Republicans and Immigration

What Congressman Smith and other Republicans propose for dealing with undocumented workers is just stomping on fire ants -- lots of motion but no action. Anyone who has lived in Texas for a summer knows that stomping on fire ants is ineffective, as are the Republican plans for building walls and increased border patrols. The effective solution for fire ants is systematic and tailored to the situation: bait and slow-acting poison. The effective solution for undocumented workers is to eliminate what they very naturally seek: jobs. These jobs, working for illegal employers, will attract undocumented workers over, under, or through the highest wall. Can you imagine building a wall around a fire ant bed? A fool's mission.

How do we systematically eliminate jobs from illegal employers? The way President Obama is quietly and effectively doing it now: send an IRS auditor into the businesses to look for signs of undocumented workers -- low and unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, unpaid payroll taxes. One agent can eliminate 50-100 illegal jobs in a day with no confrontations or family disruptions.

God gave us feet and a brain so we can move from barren land to fertile land -- immigration to improve one's lot in life is a natural act. No army can overcome it.

Why have we not heard Congressman Smith supporting the Presidents effective plan?

Since Mr. Smith almost certainly won't answer here, I'll answer for him:

 1) The Republicans don't want President Obama to succeed at anything (they have stated this). Such behavior by Congressman Smith, putting party over country, is not the behavior of a statesman leader.

 2) Many of the businesses that are illegal employers are run by Republicans. They don't really want to have their businesses audited and the jobs eliminated. "Stomping on the fire ants" helps to keep the undocumented workers scared and submissive -- and easily cheated out of wages.

 3) The Republicans seem to like lots of motion. Quiet, effective action isn't so thrilling, but the grand idea of building a wall for protection seems glorious -- as it has to civilization after civilization who forget history. And there's probably a Republican crony who's just waiting for the no-bid contract to build it at taxpayer expense.

Libertarian Utopia

Last night I dreamt I was in Libertarian Utopia again.

I was going to the local convenience store to get a newspaper. I opened the heavy steel gate we installed at the end of the driveway for protection and drove onto the toll road that goes by our neighborhood. As I approached the toll gate I saw Missy, the toll gate keeper and 15-year-old daughter of the man who owns the toll road. As usual, she carried an Uzi on a strap over her shoulder. I could see the bullet-hole-riddled burned-out carcasses of three cars nearby -- I guess those drivers didn't want to pay and Missy decided to enforce the toll the usual way. I also saw something new this time: despite the Uzi, Missy was wearing a stainless-steel chastity belt with a big lock on it. I had heard about roving bands of former Scouts turning into gang-rapists, but I didn't know they were in our area again. There's no law against it (there's no law against anything in Libertarian Utopia).

I gave Missy the token and headed on. As I drove off, I noticed that Missy went back into the booth and played with her dolls. She doesn't go to school and can't read -- her father figures she'll always have the income from the toll road and won't need to be educated. She'll eventually have babies with someone (there is no marriage here) and pass on the toll road to them.

Seeing I was getting low on tokens, I made a mental note to bring a chicken or two along with me the next time to barter for tokens at the marketplace. A cousin of Missy's runs a token-shop there -- he takes just about anything in trade for toll tokens and Missy's family eats it for dinner. There are no coins or paper money, so everything is done this way.

The road is not in good shape, so I was glad I was driving our SUV. The bridge over the creek had washed out a few months ago, but the toll road owner didn't want to fix it -- he saw nothing to gain from it. Everyone in the neighborhood had to use his road to get to and from their houses anyway. Missy's brothers and male cousins patrol the nearby land to keep people from going any other way in order to not pay the toll. They don't really "own" the land (there is no government to record ownership), but they patrol it regularly and have guns, so they might as well own it.

I got to the market and realized I hadn't brought anything small to barter for the paper, but it turned out not to matter. The paper had written a seething criticism of a local land-baron, and the baron's men had shot up the newspaper office and destroyed the presses. So much for "Freedom of the Press". The newspaper's security guards had been paid off well -- you could see them all driving around town in new cars. Even security is "free market" in Libertarian Utopia.

At this point in the dream I woke up in a sweat. I went outside and brought in the newspaper from the driveway -- on the front page was an article about pirates in Somalia. I thought, "I guess my libertarian friends would like it there -- they haven't had a functioning government in years."

How the Press can prevent another Iraq

Excellent article by Dan Froomkin:

Lessons we thought had been learned from Vietnam were forgotten in the rush to invade Iraq. And now, as we cover President Bush’s ratcheting up of the rhetoric against Iran, it’s looking like the lessons we should have learned from Iraq may not have been learned at all. So at the risk of stating the obvious, here are some thoughts about what those lessons were.

Public Funds for Private Schools

Conservatives are all about "private enterprise". Sucking the government tit is not "private enterprise".

Private enterprise is where you take some of your own money or the money of investors and put it at risk to build a business. You work to make your product or service offering better than your competitors' offerings so that customers will spend their own hard-earned dollars with your business. I strongly support this.

Voucher supporters like to fool themselves into believing that market incentives that exist in private enterprise also apply to taxpayer funded business, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The incentives for a voucher supported school will be #1: get the students in with whatever glitz it takes. #2: spend as little money on them as possible. We've seen these in action with some charter schools already. Perhaps incentive #3 is to skip town with the profits.

Electing politicians who will route taxpayer dollars your way is not private enterprise. Often it's just corruption. You only have to look at defense and highway contractors to understand what happens when government money is floating around: $800 hammers, $1000 toilets, cost overruns, lined pockets, and Aspen vacation homes for the owners. Can you imagine the opportunities for corruption when each student brings in $4000 and there's no accountability to the laws and codes that apply to public schools?

Bush knew

I knew he new. I'd read the released October 2002 NIE myself. Now we know Bush knew.

lie, n. 1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood. 2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.

Saving Face for Bush

What do y'all think about my new idea for a bumper sticker:

"How many more corporals have to die to save face for Bush?"

I heard a snippet from an interview with a Vietnam Vet this afternoon on All Things Considered. He was taking the position that any call for troop withdrawal gives hope to the enemy, and the situation will end up like Vietnam, where a million Vietnamese people were killed after we pulled out. He can't remember the reason we were in Vietnam, but says the Iraq war is different and he doesn't want the 2075-and-counting deaths to "be in vain".
So I started thinking about it and realized that whatever our reasons for entering the Iraq War were, the current troop placement is really just about saving face for Bush.
How many more Specialist Casey Sheehan's have to die to save face for Bush?
How many more Lance Corporal Scott A. Zubowski's does it take?
How many more Staff Sergeant Jason A. Fegler's does it take?

The Truth vs. What Bush says

Clear enough.

Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials

What do we know?
There were no WMDs in Iraq before the war. They weren't moved out or hidden, either. (2004 Report of the Iraq Survey Group).
The Bush Administration said there were. See the long list of quotes in my previous post.
Bush had intelligence that said there was little evidence of nuclear weapons development in Iraq. The National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 was released (in part) by the Bush Administration after the full occupation had found no evidence of WMDs. A note in the NIE from the State Department's INR said there was little evidence of nuclear development in Iraq and that the intelligence other agencies were using was known to be bogus.
The Bush Administration pressured intelligence agents to change their reports on WMDs. We had testimony before Congress during the Bolton confirmation hearings that John Bolton had tried to transfer or dismiss an agent who wouldn't change his report on Cuban WMDs to suit the Administration's position. We also know that Cheney had unprecidented meetings with the CIA. His meer presence amounts to pressure.
Contrary to what Bush says, Congress didn't have access to the intelligence that the Bush Administration did. In the first year of the administration, they had the CIA change the rules as to who in Congress was cleared to receive secret reports, limiting this priviledge to eight leaders. Given that ALL intelligence is collected and analyzed by the Exectutive Branch before going to Congress, the information Congress received was easily shaped to fit whatever message the Bush Administration wanted them to see.
The Bush Adminstration acted to stamp-out any and all opposition to their claims of Iraq WMDs. Valerie Plame was one victim. We know Libby and Rove were directly involved, and it's starting to look like Cheney, Rice, and Hadley had knowledge of the attack. When it takes so much effort to keep a story up, the story is probably a lie.

Lamar Smith's speech on Judicial Activism

Congressman Lamar Smith : 21st District of Texas: Did Lamar Smith fail U.S. History and Government in school?

Certainly he would have been taught that one of the primary reasons people immigrated to these lands was to escape the established government religions of the day! And certainly he would have studied Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that gives our courts the authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws. And certainly at least one of his teachers would have pointed out that the Bill of Rights protects the rights of individuals -- especially those in the minority -- from the power of the majority who control the government. Maybe Mr. Smith was on a trip with Tom DeLay when his classes covered these topics.

The school administrators who instituted these anti-religious policies inevitably cite the “separation of church and state” as if it were a Constitutional phrase. It is not. The phrase appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, assuring them that Congress would not establish a Federal religion.

It the phrase "Holy Trinity" in the Bible? No, but certainly Mr. Smith would acknowledge that the concept is there. The phrase is used as a commonly understood abbreviation, as "the separation of church and state" is used to abbreviate the First Amendment and supporting rulings made by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Smith apparently doesn't understand what Baptists have understood since before Thomas Jefferson's letter to Connecticut -- it is wrong for the power of the government, in any form, at any level, to be used to force a religious view on the people. One only has to apply the "walk a mile in another's shoes" test to see the problem: What if all of the teachers in a San Antonio public school were Muslim and had the authority to require students to pray to Allah five times a day? What if Hindus became the majority in Congress and changed the Pledge of Allegiance to be "under Vishnu"?

Mr Smith says, "The purpose of the First Amendment was to rule out the establishment of a particular religion and to prohibit the government from discriminating against one religion by favoring another. It was never intended to mandate that government ban religious expressions."

I say that in addition it requires that no government authority can be used to force any religion of any kind on the people and that no power to tax can be used to support religion.

Rulings by our courts have been intended only to ban religious expressions by government agents or with government backing. A teacher in a public school is a tax-supported government agent with authority and power over students. Any expression of religion by a public school teacher while "on duty" is a violation to the rights of the students present to be free of coercion in this way.

Fortunately, our courts have "activist" judges who will protect the minority from the majority.

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast The only head that rolled in Bush's administration just had a Medal of Freedom wrapped around its neck.