Hochul’s bad judge choices

Gov. Kathy Hochul recently filled 19 vacant judgeships which had been vacant for months. Her nominees were notified two days in advance. State senators were notified one day before being asked to vote. Rather than voting on each nominee individually based upon qualifications, all 19 were combined under one vote. There was no time allocated for any hearings or review of nominees’ credentials.

Hochul and State Senate majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins promised honest, open, transparent and above-board government. Just like their predecessors, it is business as usual with the Albany Democratic State Party clubhouse machine. Nothing has changed, except that the “three men in the room” is now two woman plus Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

Larry Penner Great Neck

an industrializing America — the transcontinental railroad, skyscrapers, factories, roads, bridges and coal mines that waves of immigrants were here brought to build — were completed. Once built, the laborers were regarded as a threat to the livelihoods of native-born workers but more significantly the entrenched political power structure. All of a sudden, there was concern about the influx of “alien” culture and ideas (unions) – Catholics, Jews, Italians, Irish, Mexicans, Caribbeans, Latin Americans, Socialists! Communists! Bolsheviks!

But the anti-immigrant argument of protecting American workers doesn’t hold water now because we have a serious labor shortage, especially as the birthrate has declined while people are living longer (a factor in inflation that Republicans love to weaponize).

The anti-immigrant fervor today is mostly motivated because Republicans fear that if immigrants are granted citizenship, they will be a voting bloc for Democrats. That’s why the white nationalists who now dominate the Republican Party refuse to even legalize the status of Dreamers, who only know the United States as their home, but who are forced to live in insecurity over jobs, education, healthcare, deportation.

So instead, the white nationalists are overturning child labor laws and forcing women to give birth to supply cheap labor.

Beyond their refusal to work con-

KAREN RUBIN View Point

structively to pursue concrete solutions, Republicans in Congress and their allies in the states are pushing an agenda that is making things worse at the border.

“When President Biden took office two years ago, he inherited an immigration system that the prior administration had gutted,” Ian Sams, special assistant to the president, wrote in a memo. “The prior administration wasted critical resources on an ineffective border wall [and cruel family separations], encouraged irregular migration by cutting off lawful pathways and abandoning efforts to improve conditions in the region that drive migration. Increased migration in the hemisphere, which began in 2018, has continued to rise as a result of ongoing political upheaval, economic crises, and criminal violence that went unad- dressed by the prior administration.

“On top of a comprehensive immigration reform bill that he introduced on Day One of his administration –which Congressional Republicans have blocked– President Biden has taken action on a plan to address these issues –and it is working.”

The Biden administration secured record levels of funding for border security, which enables U.S. law enforcement to catch record amounts of fentanyl and supports 23,000 agents to secure the border and apprehend smugglers. House Republicans voted against border security funding in FY22 and FY23, and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said he wanted to cut off all funding for border security.

The current administration requested $4.9 billion for border security and management — to expand detention capacity, provide medical services, help track migrants as they await their immigration proceedings, ramp up removal flights and move migrants out of cities that are facing a significant surge. But the Republican Congress authorized only half.

While the Biden administration is expediting the immigration process to quickly remove individuals who don’t have a lawful basis to stay, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is instead busing (trafficking, you could say) unvetted migrants to New York and other cities across America bollixing this effort.

Like Abbott, Republican governor and presidential wannabe Ron DeSantis of Florida is using and abusing asylum-seekers for his own political gain, actually committing unlawful human trafficking (breaking the law he just signed!), by luring them onto buses and charter planes with promises of jobs and housing, and dumping them without warning or preparation on the doorstep of “blue” governors and mayors. (Meanwhile his draconian anti-immigrant laws are driving migrants to leave Florida, causing havoc for employers.)

Some 20 Republican-led states have filed a federal lawsuit to block the administration’s parole program – effectively seeking to shut down a lawful pathway that is working so that more will be forced to make unlawful crossings that strain border communities.

The Republicans need to be exposed and punished for their cynical, cruel crusade aimed at sabotaging effective, humane, comprehensive immigration reform so essential to sustaining economic progress, not to mention the myths we love to wrap ourselves in of the “American Dream,” “Beacon on a Hill,” “Land of Opportunity,” and of course, “American Exceptionalism.”

“Let us come together again in a bipartisan way to fix our broken immigration system for good,” Biden declared in his Immigrant Heritage Month proclamation for June. “Until the Congress acts, my administration will keep using every tool we have to make the system more orderly, safe, and humane.”

Each day we awaken to the first golden rays of dawn. That we are spiraling through the dark silences of space has never been other than a miracle to me.

To stand before the last moments of darkness and watch the sun’s wind fill the world with its light as a sail is though I have never seen anything so beautiful. All the colors suddenly flow through the streets and into the city. I’ve seen the cobalt blue, yellow, and orange so often yet still feel its mystery slowly seep through the air until nothing else seems so real or wonderful.

I am again a child standing in the garden remembering what’s forgotten, all the secrets of light. Life again takes on that dreamy quality—precise and clear, above and all around.

I have no idea why this particular sun is ours or has a Goldilocks Zone—harboring the conditions that favor life. The proper wavelengths and right amount of warmth, not too much of the longer and shorter possibilities that fry biology. As if there should be something like this between us as we cross the darkness on our journey alone. Before the late afternoon shadows absent-mindedly continue to lengthen at dusk, let me say this with gratitude for those who don’t know me.

I like to remember that even as I sleep the sun is shredding darkness all the time. Countless eruptions release all the light that makes for happiness, we live in the garden.

Stephen Cipot

Author’s Note:

In retrospect, in one sense this may appear to be a Midrashic poem though not the intent. The sun emits all the wavelengths, from the longest to the shortest, which of course includes the invisible wavelengths as well the visible wavelengths of light.

The sun’s spectrum is caused or generated by nuclear fusion where atoms are combined and make other atoms and elements, the process releases huge amounts of energy covering the full spectrum.

All atoms and elements in the universe are believed to have been created within suns in this manner, beginning with the so-called Big Bang—which goes for saying that we are made of stardust.

My friend and colleague, Dr. James Haklar, likes to expand on astrophysics and share his expertise and astrophotos. Here’s a composite photo he created that shows our sun in three wavelengths: White Light (using a filter transmitting light at around 540 nanometers); Hydrogen Alpha (light at 656.28 nanometers); and Calcium K (light at 393.4 nanometers).

White light is simply the result to our eyes of all the wavelengths combined, and for us what comprises visible light is a small part of the total spectrum emitted by our sun.

Hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in the sun, which is why it mostly appears yellow/orange to the unaided eye.