10th Annual Muslim Day At Oklahoma Legislature

On the morning of Monday, May 13,2024, the second floor of the Oklahoma State Capital structure  gradually filled with people as part of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American Muslim Relations hosted it’s tenth  annual “Muslim Day at the Capital.” Along with the staff of that entity and Imam Imad  Enchassi, the attendees were greeted by several Democratic state legislators, including  Michael Brooks-Jimenez and Representative Ellyn Hefner  and Representative Arturo Alonso, who is one of the youngest members of that body, who apparently knew many of them from previous encounters.  The executive director of CAIR, Adam Soltani, was heard speaking to  all of  them  about the injustice inflicted on the citizenry of Oklahoma in the recently enacted law  that made it a crime for undocumented people to be in the state, and the hardship it will imposed on families that have members who have been criminalized as result. The attendees were given  bags that read “Bear Witness” and Uphold Justice” in accordance with the historical mission of CAIR  that contained the agenda for the gathering. Massod Abdul Haq, the  charismatic  chairman of the CAIR Oklahoma  Board, addressed the attendees and told of how some people feel powerless as they see the oppression being inflicted on others around the world but he said that we can use our dollars and our votes to speak out against  injustice. He further said that he decided to run for office after telling young people to become advocates and than decided that he should follow his own advise  and  has filed to run for the Oklahoma City Council. Imam Imad Enchassi spoke to the attendees of the need for persistence, and that those who speak for justice and peace are persistent. When the first Muslim day at the capital was held, protestors were present, but they no longer come to protest. The Imam spoke of the examples of  Abraham, Moses, and Mary the mother of Jesus who showed persistence in the face of hostility and told of the Interfaith community of Oklahoma who is also their Muslim brethren. He further told of how he looks forward to when his grandchildren, who are of Native American heritage to a degree,  can be  among those who celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Muslim Day at the Oklahoma  Capital. After a tasty lunch that was catered by Shawarma & Company, The attendees then  made their way to the first floor of the structure where they had an uplifting and inspiring  presentation from a young woman of Palestinian heritage from Georgia,  Ruwwa Romman, who told of how she won election to the Georgia Legislature and has worked with various members of that body of various political persuasions and others from the  Peach Tree State  to enact policy changes to improve the lot of the less fortunate there an how activists in Oklahoma can accomplish similar feats. The Georgia lawmaker was also part of a panel that included Representative Alonso in which those present were told of how that they can make their concerns known to policy makers. And while the Republicans who currently control the Oklahoma Legislature as well as the Governor’s office  appear to be committed to policies that demonize sexual minority communities and  undocumented  residents in the Sooner State while they demand tax cuts for the well to do,  a day at the Muslim Day at the Capital serves as a reminder that there are also officials and activists who are committed to more humane policies. “Kennedy was an illusion, Johnson is the real face of America,” French President Charles De Gaulle  said in a moment of pique. And it may be the future face of  Oklahoma will be found in the good hearted citizens who attended the Muslim Day at the capital and not the pale leaders of the GOP and their misguided and divisive  agendas.

Does David Pecker Know Too Much?

“The Man Who Knew  Too Much” was the only one of Alfred Hitchcock’s films that he saw fit to remake. The original version was released in 1934 when the film creator was still residing in the United Kingdom, and starred Leslie Banks and Peter Lorre, while the second one was made in 1956 after Hitchcock had migrated across the Atlantic to Hollywood and featured Doris Day and James Stewart in the primary roles and also had a somewhat different plot than the original. “Horse Face,”  “serial perjurer,” and “dirt bag” have been some of  the words that former President Donald Trump has used to characterize Stormy Daniels and his former fixer Michael Cohen  respectively in the lead up to the criminal trail he is currently a defendant in a courthouse in Manhattan, but he has been noticeably silent about  another witness who is currently testifying against him, David Pecker, who was the owner and operator of the National Enquirer. The tabloid publisher, who is testifying against Trump with a grant of immunity from prosecution for his role in the case, has told of how Trump contacted him  as he began to his run for the  Republican nomination for president , and asked for his assistance in using his publication to ensure that embarrassing facts about Trump did not become public through a process that is now widely known that was designated “catch and kill” in which Pecker’s operatives would buy the stories that were being offered by several woman as well as a doorman who was in Trump’s employ that detailed his alleged marital infidelities but agreed not to publish them, and the terms of their agreements with the tabloid  prohibited them from offering them to other sources since they had been paid for them. His sworn testimony has documented that in addition to that service, the Enquirer ran fictional and nonsensical stories about his political rivals to boost his chances to attain the GOP nomination, and subsequently published  unsubstantiated   accounts of how his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton was in fact fatally ill and how she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were involved in fraudulent and illegal activities through the foundation that bore their name. Pecker, in the course of his initial testimony, has told of his friendship with Trump that began in the early 1980’s when the developer had just arrived on the social scene in Manhattan,  and was soon a fixture in the   high end festivities that are ongoing there, and a former employee of the Enquirer has said that Pecker had a safe in his office that contained other stories about Trump that had put him in an unflattering light, but were also part and parcel of the catch and kill process that Pecker used to protect Trump. Is it possible that the former president is concerned as to what other evidence that the publisher will reveal about him as his testimony  continues as well as  to what the subsequent cross examination by the attorney’s who are defending him may inadvertently  uncover?

Spiro Agnew And The Possible End Of The Trump Era

 “A Heartbeat Away, The Investigation and Resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew,” was authored by journalists Jules Witcover and Richard Cohen, in 1974, and it told the tale of how Spiro Agnew was compelled to vacate his office after pleading guilty to tax evasion for his failure to pay income tax on the numerous bribes and kickbacks that he received while governor of Maryland and vice-president of the US. He had been elected to that office on the GOP ticket headed by Richard Nixon and had taken office in 1968 and was reelected in 1972. Agnew had been a divisive force in American politics, and had attacked Democrats as being what he termed “radical liberals” and members of the media as “nabobs of  negativity.”  He spoke of what he termed “positive polarization” as he denigrated those who had opposed Republican policies and the continuing  Vietnam War and he was considered to be a strong candidate for the GOP  presidential nomination in 1976. But as Witcover and Cohen pointed out, there had long been rumors of the seemingly righteous  and moralistic  Agnew having taking bribes and extorting money from those who had contracts with the state of Maryland. And as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow  told in a more recent  podcast account of Agnew’s resignation titled “Bagman,” hundred dollar bills were not widely in circulation in  that time, and  the then vice-president   used them on a frequent basis in his purchases when socializing with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities of his ilk  that served to arouse suspicion as to their origins. The US attorney’s office in Baltimore, Maryland, began an investigation and in short order located several businessmen and architects who had contracted with that state when Agnew was it’s chief executive and had extorted cash from them, and that several of them were still making payments to him in his office in Washington DC. They  documented how the sitting vice-president had been through in his demands for kickbacks from state vendors, and how even the companies that that operated the cigarette and other vending machines in state office buildings were required to make personal payments to him for the privilege of doing so. When news of the investigation became public, Agnew stated that he was confident that he would be exonerated, and defiantly said that he would not resign his office even if he was indicted. But resign he did, on October 10th, 1973, as he entered a plea of nolo contendre to one count of tax evasion in an agreement that spared him jail time in exchange for his resigning,  but also released all of the evidence that the government had amassed that documented his guilt. The author’s document the dramatic scene in which Agnew entered his plea before the presiding federal judge, and observed that as the jurist asked him the questions that are asked of all defendants who enter such pleas in which he said that it was voluntarily given, and he had not been subject to pressure to do so, and was not under the influence of narcotics or drugs when he signed the plea deal. As he stood up to answer to each question posed to him, Witcover  and Cohen said you could sense  his power and authority  ebbing out of him,  and soon people were saying that Agnew, like many criminal defendants before him,  had “copped a plea.” And a somewhat similar process may be played out in a criminal court in Manhattan, where former president Donald Trump is being subject to a proceeding  in which he is not in control of and can not bully the judge who is presiding. The testimony that has been taken to date includes the underhanded arrangement that David Pecker detailed  in which the Enquirer  praised Trump in it’s coverage of him but also wrote fictional stories concerning  his political opponents in the Republican  presidential primary and later about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It has been said that criminal defense attorneys  often encourage their clients to have family members  and friends present in the gallery  to  indicate to the juries in their cases that there are people who care about them. But Trump’s family and friends do not seem to be in attendance at his trial, despite the fact that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner  profited greatly off of his presidency, and as reported in the national media, Kushner is unabashedly cashing in on the international connections he made during his time in the White House  as his father in law runs for the presidency again.

GOP Effort To Take The OBA Out Of The Oklahoma Judicial Appointment Process

 “If the United States did not exist Fidel Castro would have had to invent it,” French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once sagely observed. The French intellectual  had at one time been an enthusiastic supporter of the  Marxist Cuban regime that Castro had imposed on that Caribbean isle nation, but had soured on it after he saw how Castro had jailed artists and others and often did so on the grounds that the US, which had sponsored an invasion of Cuba shortly after Castro had taken power, was still intent on toppling his regime, and that anyone who opposed him was an agent of the US. In the early 1980’s, when Soviet Premier Gorbachev began the policy known as “Glasnost” that  served to open the Soviet Union and it’ s satellite states in Eastern Europe to people and ideas from the West,  the citizenry there  became more aware of the freer lives enjoyed by Westerners and historians now credit those interactions with serving to erode support for the Communist systems that they were living under. And advocates for a lessening of the US blockade of Cuba, which had originally been put in place under the Eisenhower administration, argued in the pages of national publications that allowing Americans to visit there would have a similar effect in time. In 2017  the Oklahoma Bar Association hosted a seminar in Cuba, and a publication of the right wing Oklahoma Council On Public Affairs, has recently run a story criticizing it for doing so, and argued that it is one of the reasons that the Bar Association should lose the role that it has in selecting candidates for judgeships in Oklahoma, despite the fact that holding a gathering there did not constitute in any way an endorsement  of the Marxist government there. The Cuban government cruelly harasses and monitors  dissidents, and one wonders if their repressive security apparatus was placed on alert  when a conference  regarding the rule of law in an American jurisdiction was held there. The article goes on to cite in support of it’s position that the fact that one judge in Oklahoma County had to resign after it was revealed that he had had sexual relations with two attorneys who had appeared before him, and another jurist in Creek County was removed after utilizing a penis pump while presiding over judicial proceedings. Scandalous, to be sure, but do two  miscreants warrant the jettisoning of a procedure that has been in place since the 1960’s? The story does not address how the Bar’s involvement came into being. In the early 1960’s after a scandal rocked the Oklahoma Supreme Court when it became public that several judges were taking bribes as part of their decision making process on the cases that they heard, and in effort to restore public confidence in the judiciary the current process whereby a panel , the Judicial Nominating Commission, that includes members appointed from the Bar Association as well as several others who are not attorneys. That reform was approved by the Oklahoma electorate more than a half century ago.  The Republican Party is the ascendant political entity in the state, and the proposal  that is currently before the GOP controlled legislature in the form of Senate Joint Resolution 34 would allow the governor to make his own choice regarding vacant judicial posts without input from any other source. In effect, the Republicans wish to turn the clock back to the way it was before the Supreme Court scandal. The story further documents how many prominent members of the Oklahoma Bar exercise their right to donate money to candidates on the Democratic ticket, as if that is an example of political waywardness  rather than their knowledge of public affairs and concern for the state and the direction it appears to be taking.

Dubious Proposed Legislation Regarding the Undocumented in Oklahoma.

 Three members of the US Senate, one of whom was Oklahoma’s senior Republican  Senator James Lankford, came together some time ago at the direction of that legislative body’s leadership,  to craft proposed  legislation that would have addressed the issue of immigration and the condition of the Southern border of the US.  The resulting package won the support of a diverse group of stakeholders, including the  union that represents the interests of the border patrol officers who man the border, and would have also increased the number of immigration court judges as well as the  contingent of asylum officers who deal with those who are seeking refuge  in the US on the grounds that they will face persecution in their home nations if they were forced to return home. The proposal also would have addressed the issue of illegal drugs that flow across the border by using high tech devices that would be able to detect illegal narcotics hidden in vehicles. President Biden was a supporter of the resulting bill, as were most Congressional Democrats, but former President Donald Trump  instructed the Republican members of the Senate to vote against it since it would have deprived him of an issue  that he is using in his campaign to retake the White House. Despite the fact that most  of the things that Trump has said about immigration and the condition of the border are patently untrue, as has been pointed out by many  observers, and our nation is not subject to an “invasion” of  ‘rapists and mental patients” who are “animals, not people,”  his constant repeating of those false allegations has apparently convinced many of his supporters that they are true. Now the GOP leadership in the Oklahoma Legislature has climbed aboard the Trump campaign train of demagoguery and division  by unveiling  an unnecessary   proposal, and the falsehoods begin  early on the announcement from  House Speaker Charles McCall and Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat, with the wording “ this legislation is aimed at addressing the illegal immigration crises here in Oklahoma,” which will surely result in most of the citizenry of the Sooner State to ask “what crisis?”  Oklahoma has had a long history of unauthorized arrivals, and  the  “Boomer Sooner” chant that is heard  at OU  football games references the “sooners” who entered what was then Indian Territory  before they were legally authorized to do so by the federal government, and their descendants constitute some of the state’s leading citizens. The bill will create the crime of “impermissible occupation” for anyone who enters the state without having first obtain legal status from the federal government, despite the fact that federal law already makes it a crime to enter any state without having done so. Speaker McCall is quoted as saying that the proposal “will support Oklahoma’s right to legally  defend our state’s borders from those in our country illegally”  But does the state need protection from the dishwashers and tree trimmers    and others who toil  in  low paying  occupations without legal status? In addition, many of them have close family members who do have legal status, and the enforcement of that law will have  grave implications for them. Citizens of a certain age may recall how Republican  President Ronald Reagan oversaw a program that gave legal status to  undocumented individuals and the resulting economic boom that followed as many of them  saw fit to open businesses once they had the right to do so.

The Golden Legacy Of The Late Cathy Cummings Of OKC

In recent days, the national media has been reporting on an ongoing occurrence in the Oklahoma City area in which restaurateur Sean Cummings has been paying off school lunch debts of underprivileged students at local schools from funds that have been donated to honor his late wife Cathy, who passed away several months ago at the young  age of 62. Cathy Cummings also operated a restaurant, “Vito’s Italian Ristorante” that was attached to Sean’s Irish pub on May Avenue in Oklahoma’s capital city. In addition to being successful restaurateurs, Sean and Cathy Cumming’s were also committed political activists who ran for political office on the Democratic ticket and where fixtures at that party’s gatherings  where they advocated for humane and inclusive politics that sought to bring people together in a time of rancorous division.  In addition to those students relieved of debt for lunches, her legacy also includes a younger generation of   Democratic Party candidates who may have been inspired by her style of leadership who  are seeking elective office in the Oklahoma City area and  are offering  less divisive approaches to public policy issues that are designed to bring people together rather than to foster division. On recent Saturdays a group of young people have departed the law office of   Senator Michael Brooks Jimenez  armed with leaflets that tell of a young attorney affiliated with that firm, Sam Wargin Grimaldo, who is currently a candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate District 46 post, and the policies that he advocates and would pursue as a member of that legislative body. They include a proposal  that would allow all residents of the state of the statutory age to obtain driver’s licenses, and as his campaign literature points out, many other states across the nation have already done so, and that car insurance rates have dropped precipitously for those  jurisdictions as a result.
 During the height of the Cold War an intelligence officer in England who was tasked with routinely reviewing Soviet propaganda productions for the purpose of possibly unearthing clues to Russian spying, saw fit to stop and rerun a scene from a  grainy Soviet newsreel  that   had featured a   celebration of the anniversary of the  fall of Berlin in 1945. The  ceremony had  included Russian military and diplomatic officers from throughout Europe, and the alert British intelligence officer had noticed that a Russian ambassador had saluted a diplomatic official  who held  the more minor post of an attache to a European state, and she deduced from that the attache, despite his minor posting, was in fact a Soviet KGB officer who outranked ambassadors in the Soviet hierarchy, and the discovery of his actual identity led to the unmasking  of  a high  level British intelligence officer who was in fact a Russian agent. And a somewhat similar discovery was made by a woman in Enid, Oklahoma, Connie Schmidt Vickers, who was watching a news report  of the infamous gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia in which torch bearing right-wingers had defiantly chanted “blood and soil” and realized that one of the participants had recently been elected to the Enid city council, and she and several of her colleagues had  immediately begun a recall effort that eventually resulted in his recall by the citizens of his district. And hopefully leaders such as Grimaldo and Vickers will in turn inspire another generation of leaders of a humane and tolerant approach to the issues that confront us as a society.

Cleta Mitchell’s Unfounded Allegations About Undocumented Aliens Voting In The Presidential Election

 In the mid 1980’s, what may prove to be a prescient warning about the dangers of authoritarianism was delivered at a civic function that was held in the rural community of Duke Oklahoma. That admonition  was contained in a speech delivered by Steven Suttle, who was the district attorney for Jackson County at that time that included Duke. The elected official  quoted  the British statesman Winston Churchill, who said that “Democracy is the absolutely the worst form of government except for any other form of government that has ever been tried, and that went on to point out  that the supposed efficiencies of authoritarian governments are often unfounded, and said that the statement often made in support of the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy that it made the trains  on time was unfounded. He further cautioned about leaders who offer simple solutions to complex problems  and seek to blame minorities for society’s problems and to divide people. Suttle’s   concerns regarding the subject may have stemmed in part from the fact that his wife’s parents had been a Jewish couple who had managed to escape Germany shortly after the Nazi government took power there.  Suttle had long been an activist in the Democratic Party in Oklahoma, and was a supporter of Michael Turpen when he had sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1986, as was Representative Cleta Deatherage, another Democratic office holder who represented Norman in the Oklahoma Legislature and the OU campus from which she had previously received an undergraduate and a law degree. Deatherage had been a McGovern delegate to the Democratic Convention that had nominated him for the presidency, and had been a supporter of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She subsequently made an unsuccessful effort to obtain the Democratic nomination for the position of lieutenant governor, and subsequently relocated to Washington DC after her husband Dale Mitchell was convicted of bank fraud in federal court in Oklahoma. She subsequently became an occasional guest on news shows where she was identified as being a Republican and generally took conservative positions on  political issues. But more recently she has become aligned with Donald Trump in his efforts to reverse the election results of2020, and could be heard with Trump in the Oval Office on the recorded phone call in which he sought to have the Georgia election officials to award him with sufficient vote to give him the Peach Tree  State’s crucial electoral votes and was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the  RICO indictments that charged Trump and several of his associates with racketeering. Several days ago, it was reported that Mitchell was working on efforts to challenge election results in state’s that Biden carries in November’s electio, and has written a memo in which she asserts that the Biden administration is intent on have undocumented arrivals vote for him in  the election. 
  “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs;” British Parliamentarian Enoch Powell once observed. And it may be that Cleta Mitchell  believes that she can reinvigorate her political career by aligning herself with an authoritarian figure  who has said that he would like to be “a dictator for one day” and has boasted about  how he will punish his enemies with the full force of the federal government if he is returned to the presidency.

The Late Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Fondness For Cufflinks

 “Berlin is the American testicle and I’m going to squeeze it,” a belligerent Nikita Khrushchev bellowed at his American counterpart President  John F Kennedy at a Cold War summit conference  convened on June 4^th, 1961 in Vienna, Austria, and it was reported that the president’s American interpreter   diplomatically translated the phrase as “ Berlin is the America big toe and I’m going to squeeze it.” Kennedy was initially  surprised at the Russian’s belligerence and later said to him “ Your attitude is what is  mine is mine and what’s yours is well, we’ll negotiate.” The Soviet premier was clad in ill fitting plain off white suit during that encounter, and was similarly attired when he later made a state visit to the US, with his family and Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen would offend Soviet sensibilities and feelings when she wrote that Khrushchev’s wife Nina was dressed ‘Like a Russian peasant woman.”  Khrushchev’ predecessor, Joseph Stalin, only wore a worker’s tunic  in his  official appearances or a military uniform during the Second World War, and his Chinese counterparts,  Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong  and Premier Zhou Enlai also wore such  drab tunics in their official appearances as does the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un today. But in his recorded recollection of his summit conference with Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev former President Richard Nixon recalled that while he faced  Brezhnev who was clad in a tailored dark suit, he suddenly realized that  he was wearing gold cufflinks, which was somewhat surprising for a leader who claimed to be the leader of the international Communist movement  that was ostensibly committed to leading the world’s worker to victory over the capitalists. And it was reported that the British authorities thought that the Soviet Union was undergoing significant change  when Brezhnev’s eventual successor as leader Mikhail Gorbachev, did not ask to be brought to the site of Karl Marx’s grave in High Gate  Cemetery in London, where previous Soviet had made reverential pilgrimages,  but instead asked that he and his wife Raisa be permitted to visit the upscale Harrod’s Store in the  British capital instead, and Gorbachev would later have suits made for him by famed English tailor Alexander Mc Queen who also made clothes for Prince Charles. And an individual who often appears in court in the Oklahoma City area  recently asked  the staffers at the Pinpoint  Fine  Wear Men’s Store  at Fifty Penn Place in Oklahoma City if they thought that he should wear  cufflinks in his office or for his court appearances and jury trials. One staffer,  an older man named Dwight, who was wearing a pinstriped suit with gold cuff links, replied that he thought that they were always appropriate. But a younger salesman, who was addressed as “Angel” despite the fact that he was not a winged seraph did not think that cuff links were in order for the well dressed man of today. The owner of the establishment, Chris Khrais, said that he continues to sell cufflinks to men of all ages who wish to present an image of success and sophistication. In the classic novel “The Great Gatsby” a shady character who is a business associate of Jay Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim, and is said to have been the individual who fixed the World Series games of 1919, was described by author F. Scott Fitzgerald as wearing cufflinks that appear to have been made out of human molars. While it is not known if the current Russian leader Vladimir Putin, wears cuff links it would seem that similar style of them would be appropriate for him and his murderous regime.                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                     

County Commissioner Blumert And City Councilman Cooper At Stella Nova In OKC

 Oklahoma County Commissioner  Carrie Blumert  hosted a meeting with constituents at the Stella Nova Coffee Shop on Western Avenue in the Crown Heights neighborhood  on the morning of March 2^nd, 2024   that featured  Oklahoma City Councilman James Cooper as well.  The commissioner was introduced by a staffer and she in turn introduced   the councilman.  She told  those who had assembled there over the clatter  of coffee grinders and staff announcement of orders that were ready of how she had voted against the decision to place the county jail in Del City  and  that the county   would soon have  $5.8 million to distribute to  nonprofit organizations and  told of the office to contact to apply for such grants.  The office holder also spoke of a warrant clearing event that the county is sponsoring on April 12^th of this year at the  Latino Community Development Agency  on SW 10th Street from 9: 00 AM until 6:00 PM  that will feature attorneys who will work with those who have misdemeanor and traffic  warrants and that  no law  enforcement officers  will be present.  An attendee who resides  in Forest Park thanked the commissioner for preventing the placing of the jail in her area, and  Blumert  told of how that while the current jail in the downtown area is thirteen stories tall,  experts have advised her and her two colleagues that for safety reasons  such facilities should not be more than two stories in height since  the need for elevators can jeopardized the safety of jails since they can be immobilized and that is why  a  large space is required for a new site. Cooper told of how he is philosophically opposed to  the construction of a new jail regardless of where it is placed, and would prefer  that the funds be used to treat the social problems that give rise to the need for incarceration, and that as   a gay African American  man  who grew up in a home that featured domestic violence he knows first hand the impact that childhood trauma can have on  individuals. In response to a question from an attendee, Cooper told of  a website maintained by Oklahoma City that details some of the measures that can be used to calm traffic through reduced speed, and that while some of them are expensive, the city government is able to assist neighborhood groups who wish to construct them. He further detailed  how the funds generated from the most recent MAPS program have been utilized to fund improvements in various parts of the city, including the Downtown area, the LBBTQ neighborhood, and  the Britton District where  Britton Road is currently undergoing expansion and new streetlights are being put in place and that he and his  colleagues look forward to continuing to improve Oklahoma City. As the meeting drew to a close, the two elected officials thanked the attendees for their presence and questions and received a round of applause.

Biden And Trump Both At The US-Mexican Border With Widely Different Messages

President Biden

 It has been said that the distinction between a statesman and a politician is that a statesman looks to the next generation while the politician’s eyes are affixed firmly on  the next election. And according to  those differences, it  would seen that that they majority of the elected  Republican member of the US  Congress are firmly in the politician camp as they bent to the will of former President Trump and scuttled a bipartisan immigration bill that their leaders had pledged  to support and had been in the preparation stage for months. Oklahoma’s Senator  James Lankford had been the individual designated by the Senate Republican lawmakers to serve with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and Independent  Krysten Sinema  and they had worked to for months to reach a painstaking  consensus on  measures that would be agreeable  to all relevant parties. The proposed legislation would have tightened the asylum process by the hiring of more  asylum officers and also dealt with backlog in immigration cases currently pending by the hiring of additional immigration judges. It would have dealt with the smuggling of narcotics from that border through the acquisition of high tech devices that detect drugs that are concealed in vehicles,  and also mandated the hiring of additional border patrol officers, and was supported by groups that included the union that represents those officers and the US Chamber of Commerce. In a recent visit to the border, President Biden spoke  from Brownsville Texas  about the benefits of that  possible  legislation, and in a statesmanlike gesture,  extended an olive branch to his  Republican rival Trump  and asked him to join with him to address  the border in furtherance of the public good, saying “ I can come to you or you can come to me.” Former President Trump also visited the area on the same day, and from Eagle Pass, Texas, ranted against an alleged invasion of the nation by a variety of criminals as well as former mental patients. Yet as many commentators have pointed out, lawful residents commit more crimes than do immigrants, and the crime rate has fallen in the communities where large numbers of recent arrivals are situated.  Former Texas  gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke was recently in Oklahoma City and spoke at the Full Circle Bookstore and told of how his  border community of El Paso is a safe place  that does not experience much crime and that Trump’s statements about an immigrant invasion occurring is simply not true. And  while Trump’s screed contained the malice and vitriol that  have historically characterized  his public utterances, he did not seem to exude the same  exuberance that he displayed when he first burst upon the national political scene, and it has been speculated that the weight of the legal actions currently pending against him are  taking a toll on his psyche.  And it is possible that the former president is beginning to realize that  while the GOP establishment lives in fear of him and his fervent MAGA supporters,  the  majority of American public has decided that  his time for leadership has come and gone.