Open Thread - Friday, June, 26, 2015

Hello, I am off to one of my favorite places and will not be around to make smart ass comments. My Sweetie and I spent our first forty odd years around Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a wonderful mid-western city that far exceeds it's reputation. It was at the core of industrialization, then shed it's smoke stacks and revitalized as a university, medical and engineering center. Wish you were here.

The city is now a green building center.

Pittsburgh is the city of bridges. The bridges are fascinating.

I miss Saturday mornings in The Strip District.

Have a great weekend.

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hecate's picture

Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex. And to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when a marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state.

Things change. Eleven years ago Karl Rove used "make gay marriage forever go away" ballot initiatives in 11 states to whip to the polls retro-voters a-skeered of gay people, voters who meanwhile pulled the lever assuring the continuance of the reign of George II. Today, all those people are over.

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Hundreds of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent are crossing into Haiti each day from the Dominican Republic, fearing possible deportation, and Haiti's prime minister said the influx was causing a humanitarian crisis.

The surge in border crossings follows implementation last week of a new Dominican immigration law which requires undocumented individuals to register for residency under a "regularisation" programme.

Those unable to register and who do not have identity documents can be deported, Dominican officials have said.

While the Dominican government says there will be no mass deportations, undocumented migrants are taking no chances.

Haitian Prime Minister Evans Paul said Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, was struggling to cope with the influx.

"With the deportation of migrants from the Dominican Republic, we are in a climate of a humanitarian crisis," he wrote on his Twitter account on Thursday.

In the past week, around 12,000 Haitian migrants have streamed across the border into Haiti in packed buses and on foot, carrying bags of belongings on their heads and pushing wheelbarrows stacked with furniture and mattresses.

But changes to nationality laws and a 2013 constitutional court ruling have stripped children of Haitian migrants born in the Dominican Republic of their Dominican nationality, rights groups say.

This means they have no identity documents and are stateless.

"With a stateless population in the Dominican Republic estimated at more than 200,000 people, the consequences of expulsion could be devastating," Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters in Geneva earlier this month.

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The last round of documents that filtered through Wikileaks, concerning the NSA's spying on French presidents, might have been one step too far.
Just one day after France summoned the U.S. Ambassador to explain this latest act of disrespect, France's Justice Minister floated an idea.

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira thinks National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange might be allowed to settle in France.
If France decides to offer them asylum, she would “absolutely not be surprised,” she told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday (translated from the French). She said it would be a “symbolic gesture.”
Her comments echoed those in an editorial in France’s leftist newspaper Libération Thursday morning, which said giving Snowden asylum would be a “single gesture” that would send “a clear and useful message to Washington,” in response to the “contempt” the U.S. showed by spying on France’s president.

The decision isn't up to Taubira. It would require a decision by the President and PM.

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shaharazade's picture

another big disappointment to me and I suppose many people, given that he was billed as a 'socialist' supposedly lefty and seems to be just another poodle pol. Better then Sarkozy? I doubt he or PM Valls will decide to give asylum to Assange or Snowden as that might irritate the US and the global powers that be that are 'rule the world'.

I am a great admirer of Stefan Hessel who wrote Outrage Now in 2010 a 35 page booklet that inspired OWS and the global outrage that blossomed globally in 2010. He endorsed and pumped Hollende as he at 92 believed Hollende was an actual 'socialist'. I bet he's spinning like a top in regards to Hollende's agenda. As is Elenore Roosevelt who Hillary channels (lol). Apparently Elenore tells her to grow a rhinoceros skin and walk like Maggie Thatcher. I guess I'm just to cynical at this point to believe any of this transnational bantering between the leaders of the free world. They all suck in varying meaningless degrees of suckatude. Kind of like the Democratic party vs.Republican party.

They might get in spats with each other about spying, encroachment on territories, economic screws or deviations on oligarchical collectivism, international spooks cyber war insanity, but when push comes to shove they all work and implement the same IMF, World Bank, Davos direction home. Screw humans screw the planet and keep the funny money rolling. Hollende is part of this world as we find it and not about to allow enemy's of the oligarchical collectivists sanctuary.

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