Role of Government

One of the most important things for our next president is their job as the chief of law enforcement.

|

One of the most important things for our next president is their job as the chief of law enforcement. The most important laws in our country regulate manufacturing, they ensure products we use every day are as safe, healthy, efficient and non polluting as possible. Regulations push industry to build better products, to innovate and to protect the public interest.

Some are pushing for radical changes in our country. I don’t believe in them. Instead, I think we should push industry to follow the law, and make incremental improvements as standards are increased to better protect the public as a whole.

Open Water Today

Trump says he’s pursuing executive order to end birthright citizenship | PBS NewsHour

|

Trump says he’s pursuing executive order to end birthright citizenship | PBS NewsHour

I have a lot of questions how this would work. You can't deny somebody citizenship when they are a natural born citizen but I guess in theory you could deny a birth certificate to children of immigrants? But how would you do that?

Hospitals aren't owned by the federal government, and it's local governments that keep birth certificates. And even if you lack a birth certificate, you are still a natural born citizen - you could always prove your birth in the country by other means.

Plus I suspect denying birth certificates based on race or national origin would violate the Civil Rights Act, as hospitals are certainly public accommodations and offer services to the interstate travelers.

Hitler’s Influence in the US Was Greater Than You May Think | Time

|

Hitler’s Influence in the US Was Greater Than You May Think | Time

"In fact, when Bradley W. Hart first started researching the history of Nazi sympathy in the United States a few years ago, he was largely driven by the absence of attention to the topic. Hart’s new book Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States argues that the threat of Nazism in the United States before World War II was greater than we generally remember today, and that those forces offer valuable lessons decades later — and not just because part of that story is the history of the “America First” idea, born of pre-WWII isolationism and later reborn as a slogan for now-President Donald Trump."

http://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/

I thought democracy in Chile was safe. Now I see America falling into the same trap | Ariel Dorfman | Opinion | The Guardian

|

I thought democracy in Chile was safe. Now I see America falling into the same trap | Ariel Dorfman | Opinion | The Guardian

"Such deliberate savagery was only feasible and normalised because millions of Chileans who had felt threatened to their core by the Allende revolution accepted this war on their compatriots as necessary to save the nation from communism – even if there had been no human rights abuses by Allende’s government and absolute freedom of assembly and the press. Whipped into a frenzy by a campaign of hate-filled lies, the supporters of General Augusto Pinochet were persuaded, as in Franco’s Spain, that democracy was a cancer that had to be eradicated in the name of western civilisation."

"In time, enough Chileans came to their senses and, through popular mobilisations and at great cost in lives and pain, created a coalition that restored democratic rule in 1990. But the consequences of those traumatic events, the division of the country against itself, persist today, 45 years after the military takeover. We also, however, emerged from that tragedy with insights that might be relevant to this current moment in history, when democracy is under siege in the US and across the globe, with countless citizens enthralled by strongmen who manipulate their frustrations and resentments and play to their worst nativist instincts."