Category Archives: Family

The Best Family Is The One You Get To Choose

America, Family, Judaism & Jews

The best evening ever was had, last night, with The Vietnamese Family (we’re fortunate to have a Lebanese one, too). Thrown into a marvelous mix of individuals was a new black sister (who happens to be Jewish, too). First up is the exotically beautiful BFF—I don’t know if generous and kind, funny and animated come through in the pic, but she made the best lobster ever. There was good cheer, good humor and good spirits, double entendre intended. Yes, water is a superb drink when taken with the right spirits.

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25 Fun Facts About The Donald

Capitalism, Celebrity, Family, Politics, Republicans

Naturally, there are not many things mere mortals share with The Donald. I share numbers 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 22 and part of 11. What about you?

“25 Things You Don’t Know About Donald Trump,” Via US Magazine:

8. I like See’s Candies. [See’s is way too sweet, but being a hopeless candy person myself, I get the weakness.]

9. Citizen Kane is my favorite movie. [Not my favorite, but a very respectable choice.]

10. I turn off the lights when I leave a room. [Me too. It was drummed into us as kids.]

11. I like to read history, biographies …

17. I ask a lot of questions. [Doctors, dentists and the like get impatient and are often flummoxed.]

18. I’m very approachable. [So long as you don’t assail me with your politics. That’s the rule. If you read my stuff, however, you can ask and challenge galore.]

22. I eat lunch at my desk. [With a dishcloth over the PC keyboard.]

The rest is pure Donald:

1. I ride an elevator to work. It’s my greatest luxury.

2. I do my own hair (but my wife cuts it).

3. I like cherry-vanilla ice cream.

4. I don’t use an intercom in the office.

5. I’m 6-foot-3.

6. I often have mirrors, chairs, and sinks in my front office in order to decide what’s best for my buildings.

7. I have one of Shaq’s shoes in my office.

11. I like to read history, biographies, and the New York Post’s Page Six.

12. I don’t drink coffee, tea, or alcohol.

13. I love spending time with my family.

14. I like to drive myself when I’m out of the city.

15. I scrape the toppings off my pizza — I never eat the dough.

16. I love Scotland, where my mother was born, and where I’m developing a golf course.

19. I like hamburgers.

20. I like having dinner at home with my family.

21. My sister Maryanne makes meatloaf for me on my birthday.

23. I have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

24. “You’re fired!” is the No. 3 greatest TV catchphrase of all time.

25. I’m actually very modest. [Correction: Trump is realistic about himself, not modest.]

‘I’m Owned By The People!’ Says Trump

Business, Elections, Family, Media, Republicans

In a long feature about Donald Trump, Rolling Stone’s Paul Solotaroff breathlessly declares, “What I saw was enough to make me take him dead serious. If you’re waiting for Trump to blow himself up in a Hindenburg of gaffes or hate speech, you’re in for a long, cold fall and winter. Donald Trump is here for the duration — and gaining strength and traction by the hour.”

On CNN, Solotaroff noodled on about the absence of “Republican wise man” among Trump’s political entourage. The pundits are part of the nimbus of power that is DC. As such, they refuse to comprehend that the “Silent Majority” detests them, their politcal masters and their scheming handlers. Very good that Trump’s entourage doesn’t include these Republican snake-oil salesmen.

It is unclear whether Solotaroff is showing condescension when he describes the Trump “singular family gift as seeing the future and beating everyone else to it.”

As to child rearing, Donald Trump was no sissy boy and he has been tough on his own spawn. “If the nation’s mothers and fathers want fabulous kids like Donald Trump’s, they ought to try conducting themselves this way with their stroppy offspring” (From: “Megyn, Jorge, and a Reaganesque Trump”)

… Though Fred [Donald’s father] lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. “We’d go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors,” he says. “You’d see ’em ring the bell and stand way over here. I’d say, ‘Why’re you over there?’ and he’d say, ‘?’Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'”

Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. “I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping,” says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father’s. “My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar.” “I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn’t an option,” says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump’s kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they’ve nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. “We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well,” says Don Jr. “But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently.”

When all is said and done, the contempt this reporter has for the Trump crazies is palpable:

… As we stand there, hundreds of feet above New York, gazing on the Lilliputian tourists, it occurs to me to wonder: How on Earth, from this vantage, did Trump see into the hearts of underemployed white folk? How did he know that they stewed and simmered over free trade, immigrants and fat-cat Republicans who’d sold them down the river for decades? How did he guess that they’d conflated those things to explain the flight of factory jobs, and that all they really cared about, besides the return of those jobs, was that someone beat the hell out of the party hacks — the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers and Karl Roves? …

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Birthright Citizenship For All Was Read Into The Constitution

Constitution, Family, IMMIGRATION, Law

Donald Trump is on solid constitutional ground when he calls for the elimination of birthright citizenship—just as Ron Paul was hardly on constitutional quicksand when he did the same, as a candidate for president, in 2008. Rep. Ron Paul’s plank was to restore the original intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment,” about which the left-libertarian Richard A. Posner—judge, United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and lecturer at University of Chicago Law School—is agreed, too.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Justice Posner, hardly an immigration restrictionist, has argued that “the purpose of the rule was to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves and the exception for children of foreign diplomats and heads of state shows that Congress does not read the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment literally.”

Yes, the Constitution is vague, ambiguously written and unevenly applied.

Posner:

… There is said to be “a huge and growing industry in Asia that arranges tourist visas for pregnant women so they can fly to the United States and give birth to an American. Obviously, this was not the intent of the 14th Amendment; it makes a mockery of citizenship.’” John McCaslin, “Inside the Beltway: Rotund Tourists,” Wash. Times, Aug. 27, 2002, p. A7.

We should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children. That abuse provides an argument for abolishing birthright citizenship. A constitutional amendment may be required to change the rule, thoiugh maybe not, see Peter H. Schuck & Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity 116–17 (1985); Dan Stein & John Bauer, “Interpreting the 14th Amendment: Automatic Citizenship for Children of Illegal Immigrants,” 7 Stanford L. & Policy Rev. 127, 130 (1996), since the purpose of the rule was to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves and the exception for children of foreign diplomats and heads of state shows that Congress does not read the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment literally. If birthright citizenship is not commanded by the Constitution, it can be eliminated by amending the statutory provision that I mentioned.

But closing the loophole that encourages foreigners to come to the United States solely to make their future children U.S. citizens would not address the larger question of birthright citizenship. For undoubtedly most children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are not born to persons whose motive for immigrating was based in whole or significant part on a desire to have U.S. citizen children.

Most countries outside the Western Hemisphere do not recognize birthright citizenship; instead they base citizenship of children on the citizenship of their parents or other lawful connections between the parents and the country (ethnicity or religion, for example). Should we adopt that approach, by constitutional amendment if necessary? (It may not be necessary, as I have suggested, but I take no position on that question.) The problem is that though it would discourage people from coming to the United States for the sole or main purpose of having children who would be U.S. citizens …

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