Month: January 2012

Tough love for teens

by digby

Back in the 80s this was a Cheech and Chong movie. Today it is a Kafkaesque nightmare:

Turner has been searching for Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.

Turner searched for months for a clue.

“God just kept leading me,” she said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and do whatever God told me to do, and I found her.”

Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place – Colombia.

Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.

“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

I honestly can’t think of many things more horrible. I guess they could have tortured her before they deported her. But not to worry. They’re looking into how this could happen so I’m sure it will be just fine:

“ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” said ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale. ” At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”

ICE officials also noted there have been instances where ICE has seen cases of individuals providing inaccurate information regarding who they are and their immigration status for ulterior motives.

This is a fourteen year old girl! Who doesn’t speak Spanish! That’s Alice in Wonderland lunacy.

But it’s not unprecedented:

Rennison Castillo is an army veteran ICE held for nine months even though he had provided documentation of his U.S. citizenship, a claim acknowledged in an apology written by U.S. Assistant Attorney Phil Lynch in October, 2010 as part of the public settlement that included as well $400,000 and Mr. Lynch’s reassurances that ICE had new procedures in place to “avoid this happening again to a fellow U.S. [c]itizen.”

If ICE is going to hold an Army vet and ignore his pleas for nine months, what chance does a 14 year old girl have of having ICE agents respect her U.S. citizenship?

Good question. In fact, there are hundreds of Americans wrongly deported each year. I’m sure that most Real Americans don’t really care because they think it could never happen to them. Let’s hope not. It’s pretty awful.

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One of the empty boys

by digby

The date was May 20, 1966. A group of students had taken over the office of Stanford President Wallace Sterling, protesting against the institution of a test that was among the first steps toward the Vietnam-era draft.

Carey Coulter, a conservative and anti-Communist student who had spent time as a civilian in Vietnam, was outraged and organized a counter-protest.

“We were there to get an education and these people holding the Administration hostage was antithetical to that,” he recalled to BuzzFeed in his first interview about the day.

As the roughly 150 counter-protesters held signs and chatted with passing students, a tall, neatly-dressed 19-year old Coulter had never seen before approached him.

“He walked up to me and said that he had some experience with the press, and that he would handle the press for me if I wanted him to,” Coulter recalled. “I said fine, because I was busy running the demonstration.”

“He just saw the demonstration, was sympathetic to it obviously, and came up,” Coulter said. He added that Romney hadn’t made the sign he’s carrying in the photograph.

Romney hadn’t organized the protest, and wasn’t part of Coulter’s later efforts to beat back a growing student anti-war movement.

“I don’t recall ever seeing him again,” Coulter said of Romney, who spent just a year at Stanford and enrolled after his mission in France at Brigham Young University[…]

Greenwald did the job on Romney’s Vietnam non-experience back in 2007. I particularly liked this Boston Globe quote he refers to:

Mr. Romney, though, said that he sometimes had wished he were in Vietnam instead of France. “There were surely times on my mission when I was having a particularly difficult time accomplishing very little when I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military,” he said in an interview, “but that was not to be.”

He was prevented from serving because he was a “minister of religion” you see. Such a pity.

Not that I particularly want to revisit the Vietnam wars, but this does remind me of a piece I wrote about fellows like Romney back in the day. It’s long, this is just an excerpt:

The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60’s male leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin — he was both virile and heroic.

The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight. This, I think, is deeply understood by people at a primitive level and all cultures have some version of it deeply embedded in the DNA. It’s not just the willingness to die it also involves the willingness to kill. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.

And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. In fact, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight it here. These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate.

Now it must be pointed out that there were many men, and many more women, who didn’t buy into any of this “manhood” stuff and felt no need to join in tribal rituals or bloody wars to prove anything. Most of those men, however, didn’t aspire to political leadership. Among the revolutionaries, the warriors and the chickenhawks, there were many who did. Indeed, these manhood rituals are more often than not a requirement for leadership. (Perhaps having more women in power will finally change that.)

The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove.

It’s a little psycho-babbly, I admit. But I still think there’s something to this. The political leadership that emerged from the Vietnam generation are peculiar in this way, no doubt about it.

And, by the way, late boomer Barack Obama, despite his protestations to contrary, grew up in a culture immersed in all this, so he hasn’t escaped it. I don’t think he’s operating from this same logic, however. If he’s trying to prove something, I don’t think it stems from this particular pathology.

Romney, on the other hand, is one of those guys, with all the baggage that comes with it. Look at that picture.

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The Deconstructed Sex Candidate

by digby

Santorum thinks that people have kids for the money. Seriously. You may have thought that the baby boom happened because people had just gone through 15 years of depression and world war but it was really for the tax deduction.

QOTD

He is a one man wrecking crew whose great gift is creating chaos and ill feeling. He’s the walking embodiment of the modern conservative movement.

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Hope and Changeby digbyBefore we leave Iowa behind completely, I did want to post this little piece from TIME Magazine. Apparently at one point all the candidates showed up to give speeches at a high school.

Afterward, TIME asked several groups of students to give the first word that came to mind after seeing each candidate (or their surrogates) speak. Here’s what they had to say.
Bachmann: Crazy. Different. Crazy. Wavering. Rude. Woman. Minnesota. Woman. Crazy. Crazy. Extreme. Woman. Waterloo. Homey.Romney: Meh. Alright. Mormon. Kind. Chill. Money. Politician. Bad. Money. Money. China. Mormon. Children. Accomplished.Paul: Hero. Likeable. Conservative. Strong. Concerned. Best. War. Amazing. Libertarian. Old. Not-my-favorite. Good doctor. Awesome. Supported.Santorum: Okay. Awful. Awesome. Unknown. Underdog. Wonderful. [No answer]. Nice. Conservative. Family. Religion. Pretty good. Immigrant. Unique.

I’m not going to parse all that, but I did think it was interesting that Bachmann was pretty much defined as a crazy woman. Not that she isn’t a loon. But it does show that “male” is still such a default that being a woman is notable — even among young people. Granted, she was the only one running, but she’s still a member of half the population. Depressing.

Well hell. Bachman’s gone, which is going to make the GOP debates far less entertaining. And frankly, that’s the only real interest I have in these primaries.

While you wait for the returns …

by digby

Greatest primary season moments, 1976-2008:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Primaries have always been something of a clown show, but I think this one may be one for the books. Cheering for executions has to stand out.

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When right wingers get cocky

Update: More on the Duggar endorsement.

Chart ‘O the Day: Real America

by digby

Juan Cole has provided a useful chart explaining what the Villagers mean when they explain that they flock to Iowa to see “Real Americans” choosing the candidates the rest of us will have to vote for.

And anyway, the Iowa caucuses are bullshit as Rick Perlstein eloquently explains here.

I’m not going to engage in the rousing argument about David Atkins’ last post, except to say this: I tend to see this in terms of negative and positive rights, categorical imperative and other more esoteric concepts than “intervention” although that’s part of it, at least in economic and social justice terms.