Immoral and Illegal Deportations

Dear Friends,

President Obama is denying the children that have struggled to come to our borders from Central America to escape poverty, drugs, violence and death due process as well as their right to claim asylum, and then he is deporting them.  Please watch this clip.



Now please write to President Obama (here).  The United States of America that I know and love is better than what we are doing to these people.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Save the children by letting them stay

Dear Friends,

All the talk in Washington these days seems to be about how to speed up the deportation of the children coming to our borders escaping a life of violence, death, poverty and hopelessness from their  homes in Central America.  Stephen Colbert did a segment on The Colbert Report recently that calls out the hypocrisy of our politicians and, I am afraid, our country.  You should watch it.

The Colbert Report
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It seems like most politicians from both parties are looking for ways to speed the deportation of these children.  Many of these children have grounds for asylum even under our rather antiquated laws.  Both legally and morally they deserve a real opportunity to receive asylum.  A recent article in The New York Times entitled "Rush to Deport Young Migrants Could Trample Asylum Claims" (here) makes this crisis more personal and real.  I hope you will read it, and then demand that President Obama not send these children back to poverty, violence and death.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

[C] Children

Dear Friends,

Charles Blow's column in The New York Times on Saturday (here) entitled "The Decade of Lost Children" was really depressing.  I knew that we, as a country, were letting our children down, but I had no idea we were doing the terrible and immoral job that we are doing.  Mr. Blow references a report by the Children's Defense Fund (here) and cites some of their findings:

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.
• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.
• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.
• A majority of children in all racial groups and 79 percent or more of black and Hispanic children in public schools cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grades.
• The annual cost of center-based child care for a 4-year-old is more than the annual in-state tuition at a public four-year college in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

Here are some more terrifying facts from the report.

How America Ranks Among Industrialized Countries in
Investing in and Protecting Children
1st in gross domestic product
1st in number of billionaires
1st in number of persons incarcerated
1st in health expenditures
1st in student expenditures
1st in military technology
1st in defense expenditures
1st in military weapons exports
17th in reading scores
22nd in low birthweight rates
23rd in science scores
30th in infant mortality rates
31st in math scores
31st in the gap between the rich and the poor
Last in relative child poverty
Last in adolescent birth rates (ages 15 to 19)
Last in protecting our children against gun violence
The United States and Somalia (which has no legally constituted government) are the only two United Nations members that have failed to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

How can the richest nation in the world treat its children so poorly?

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal