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About this blog: I am a native of Alameda County, grew up in Pleasanton and currently live in the house I grew up in that is more than 100 years old. I spent 39 years in the daily newspaper business and wrote a column for more than 25 years in add...  (More)

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Two stories of Ukraine

Uploaded: Mar 29, 2022

Following on Ukraine with good news and bad news.
A month ago, I wrote about a Ukrainian woman who worked for a construction company repairing my home. At the time after Russia had invaded, she was planning to travel to Ukraine to help her elderly mother get out of the country from the city in east where she lived. She didn’t have details, but was planning to figure it out and go quickly. She has a sister with small children who lives in Israel and Libi was single so she figured she would have to go.
Turned out that her sister was able to get her mother a ticket on a bus to Lviv and she was able to go from there to Poland and then onto Israel. Great news—displaced, but safe with family.
It was not the case for a Ukrainian couple that my friend Kate Runyon met on a Hawaiian cruise this winter. You may remember Kate from her service on the Livermore school board and the education foundation prior to her election. We met when I was helping the foundation pull together funding when the district was really struggling financially in the early 2000s.
Kate and her husband, Dave, love to cruise and have taken 20 or more as Kate related to me in a recent phone call. She’d reached out because she figured I would know some area restauranteurs who could use some good help. The husband was as fine a server as she said she’d ever encountered and his wife was also employed on the ship.
The cruise was scheduled to end in San Francisco and their employment contract was up. Kate had offered bedrooms in her Livermore home. Since her kids grew up and left, she and Dave had plenty of room in their spacious home. She thought they could figure out the immigration issues once the couple was temporarily settled here.
So much for plans.
As Kate wrote on her Facebook page March 23, “I am not proud of my country today. Some of you know that we took a cruise and our superb waiter was from Ukraine. They were due to return to Ukraine this week. They were leaving from the port of San Francisco on Sunday. They were in a very bad situation. We have several empty rooms since the kids grew up and moved away. We offered those rooms to Taras and his wife who also works on the ship.
“But our government is not letting Ukrainians off ships in US ports. It is shameful. When you look at all the people let into Poland. It is APPALLING that we are not doing our part to help people fleeing the violence.
They are leaving the ship in Mexico, and going to Poland. They don’t even speak Polish. They speak excellent English. To Taras, Ivanka, and Maria I am so very sorry.”

If I recall correctly, President Biden announced last week that his administration would admit 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. Here were two—or more on that cruise ship—that could have immediately been relocated here without the challenges of moving people from Poland or other eastern European countries.

Compare that policy with whatever passes for “policy” with the wide-open southern border or the flood of Afghan refugees—driven by the Biden administration’s horrible execution of bailing out of their country.

I agree with Kate’s view, although I’d clarify that it’s the administration in power that is failing, not the United States people.

Democracy.
What is it worth to you?

Comments

Posted by Rich Buckley, a resident of Livermore,
on Mar 29, 2022 at 8:48 am

Rich Buckley is a registered user.

US ON WRONG SIDE OF THIS WAR

Humanitarian aid is needed of course. That is not my point. An army staged to invade, take and hold territory would use a 3 to 1 ratio to Ukraine's 350,000 standing army. Russia has deployed only 200,000. You think Russian generals are that stupid if the objective is to take and hold Ukraine? This is a scalable police action, not total war. The Russians obviously are doing exactly what they warned they would do for the past 8 years. Russia sees the controlling Nazi Khazarian-Mafia [KM] faction of the Ukrainian army as an existential threat, much as your grandfather's in WW2 realized, witnessed and understood.

This ancient Nazi Khazarian-Mafia [KM] faction goes way back hundreds of years. They are the epicenter of evil in the world that have controlled media, banking, militaries, and captured Congress and a huge military industrial complex. They are known as the ancient Name Stealers, the Khazarian-Mafia [KM]. Web Link">Web Link They lie about everything to everybody..., get in the showers and stop yelling, we are just going to disinfect you! Oh, don't worry about Nazi Ukrainian extremists today, we removed the extremists from reigns of power. Why? Well we control Selenskyy.

Try some Col. Scott Ritter recently interviewed on Grayzone, or Col. Doug Macgreagor Web Link">Web Link

This is all about the economy. War is the diversion. The [KM] will do anything to divert attention from it's final stage collapse.

NATO?Proxy-Ukraine has been training 5 battalions a year to NATO standards in Western Ukraine for years, then shipping these battalions off to Eastern Ukraine to shell and kill the 70% historic Russian population along the Eastern edge of Ukraine. This area is historic Russian land right down to and including Crimea going back hundreds of years. Sempre Fi ... Don't Look Up.


Posted by Rich Buckley, a resident of Livermore,
on Mar 29, 2022 at 9:58 am

Rich Buckley is a registered user.

The two blocked links above are:
 
(1) "Try some Col. Scott Ritter recently interviewed on Grayzone, or Col. Doug Macgreager" Web Link

coded as hotel tango tango papa sierra colon slash slash youtu dot be slash letter O S k p l q 3 T dash Z c 

(2)  "They are known as the ancient Name Stealers, the Khazarian-Mafia [KM]."  Web Link

coded as hotel tango tango papa sierra colon slash slash whiskey whiskey whiskey dot bitchute dot charlie oscar mike slash video slash z M 8 y V o 2 5 k n f 6 slash 

Sempre Fi ... Don't Look Up


Posted by Lahommed, a resident of Dublin,
on Mar 29, 2022 at 10:01 am

Lahommed is a registered user.

If President Trump were in office not Biden there would be no Illegal, immigration problems. no conflict in the Ukraine. Food and gas prices would be normal not the insanity we witness today. Peace would be the focus around the world. People would see the economy much better and jobs filled with workers. in less than 2 years Biden has nearly crippled America. There are consequences for poor choices at the ballot box. America has lost her ability to see good vs evil. America is in trouble and yes like every great empire before her America can and will fall if we the people sit by and do nothing!


Posted by Malcolm Hex, a resident of San Ramon,
on Mar 31, 2022 at 12:28 am

Malcolm Hex is a registered user.

From the Jerusalem Post:

The antisemitic conspiracy films floating about YouTube have names like “The House of Rothschild: Khazarian Mafia Pretending to Be Jews" or “Zionist Conspiracy a.k.a. Fake Jews (Synagogue of Satan)."

From the ADL:

Some allege that the war itself is orchestrated by Jews for both financial control and global prowess. Others refer to the “Khazarian Mafia" or the “Khazarian invasion" to justify and even celebrate Russia's invasion. This conspiracy alludes to the belief that modern Eastern European Jewry descended from a people known as the Khazars, who allegedly converted to Judaism in the eighth century and lived in present-day Ukraine. Believers claim Putin's incursion into Ukraine was a means to help the country counter/dispel an invasion of “Khazar Jews."

These conspiracy theories, and the people who believe in them, are very special.



Posted by Rich Buckley, a resident of Livermore,
on Mar 31, 2022 at 2:35 pm

Rich Buckley is a registered user.


Here is the link to deep historic understanding on what's going on.

Web Link

coded as hotel hotel poppa sierra colon slash slash tinyurl dot com slash 2p8feuwx

Don't look up! Sempre Fi.


Posted by RobertD., a resident of Bridle Creek,
on Apr 2, 2022 at 2:10 pm

RobertD. is a registered user.

Tim, Are you and Kate saying that we should give priority to these two Ukrainians who worked on a cruise ship instead of the ones whose homes have been destroyed and families whose husbands/ fathers cannot leave Ukraine because they have to stay to fight the Russians? We don't even know the details of their passports and visas from a legal perspective. So, I would say that you are jumping into conclusions very quickly to blame the Biden administration for the fate of these two people.

And, to make it worse, you complain about thousands of Afghans coming the US. There are many white Christian conservatives who would rather have white European Christian immigrants than brown ones especially Muslims from Afghanistan. I am not saying you are one of them, but your blog makes it sound that way and dog whistle to people who think that way. Other people see right through this, which is why religion, especially Christianity is in huge decline.


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