has been “directly involved in the care of tens of thousands of lives, currently with an active patient panel of over 3,000 patients.”
“I can only hope that the impact I’ve made in caring for our community of Virginians, your constituents, for the past 30 years will hold some weight in swaying your decision to intervene on my behalf,” he wrote.
He shared a letter that Connolly wrote to a USCIS official on his behalf.
“I trust that you can imagine how difficult it must be to believe that you were a citizen of the U.S. your entire life, just to find out you actually were not,” Connolly wrote. He added, “Our office is respectfully requesting all possible consideration in expediting this case in accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.”
Sobhani said he hopes his citizenship will be restored within six months, but he has no idea if that’s a realistic expectation. He has no idea if he will have a passport in time to attend his son’s wedding in Portugal next year or if he will get to make those retirement scouting trips with his wife anytime soon.
He has no idea how long he will remain stateless.
A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he’s no longer a citizen. - The Washington Post
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Migrants were bussed over to Floyd Bennett and upon seeing the area they got back on the bus. This was last month. Well now they don't have a place to stay.
Fast forward to this month and migrants would stay there willingly if given the opportunity because there is no where else to stay. The hotels are a 30 day stay and then you get put out.
Floyd Bennett as stated is not ideal if you want to find work schools, etc. That was the initial rejection from the migrants and I get it. It's tent city and not the greatest conditions. If it's all there is though they had better take the offer.
Winter is coming and you can't have them out on the streets, they'll freeze to death.
Maybe the border will ease up for winter?
Time moves too fast, take care of the people you love.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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