Opinion

There’s a culture and spirit in the Rio Grande Valley that is felt by everyone — we are a strong and proud community, willing and able to endure and overcome whatever adversity might be thrown our way.

Three strikes, you’re out, Joe Biden.

Your Aug. 3 editorial, “What if: Cuba is rebuilding ties with Russia and China” correctly diagnoses the growing threat of Russia and China in the region, but then asks the question, “what if” the Obama thaw had continued? This is where the question of cause and effect arises.

In their commentary, “Texas does not understand power of immigrants” (July 28), Linda Corchado and Bob Sanborn state that immigrants are a positive in the U.S. because the “Immigrants annually contribute $119 billion to our Texas economy.”

When we Texans say “Happy Labor Day” or “Have a good Labor Day Weekend” this year, whom are we talking to? Surely, it’s not to laborers like those in whose honor the government officially adopted the holiday in 1894, as it was suppressing the Pullman workers strike — laborers doing the hard, dirty work and earning barely subsistence wages.

Another border operation, another questionable shooting, another example of why our continued use of military personnel is wrong for border operations — especially when those operations are only intended to win political points with voters who are afraid people who don’t look like they do.

Remember the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 when then-President James Monroe and the U.S. government saw the need to keep all European powers from further colonization in this hemisphere. What chutzpah! Here we were a new country and we were already setting rules and laws regarding this entire Western Hemisphere as if we owned it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently launched his latest bid to ban private health insurance and force all Americans into a government-run health plan

Donald Trump isn’t the first politician who refused to accept defeat, and he isn’t the first to face criminal conviction. He is, of course, the first president in this position — Richard Nixon resigned and was pardoned before formal charges were ever brought against him for his involvement in covering up a burglary of Democratic Party headquarters and other acts against political rivals.

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon in January 2018, Franklin Graham said the difference between Bill Clinton committing adultery as president and Donald Trump performing the same forbidden act before being elected to said office was that Trump’s sinful actions, according to Graham, “happened … 14 years ago and so I think there is a big difference and not that we give anybody a pass but we have to look at the timeline and that was before (Trump) was in office.”