Day: December 30, 2024

The H-1B Debate Erupts.

Today is National Bacon Day and what better time to post on the pigs that will be running this country?

A minor buckle in the MAGA loyalists over a special visa for those ‘elite workers’…..it seems some of Trumpies picks for high position are not natural Americans and got where they are by this special visa and this set off a heated debate.

A “civil war” of sorts broke out over the weekend in MAGA world, pitting far-right Trump supporters against the billionaire tech-bro contingent. The fight started Sunday when President-elect Trump announced he’d chosen venture capitalist and India native Sriram Krishnan as a senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. That “triggered an anti-Indian backlash,” per Axios, which notes that part of the pushback against Krishnan has centered on his advocacy for lifting caps on H-1B visas. More:

  • H-1B: CNN notes that this specific visa program allows 65,000 “highly skilled” workers into the US annually, with another 20,000 granted the paperwork if they obtained an advanced degree in the US. The tech sector especially makes use of this visa—including Trump ally Elon Musk, who first came to the US as a foreign student and then worked here on an H-1B visa.
  • Ready, set, fight: Newsweek has a timeline, starting with a series of disparaging tweets from Trump loyalist Laura Loomer. On Monday, she called the selection of Krishnan “deeply disturbing,” adding that his views are “in direct opposition” to Trump’s “America First” agenda. In a follow-up tweet on Christmas Eve, she noted “our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India.”
  • Musk: The new Trump BFF weighed in next in support of drawing highly skilled workers from other countries, writing on Christmas: “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low. Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”
  • Ramaswamy: Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments came Thursday, spurring accusations of “elitist rhetoric,” per the Times of India. In a lengthy tweet, Ramaswamy accused American culture of fostering “mediocrity.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote. “More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons.”
  • More reaction: Other big names in the GOP sphere pushed back at Musk and Ramaswamy. “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” posted former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. “We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.” Ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz weighed in on the “tech bros”: “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”
  • Musk turns on Loomer: When Loomer insinuated that a rift was growing between Trump and his Silicon Valley pals, and that DOGE is a “vanity project,” Musk called her a “troll,” per the New Republic. Loomer also insisted Friday that Musk was retaliating by taking away her blue check and subscriptions on X, the social media platform he owns.
  • Trump’s take: The former and future commander in chief slammed restricted H-1B visas somewhat during his first term. However, in a podcast this past June, Trump appeared to have softened his stance, noting that he believed any foreign national who graduated from an American college should be eligible for permanent residency.
  • What’s next? Per Axios, this “tense MAGA vs. DOGE moment” will “potentially settle a looming conflict over who has the most influence in Trump 2.0—his historic base or his newfound techno-libertarian allies.” “It’s a sign of future conflicts,” warns Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, per the Washington Post. “This is like the pregame.”

Damn foreigners!

This minor ‘civil war’ will be fascinating to watch and see how dear Donald handles this….

Damn I love this stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Ukrainian Realization

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been going on for damn near 3 years. The US and NATO has done everything it can to keep the conflict going but now there will soon be a new president that has a desire for the war to end.

My guess this bold statement by Zelensky has something to do with our past election.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has conceded that Ukraine does not have the ability to drive Russian forces out of the territory Russia has captured since the 2022 invasion, as well as Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014.

“We cannot give up our territories. The Ukrainian constitution forbids us to do so. De facto, these territories are now controlled by the Russians. We do not have the strength to recover them,” Zelensky told the French newspaper Le Parisien.

“We can only count on diplomatic pressure from the international community to force Putin to sit down at the negotiating table,” the Ukrainian leader added.

Zelensky has long maintained that his war goals include driving Russian troops out of Russian-controlled Ukraine, which includes about 80% of the eastern Donbas region and parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. A “peace formula” pushed by Zelensky called for a full Russian withdrawal before peace talks could even happen.

A potential peace deal that was on the table in March and April of 2022 would have involved a Russian withdrawal from the territory it had captured following the invasion in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. But the deal was discouraged by the US and its allies and fell apart. Later that year, Moscow formally annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, and it now considers all of the oblasts, even the Ukrainian-controlled areas, a part of Russia.

Back in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out Moscow’s conditions for peace, which included a Ukrainian withdrawal from the oblasts he considers part of Russia.

(antiwar.com)

Let’s say this comes to be how will the Ukrainian people react to the knowledge that this conflict could have ended much earlier and spared all those lives and destruction?

After months of promoting Ukraine’s excursion into Russia….things have changed….

The Joe Biden administration believes that Ukrainian forces are on the verge of a total loss in Russia’s Kursk Oblast and is now advising Kiev to pull its troops back. Reporting on Kiev’s losses in Kursk, the AP reports the Ukrainian forces have become “demoralized.”

In August, tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops stormed across the Russian border and seized a large swath of lightly defended territory in the Kursk Oblast. Since then, Moscow has slowly won back over half the territory. Now, the White House says Ukraine must abandon its foothold in Russia before its troops become encircled.

Discussing the situation facing Ukrainian forces in Kursk, one US official told Bloomberg, “it was a question of time whether Russian forces could envelop it, creating a dilemma for Ukrainian forces to either retreat or surrender.”

Two officials confirmed to the outlet that the White House believes that the Kremlin is now pushing into the Kursk battlefield, and Ukrainian forces will be defeated within months. This assessment has the White House telling Kiev to pull its remaining forces out of Russia.  

The strategy behind the Kursk offensive was always in question. Many of the proponents of the attack argued it would give Kiev additional bargaining chips at the negotiating table. However, it now appears Ukraine will lose the territory before talks begin.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/white-house-tells-ukraine-to-pull-its-demoralized-forces-from-russia/

This situation will be interesting to see how the US will handle this and the reaction of the Ukrainian people.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Jimmy Carter–Rest In Peace

The sad news has broken that ex-president Jimmy Carter has passed away.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who was turned out of office by voters after one term and went on to build houses for the poor and champion democracy around the world, died Sunday. He was 100 and the longest-living US president. His son said Carter died at his home in Plains, Georgia, the Washington Post reports. His wife, Rosalynn, to whom he was married for more than 77 years, had died in November 2023, and Carter made his final public appearance at her memorial service. Among his last appeals to his country was in an op-ed after the attack on the US Capitol in 2021. “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” Carter warned, adding, “Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.”

Born Oct. 1, 1924, Carter was the eldest of four children and grew up in a house without running water or electricity. His family had a peanut farm two miles from Plains. When he was 19, Carter entered the Naval Academy, then became one of the first officers assigned to its nuclear submarine program under future Adm. Hyman Rickover, who drove his staff hard and didn’t believe in praise. “I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man,” Carter said. He returned to Plains and the family business when his father died, per the New York Times. Although he called himself a peanut farmer when he entered politics in the early 1960s, his father had expanded and diversified as he prospered, and Carter ran a significant commercial enterprise by that time.

Carter was elected a state legislator, then governor, shaking up Georgia politics by declaring, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” He served one term but built a political team with an eye on the presidency. In 1976, he ousted President Gerald Ford, who later became a close friend, to become the nation’s 39th president. He had run as a moderate Democrat and born-again Southern Baptist who promised to never lie to Americans, drawing contrasts to the recently resigned Richard Nixon. He also brought technocratic plans to make government more efficient, per the AP. Carter had successes in office that included a landmark treaty in the Middle East. But his support faded under the weight of double-digit inflation and the taking of US hostages in Iran, and he lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan.

His presidency has risen in historians’ estimation recently, but it was Carter’s work after he left office that was most widely admired. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and hammered nails alongside his wife as they built homes for Habitat for Humanity. The couple founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, under which they traveled the world to promote peace, democracy, and humanitarian efforts. “I thought he was a great president because he was a president of values, and he acted upon the values,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said. “He went from the White House to building houses for poor people. He glorified that work. Others wanted to do it because he did it,” she added. “That’s powerful.”

Of all the modern presidents he was the most selfless and committed to serving the people of this country even after he was no longer president.

Past presidents tell of Jimmy Carter….

A moment of silence was held for Jimmy Carter at the Atlanta Falcons’ game at the Washington Commanders Sunday night—a game with multiple links to the former president, a native of Georgia who led the country from 1977 to 1981 from the White House, less than eight miles from the Commanders’ stadium, the AP reports. Meanwhile, current and former US presidents were also honoring Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, WBAL reports:

  • President Biden: “Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman, and humanitarian,” Biden’s lengthy statement starts. “Over six decades, we had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend. But, what’s extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well. With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us.”
  • President-elect Trump: “Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.” Yahoo News notes that in a second post, Trump added, “While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for.”
  • Former President Barack Obama: Framed as a story about Carter’s frequent Sunday school teachings, Obama made note of Carter’s accomplishments during “the longest, and most impactful, post-presidency in American history—monitoring more than 100 elections around the world; helping virtually eliminate Guinea worm disease, an infection that had haunted Africa for centuries; becoming the only former president to earn a Nobel Peace Prize; and building or repairing thousands of homes in more than a dozen countries with his beloved Rosalynn as part of Habitat for Humanity.”
  • Former President George W. Bush: “James Earl Carter, Jr., was a man of deeply held convictions. He was loyal to his family, his community, and his country. President Carter dignified the office. And his efforts to leave behind a better world didn’t end with the presidency. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center set an example of service that will inspire Americans for generations.”
  • Former President Bill Clinton: “From his commitment to civil rights as a state senator and governor of Georgia; to his efforts as President to protect our natural resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, make energy conservation a national priority, return the Panama Canal to Panama, and secure peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David; to his post-Presidential efforts at the Carter Center supporting honest elections, advancing peace, combating disease, and promoting democracy; to his and Rosalynn’s devotion and hard work at Habitat for Humanity—he worked tirelessly for a better, fairer world.”

Kind words for a kind man.

More on the legacy of this superb American….read and understand….

https://www.commondreams.org/news/jimmy-carter-dying

Here is a look at photos of this well respected man….

In the mid-1970s, Jimmy Carter campaigned as a political outsider for the White House promising honesty, good governance and respect for human rights. These were issues that remained at the forefront of his thinking both during and after his one-term presidency.

Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, 2024, is the longest-living president and has spent more than four decades out of office. During these years he continued his human rights and humanitarian work. He undertook several (sometimes controversial) peacekeeping missions abroad, and helped build homes for charity alongside his wife, Rosalind (1927-2023), well into his late 90s.

“One of the things Jesus taught was: If you have any talents, try to utilize them for the benefit of others,” President Carter told People magazine in 2019. “That’s what Rosa and I have both tried to do.”

Below, look back at some of the key moments in Carter’s life, from his rustic Georgia upbringing to his post-presidency honors.

https://www.history.com/news/jimmy-carter-photos

He will be missed for he was the very model of what an American should strive for in life….service to community and the nation.

Thank you Jimmy….for your service and you will be missed….R.I.P.

I shame that more ex-presidents have not followed in his footsteps for this country would be so much better than it is today.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”