It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer  of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of  course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.

 

Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really  overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor  got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from  the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday.  It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama,  never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since  both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio  by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

 

As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything  Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.

 

In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now  look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.

 

Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:

 

1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.

2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.

3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.

 

The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:

 

1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..

2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.

3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.

4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).

5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.

6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.

7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.

 

Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,

 

Editor, The Amazing Democrats. 

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“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard. 

by Janell Ross 

 Illegal immigration is one of those topics on which almost everyone has an opinion — maybe several opinions. But when it comes to the facts, the number of people with a grasp on them is a lot smaller.

Donald Trump, a contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said last month that illegal immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border are in large part “rapist and “murderers.” And in San Francisco, the shooting dead of Kathryn Steinle, 31, allegedly caused by man who has been deported multiple times and convicted of a series of very serious crimes, has set off a new wave of concern about immigration and so-called “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco.

It’s a lot. That’s why there is Part II. But we’ve tried to boil it down to the essentials for your next immigration-related debate.

If a person is in the United States illegally, why isn’t he or she arrested and shipped back to his or her home country immediately? 

This is one of those places where the country’s commitment to freedom and liberty get a real road test.

As mentioned above, immigration is often complicated. At least some portion of the people who do enter the country illegally or overstay the terms of their visitor or student visas also have legitimate asylum claims. Asylum is limited to individuals who can provide evidence that they have faced persecution or might be killed if they return to their home country. And U.S. law says that most people caught inside the United States should be given a chance to make those claims in an immigration court. (For more information on asylum seekers.  

Now, layer on top of that more than 445,000 people awaiting immigration hearings. Most of these people cannot make a successful asylum claim but might have some other legal defense such as proof of a U.S. citizen parent or grandparent.

Unauthorized immigrants caught inside the United States — or in some cases at the border — generally get a hearing in one of the nation’s deeply backlogged immigration courts. Wait times now stretch into 2019.

That means that federal immigration authorities also have to make decisions about whom to hold during that wait and whom to release and trust to show up again.

How many people does the United States deport each year?

The data reporting here lags a bit behind and, of course, varies from year to year. But on average, between 2011 and 2013, immigration courts ordered about 414,650 people out in one way or another. Here’s the picture painted in the Department of Homeland Security’s most recent annual immigration data report, for 2013.

What is a “sanctuary city,” anyway?

The policies and practices differ in the estimated 60 sanctuary cities around the country. That list includes major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston. But generally, when someone has been, for instance, arrested for driving without a license and then identified as an illegal immigrant at a jail in a sanctuary city, they must serve jail time for state charges or pay related fines. Then, they are let go.

Most of these cities have identified some set of guidelines or conditions under which federal immigration officials must be alerted before the person’s release. Usually they are connected to what’s on the person’s rap sheet.

But some either don’t have them or don’t follow them. For a deeper look at the role that San Francisco’s sanctuary-city status has played in the immigration debate since the Steinle shooting.

Once an undocumented immigrant has been arrested for committing a crime inside the United States, why do sanctuary cities let them go? 

During the apex of the country’s illegal immigration challenges, before the recession, law enforcement officials in some communities expressed concern about the practice of releasing these inmates after they had served time for state offenses. Some of those communities entered agreements to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement. This went on between 2004 and 2012.

These agreements allowed local jails to house undocumented immigrants after they had served time on state charges and bill the federal government for this service. Sometimes inmates were passed along to jails in other places without any formal notice to family members, then into the immigration court system for an expedited removal hearing. In many cases, people were returned to their home countries in weeks.

That program was widely criticized as a possible revenue stream for some local jails  and a potential violation of international human rights accords. Some people were unable to communicate with embassy officials from their countries of origin or notify family members of their arrests, basically disappearing without explanation. Civil liberties groups called it a vehicle for racial and ethnic profiling.  

One Tennessee sheriff described it as part of his toolkit to “stack these violators like cordwood” In addition, more than one analysis of who was deported and what happened during that process showed that most were people initially arrested for minor traffic violations and who had no criminal record.  

President Obama touted the fact that his administration had deported the largest number of people in U.S. history. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates said all of this deeply damaged already-limited police trust in immigrant communities, making people afraid to call police or provide information. That, these advocates argued, was the real threat to public safety.

This is where sanctuary cities come in.

What happens in other cities?

After a series of changes, new programs and memos from the top that were supposed to assure that more of the nation’s deportation apparatus got aimed at serious and violent criminals, the Department of Homeland Security is now asking communities to participate in a different program, this time called Priority Enforcement.

Priority Enforcement won’t formally begin until later this summer, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. When it does, it will ask local law enforcement agencies to notify federal immigration authorities before the scheduled release of an immigrant targeted for deportation. Those targeted for deportation include people with violent and serious crime convictions. And federal officials told The Post that they did make just such a request to the folks in San Francisco.

Finally, is there any evidence that those who enter the country illegally commit more crime than others?

The Fix looked at this issue this week and found an answer that shouldn’t really be surprising.

Like every population, there are some people who have immigrated to the United States illegally who go on to commit serious and misdemeanor crimes in this country. But immigrants of all kinds are actually less likely to commit crimes than those born inside the United States.

It’s important to note that more than one-quarter of all immigrants currently in the United States are undocumented. So a spike in their crime rate would likely mean the “first generation” line wouldn’t be so low.

1. We hope that helps.

by Janell Ross 

Illegal immigration is one of those topics on which almost everyone has an opinion — maybe several. But when it comes to the facts, the number of people with a grasp on them is a lot smaller.

It’s no wonder. The United States has one of the most active and complicated immigration systems in the world. For instance, a different number of visas — needed to come to the United States — are issued each year in various countries. And the wait times for those visas varies greatly.

There are at least 4.4 million people waiting. Those figures include 1.3 million in Mexico alone. That system is also paired with a visa lottery and a series of special visa programs reserved for artists, models, scientists, international business executives and other people with special and needed skills. Then there are the millions of undocumented immigrants already living inside the United States.

It’s a lot.  But we’ve tried to boil it down to the essentials for your next immigration-related debate.

How many immigrants live in the United States illegally and where do they come from?

The Pew Research Center put this number at 11.2 million people in 2012, down from a high of 12.2 million in 2007.

Most — 5.8 million people — hail from our nearest neighbor to the south, Mexico. Another 1.7 million come from various countries in Central America. About 1.4 million people come from an Asian country. South America is responsible for about 700,000 people. Europe and Canada contributed 600,000. And Africa and the Middle East, 400,000. In addition to this, about 550,000 arrived from the Caribbean.

Is illegal immigration an increasing problem?

Well, a look at the chart above pretty clearly says the answer, at least for the last few years, is no. But there are also other bits of federal data  that suggest a more complicated answer.

There was an unquestionable surge in the number of unaccompanied minors and women with children who last year entered the United States and, in many cases, turned themselves in to border authorities. And the Coast Guard also reported an increase in the number of Cubans trying to enter the United States to take advantage of what they fear will be the last days of their special immigration options.  

Still, illegal immigration is not a mushrooming problem. But it is a real one. Federal agents apprehended nearly 50,000 people trying to enter the United States without permission last year.

What’s causing the declining illegal immigration rate?

This is one of those situations in which lots of hands want to take some credit.

Federal agencies have invested heavily in border patrol activities. Border patrol is even using drones to monitor the area. (The nation’s auditor issued a report late last year on civil liberties issues in the border region due to drone use, in case that’s a concern for you.) And border state leaders such as former Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican seeking the 2016 Presidential nomination; have touted their state’s contributions to enhance border patrols. Perry said that federal officials are unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the situation on the ground.

Immigration dipped during the recession when few jobs were available in the United States. But many of the unaccompanied minors and families that streamed into the United States in 2014 did so to reunite with family members already here or to escape some combination of terrible gang violence and economic instability at home.

So geopolitical forces — including some U.S. policies — are all in play.