regiskalkpaser's blog

Kendoll’s group calls for all undocumented immigrants to leave the United States immediately. Its uncompromising views have left the organization on the margin of many political debates in Salem.

But Kendoll has brought Oregonians for Immigration Reform to the brink of its biggest political victory in Oregon. She wants to be careful, because she knows how easily she might be misunderstood.She says she doesn’t know if the people next door are illegals, but she suspects her neighbors have routinely harbored some.

“Let me be clear,” she says, leaning over her plate of smoked mozzarella fonduta. “I’m not saying that they’re the only kind of people who don’t follow the laws. I’m saying that I hear hundreds of stories about neighborhoods being degraded.“We are told all the time that people come here and want to become Americans,” Kendoll adds. “I don’t think they’re interested in becoming U.S. citizens. It’s just an organized assault on our culture.”

The irony, of course, is that women who breast-fed in the 1970s say they were judged for being crunchy Earth mothers by those who gave the bottle. Now they are considered mainstream and judging formula feeders. Can’t we all just get along?Today I’m back at work, and sometimes I miss those maternity-leave baby yoga classes. I’m especially grateful for one thing I was told by the instructor, who overheard the fellow mommy-and-me-yogi lecturing me about breast-feeding.

“In a few years when they’re in preschool, you will never have to talk about breast-feeding again,” she said. “So don’t even think about it. Enjoy your baby. You earned it.”

“The message is clear, ‘If he can get Zhou, who can’t he get?’” says David Kelly of the research group China Policy in Beijing. Xi’s “new concept for China,” as state run Xinhua news service put it in August, runs “farther and wider than the outside world can imagine.” Xi refers to this as a great “rejuvenation.”

Xi has lavishly promoted a vision of a “China Dream” of wealth, status, and national pride that appeals to the urban middle class where he is very popular. It strikes a nationalist chord in a country that has long felt looked down on. Yet Xi is also implementing strict prohibitions found in party circular Document 9 of August 2013, also known as the “Seven No’s.”The manifesto calls on party faithful to stamp out free expression, foreign influences, or anything that faintly smells of democracy, transparency, or independent views.

In his own backyard, Xi has out-hardlined the hardliners: He clamped down with extra vigor on upstart ethnic Uighers in the far west Xinjiang Province. His messages to Taiwan about unity with the motherland are tougher. He deep-sixed Hong Kong’s hopes for free and fair elections in 2017 – something that has come back to bite him on the streets of that former British colony, Asia's financial hub.