President Obama questioned about immigration and Fast and Furious at Univision town hall

[TomCADem]

Source: CNN

Miami, FL (CNN) - President Barack Obama flew to Miami on Thursday to try to shore up Latino support in a town hall forum broadcast by the Spanish language network Univision.

Before an audience of 700 Spanish speakers – half college students - at the “Meet the Candidates” forum, Obama defended his record on immigration and tried to explain why his administration did not fulfill a 2008 campaign promise to tackle comprehensive reform in his first year in office.

“When we talked about immigration reform in the first year, that was before the economy was on the verge of collapse … the stock market was collapsing. And so my first priority, was making sure we prevented us from going into a great depression.”

Univision host Jorge Ramos pressed Obama on his pledge, saying “a promise is a promise.” Obama countered that the lack of legislation in Congress was not entirely his fault. Republican political opponents, he said, kept many significant immigration measures from getting off the ground.


Read more: http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/20/univision/

[oldsarge54]

1. A Promise is a Promise

And the the Tea Party is the Tea Party. Everybody should have noticed that the Republicans have not been precisely cooperative. And yes, the priorities and three major actions Obama got through congress before the death of Ted Kennedy took the filibuster proof Senate away from him benefited everybody, latino as well. The stimulus package was not a failure, although it could be said that nobody knew how deep the Great Recession would be, and Keynes did say that a stimulus was a bridging operation until the economy fixed itself. The CARD act is just not putting some bite and perhaps fear of the law into the credit card industry - full results are yet to be seen, and latinos benefit from the ACA rather strongly as well. It should be pointed out, that Obama, while deporting record numbers of illegal aliens, concentrated on those with violent criminal records, rather than those unfortunates caught in ordinary traditional sweeps. Lastly, in fighting those lawsuits against states who had given themselves over to for profit prison schemes based on a business model of victimizing any latino without papers on him/her, and the mini-dream act that Obama was able to do by regulatory means shows that at least he was looking for ways to make things work.

In short, Jorge Ramos, who is your friend? Someone who is in there swinging for you, or that guy that show disdain for half the nation while kow towing to the business that abuse us all?