Survivor of America's WWII internment camps George Takei.
Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:
1) The internment (not a "sequester") was not of Japanese "foreign nationals," but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.
2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected “enemies” then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the U.S. already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.
3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.
Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you, too, will come away with more compassion and understanding.
TWEET OF THE DAY
Blast from the Past
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—As Obama, Reid, and Pelosi meet on tax cut plan, GOP attacks with a whimper:
Here's how John Boehner's spokesman is responding to the Democratic plan to vote on extending middle-income tax cuts:
Michael Steel, a spokesman for John Boehner, emails a response to the news that House Dems are planning to hold a vote just on extending the middle class tax cuts: "The last thing our economy needs right now is a massive tax hike on families and small businesses -- and that's what this plan would mean."
So their big comeback is that cutting taxes on every American is actually a massive tax hike. I certainly wouldn't have expected them to say anything less, but really, this is pretty much a ho-hum response. It doesn't necessarily prove that Republicans are about to blink, but it also isn't a line in the sand sort of response -- Steel didn't say there's no way in hell Republicans would vote for middle-class tax cuts unless upper-income cuts were passed as well.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Great American Refugee Freak-out: to mock or not to mock? Koch bros. launch their own intel ops. Senate Gop in disarray: Obamacare repeal vs. Planned Parenthood defunding vs. blocking Syrian refugees! David Waldman, Greg Dworkin, Armando & Joan McCarter discuss it all.
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