By some sad twist of fate, Ted Cruz, a man whose face is regularly broadcast to millions of television viewers, does not possess a face that is pleasing to the eye. What’s worse, he’d now like to openly display that face to the public for hours on end: the Senator from Texas has promised a filibuster.
On Sunday, Cruz went on ABC’s This Week to discuss the passing of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and the ramifications for the political landscape. When asked what he’d do if President Barack Obama were to nominate a new justice, the Republican presidential candidate said he would “absolutely” to prevent the Senate from voting, regardless of who the nomination was.
“Absolutely, this should be a decision for the people,” he said, calling for a referendum on the court instead, despite no precedent for such a measure whatsoever.
Lest we forget, Cruz has filibustered before, and it was an excruciating nightmare that included a painful reading of “Green Eggs and Ham,” and a loving explanation of the show “Duck Dynasty.”
The past 24 hours have turned out to be an emotional seesaw for Kanye West. Right before heading onto the the Saturday Night Live stage to perform a new single from his latest album The Life of Pablo—released early Sunday morning, after his seventh appearance on the show—Kanye proclaimed to his 18.7 million fans via Twitter that he is $53 million in “personal debt” without naming the cause of his alleged monetary woes.
“I write this to you my brothers while still 53 million dollars in personal debt,” Yeezus tweeted to his fans right before heading out to debut “Ultralight Beam,” his album opener.
The tweet came after a mini-rant about the namesake behind his new his album The Life of Pablo, which the rapper dropped after his SNL performance, clarifying that the Pablo in question isn’t the one that Netflix fashioned a cocaine-fueled TV drama after (Escobar) or the one that really liked painting cubes and sad guys with guitars (Picasso), but after Paul the Apostle, calling him “the most powerful messenger of the first century.”
While Yee didn’t follow up with a reason for his debt, the culprit might be his ventures in fashion—he previously admitted that his Yeezy clothing line had scored him a $16 million loss, and as Consequence of Sound noted, his women’s clothing line put him $30 million back in 2014.
Either way, we can all look forward to an incoming batch of “all memes are wrong” memes. So meta. [TMZ]
In other Pablo-related news, pharma bro Martin Shkreli is giving everyone an excellent dose of schadenfreude with an online meltdown that can only be described as a #Trumpertantrum 2.0. The reviled Wu-Tang Clan album owner freaked out on the interwebz after claiming to lose out on a bid for The Life of Pablo—and $15 million in the process—by a guy named Daquan (or, as Shkreli called him, “Kanye’s boy”) after attempting to get his hands on the album before everyone else.
The multimillionaire subsequently and succinctly captured the essence of his freak out:
After posting a video wherein the entrepreneur switched out his patented Supreme Court smirk for some exasperated, rubbery-faced looks of despair, Shkreli updated that he would get a full bitcoin refund courtesy of Satoshi Nakamoto—but only after boasting that he could “make his money back faster than anyone.”
He also fumed that he hoped the rest of the Internet denizens would “all enjoy this stupid music SO much,” adding that he has now “quit rap,” leaving all hip-hop albums, unleaked or otherwise, now safe. [Twitter]
Jimmy Kimmel pretended to leak the name of Chrissy Teigen and John Legend’s baby sans spoiler alert. [EOnline]
Body activist Ashley Graham has become Sports Illustrated’s first size-16 model. [People]
Pop star and occasional Ryan Murphy vampire countess Lady Gaga got David Bowie’s face tattooed on her actual body. [TMZ]
Kim Kardashian wants to make single people cry with a “Lonely Hearts” playlist for Valentine’s Day. [JustJared]
Bill Clinton seems to think that he is, inexplicably, a “stand-in for the first black president,” as he so carefully explained this week.
“Unless your ancestors, every one of you, are 100 percent, 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa, we are all mixed-race people,” said the former president at a campaign event in Memphis on Friday, downplaying President Barack Obama’s accomplishments.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has not yet commented on the incident. But a good hunch tells me that as he spoke, somewhere just off stage left, Clinton stood, the steam of a thousand raging hell-fires bursting forth from her ears.
USA Today reports that Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara announced that Scalia’s official cause of death was myocardial infarction, the medical term for a heart attack. He died while on a quail hunting trip at a lodge in Texas. Scalia was 79 at the time of his death, and had served on the Supreme Court since he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
Per Scalia’s family’s request, Scalia’s remains will be flown to back to the East Coast for his funeral services.
In January of last year, former Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari announced she was writing a whole book about “really just everything” in her life. Today marks the second Valentine’s Day she’s celebrated since beginning that journey.
At least one student tweeted about the incident as it happened:
CBS reports that the men were seen near the school’s Student Union building, and that officials had apprehended at least one suspect, Brad Bartelt, 47, saying that he was in fact acting alone. Jonesboro Police Chief Rick Elliott said that Bartelt was carrying a 12-gauge shotgun, gasoline can, and a propane tank.
The university tweeted that the lockdown had been lifted on Sunday afternoon; we will update this post when more information becomes available.
If you tuned into Saturday Night Live’s February 13 show last night, you were probably expecting a Kanye performance or two, and maybe Melissa McCarthy reminding us that her penchant for face contortion is the apex of an actual art form. But the decades-old show might have bested last week’s Bernie Sanders cameo (and definitely topped Larry David’s Irish brogue) with the ultimate trump card (or Clinton card, if you prefer): the enduring power of Beyoncé.
While it’s hard to top the debut of Yeezy’s “Ultralight Beam” performance (i.e., the first track from The Life of Pablo) featuring Chance the Rapper, Kirk Franklin, Kelly Price, The-Dream, and El Debarge (as well as an ensuing rap duel with Kyle Mooney), as well as by Leslie Jones’s genital-centric list of attributes for her perfect man (“good hair, nice skin, smells like an Israeli”), the reaction to Queen Bey’s “Formation” might one of the strongest SNL skits to come out in recent memory, riffing on how pretty much all of white America somehow finally realized that Beyoncé is, indeed, not white.
Cut in the style of a horror movie trailer, the sketch lampooned the reaction to with the release of her #BlackLivesMatter-themed “Formation” music video on February 6, a day which will life in both fabulous and socially-conscious infamy, accurately billing it as “the day that shook the whole white world,” rolling privilege check after privilege check into a ball of delightful, dystopic pandemonium.
One of the best highlights? “Maybe this song isn’t for us,” said a distraught Bobby Moynihan, followed by a terrified Cecily Strong: “BUT USUALLY EVERYTHING IS!”
So yes, white people: Queen Bey, your “girl” Amy, and even Kerry Washington (!) are black and they’re women—even if one of them is on ABC.
Bad news travels fast, but apparently not fast enough for the The Austin American-Statesman.
In what appears to be a striking coincidence, the newspaperpublished a glowing review on Sunday of the Cibolo Creek Ranch, the same ranch at which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died on Saturday. The piece, unfortunately, was titled in print: “At exclusive Big Bend resort, guests enjoy the high life.”
The story’s author, Pam Leblanc, noted the timing on Twitter.
The review, caught by Texas Tribune reporter Aman Batheja, now contains an editor’s note, saying that the piece was published just before Scalia’s death:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away yesterday, leaving behind a controversial—at best—legacy. But the one area where he was shockingly forward-looking was in technology.
Scalia’s opinions were backwards in almost every possible arena. His views on gays, women, minorities, religion, health care, abortion, business, campaign finance, the death penalty, and the environment run counter to progress in all arenas. And when he wasn’t winning, he was offensive about those opinions. Even when he did win, he had a tendency to put people down during oral arguments.
He was also a man of prodigious legal knowledge and was a phenomenal writer. Scalia’s dissents almost always produced a quote that was instantly recognizable as his voice. Often, they were infuriating.
For all the harm he did sitting on the Court for nearly thirty years, Scalia was surprisingly adept at understanding technology. Justice Alito may have once joked, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?” but that same case is the one where Scalia declared that video games get First Amendment free speech protection.
In that case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, Scalia voted to extend the First Amendment to video games, a technology he could never have foreseen when he was growing up. Scalia wrote the majority opinion in that case, setting this as precedent:
Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium. And “the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary” with a new and different communication medium.
Scalia had an ability to recognize when the Constitution continued to apply to new technology. He was very pro-privacy, so long as the invasion was to your home. Scalia wrote the opinion in Florida v. Jardines, a case which declared that a drug-sniffing dog was too advanced a technology to be used on someone’s porch without a warrant. He also authored the decision in Kyllo v. United States, that use of thermal imaging was a search that required a warrant. In that opinion, he was very aware of changing technology’s affect:
It would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the advance of technology. For example, as the cases discussed above make clear, the technology enabling human flight has exposed to public view (and hence, we have said, to official observation) uncovered portions of the house and its curtilage that once were private. The question we confront today is what limits there are upon this power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.
If technology breached the integrity of your house walls, Scalia was not going to let anyone use it without a warrant. We can’t know for sure, but the very narrow decision in Florida v Riley, allowing surveillance from a helicopter, seems very Scalia. Law enforcement didn’t need a warrant because it was in public airspace and the helicopter didn’t interfere with the use of the home. If the regular public couldn’t have gone there, neither could the police. If drone surveillance had ended up at the Supreme Court before his death, you could bet Scalia would have been asking all of these questions.
Where Scalia shines with technology is in a pair of cases: American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. and National Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Services. In each, he seemed to understand technology better than his peers.
Aereo questioned whether a cloud-based antenna and DVR system violated copyright law by “retransmitting” a public performance of network TV in people’s homes. Even though Scalia took some flak for not knowing that you have to pay for HBO during oral arguments, he also wrote a dissent where he argued hard against the majority declaring Aereo basically a “cable company” that needed to pay for its programming:
Aereo does not “perform” at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) that will sow confusion for years to come.
Instead, Scalia said that it was not the service, it was the user:
Unlike video-on-demand services, Aereo does not provide a prearranged assortment of movies and television shows. Rather, it assigns each subscriber an antenna that — like a library card — can be used to obtain whatever broadcasts are freely available. Some of those broadcasts are copyrighted; others are in the public domain. The key point is that subscribers call all the shots: Aereo’s automated system does not relay any program, copyrighted or not, until a subscriber selects the program and tells Aereo to relay it. Aereo’s operation of that system is a volitional act and a but-for cause of the resulting performances, but, as in the case of the copy shop, that degree of involvement is not enough for direct liability.
Brand X was a 2005 case that challenged the idea that cable internet providers were an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” The FCC had made that categorization under pressure from cable companies which really, really didn’t want to be subject to the more stringent rules governing telecoms. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, “telecommunications services” have to give access to their networks to the public. Which ensures competitive prices. The FCC calling internet service providers an “information service” allowed telephone companies to give pricing advantages to their own subsidiaries and require customers of third party ISPs purchase landline services to provide DSL. Cable companies offered no access at all to their data lines.
Scalia was having none of this. In his dissent in Brand X he said:
The first sentence of the FCC ruling under review reads as follows: “Cable modem service provides high-speed access to the Internet, as well as many applications or functions that can be used with that access, over cable system facilities.” Does this mean that cable companies “offer” high-speed access to the Internet? Surprisingly not, if the Commission and the Court are to be believed.
He got even more scathing, in a comparison that should have persuaded everyone of the absurdity going on here:
If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common “usage,” would prevent them from answering: “No, we do not offer delivery—but if you order a pizza from us, we’ll bake it for you and then bring it to your house.” The logical response to this would be something on the order of, “so, you do offer delivery.” But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: “No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually `offering’ you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is `part and parcel’ of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is `integral to its other capabilities.’” Any reasonable customer would conclude at that point that his interlocutor was either crazy or following some too-clever-by-half legal advice.
Which adds up to Scalia being on the side of net neutrality.
None of this is to say that Scalia was always great when deciding cases about technology, but it seems to be the one area where he was surprisingly forward-looking. Which is shocking for a man whose views so often seemed backwards and whose legal arguments were so rooted in the past.
Additional reporting by James Whitlock and Andrew Liptak
Cops rushed to the hotel just south of Central Park after the woman — whose relationship to Spitzer is unclear — phoned 911 and said she was having a breakdown and had slashed her wrists around 8 p.m. Saturday, sources said.
She was taken for medical treatment at Roosevelt Hospital, where she told staffers that Spitzer — who quit as governor over a hooker scandal in 2008 — had choked her, sources said.
In 2013, he ran and lost for City comptroller; now, he runs the successful real estate development firm built up by his late father. The disgraced governor’s first project with the family business is a $700 million, 856-unit rental development in south Williamsburg. It will have two rooftop pools.
According to the Post, the woman who accused Spitzer of choking her has recanted, and is not cooperating with law enforcement.
In Portland on Friday, after the last four Malheur wildlife refuge occupiers made their first court appearance, Nevada Assemblyman John Moore spoke to reporters outside the Federal Courthouse. “In my opinion, Mr. Finicum was murdered,” he said, referring to LaVoy Finicum’s shooting death by Oregon state police.
“This man was trying to surrender,” Moore said, “but they chose violence and murder rather than to apprehend him.” A member of the Libertarian Party of Nevada and a former Army Ranger who was elected after having raised essentially no money at all, Moore described the action taken in the video that the FBI released of Finicum’s death as an “ambush.”
“That man died at the hands of the Oregon state police, and federal agents, and he did not need to. That’s why I’m here today, that’s why I came up here—to try to prevent the further loss of life,” he said. “I will travel anywhere for that purpose.”
Finicum’s death last month, following a car chase in which most of the Oregon occupiers leadership was arrested, has become the subject of much paranoid theorizing by militia and patriot groups across the country, as well as by those sympathetic to such groups. Shortly after his death, another Nevada lawmaker, Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton, wrote a Facebook post comparing Finicum to Moses and Jesus:
From Moses who killed an Egyptian for abusing his people, to Jesus who died on a cross as a condemned criminal, many of those who operate outside the box and promote love and justice over the current form of government are treated as outcasts and many times murdered.
Today we were reminded that the power of evil is still alive and well as LaVoy Finicum was gunned down and murdered in Oregon. LaVoy was a man who had documented the suffering to which he and his family had been subjected, via the heavy hand of the government, through his writings and his videos.
Oregon lawmakers are considering a bill to (temporarily) bar the disclosure of the officer’s name who actually pulled the trigger, the Oregonian reported last week. Oregon State Police said they’ve received death threats against the officers family. “The whack jobs—the militants—they were demanding to know the name of the officer that killed LaVoy, and they were going to kill him,” Representative Jeff Barker said. “We’re frantically trying to get this one done.”
On Friday, Moore continued: “This kind of treatment should appall each and every one of us. That is not what I fought in combat for—so that our government can murder our own citizens.”
On Sunday, Pope Francis celebrated Mass in Ecatepec, north of Mexico City, home to a towering statue of Santa Muerte: “That wealth which tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering. This is the bread that a corrupt family or society gives its own children.”
Hawaii Governor David Ige declared a state of emergency on Friday amidst an outbreak of dengue fever. According to the Associated Press, there have been more than 250 confirmed cases on Hawaii’s Big Island.
The declaration also applies to the Zika virus, although there have not yet been any locally-transmitted Zika cases in Hawaii.
“We are doing everything we can to be prepared, to be proactive, to prevent vector borne diseases here in Hawaii,” Ige said at a press conference. The mosquitos that carry dengue can also carry the Zika virus, which is present on several Pacific Islands, including American Samoa.
Per the Department of Health, 231 of the confirmed cases are residents of Hawaii Island and 24 are visitors: 209 are adults and 46 are children.
This is the first outbreak in the Hawaiian Islands since 2011, when four people were infected on Oahu with a local strain of dengue fever. In 2001, an outbreak in Hawaii infected 153 people, predominately in East Maui.
Dengue is not normally present in Hawaii and occurs mainly in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. It was likely transmitted via travelers coming through the islands, as happened in Hawaii in 2001 and 2011.
An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Nov. that visitors to the islands should not cancel plans.
“This isn’t a huge outbreak compared to elsewhere,” said Dr. Lyle Petersen, director of the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, on Nov. 20.
In comparison, Peterson said as many as 400 million people are infected yearly around the world. He said in Puerto Rico, where the disease is endemic, that 95% of the population has been infected at some point.
Declaring a state of emergency may help the state acquire more funding for preventative measures, and will also empower state officials take more aggressive steps to preventing the outbreak’s spread.
Image via State of Hawaii/Department of Health. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
After several months of teasing, HBO has released a new trailer for its upcoming sixth season of Game of Thrones, and it’s a dark one.
We’re treated to a whole bunch of people we haven’t seen in a while in the House of Black and White in Braavos: Ned, Rob and Catelyn Stark, Joffrey, before finally coming to, Jon Snow, who intones: “The Long Night is coming, and the dead come with it.”
There’s much to go on here as we end with a shot of the remaining survivors of the show in the crypt. It does set a pretty bleak tone to the upcoming season.
Game of Thrones Season 6 will premiere on April 24, 2016 on HBO.
When Donald Trump got booed, loudly and often, during the Republican National Debate Saturday, he blamed it on an audience stacked with “donors and special interests.” Turns out, he wasn’t wrong.
“That’s what it is. And by the way, let me just tell you. We needed tickets—you can’t get them. You know who has the tickets? I’m talking about to the television audience. Donors, special interests, the people that are putting up the money,” Trump said over loud boos. “The RNC told us that we have all donors in the audience.”
And though Trump blamed the booing on his refusal to accept donations, which isn’t exactly true, his assessment of the audience checked out.
This weekend Breitbart News reported the breakdown of the Peace Center’s 1600 seats: 600 of which reportedly went to candidates, 550 to the state party and locally elected officials, 367 to the RNC and the remaining 100 tickets were split between CBS, the Peace Center and Google.
It’s true what they say—even a broken orange clock is right twice a day.
An Australian mining company has unearthed the biggest diamond ever found in Angola. This diamond is not expected to change Angola’s 207th place ranking in global life expectancy.
A teenager who allegedly tried to steal a $160 pair of Air Jordans last week literally paid an arm and a leg for them when his victim ran him over with a car in a violent incident caught on video.
According to reports, 17-year-old Zachary Sam had arranged to buy the shoes from 39-year-old Philippe Pierre on Friday afternoon in Brooklyn. But when Sam got into Pierre’s car, he allegedly pulled a gun and took the shoes without paying. Surveillance video, gratuitously overlaid with an ominous score, shows Pierre immediately made a U-turn and mowed Sam over, severing the teen’s arm in the process.
Incredibly, Sam escaped the carnage and boarded a city bus, leaving the arm behind and providing this story, via the New York Post:
Sam got out from under the car, he said, and ran inside a city bus.
“Everyone is screaming, ‘Come back, come back, your arm. You’re bleeding too much,’” Fleur said.
Sam then got out of the bus and started running down Avenue M, he said, before finally collapsing in the street.
Doctors reportedly attempted to reattach the arm, and both men are headed to jail, where everyone’s wearing Pumas anyway.
On the morning of February 13, the owner of Cibolo Creek Ranch, in the west Texas town of Shafter, discovered the cold body of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in one of the ranch’s hotel rooms. The owner, John Poindexter, later told the San Antonio Express-News, “We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled. He was lying very restfully. It looked like he had not quite awakened from a nap.”
In quick, confusing succession, local news outlets declared three different causes of death. First it was unspecified “natural causes.” Then it was a heart attack (or a “myocardial infarction”), which is considered a natural cause of death. Then, finally, it reverted to “natural causes” again—not a heart attack—with one additional detail: According to a local judge chosen to assess the circumstances of Scalia’s death, his heart had simply stopped beating. The confusion apparently arose from a quirk in Texas law that allows judges to officially attribute deaths to natural causes without personally inspecting the deceased person’s body. As a triple-bylined Washington Post report explained last night:
It [took] hours for authorities in remote West Texas to find a justice of the peace, officials said Sunday. When they did, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body — which is permissible under Texas law — and without ordering an autopsy.
One of two other officials who were called but couldn’t get to Scalia’s body in time said that she would have made a different decision on the autopsy. “If it had been me . . . I would want to know,” Juanita Bishop, a justice of the peace in Presidio, Tex., said in an interview Sunday[.]
In her interview with the Post, Guevera insisted that she issued her evaluation of Scalia’s death after consulting with on-scene law enforcement officers, who detected no signs of foul play, and Scalia’s doctor in Virginia, who disclosed that his patient had been dealing with unspecified health issues in recent weeks.
The judge did not, however, elaborate on why she declined to have Scalia’s body undergo an autopsy. That decision is particularly notable given the fact that members of Scalia’s family apparently told employees of the El Paso funeral home where his service was held on Sunday that they did not want the state to perform an autopsy. The same decision seems even more conspicuous in light of unconfirmed reports that Scalia requested the cremation of his remains in his written will. A cremation would, after all, likely destroy any evidence of foul play.
(If the reports about Scalia’s requested cremation are true—and, as of now, there’s nothing beyond a few joking tweets to suggest they are—then his understanding of religious doctrine was slightly more flexible than he let on. You may recall that the justice was a devout Catholic who disputed the validity of the Second Vatican Council, a sweeping set of changes enacted by Church officials in the 1960s. One of those changes consisted of lifting the Church’s centuries-long ban on cremation. Considering the showhe made of rejecting Vatican II’s legitimacy, the idea that he would ask to be cremated in his will is, if not unbelievable, at least fairly odd.)
As of Monday morning, it’s still unclear whether authorities will perform an autopsy on Scalia’s body, a state of limbo that has alreadyinspired morethan a few conspiracy-minded conservatives to demand more information about Scalia’s demise. According to CBS News, officials are still debating the next steps to take. The justice’s remains are scheduled to be transported on a Monday flight from El Paso to an undisclosed location in Virginia, near the home where Scalia lived with his wife, Maureen, and their nine children.
The woman, Svetlana Travis, was hospitalized Saturday night. Police responded to the $1,000-night suite after she called 911 to say she was having a breakdown and had slashed her own wrist, the Post reports, but left after Spitzer answered the door saying that everything was fine. When the cops went back to check, they reportedly observed broken glass and blood on the floor.
Travis, who briefly cooperated with the NYPD before declining to press charges, allegedly claimed Spitzer had choked her during an argument, which officials tell ABC began when she indicated their relationship was over.
The alleged incident occurred at the Plaza Hotel at around 8 p.m. Saturday, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the case.
Spitzer, 56, and the woman — identified by ABC station WABC as a 25-year-old — had “some sort of romantic relationship for about two years,” and it appeared she was going to break up with him, which “may have led to the spat,” the official said.
So far police have declined to charge Spitzer with any crimes in connection to the incident, and according to the Post he was seen “wearing a skullcap” while visiting Travis at the hospital Sunday. Sources tell the tabloid that she refused to cooperate in the investigation after giving her initial statement and may already have left the US for Russia.
Cool Pope “Francis” (a rap name), a Catholic man that religious people must pretend to respect, continues his irksome habit of making public statements that do not comport with the official positions of Republican presidential candidates.
Donald Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, is not a Catholic, but he has said that “Nothing beats the Bible,” which would seem to indicate that he is obligated to at least pay a little lip service to the holiness of the Cool Pope. Donald Trump also believes that we need to keep Muslims out and we need to build a wall to keep Mexican immigrants out and generally that immigrants are bad, very bad.
Allow me a final word to convey the appreciation of the Pope for everything you are doing to confront the challenge of our age: migration. There are millions of sons and daughters of the Church who today live in the diaspora or who are in transit, journeying to the north in search of new opportunities. Many of them have left behind their roots in order to brave the future, even in clandestine conditions which involve so many risks; they do this to seek the “green light” which they regard as hope. So many families are separated; and integration into a supposedly “promised land” is not always as easy as some believe.
Brothers, may your hearts be capable of following these men and women and reaching them beyond the borders...
Your efforts will not be in vain when your dioceses show care by pouring balm on the injured feet of those who walk through your territories, sharing with them the resources collected through the sacrifices of many; the divine Samaritan in the end will enrich the person who is not indifferent to him as he lies on the side of the road.
Can’t wait for Donald to drop the hammer on this loser.
