Margaret Thatcher made this comment in the 1980s, before the Internet made it possible for most people to figure out that:

• The countries that make universal healthcare and free education available to their citizens are the happiest nations and Earth, and
• The United States offers its people a great number of free services: roads, bridges, tunnels, firefighting, national defense, embassies, air traffic control, food safety, libraries, public schools, FEMA, criminal justice and corrections, law enforcement, OSHA, auto safety, disease control, the upkeep of our local, state, and national parks and beaches, animal control, space exploration, and dozens of other items.

Bashing Socialism

I know not everyone agrees with me (e.g., my wife) but I will be surprised if Trump completes his term in office.

Congresspeople want to be re-elected, and for most of them, this is the only thing motivating their actions.  How many of them want to be thought of as someone who supported a criminal president who brought this country to its knees?

It Seems Trump Is on His Way Out

There are two types of people.  OK, there may be many different types of people, but there are at least two.

First are those of us who stand for the idea: live and let live. We don’t deliberately step on ants, and we support the rights of the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere to enter the United States to escape starvation and the threat of death by the Mexican drug cartels to pick our crops and live here, for months at a time, to live in the U.S.

Until Donald Trump rose to the U.S. presidency and gave us all permission to be our worst selves, virtually all of us felt this way. Were migrants a problem before about 10 years ago?

The other type is those like Christian Castro, who takes (took, past tense) great delight in tormenting the most world’s poorest and most desperate.

The story here from the New York Times:

Law enforcement officials on Friday arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant this year and lying about it.

The agent, Christian J. Castro, 52, was caught in Texas after investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tracked him down, according to the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which had charged him this month with four counts of second-degree assault. He faces an additional charge of filing a false police report.

The shooting, on Jan. 14, set off violent protests at the height of the Trump administration’s immigration operation in Minnesota this past winter.

“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr. Castro,” Mary Moriarty, the attorney in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, said in a statement.

Recognizing the Worst Among Us