CNN Anchor
Erin Burnett OutFront
Watch Erin eviscerate “Coach Cooch” — talk about debunking many of Trump’s flse narritives and blatant racist lies in one short piece:
https://apple.news/AzfXx6N_GTA-c-0HtLeBxmQ
News & Politics Reporter
Huffington Post
Historian & Executive Director
American Jewish Historical Society, NY
Read Sarah’s report of the mismatch, featuring American Jewish Historical Society’s Historian Annie Polland:
7 hours ago
Ken Cuccinelli: Statue Of Liberty Poem About ‘People Coming From Europe’
Trump’s citizenship and immigration chief followed up his earlier comments about the famous Emma Lazarus poem with a racist clarification.
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Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reinforced his controversial interpretation of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty ― this time giving it a racist twist.
CNN journalist Erin Burnett was asking Cuccinelli about his earlier interview with NPR, in which he reworded the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” saying: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”
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“‘Wretched,’ ‘poor,’ refuse’ – right? That’s what the poem says America is supposed to stand for. So what do you think America stands for?” Burnett asked Cuccinelli.
“Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe,” Cuccinelli answered, “where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class … And it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written.”
It is unclear why Cuccinelli felt the need to specify the group of immigrants Lazarus was referring to. The poem itself describes the Statue of Liberty by saying, “From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome.” USCIS did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Cuccinelli was on NPR defending the Trump administration’s controversial new rule effectively barring legal immigrants who are on government benefits, like food stamps and Medicaid, from becoming permanent residents.
Lotsa folks asking for longer version of this cuccinelli clip. Here it is.
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After his remarks on NPR, HuffPost spoke to Annie Polland, a historian and director of the organization that has the original manuscript of Lazarus’ poem.
“To see how something so expressive of the country’s greatest ideals, to see how it could be so contorted or distorted, is really, I think, dismay is the only word,” said Polland, the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, adding that she was “not surprised because we’ve been hearing these sentiments more than we have in the past.”
Lazarus originally wrote the poem in 1883 and it was added to the statue in 1903. Since then, the poem has become a symbol of the United States’ history of immigration.
Polland argued that the poem “is as much about who America or what America should be, as it is about immigrants,” adding that “in many ways, America defines itself by how it’s welcoming immigrants.”
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair
And, speaking of “evisceration,” perhaps no pundit in American does it better than Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin, who as had “Don the Cons’s “number “dialed up” from the get-go:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/ken-cuccinelli-statue-of-liberty
Lady Liberty
TRUMP OFFICIAL REWRITES STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM TO REFLECT TRUMP’S “NO POORS” POLICY
Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t think the whole “give me your tired, your poor” business applies anymore.
BY
AUGUST 13, 2019
BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES.The base of the Statue of Liberty famously displays the words of Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But, if Donald Trump’s top immigration official had it his way, the poem would be revised to reflect the president’s “rich immigrants only” policy.
Speaking to NPR on Tuesday, the day after the administration unveiled a new rule that will penalize green card applicants for “financial liabilities” like having a low credit score or using Medicaid, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked if Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” remains “part of the American ethos.” To which Cuccinelli offered some suggested edits inspired by the executive branch’s take on who should or shouldn’t be allowed to live in the United States. “They certainly are,” Cuccinelli said. “Give me your tired and your poor—who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”
Here’s acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read, “give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”
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One day prior, Cuccinelli had told reporters at the White House that he was “certainly not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty,” though apparently, having slept on it, he’s now up for some kind of appendage. During his interview with NPR, Cuccinelli noted that the plaque bearing Lazarus’s words “was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge was passed—very interesting timing.” It’s not at all clear what point he thought he was making.
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Jon Favreau Breaks Down The Lion King’s Opening Scene
Despite having zero actual experience in immigration policy, Cuccinelli was hired in May thanks to previous work sponsoring bills that tried to repeal birthright citizenship and would force employees to speak English in the workplace. (Had the latter passed, we assume Cuccinelli would have proposed revising the Statue of Liberty’s poem to read, “Speak English, bitch.”) In 2013, his mother told the Washington Post that as Christians, the Cuccinellis raised their children to “care [for] the poor” and that “if someone is starving, you want to bring him a meal, not a book on how to cook,” lessons her son apparently forgot. (Speaking of his Christian values, Cuccinelli has said that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.”)
This isn’t the first time a member of the Trump administration has cast aspersions on the whole “give me your tired, your poor,” business. Back in 2017, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief white rage officer, told Jim Acosta that he didn’t give a shit about the poem because it “was added later and is not part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
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We are “governed” by evil racist fools. It’s up to the “The Due Process Army” and others to defend America and American ideals from these ignorant, yet existentially dangerous, White Nationalist racists!
PWS
08-14-19