'When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.' 
                                                                     --Leviticus 19:33-34

'I have never turned away a stranger, but have opened my doors to everyone.' 
                                                                                    --Job 31:32

'Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.'
                                                                          --Zechariah 7:10

'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
                                                                                                                                             --Matthew 25:40

'Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.'
                                                                                                                                            --Hebrews 13:2

Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah , the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler… 
                                                                                                             --The Holy Quran, Al-Baqarah 2:177

'You must come home with and be my guest; you will give joy to me, and I will do all that is in my power to honor you.' 
                                                                                                                                    --Percy Bysshe Shelley

'The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself to the service of others.' 
                                                                                                              --Gandhi

'Only a life lived for others is the life worth while.'
                                                                                   --Albert Einstein

'Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and we will tell them to get the hell out of our great country.'
                                                                                                                           --Donald Trump's America

One month on from the mass murder in Las Vegas, and the bump stock - that law-skirting piece of ingenuity that enables someone to turn a semi-automatic weapon into a de facto automatic weapon, enabling Stephen Paddock to murder 58 people and paralyze and wound hundreds more - is not only not illegal; it is back out there on the market. Way to go, NRA! 

As I continue to come down from last weekend's David Foster Wallace conference, I stumbled onto this Salon piece, reflecting upon Wallace's prescient forewarning regarding the seductive dangers of reality-TV culture, (if 'culture' in this instance is the right term). Like James Incandenza's film, Infinite Jest - a film that entertains its viewers to death - we are rapidly spectating ourselves into a nihilistic conflagration. One might wish to find solace in the fact that Trump's approval rating declines on a nearly daily basis, and that he is now sitting at record low support for any president at this point in their administration. Is this not, we might wonder, evidence that America is growing weary of the Reality-TV President? Yet, we risk missing the forest for the trees if we fail to see that Trump is merely part of a much larger problem - one player in the spectacular carnival of souls that daily constitutes our leisurely milieu. However low his numbers may be, we (and I speak from a first-person perspective) continue to watch. We tune in to find out what's new with the Russia investigation, we wait with bated breath to see which official he will inappropriately fire next, we laugh snarkily at his latest tweets, we cheer on the folks at CNN as they assume the mantra of political satire. We are no less enamored of the spectacle than we were two years ago - spectating ourselves to apocalypse.  

In attempting to 'drain the swamp,' Trump is considering and appointing only swamp-people.

After a nearly sleepless night, and after having to face my children this morning, I have no words of my own to describe what I'm feeling, and besides, others have already said it better than I ever could.

Van Jones: "How do I explain this to my children?"

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: "Today this former nation sent a message to the political establishment - and the nation's nonwhite populations - by electing Donald Trump. Instead of 30 years of leadership, we have a political neophyte who saw a gap in the political marketplace and sold himself as a racist who would avenge eight years of an African-American in the Oval Office. Instead of a former secretary of state, we have a man who knows little about foreign relations. Instead of a commander in chief, we have a man who insults our troops past and present, and a man so impulsive his campaign had to take his phone away from him to stop his destructive tweeting, as though he were a child. 

I feel great sadness and trepidation for America tonight. We are better than this. Our task as citizens will be to let Donald Trump know it, in the strongest possible terms." 

From CNN: "FBI: Review of New Emails Doesn't Change Conclusion on Clinton." 

I wonder if the media will spend as much time and energy trumpeting this headline as they did buzzing about Comey's irresponsible announcement concerning the new emails. Doubtful. The 'nothing to see here' headline isn't nearly as sexy as vague insinuations stoking the fires of distrust. 

Just read this article by Ben Domenech in the Federalist. 

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/14/blame-the-elites-for-the-trump-phenomenon/