Category Archives: Immigration

The Milne Transcripts, part 5: I’m not telling you

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The latest in my series of posts about Scott Milne’s epically bad July 25 appearance on WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show. Not only is he not ready for prime time, he’s not ready for 9 a.m. on a weekday. 

If the late Fred Tuttle was the Man With A Plan, then Scott Milne, Republican candidate for Governor, seems to be the Man Without A Plan. Time after time during the interview, he refused to take positions on important issues. He deferred until September or even until after the election; he said issues were too complicated for him to immediately answer.

His usual excuse was that he’s only been running for a short time. “I’m new to this game,” he told Johnson at one point, “I should get 30 days.” This is a reference to his campaign strategy: August is for attacking the Shumlin Administration, and September is for unveiling his own policies.

Well, I can sympathize with a candidate who’s just getting started — but whose fault is that? Which inexperienced candidate waited until the last possible moment to launch his campaign?

Er, that would be Scott Milne.

It’s like an actor who agrees on short notice to step into the lead role in a play, but when the curtain rises on Opening Night, he tells the audience he needs more time to learn the part because “I’m new to this game.” You think the audience would walk out?

Sorry, Mr. Milne. You signed up for this. You knew the calendar. The lights are up, the curtain is drawn, and you’re on.

Let’s look at his platform of procrastination, shall we?

— On health care reform, he refused to take a stand on the concept of single-payer (although he also called single-payer “reckless” more than once, so take your pick):

The single-payer is clearly something that we’ll be continuing to look at, and talk to the folks that I’m talking closely with now, and we’ll have some more specific ideas on that before the election.

— He calls Vermont’s economy his top priority. What will he do? “We’ll have a plan for fixing the economy” before Election Day. But he did offer a hint about his plan — albeit a useless one:

Our primary, um, fix that we’re going to offer to Vermont is, uh, a much better tone and friendly tone towards business, and then some specific plans about how to attract business and keep business in Vermont.

Aha. His “primary fix” is a better “tone.” Which makes sense; his primary criticism of Shumlin is the “unfriendly tone” toward business. If we just adopted a better “tone,” our economy would shoot through the roof.

— At one point, a caller asked about the then-extant possibility that Vermont would temporarily house some of the immigrant chlldren who have crossed into the US. He began with some good hemming and hawing:

The, um, situation of, ah, folks coming into, ah, Vermont from Central America is, is a really tough one.

After that inarticulate start, detoured into a standard Republican attack on President Obama, filled with ums, ahs, awkward pauses, and even a “Holy Shamoley,” before Johnson prompted him to answer the actual question.

Uh, I don’t know yet. I mean, I’m not going to jump up and down and say no. … I think it’s a complicated decision that deserves a lot of thought.

And then he patted himself on the back for having no opinion on the issue — because taking a stand would be the easy thing to do. Uh-huh. Also the leaderly thing to do.

— On the vexing subject of reforming public-school funding and organization, Milne plans an even bigger dose of delay:

I don’t think we’re going to have a specific plan before the election. What I’ve promised is, there’ll be a plan from the Milne Administration in the House and Senate in the first half of the biennium.

I can understand why he doesn’t want to stake a position during the campaign; the issue’s a toughie, and he’d be alienating some voters no matter what he said. But again, not exactly Leadership in Action.

All this deferral makes Scott Milne look weak. It’s even worse when he sounds weak as well: his voice hesitant, his sentences often incomplete and littered with “ums” and “ahs.”

Scott Milne posits his procrastination as The Big Plan: the “August Strategy” of attacking, the “September Strategy” of revealing his own ideas. I would argue that this is completely ass-backward: Now is the time when Scott Milne has the stage to himself, because Governor Shumlin won’t formally start the campaign until after Labor Day. Milne should be rolling out his proposals this month, and engage the Governor in September and October, when the two men will be sharing the stage.

Of course, the September Strategy is a convenient rationale for a candidate who’s just getting his feet wet and hasn’t worked his way through the issues. He said so himself, frequently referring to “the people I’m talking to” as he formulates his own views.

Not a good look for a man claiming to offer “leadership.”

Best get crackin’, Mr. Milne. You’re on stage, you’re fumbling it, and you’re losing the audience.

Aki Soga takes a stand

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In this day and age, it takes some courage for a newspaperman to criticize his readers. But that’s just what Aki Soga did on the Sunday Freeploid’s editorial page.

The Burlington Free Press’ website has been something of a toxic waste dump this week — in particular, the comments below its stories about Vermont possibly playing host to some of the thousands of children who have crossed our southern border and overwhelmed the Border Patrol’s ability to house them and process their cases.

The comments have been full of ignorance, rage, and hysteria. They accused “our crazy politicians” of “flooding the country” with illegal immigrants. They rant about the cost to taxpayers of housing them “forever,” which is a lie. They say the children aren’t children at all, but are drug mules and gang bangers. There were calls for “taking care of our own” first, which is rich considering what these geniuses probably think of social service programs in general.

There was enough bile and hatred that Aki Soga felt compelled to write an editorial entitled “Rise Above the Ugly Immigration Rhetoric,” upbraiding those commenters and making the case for humane treatment. For which I say, good on ya’, Mr. Soga.

At issue is the federal government’s request that Vermont consider housing up to a thousand immigrant children on a temporary basis. And, as Soga states in the third paragraph of his editorial:

The immediate reaction, coming mainly online in response to a Free Press story published Wednesday, dredges up the worst stereotypes while exposing a stark lack of understanding of the situation.

There is nothing to support claims by some opponents that the unaccompanied minors are gang members or have ties to terrorists. There are no reports of the children posing a serious public health threat.

To the commenters’ call for turning the kids back at the border or immediately deporting them without a hearing, Soga points out that the problem is “largely due to a 2008 law targeting human trafficking — passed with bi-partisan support and signed by President George W. Bush. The law requires children from Central America be given an immigration hearing before they can be returned to their home countries.”

He closes by calling for “level heads” and rejects “fears driven by ignorance of xenophobia,”  and asserts that “Vermonters are better than that.”

And how did the Freeploid commentariat react to Soga’s appeal to reason? Let’s check the comments.

“Joey Miller,” citing a post on the far-right-wing Judicial Watch, invokes the spectre of gangs and drugs:

Bringing a thousand “children” — many if not most of whom will be teenagers — from the most gang-infested murderous communities in the Americas into a small rural state with a serious heroin problem developing WILL result in a significant influx of gang violence here.

“Rich Celia” opts for the simple and straightforward:

Send them back.

“Bill Sprano” cites his standard of justice — which conveniently ignores the 2008 law — that’s LAW — requiring a hearing before deportation. And also ignores the fact that these children aren’t in the country illegally; they presented themselves at the border and were taken into custody according to, ahem, the law. But don’t let that stop Mr. Bill.

…these people are entering the country Against Our Laws! and they are aware it is against the law. This makes them Criminals by definition.

… Crime is Crime and we need to stop pussyfooting around the immigration issues and close the border with whatever force required, and send back as quickly as possible every illegal immigrant we can.

“Tim Vincent” seconds Mr. Sprano’s screed, and adds,

But you know…..It’s not about the law, it’s about creating more Democrat voters.

Yeah, because Obama’s big plot here is to assimilate all these children and turn them into freeloading, welfare-loving Democrats.

And Mr. Smook Banng (which is not at all a pseudonym) makes the rhetorical leap from temporary housing to permanent residency:

what… if hundreds of children came to Burlington, they end up staying for years (or longer), have to be enrolled in the public schools, and the school system needs to hire hundreds more employees to handle all the non-English learners? At what point do you become sympathetic to the plight of the taxpayers[?]

“Hundreds more employees”? At the very most, Vermont would provide temporary housing for no more than 1,000. Even if every one of those chlidren stayed, would the district really need “hundreds more employees”? Only in the fever dreams of Smook Banng.

And in fact, these children are all in custody. There’s a backlog in the system, mandated by LAW, to process their cases. Many will be sent home after due process. Some will be reunited with families already in the U.S. Few if any will remain in Vermont.

To be fair, there were a few voices of reason in the cesspit of the Freeploid’s comment section. But they were outnumbered by the angry trolls dwelling under that journalistic bridge.

Again, congratulations to Aki Soga for making a strong case for thoughtful consideration of the issue. And you trolls can get back under your bridge anytime.