Southern cracker view of Hawaii

SUBHEAD: Jeff Sessions dismisses Hawaii as ‘an Island in the Pacific’ that shouldn't be able to question Trump.

By Charles Savage on 20 April 2017 for the New York Times  -
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/us/politics/jeff-sessions-judge-hawaii-pacific-island.html)


Image above: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the racist US Attorney General doubts Hawaii federal judge's authority. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: Anytime the Untied States wants to cut Hawaii off and reaffirm separation and the sovereignty stolen over a century ago it's okay with me. Hey Jeff, we'll gladly accept just being an island in Pacific if you'll just leave us alone.]
 
Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke dismissively about the State of Hawaii while criticizing a Federal District Court ruling last month that blocked the Trump administration from carrying out its ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world.

“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Mr. Sessions said this week in an interview on “The Mark Levin Show,” a conservative talk radio program.

Mr. Sessions’s description of Hawaii, where the federal judge who issued the order, Derrick K. Watson, has his chambers, drew a rebuke from both of the United States senators who represent the state. Annexed as a territory of the United States in the late 19th century, Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959.

“Hawaii was built on the strength of diversity & immigrant experiences — including my own,” Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, wrote on Twitter. “Jeff Sessions’ comments are ignorant & dangerous.”

The other senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, who is also a Democrat, expressed similar sentiments, writing on Twitter: “Mr. Attorney General: You voted for that judge. And that island is called Oahu. It’s my home. Have some respect.”

Asked for a response from Mr. Sessions, Ian Prior, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said in an email: “Hawaii is, in fact, an island in the Pacific — a beautiful one where the attorney general’s granddaughter was born. 

The point, however, is that there is a problem when a flawed opinion by a single judge can block the president’s lawful exercise of authority to keep the entire country safe.”

(The State of Hawaii is a chain of islands, one of which is also called Hawaii; the judge’s chambers, however, are in Honolulu, which is on the island of Oahu.)

Judge Watson, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, was confirmed in 2013 by a 94-to-0 vote; Mr. Sessions, then a United States senator from Alabama, was among those who cast an approving vote. 

A former federal prosecutor, Judge Watson earned his law degree from Harvard alongside Mr. Obama and Neil M. Gorsuch, the newly seated Supreme Court justice. He is the only judge of native Hawaiian descent on the federal bench.

Last month, Judge Watson issued a nationwide injunction blocking President Trump’s travel ban, ruling that the plaintiffs — the State of Hawaii and Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii — had reasonable grounds to challenge the order as religious discrimination. 

He cited comments dating to Mr. Trump’s original call, during the 2016 campaign, for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

During the arguments, the government had contended that looking beyond the text of the order to infer religious animus would amount to investigating Mr. Trump’s “veiled psyche,” but Judge Watson wrote in his decision that there was “nothing ‘veiled’” about Mr. Trump’s public remarks. 

Still, Mr. Sessions reiterated that line of argument in the radio interview, saying he believed that the judge’s reasoning was improper and would be overturned.

“The judges don’t get to psychoanalyze the president to see if the order he issues is lawful,” Mr. Sessions said. “It’s either lawful or it’s not.”

.

Miles to Go Before We Sleep

SUBHEAD: I have spent half my life trying to stop or slow down that which now comes onrushing like a wave so tall that it blots out the sun.

By William Pitt on 24 November 2016 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38515-miles-to-go-before-we-sleep)


Image above: A father and child in a frightening landscape. Viggo Mortensen stars in the 2009 postapocalyptic thriller based on Cormac McCarthy's Pultzer Prize-winning novel "The Road". From (http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/08/survival/the-road-movie-text).

I took my daughter for a long walk under the low November sun, and it turned into an adventure. We are hedged by deep forest to all points on the compass here in the great granite north, home to deer runs that spider-web the fallen pine needles, ghostly moose like towering mystics in the far field, a family of porcupines, one cat-eating coyote and the occasional ominous bear. Serious stuff.

Before our walk, my daughter was content to contend with the lawn that greens the verge of the dark and deep, but Daddy was with her this day, and that meant pressing the edge.

Over the ancient stone wall we went, into the thicket of pines where she learned to snap off the dead branches lest they claw at her eyes, then deeper, over the moss and the deadfalls laid down by a windstorm and further, into the places where the sun only hints at a kiss, her plowing forward and me always aware of the surround, where true north is, the way back to the house.

She found her favorite place in that secret space: Bifurcated trees. Trees with two, three, four, five full trunks growing up and out of one base like a splayed hand, like a crown. She would find one and crawl into the base, the hollow where all the fingers reached up and out toward the sky.

She stood there timeless, three feet of eternity conducting the energy passing through her, speechless, rigid in bliss. She was in the palm of a living thing, and if she didn't know it, the tree did. I felt it, too. I watched a tree sing to my daughter as she stood in its elder grasp, and she heard it full well.

I am thankful for that.

Thankfulness is a hard dollar to make these days. He Who Shall Not Be Named Here Today hasn't yet taken the oath of office, and already the deep stain of his impending presidency marks us all. It is difficult to locate gratitude in this vortex of shame, confusion, hate and greed, but this is an orderly transition of power, right?

He won, everyone else lost, and never mind the shenanigans from overseas and right down the block. We are in the pipe now, five by five, charging into a future that reeks of the past.

Native Americans are being attacked with "non-lethal" concussion grenades and rubber bullets for protecting their water rights out in North Dakota, all in the lead-up to Thanksgiving -- a holiday which, after all, is about celebrating the United States' "heritage."

A new creature now walks the land, most clearly visible on televisions tuned to "news" networks. No zoologist has labeled it yet, so I just call it the "Yeahbut."

Every time a fascist, a racist or an all-out Nazi is tapped for a Cabinet position in the looming administration, all the apple-polishers on the screen say, "Yeah, but how bad can they really be?" or "Yeah, but that was a long time ago" or "Yeah, but those people don't vote anyway," and we are all a little worse for the wear in the stench of the Yeahbut's passage.

Forgiveness is divine, it is said, but watching the TV people exonerate themselves for the ruin they gleefully foisted upon us in the name of ratings and advertising dollars makes me glad, for their sake, that I am a peaceful man.

I am so tired. I have spent half my life trying to stop or slow down that which now comes onrushing like a wave so tall that it blots out the sun.

Yet I remember my daughter standing in that tree, in her simple glory, and all of it shimmers into shards of purpose, and I am thankful to know I have a few good fights left in me. I am thankful for my good right arm and what I will do within its reach.

I will not be still. I will not be silent. I will volunteer at a food bank to help those who will feel the grind of these coming years most keenly. I will volunteer to be an escort at a women's clinic because my daughter has rights.

I will make it known that my home is a sanctuary for anyone who fears being unjustly thrown out of the country. If they try to run Kobach's registry of Muslims, I will be first in line to sign my name. I will do that, and more.

Through it all, some of me will ever be in the forest with my daughter. I am in a horde of leaves amid the hushed susurrations of wind through evergreens with a little girl who knows nothing of sorrow yet as she stands in a throne of wise bark. I feel the low jolt passing from trunk to her hand to trunk, and I know why I am here.

When next we pass over the ancient stone wall into that sacred shrouded space, I will whisper to her the lines from her favorite bedtime poem:

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep."

And I will mean it. I am thankful for this small patch upon which I make my stand. This far, no farther, and not one step back. Happy Thanksgiving.

• William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

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Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

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