Politics OMG Carly with huge 100% gain in polls

I'm hoping for a TRUMP / RUBIO ticket

 

So, Walker bites the dust. Who's next?

 

It's gotta be the bottom feeders

 

But the failed no-release US immigration policy is not prepared to handle them
April 21, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Mary Turck @maryturck
The kids are back. And once again, the U.S. immigration system is not prepared to handle them. Every spring, along with birds and butterflies, children and families desperate to escape violence in Central America and Mexico head north in increasing numbers. The U.S. response: more prison beds, more Border Patrol agents and speedy deportation proceedings. These responses violate the human rights of refugees, protected by both U.S. and international law.

The numbers of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border peak from March to June. The Border Patrol apprehended 3,138 unaccompanied minors in March, slightly fewer than in the same month in 2013 and 2014. The number of Central American migrants is expected to climb steadily through June, though not as high as last year’s record. And without record-breaking numbers, their plight is unlikely to make global headlines. This year, the cries of the children will not even reach our ears. We now have Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and a whole cavalcade of presidential aspirants to listen to.

The overwhelming majority of the child migrants and refugees come from Central America. They flee from Honduras, the murder capital of the world, from Guatemala’s organized corruption and violence, from the deadly gangs of El Salvador and from the drug-cartel-imposed terror in Mexico. Surviving rape and robbery, deadly deserts and La Bestia (the Beast) freight trains, the refugees arrive at the presumed safety of the United States. Unlike the migrating birds and butterflies, they find no welcome here.

Some will be immediately deported, without regard to their legitimate fear of return and likely refugee status. Many women and children will be imprisoned, joining thousands of last year’s refugees still languishing in so-called family detention centers. According to The Houston Chronicle, there is now “more space for families at detention facilities in Dilley and Karnes [in Texas] and up to 7,300 beds in facilities across the country for unaccompanied minors.”

The no-release detention policy of locking up women and children who have crossed the border was implemented last year to deter other refugees from following their path. McClatchy News calls this a “once almost abandoned, and highly controversial, practice.” The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the federal government, saying it is illegal to imprison immigrants “not because they individually pose a danger to the community or flight risk that requires their detention, but in order to deter other Central American migrants from coming to the United States.”

“A central element of international protection is the right not to be forcibly returned or expelled to a situation which would threaten one’s life or freedom,” according to the United Nations fact sheet on the principle of nonrefoulement. Moreover, all migrants, regardless of refugee status, are entitled to “minimum human rights and minimum standards of treatment.” The conditions in for-profit prisons where Central American migrants are detained fall far short of those standards.

Earlier this month, women at the Karnes family detention center protested the lack of food and medical care there. After five days, they ended their hunger and work strike when some were placed in isolation and others were threatened with immediate deportation or loss of custody of their children. After initially denying that any strike took place, the Department of Homeland Security is now investigating.

Imprisoning immigrants who seek refuge in the United States is not only inhumane and illegal, but it is also not reducing immigrant arrivalsas intended.
The detainees resumed their hunger strike on April 15. “ICE fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference, and all detainees, including those in family residential facilities such as Karnes,” theICE said in a statement last week. But the GEO Group, a private for-profit company that runs the prison, considers protests prohibited actions, and staffers termed the strike an “insurrection.”

Many of the mothers at the facility, a 600-bed immigration prison, have passed their credible-fear interviews, the first step in the asylum process. They remain at the detention center because they have not been granted bond or because they lack the thousands of dollars needed to post a bond.

The Geo Group has about 78,000 prison beds in 98 facilities in the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Australia. In its 2012 annual report, the company (formerly known as Wackenhut) listed 13 facilities in Texas. Only the Corrections Corp. of America, with about 85,000 U.S. prison beds, is larger.

The market is good. The Cheat Sheet, an online media company that says it provides news for the “affluent and influential millennial business professional,” cheerfully advises investors, “Over the past several years, one of the best investments has been in shares of prison owners and operators.” Investor profits come at a high price in prisoner suffering. Across the private immigration prison system, complaint after complaint alleges sexual abuse,lack of medical treatment, arbitrary punishments and solitary confinement, unsanitary facilities, inedible and insufficient food and even undrinkable water. Immigrants have no right to lawyers, and few lawyers are available to represent them. When volunteer lawyers arrive, prison restrictions make representation difficult.

In February the feds moved inmates from the Willacy Detention Center in Texas to another for-profit prison after male immigrant prisoners at the facility staged protests, citing filth and lack of medical care. Willacy has since been shut down — the second time in five years that the for-profit prison was closed because of its failure to provide adequate care to inmates.

Activists are planning a large demonstration at the gigantic immigration internment center in Dilley on May 2 to demand the prison’s closure and an end to mass incarceration of immigrants. The Dilley detention center is planned to eventually house 2,400 immigrants.

The list of for-profit prisons continues to grow — Karnes, Willacy, Dilley, Artesia, Adelantado, etc. Some hold families; others house men awaiting deportation. The immigration machine grinds on, chewing up and spitting out lives.

While Central American families flee in large numbers, the overall number of undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. is the smallest in 40 years. Illegal entry is less than one-third its level in 2000, according to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. And the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has dropped by more than a million since 2006.

Imprisoning immigrants who seek refuge here is not humane and not legal, and it is not reducing immigrant arrivals as intended. Instead of filling immigrant detention centers and the pockets of for-profit prison contractors, the U.S. government should strive to meet its domestic and international obligations. The law gives a high priority to releasing refugees and asylum seekers into the community while their cases are pending. And, when possible, unaccompanied minors need to be quickly placed with adult relatives. Asylum decisions are a matter of life or death.

Yet as the migrants return this spring, the White House’s blanket no-release policy will deny vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees the right to a meaningful hearing with representation by an attorney.

Mary Turck is an adjunct faculty member at Macalester College and a former editor of The Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Now mags, post a sympathetic photo of a dead Syrian baby fleeing war and bitch more about hispanic refugees seeking freedom from oppressive regimes

 

I think this statement by a Democratic Governor will be all I need.

 

Carly Fiorina's HP Legacy
For someone who is running around the country these days portraying herself as a victim, Carly Fiorina is actually one very lucky lady.

Thanks to the boardroom scandal at her old company, Hewlett-Packard, there is a renewed interest in her controversial tenure as CEO/chairwoman of that company -- enough interest to land her interview segments on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," on this morning's "Good Morning America" and a second print run on her new book, "Tough Choices."

Better yet, because the recent HP scandal centers on Patricia Dunn, the woman who replaced her as chairwoman, and involves many of the same players, Fiorina is now free to utter dark implications that her own case really involved secret conspiracies and sexism -- and actually have a few suckers out there believe her.

What Patricia Dunn did was idiotic and illegal, and she was obviously in over her head as chairwoman of the board. But, by all indications, she let her obsession with protecting HP and her duties to corporate governance take her over the line into breaking the law. Everything she did was for the company, not her own self-aggrandizement.

No one can ever say that last line about Carly Fiorina, the very embodiment of the dot-com boom corporate superstar. One is hard-pressed to think of anything she did during her time at either Lucent or HP that wasn't designed to burnish her own image -- at the sacrifice of anyone who got in her way. Indeed, that's exactly what she's doing now with her self-exculpatory book: blaming the victims -- that is, everyone but herself -- for her failings as a manager.

There is one more way that Fiorina is lucky. Just as she managed to skip out of Lucent right before the Feds arrived, so too has she been out of HP just long enough for the media not to draw too many connections between the scandal and the pestilential culture she created at the company. Only a few reporters have noted that the leaks began during the last days of Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, when her policies and personality had turned the board into an armed camp, etched with paranoia and divided against itself.

It was from this poisonous stew that the scandal emerged -- a passive-aggressive Dunn, faced with what appeared to be a mutinous board, instead of confronting the directors head-on, instead decided to become Inspector Javert behind the scenes. That this little fiasco took a year to play out guaranteed that Fiorina would be far enough from the blast zone to point at the smoking crater and be able to claim, not that she helped set the process in motion but that she was the first victim of this evil cabal.

For all her attempts to rewrite history, there are certain facts that Fiorina cannot escape. The first is that in the only plebiscite on her leadership -- the proxy vote over the acquisition of Compaq Computer -- HP employees, men and women, repudiated her. Fiorina may claim now that HP's current strong business is the product of her strategy -- a dubious claim in itself -- but the fact is that the first requirement of corporate leadership is to get the employees to follow. At that, she failed miserably.

She's gone public with her opinion that she took a stodgy old company and moved it forward, turning it into a leading-edge business. But look at her tenure. She took a company that was one of the most innovative of all time, one that empowers its employees, and turned it into a top-down company that was trying to profit off the PC market -- an aging business that was past its twilight. Where's the cutting edge in that?

Another fact is that the real reason Fiorina lost her job at HP was because, even as the rest of the tech industry was recovering from the dot-com bust, HP's stock remained flat -- at least until current CEO Mark Hurd came along to tear down Fiorina's infrastructure and restore company morale. In other words, Fiorina's leadership was also repudiated by both the analysts of Wall Street and thousands of average shareholders with no personal interest beyond a return on their investment.

Finally, if Fiorina was fired by a conspiracy of her board of directors, as she claims, it was a conspiracy led by her own mentor at the company, Dick Hackborn, who had convinced HP to hire her and had formerly been her greatest champion. In the end, even he turned on her.

In other words, her employees, her shareholders, industry analysts and her own board of directors repudiated Carly Fiorina's leadership of Hewlett-Packard. There is a clinical term for people who believe in such elaborate conspiracies against their own person. Meanwhile, the truth is that, for all of her post facto justifications, Carly Fiorina was a failure at Hewlett-Packard.

And there is one final fact: Corporate executives aren't fools. There are any number of corporations out there looking for a top-notch new CEO or chairman. Where are the job offers for the once "most powerful woman in American business?" Meanwhile, Fiorina has spent the last year writing her literary self-justification and touring the distant world, raking in big fees giving speeches to credulous businesspeople who only know her name, not her reputation.

Trust me, that reputation endures in Silicon Valley, where she now enjoys the title (not easy to get) of the worst CEO in Valley history. And for real Carly-hatred, you need only visit a local HP division and ask any survivor of her time with the company. Ask them what they thought of Carly Fiorina, and then you'll have your answer.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

ABCNews.com's "Silicon Insider" columnist, Michael S. Malone, worked at Hewlett-Packard from 1975-1979. His book, "Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company," will be published in Spring 2007.

 

Poll: Trump Leads, Clinton Under 50
A strong performance in last week’s Republican presidential debate has raised former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s public profile, but not nearly enough to cut into real estate mogul Donald Trump’s lead over the rest of the GOP field.

Trump takes 32 percent of the vote among self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, according to a new Morning Consult tracking poll — far ahead of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s 12 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 11 percent.

Fiorina finishes in fourth position, at 6 percent, just ahead of Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas), who clock in with 5 percent each.

Republican Presidential Primary ContestTru…BushCar…Ru…Hu…Wa…CruzPaulChr…1/27/27/20158/3/20158/9/20158/16/20158/30/20159/7/20159/13/20159/20/2015010203040
Carson, Bush and Fiorina are all bunched together in the race for second place. Thirteen percent of voters say they would pick Carson as their backup choice, compared with 11 percent for Bush and 10 percent for Fiorina.

Republican voters are still deeply intrigued by the outsider candidates in the field, all of whom poll higher than more established, veteran politicians. More than 60 percent of Republicans say they have a favorable impression of Carson (62 percent) and Trump (61 percent). Fiorina, who was unknown to much of the GOP base before turning in two consecutive rock-solid debate performances, is seen favorably by 51 percent of Republican voters, while 20 percent view her unfavorably.

More than half of Republican primary voters say they see Bush, Rubio and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee favorably.

On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time has fallen below the 50 percent mark. She maintains a strong lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — 49 percent to 28 percent — though her 21-point lead is at its lowest point since Morning Consult began surveying the Democratic field.

Democratic Presidential Primary MatchupCli…Sa…O'Ma…We…Ch…Ot…7/27/20158/3/20158/9/20158/16/20158/30/20159/7/20159/13/20159/20/2015020406080
Clinton maintains a strongly favorable image among self-identified Democratic voters, 76 percent of whom say they see her in a positive light. But Sanders, too, is broadly popular with Democrats: 59 percent see him favorably, versus 13 percent who view him unfavorably.

Clinton has a net-unfavorable rating of 45 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable among registered voters. Among that broader sample, only three candidates have favorable ratings higher than their unfavorable ratings: Sanders, Carson and Fiorina.

But Clinton maintains leads over every possible Republican nominee against whom she was tested. Registered voters favor Clinton by a 45 percent to 39 percent margin over Bush, by a 46 percent to 38 percent margin over Rubio and by a 45 percent to 41 percent margin over Trump.

Just one-third of registered voters say the country is headed in the right direction, while two-thirds say the country is on the wrong track. Forty-two percent say they approve of the job President Obama is doing, a statistically insignificant difference compared with last week. Fifty-five percent disapprove of Obama’s job performance.

The Morning Consult survey polled 4,033 registered voters for an overall margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. A subsample of 1,551 self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, while a subsample of 1,761 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

 

Apparently the millions of dollars spent and cooperation of all mainstream media for Carly Fiorina netted them a 1% gain on national poll average, while Trump spends hardly nothing and gains 4% of votes and +9 more lead over 2nd place.

Trump haters must be steaming right now!