House Republicans sure did a great job taking care of that undocumented immigrant child issue before leaving for recess, passing a bill that actually takes away hearings for these children and just ships them back before they can make their case. What do Republicans have to offer besides rage and hatred anymore? So NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to handle this issue with more compassion and thought. They'll have to deal with it again, since the Senate won't take up the House bill, and even if by some miracle the Senate did take up the House bill, President Obama would veto it. Mr. Obama will no doubt also issue some executive orders on his own, which House Republicans will find more intolerable than they found Mr. Bush's unilateral warrantless wiretapping. All this fracas will energize the Republicans' hard-right wedge, and it may also energize nominal Democratic voters -- but in the meantime, tens of thousands of children will have no idea whether they're going to get a fair hearing to stay in the U.S. with family already here, or go back to whatever fresh hell their home countries are serving up. A civilized person would call that intolerable.
Meanwhile, if you're still hoping against hope for some good to come out of the current iteration of the Israel/Palestine conflict, then MoveOn still helps you tell Secretary of State Kerry to push for a more lasting ceasefire and an end to Israel's ongoing economic blockade of Palestine, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write a letter-to-the-editor in which you urge Congress to do the same. Are we being anti-Semitic if we don't tell our government to pressure Palestine to stop their attacks? No: we condemn all violence, and all death from violence, but who has leverage over a people who have been occupied for decades on end and herded onto ever smaller scraps of land and kept from food and water and humanitarian aid? No one, that's who. But we have leverage over Israel, loathe as we've been to use it, because we give them plenty of military aid, aid they're using to attack Palestinians as we speak. And it must have occurred to someone in the Obama Administration that America would have more leverage over Hamas's actions if Palestine had a secure and vibrant state of its own. Hasn't it? These people are supposed to be smart, after all. That may even be why we elected them, at least the first time.
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