How Immigration Stimulates Economy: Case In Point

This article gives a case where immigrants literally saved a town in Maine - by stimulating their economy. How?

Barely a decade ago, Lewiston, Maine, was dying. The once bustling mill town's population had been shrinking since the 1970s; most jobs had vanished long before, and residents (those who hadn't already fled) called the decaying center of town "the combat zone." That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace. Since then, the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped. In 2004, Inc. magazine named Lewiston one of the best places to do business in America, and in 2007, it was named an "All-America City" by the National Civic League, the first time any town in Maine had received that honor in roughly 40 years. "No one could have dreamed this," says Chip Morrison, the local Chamber of Commerce president. "Not even me, and I'm an optimist."

It's not just that Maine has a low birth rate. Why does it have a low birth rate? Lack of diversity. So it's not just people, but people of diverse backgrounds, that stimulates the economy. Think Obama. Think immigration, too.

Commerce isn't all the Somalis are reshaping. Maine has America's highest median age and the lowest percentage of residents under 18. Throughout the 1990s, the state's population of 20- to 30-year-olds fell an average of 3,000 a year. Demographers predict that by 2030, the state will have only two workers for each retiree. "In many small Maine towns they're looking at having to close schools for lack of schoolchildren," says State Economist Catherine Reilly. "It will snowball. Right now we're seeing the difficulty of keeping some schools open; in 10 or 15 years that's going to be the difficulty of businesses finding workers." The same ominous trend is seen in other states with similarly homogenous demographics and low numbers of foreign-born residents—states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Reilly adds: "If you told a demographer just our racial composition, they would be able to guess that we're an old state with a low birthrate."

Want to do something really patriotic, good for America? Encourage immigration.

Take that, Lou Dobbs!

Reid: Immigration Reform Will Be EZ under Obama

According to Harry Reid in an interview with Gannett, President-elect Obama and former rival Sen. John McCain already agree on immigration reform, and Congress is likely not to put up a fight on this one, saving their sabers for health care reform. Sounds good, but we'll see what comes down later.

Two-Thirds of Americans in "Constitution-Free" Zones

Let's hope this post becomes a blockbuster, and wakes up America.

The government is turning vast swaths of our country into a "Constitution-Free Zone" in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is allowed to exercise extraordinary authority that would not normally be permitted under the Constitution. The government says that "the border" — where there is a longstanding view that the Constitution does not fully apply — actually stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s "external boundary." And increasingly, we are seeing DHS vigorously utilize that authority.

Now what exactly is in that "external boundary"? Maybe you are, since

nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population live within this "Constitution-Free Zone." That’s 197.4 million people.

Even inland

We calculated this using the most recent, 2007 numbers from the U.S. Census, and released a map showing the cities and states that are enveloped by this zone. It includes some of the largest metropolitan areas in the country: New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. States that are completely within this Constitution-Free Zone include Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. When you say "border," they think "all of New England."

CBP has been setting up checkpoints far inland— on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminalsin Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. People are also reporting that even after they provide passports or state driver’s licenses, CBP continues to interrogate them and try to pressure them into permitting a search.

For example,

Craig Johnson, a music professor at a San Diego college, told how he participated in a peaceful demonstration near the border to protest against the destruction of a state park so that offense could be constructed along the U.S. border. CBP agents monitored the protest and collected the license plate information of those who participated. Since this protest, Mr. Johnson has twice crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and, each time, he has been pulled aside for additional screening. He was taken to another room, handcuffed and questioned. On his first crossing, he was also partially stripped and subjected to a body cavity search. A CBP agent also told Mr. Johnson that he was on an "armed and dangerous" list. Before the protest, Mr. Johnson crossed the U.S.-Mexico border numerous times without incident. It is difficult to believe that his subsequent harassment at the border is unrelated to his protest activity. If it is related, that would constitute a significant abuse.

The part of the Constitution most significantly violated here would be the Fourth Amendment against unwarranted searches and seizures. Do you really think the "immigration problem" will be solved by dissolving the Constitution in selected areas? Is the freedom of Americans worth ditching in order to supposedly police our country from people who mostly are migrant workers that our economy actually benefits from? Are we so bankrupt of ideas that living in fear is preferable to making laws that work practically to solve our problems? Well, it's hard to have ideas when you're having a nervous breakdown, as Lou Dobbs would have prefer.

Especially now in the hyped-up climate where Fear of Terrorism is supposed to penetrate every cell of our flag-wrapped bodies, do we really want Fear to take precedence over ... liberty and freedom??? Fear, pray tell, of what? Fear of ... oh, yeah, fear of losing our liberty and freedom.

What sense does that make???

Debates Ignore 12 Million People: Where's the Discussion of Immigration?

There may be a lot of reasons for this, but isn't it absurd that the Presidential debates have so far totally ignored the issue of immigration? Is that because it's too hot-button? Or because they hope they can get elected without dealing with it? Angela Kelley brings this issue up:

Latino community to immigration advocates to probing journalists have been eagerly awaiting to hear more about what the two candidates plan to do about the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. To date, they've heard very little.

Are the candidates afraid that this will explode in their faces?

Our immigration problem isn't going to disappear just by not talking about it. As Barack Obama and John McCain were preparing for their debate last night, 300 workers were rounded up in an immigration raid at a chicken processing plant in South Carolina. In fact, as the two candidates were taking shots at one another, we can guess about 100 children in South Carolina--both citizens and non-citizens--were still left stranded, not knowing where their parents were or when they would see them again.

Obama and McCain haven't been afraid to talk about who is to blame for the demise of 2007's immigration bill. In dueling Spanish-language ads, McCain has unfairly accused Obama of trying to block the major immigration bill that he supported. Obama retaliated with an equally questionable ad tying McCain to immigration hardliners like Rush Limbaugh who McCain has generally stood up to. Yet amidst all of this finger-pointing, neither candidate has adequately addressed the bottom line: what would they do, as president, to fix our broken immigration system?

I discussed this back-and-forth earlier and disagree that Obama's ad was "equally questionable", but do agree that the candidates have not given any specifics or made themselves very clear on the issue.

Nonetheless, Obama's general approach to politics appears that it has more compassion and therefore will do a better job, if compassion is still included, of dealing with migrant issues humanely and in a balanced way without getting sidetracked by hate-mongering extremists.

So there are 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
That's no small number.

So why don't the candidates address the issues involving those 12 million people?

• What is realistic and what should be done about the 12 million immigrants here in the U.S. without papers?
• What should be done with the employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers, take advantage of them, and undercut their competitors: what should be done about them?
• Opponents of reform say anything that provides legal status to those here illegally is amnesty: how do you define amnesty? Do you support amnesty? If not, what do you support?
• How do you make sure that we actually solve the problem rather than pass reforms that perpetuate the problem and lead to another 12 million coming in illegally in the future?

Actually, then, there's more than 12 million people involved: there's the Latino vote, significant in swing states, involved.

With anti-immigrant fervor plaguing Latinos--both citizen and non-citizen--immigration has become one of the most pressing issues for Latino voters. That's why you'd think that the two camps would be eager to win over the unprecedented number of Latinos prepared to vote for the first time in battle ground states by sharing their solutions to our immigration system breakdown and not tip-toeing past the 12 million elephants in the room.

Could someone answer why this critical voting bloc is essentially being ignored on a key issue that actually affects all Americans? It is a critical factor to the economy - the labor issue - and at the same time it is a moral issue - mistreatment of undocumented migrants is unconscionable, especially when it goes under the guise of "patriotism". Where is "liberty and justice for all" when not having certain papers is equated with crimes like theft and murder? The anti-immigration backlash is just another facet of the Grand Old Party's legacy of hate and division painted over with the colors of a flag.

McCain Speaks With Forked Tongue: One English and Its Opposite Spanish

The Republican Party says, in English:
"We oppose amnesty. The rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activity. The American people's rejection of en masse legalizations is especially appropriate given the federal government's past failures to enforce the law."


But in Spanish, they say (translated):

"[Barack] Obama and his congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants. But are they? The press reports their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail. The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies: Ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

So which is it?

CNN's Ruben Navarrette Jr. says
the McCain ad "hits the target" while Obama's attempt at courting Hispanic voters "misses". His reasoning is that the above quote from their Spanish ad gives "facts" while the Obama ad, he claims, is more vague and accusatory, stating: "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that lies just to get our vote, and another, even worse, that continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families."

Well, what's untrue about that? Navarette claims that Obama's ad ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh, but I don't see where it does. On the other hand, Huffpo's Frank Sharry says:

First, Sen. John McCain was for reform - championing a bipartisan, comprehensive immigration bill with courage and leadership until it collapsed in the summer of 2007. Then, with Republican primary voters in a surly mood toward immigrants, he changed his position, saying that he wouldn't support his own reform bill when competing for the Republican nomination.

Now, the McCain campaign has launched Spanish language attack ads making the outrageous claim that Senator Obama and the Democrats blocked comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.

If you're trying to follow along at home, let's summarize: Senator McCain - in English - is now saying that he wouldn't support the comprehensive immigration bill he once co-authored with Senator Ted Kennedy, a bill that he previously voted for. Senator McCain's campaign - in Spanish -- is now attacking Obama for blocking a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007, a bill that Senator Obama voted for.

As to Navarette's defense of McCain's ad and his attack on Dems for supposedly "killing" the Immigration Bill,

From the English ads, it appears that McCain really does speak with forked tongue: one fork in English to dish up anti-immigration sentiment to the white folks, and one fork serving pro-immigration fare to Latinos. McCain, you can't have it both ways. People have the right to know where the candidates really stand. The only language we want to hear is the truth.

Undocumented Migrants Don't Evacuate Ike, Fear Ice Prisons

Even though there has been a declared "hurricane amnesty" for undocumented workers in Texas, even though the National Weather Service has issued a "certain death" evacuation order, many migrant workers are afraid to evacuate. ICE, the police arm of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security), has been known to deport people even after Michael Chertoff assured people they wouldn't be picked up for evacuating. ICE, as migrants will tell you, has a will of its own, an agenda.

An agenda like all of the DHS, where humanitarian considerations often take last place to the heavy-handed mandate for Security, fanned by "patriotic"-labeled mania and panic. So what's happened to those people?

It's happened before. As reported on Democracy Now!:

"...earlier this summer, despite assurances to the contrary from Department of Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, Border Patrol agents kept open checkpoints and apprehended a van of people trying to evacuate from Hurricane Dolly. Last month, many undocumented immigrants in New Orleans did not evacuate during Hurricane Gustav due to deportation concerns."

As one of the Immigration Rights demonstraters at the DNC in Denver said:

In May of this year, ICE went in and rounded up about 300 to 400 workers, and right now the town has become a virtual prison for the women and the children. They can’t leave, and they can’t work.

So the fear is more than just being deported, which is bad enough, but of having whole families imprisoned as they have done in Texas, or of otherwise having their families broken up or being deprived of freedom or means of making a living.

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interviewed David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. When Goodman mentioned the largest immigrant raid in US history just before the Democratic National convention, in which hundreds of people were rounded up, this discussion ensued:

DAVID BACON: That’s right, in Laurel, Mississippi. And then, what got even less coverage was that they took 481 people, and they put them in a detention center in Jena, Louisiana and just sort of left them there— AMY GOODMAN: In Jena.
DAVID BACON: —for two weeks. In Jena, right.
AMY GOODMAN: The Jena Six.
DAVID BACON: Right. In fact, that detention center is probably the biggest single, you know, source of employment for people who live in Jena now. But the problem with those workers is that they were—you know, there was no habeas corpus, there was no bail. There weren’t even any charges against those people for two weeks. It’s kind of like creating, I think, a Guantanamo-style of justice or injustice that’s excused because it’s being directed—you know, ICE mentions the word “illegal,” and then all kinds of things become permissible that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.

Bacon later discusses the government's motivation behind these raids, which have created an atmosphere of fear in immigrant communities.

I think the government has an agenda here. In fact, it’s pretty open. Michael Chertoff keeps saying it over and over and over, and that is that he says we’re going to shut the back door and open the front door. And what that means is that ICE is trying to push for the establishment of new guest worker programs, so that people can come here as workers, but only as workers, without rights, without eventually getting political rights, without becoming citizens, certainly without voting, but whose labor is going to be used in the economy. And so, these raids are a way of terrorizing people and saying to people: don’t think that you’re going to be able to come to the United States; don’t think that you’re going to be able to work in any other way other than through these programs.

So it's about more than simply "protecting our borders" or even "protecting our culture". It's about bringing in people not as equals, not as immigrants, but as a "worker class" who cannot have and enjoy the same rights "the rest of us" do. It's not about documentation or even assimilation, but about keeping the slavery-level work force at the same cheap rates but without the legal hassles.

The comprehensive immigration bills that we saw in Congress in a lot of ways were labor supply bills. These were bills that were really intended to supply guest workers to industry and then an enforcement program to kind of drive workers into those programs.

So, the difference of opinion, I think in the Democratic Party, especially, is between people who sponsored those programs and other people like Sheila Jackson-Lee, the congresswoman from Houston, who said instead of having a guest worker program, what we need is people to be able to come here with green cards and with permanent residence visas.

And also, the thing I think that she said that was really a pioneering idea, and that was that we also need a jobs program. We need to couple immigration reform with jobs programs. So she said, let’s take the fees that people pay when they’re normalizing their status and use that to set up job creation and job training programs in communities with high unemployment, so that all communities can have some kind of benefit out of these bills. You know, these labor supply bills, comprehensive immigration reform bills, what they do is they pit communities against each other over jobs, over wages and so forth.

Bacon also takes this observation a step further - blaming it on international trade agreements that screw the people on the non-supply-side, the workers and farmers of the world.

NAFTA allowed big US grain companies to dump corn on the Mexican market, which essentially made it impossible for small Mexican farmers to sell their corn that they were growing for a price that would pay for the cost of growing it. So you can’t farm any longer. What do you do? You have to support your family some way. And so, people become part of this migrant stream coming to the United States.
And it’s not just the US. I mean, these structural adjustment programs, trade agreements, it’s happening all over the world. There are 200 million people in the world who are living outside the countries where they were born.

So, you know, Congress passes these agreements, which sort of push people into migration, and then immigration bills, which are essentially trying to ensure that their labor gets supplied to corporations at the lowest possible price and that people have the fewest possible rights.

Where will this end? It would help if people understood the issues better. But as we've seen with Sarah Palin, wisdom and understanding are often trumped by loud aggressive voices and sound-bites that feed into peoples' prejudices. Ultimately, though, what America stands for, or thinks/hopes it stands for - freedom and justice - requires replacing simplistic "patriotism" with higher values that include giving a damn about what happens to our species, our planet, and who, in fact, we are.

Woman Gives Birth Under Torture: Homeland Security Hell

Is Naomi Wolf's predicted "fascist shift" accelerating, using the anti-migrant controversy as another "facilitating issue"?

As The NYT reported Sunday, a simple traffic stop of Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, turned into another case of Homeland Security Hell, of criminalizing poverty or the "crime" of not having "proper paperwork", in this case by torture.

But this was first reported at Political Salsa on June 13th by Tim Chavez, who heard her and described the torture, reminding him of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It seems the war supposedly started to combat terrorism has now come home to torment anyone without the right paperwork: without papers, they're demons...
But is this even more sinister??

And so that - or what? - justifies this:

* A woman, three days before delivery of her fourth AMERICAN child, was wrongly arrested and incarcerated.

* Her water broke while she was in jail; she was transported to Metro General Hospital.

* When the nurse asked her to undress to get into hospital clothes, the sheriff's guard was asked to leave for the moment. He -- yes, he -- refused. So she had to undress in front of him. I don't know about your culture, but in the Mexican culture and Mexican-American culture, that is a highly offensive affront to our women, no to mention our mothers.

* Then, while in labor, she was handcuffed by her wrist and ankle to the bed. I've seen women in labor, and they constantly are shifting positions to try and get some sense of relief, if that is even possible. Now consider the pain if handcuffs prevented your movement.

* Thankfully, the handcuffs were taken off two hours before she delivered. But then she was restrained again in bed a day later. And every trip to the bathroom required leg shackles. When the nurse strongly objected, the sherrif's department stayed absolute. The nurse said the new mother would not be able to clean herself properly with shackles. The sheriff's guard said it didn't matter; he was doing his job.

Didn't we hear that excuse before at Nuremberg? Never forget; we still hardly remember. Our Jewish brothers and sisters deserve better from us.

* It also didn't matter if the baby received the critical mother's milk in its first days of life. The child was removed from its mother, and Ms. DeLaPaz was returned to jail.

* The final injury inflicted upon this CIVIL/MISDEMEANOR offender was the denial of her use of a breast pump to express her milk for the baby and her own comfort. The nurse again strongly objected, but the sheriff's department again played law enforcer, physician and God.

* Ms. DeLaPaz returned to her jail cell in great pain from her swollen breasts. She could not sleep due to the agony.

* Meanwhile, her infant son was taken to a pediatrican. There he was tested and found to have a blood level containing a high measurement of a dangerous chemical that produces jaundice, a yellowing of the skin. My father had jaundice before he died of cancer, so the condition denotes the medical seriousness of the moment.

The child's condition was due to a lack of mother's milk.

When the government can keep a mother from her newborn infant and prevent the baby from being breastfed because of some law, the law itself creates a crime. When being or appearing to be Hispanic leads to criminal investigation after a traffic stop, something is racist and wrong. When xenophobia creates anti-migration laws so draconian they criminalize what was once a civil matter, we end up with Homeland Security Hell.

"Illegal immigration" is violation of paperwork, not an act against another person. It was always civil, until manic Republicans criminalized it. And so human beings are fodder for someone's paranoid insanity-created law. The law itself becomes a source for inhumanity and crime.

Welcome to Homeland Security Hell.

The NYT sees it as a problem created locally by cooperation between local and federal authorities, and didn't specifically call it "torture":

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

But in fact it goes much deeper. ICE is the enforcement arm of the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security). Under the anti-terrorist federal overhaul and the creation of the DHS, there is a mandate to "bring people in" in order to stay funded. This started with Gitmo and renditions and has, as Naomi Wolf predicted, come home to a town hear you. It's the ideology where We Americans are the Good Guys that need to Lock Up the Other Non-Americans, the Bad Guys. It starts with terror suspects, expands into immigrants, and catches stray "liberals" and other "dangerous" types. Soon, as Tim Chavez pointed out,

But beware, if your wife unknowingly is driving through a part of Berry Hill. And with her dark hair and new tan she got at Destin, she may look Hispanic from a distance.

Just pray that she isn't pregnant and about to deliver. Don't let her drive in Nashville after the fifth month of pregnancy just to be on the safe side. For sure, keep her out of south Nashville and ultimately out of the hands of Sheriff Daron Hall's department.

Viewed in light of Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America in Ten Easy Steps", the incident is even more ominous. Carolyn Baker, in her review of Wolf's book The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot discusses this aspect of the overall change in law enforcement techniques, which seems not to be limited to only "287G", as the NYT would like us to believe:

Some of my students who are criminal justice majors tell me that the latest strategies now being taught to police officers are "shock doctrine" techniques which terrorize and intimidate civilians in order to control them. Law enforcement officers are no longer encouraged to "keep a cool head" but to "follow their own instincts" (which usually means their own internal, adrenaline-charged state of terror) and react with full force because it's easier to apologize (or encounter a lawsuit) than to ask permission or risk being killed. Terrified people should not be wearing a badge and carrying a gun, and when they are, a fully terrorized society is guaranteed.

It could be ... Los Angeles? New Jersey? Miami? Omaha? Why not? Every town now has a Joint Terrorist Task Force and an ICE team, looking for some suspects to round up. The rules that apply here are "protect Us." And "lock up Them."

And who are "them"?
Them "R" Us.

Is the Anti-Immigration Movement Really a New Racist Movement?? Looks like a Resounding "YES"

This incident says it all: A Minuteman on the front lines of the anti-immigration movement, a republican phenom, saying "Fuck You, Brown Boy!"...

As Kyle de Beausset said in his report on the crowd outside where Obama was giving a speech in San Diego at the annual National Council of La Raza (NCLR) conference where the incident took place (from one of the San Diego Minutemen, an anti-immigration group),

Just as I was about to turn away from filming a man holding a sign of a boy urinating on the phrase "La Raza", I heard him begin to chant, "Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy." The San Diego Minuteman supporter was walking up a ramp to the convention center and was speaking to another full-grown man that looked to be of latino descent to me.

They were supposedly "protesting" La Raza's "racism" using racist epithets...!?!

Some will see the above incident as the fault of a fringe lunatic, who supports a fringe organization, but as anyone who blogs about migration can attest, hateful rhetoric like this has poisoned almost every online forum that takes up the subject. Any newspaper article that dares even suggest that unauthorized migrants are human quickly fills up with hate like this in the comment section. Even the mainstream progressive blogosphere is filled with hate like this. Look no further than Alternet's special immigration section for evidence of that.

This hate is degrading the U.S.'s democracy, and preventing the U.S. from arriving at a meaningful solution to the issues associated with migration. I live and breathe the U.S. migration debate. And even for someone like myself, who is very familiar with the U.S.'s history oppression, I find myself living in disbelief over the suffering of that millions of authorized and unauthorized migrants have to live through every day in the United States.

And as we all know from even W.'s attempt at Immigration reform, the racism and fear provides a lot of right-wing steam attacking this amorphous non-WASP "threat" that is undermining their livelihood and that of Lou Dobbs, who has solved all the economic problems facing the nation with the simple, symbolic concept of building a huge, impenetrable Wall against the Other.

Problems begin when that very wall and all it symbolizes undermines what America has always symbolized: democracy, freedom, and compassion. So much for those dreams - hate is much more compelling for an apparently vocal, mostly Republican, "interest group".

Immigration & Lou Dobbs' "I have a nightmare" Speech

Bridgethought of the Day: When the going gets emotional, the emotional get lost.

Two facts you must know, and know well:
Immigration is not just an "emotional hot-button issue" rated Rx, it is all about emotions. Those emotions are, to wit: a) fear; and b) terror.

Lou Dobbs has always been The Bastion of sound, sane, reliable, reasonable, & conservative advice on the one subject of prime concern among all conservatives, i.e., Money.

Add 1 + 2 and you get: 3. A blithering fool.

Yes, fear also has its chemistry - powerful stuff, that - and the neocons, as well as the traditiocons and establicons, are the alchemists, providing you plenty of fears to gnash your virtual teeth on well into the 43rd Century. But fortunately, they're saving you the $ & trouble by working hard to bring you Armageddon long before that - say, 2012 by my ... ah.. calculations.

But enough blabbering. Let's get right to the blithering, which, according to the price tag on Paris Hilton's trip-to-jail photo, is what we value most. You see, what turned our Financial Stability Hero, Lou Dobbs, into Hearts on Fire is Immigration, and almost everything morally wrong and disgusting emanates therefrom.

People give credit to our Congress in Inaction for the failure to come up with a solution to the Immigration Hot-Button Issue, but we should never dismiss the unfailing efforts of the tireless and indefatigable Lou Dobbs to deprive George Bush of even One Final Success to offset the failure of his War Without End Amen Policy.

His stirring "I Have a Nightmare" Speech certainly sets the stage for all Americans to work up a fear so intense it almost, but not quite, rivals the much-touted Fear of Death and Fear of the death of loved ones by starvation, or their torture by poverty and other disasters that are behind much of the "illegal aliens"' fight for legality, aka Immigration. So without further ado, here are some excerpts:

"I have a nightmare... that millions of illegal aliens are getting a free ride - and we're paying for it - instead of paying for the wars and weapons systems to which we, as a free society, are entitled... I have a nightmare ...

"That rampant illegality by illegal aliens will spill over and cause hard-working law-abiding citizens to rebel against the rampant injustice of it all, and break the law... starting with the laws enforcing taxes to be paid to the IRS...

"I have a nightmare ... that illegal aliens are taking countless jobs from law-abiding legal citizens, who are forced against their will to live as couch potatoes, drinking beer and watching 70's reruns when, were all illegal aliens eliminated by simply enforcing existing laws and building a 2,000-mile-long wall visible from space, those same couch potatoes could instead be breaking their backs picking potatoes in the fresh methane-infused air and living in squalid metal shacks so they could send a few measly dollars to their wives and kids in Chicago and Cincinnati where they can better fend off druglords and ... pay their taxes - instead of being sent down to Mexico and subsidizing a free ride for hungry women and children who pay no taxes to the United States... I have a nightmare...

"That illegal aliens are bringing more and more leprosy into this country and other horrifying diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox, bubonic plague, and amebas, to name a few. .. and instead of spending more tax-n-spend liberal cash on health and human services, we could be spending them, as we should be, on more weapons systems, international war adventures, and cool killing games that we call "international policy" and "saving the world for democracy"... I have a nightmare...

"That the minimum wage will be reduced to $1.60/hour... that crowds of people will gather in the streets of ... of Boise, Idaho, and Cleveland, Ohio ... singing "Cielito Lindo" at soccer games ...the streets of America will be filled with people hawking Virgin Mary statuettes and a strange white cheese we can't understand that will give us diarrhea ... that honest, hard-working Americans will have to learn the meaning of "uprimez el ocho", whatever that means - I for one, have no intention to ever know what it means ... our children will experience the horrors of being - gag - bilingual ... and the water supply will have amebas ... I have a nightmare...

"That the IRS will go bankrupt, forcing us to resort to dealing with world problems on the cheap, with diplomacy ... I have a nightmare ...

"That without sufficient tax revenue, we'll be forced to outsource the entire President's cabinet, just to make ends meet ... and these, my friends, are the nightmare possibilities:

• The office of Secretary of State could be outsourced to the Dalai Lama;



• The Secretary of Treasury could be outsourced to the Sultan of Brunei - which, on the up side, could be a boon to gold futures, and perhaps the luxury auto industry;



• The Secretary of Defense could be outsourced to, imagine it, Kim Jung Il;



• The Secretary of the Interior could be outsourced to Prince Albert of Monaco;



• The Secretary of Labor could end up outsourced to Hugo Chavez;



• Secretary of Health and Human Services would be outsourced, probably, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation;



• The Justice Department could be run by the Hague, or Amnesty International;



• The Secretary of Energy would be outsourced to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia or even King Abdullah, whichever shows up first;



• The Secretary of Commerce would be outsourced to a Wal-Mart/China Consortium;



• NASA would have to be outsourced to Bert Rutan and Richard Branson; and



• The CIA would be run by the Mossad with secret black funding by unknown billionaires.

"I said, I have a nightmare... and if you read the Immigration Bill, you too would have nightmares... because everything in it is all about legalizing the illegal and inalienating the alien, and that's disgusting, because it's just plain wrong, financially unsound, and will destroy our tax base, and destroying our economy... instead of building more prisons and barbed wire and walls to protect our way of life and our American institutions of baseball and transfat pie and freedom fries and whataburgers that have no relationship with Austria..."

Fortunately, no one, not even Lou Dobbs, not even the U.S. Congress, not even, of course, Bush or his administration, has read the Immigration Bill because it's just too damned long... so it's lose-lose for the people who are dying in an effort to feed their families on the side of the border that has rampant millionaires flicking their cigarettes on hundred dollars bills just for laughs, or who think a gold-plated toilet isn't gross, as long as the Sultan of Brunei approves, just so long as those growing ranks of over-the-top rich folks don't get burned, let the aliens die, and keep them, certainly, illegal. Because it's legal to be cold-hearted and self-indulgent, certainly - but fighting for life in the desert is punishable by death, banishment, or an eternal place in the nightmare of Lou Dobbs...

So which fear wins in the Fear Wars, fear of death or the problems of poverty for one's family, or fear of alien cultures and free rides? We report, you decide, but remember...

Fear the snear.

OK, Hillary impressed me in the debates. She looks like she has a positive agenda on health care and "shared prosperity", economic measures aimed to bridge the gap, or gaping hole, between filthy ostentatiously don't-give-a-damnedly rich and we're-in-real-trouble-here poor. But it's foreign policy that tells the tale - just like with my great-eared hope, Barak Obama, who stood tall and firm with the War Without End Amen. Hillary got some boos in Washington's "Take Back America" fete for the following telling tale:

Sen. Hillary Clinton:
"The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.”

First, the American military - not policies, not negotiations, not gifts of infrastructure, food, housing assistance, humanitarian aid, not diplomacy, not advice, not any form of help whatsoever except military arms - is supposedly "giving" - tell me do, Hillary, how guns "give" anything but death to one side or another - "a chance"? So Iraq, according to Hillary, failed to take that "chance". But the "chance" was for elections. The "elected" government is accused thereafter of the "failure". Not failure to have elections for which they were given the chance. But failure to make "tough decisions".

How do military arms and personnel help a government to decide anything? This is pure doubletalk designed to get elected by a populace presumed "conservative" and duped into thinking it's true. "Conservatives" are extremely liberal with war, your tax dollars in warmongering, and liberal with restricting freedoms in favor of fear. "Conservatives" spend more money than "Liberals" who would rather spend your tax dollars at home on building a stable "Homeland" with freedom & justice for all than on foreign adventurist wars to promote neither freedom nor justice but only two things: corporate profit in the short run, and a thang called Israel in all runs.

Hillary is all about power, and I'm not convinced she'd be any better than anyone else at focusing on human issues, which is the big circle, not right and left, we all really face.

Meanwhile, some excerpts from Dear Amy Goodman, I love you, ... news:

Israeli Court Limits Entry of Wounded Gaza Residents
Meanwhile Israel’s High Court has rejected a motion for immediate entry of all Gaza residents in need of life-saving medical attention. Israel has allowed at least thirty-five Palestinians but some twenty-five remain stranded at Gaza’s crossing with Israel. Sari Bashi of the Israeli human rights group Gisha urged the Israeli government to allow them entry.

Sari Bashi: "Since Thursday Israel has closed the borders of Gaza, no one can leave. These are patients who if the they don't enter Israeli hospitals immediately their life is threatened. Because Israel continues to exercise control over Gaza's borders it has an obligation to let patients receive life-saving treatment outside of Gaza."

Our "democratic friends" in their moral hour of triumph.

True, what one Israeli said about the right-wingers of that land, sometimes it seems they care more about animal rights than the rights of human beings.

Make that "most of the time." Sorry, Ari.

Carter: US-led Boycott of Palestinians “Criminal”
Meanwhile former President Jimmy Carter has weighed in on the Bush administration’s role in the current crisis. Speaking in Ireland, Carter said the US, Israel and the European Union are trying to divide the Palestinian people. Carter also called the administration’s refusal to accept Hamas’ election win last year “criminal.” He said: “The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah.”

That's why Carter is always made out to look like a total failure and a disgrace to the office. Hillary knows what she's doing. You can't tell the truth without facing the consequences. We're in a government by liars with an agenda you can't easily know, because they are lying so much.

ACLU Sues for End to Drugging Immigrants Facing Deportation
And finally, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class-action suit on behalf of two immigrant males who say they were drugged against their will as U.S. officials tried to deport them. One of the men is an Indonesian national seeking asyslym; the other a Senegalese married to a US citizen. Both say they were forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs. The ACLU wants a judge to block all drugging of immigrants facing deportation proceedings.

Did you know this was happening? We are getting more and more like Israelis: they're not people unless they're "one of us." And the category "subhuman" makes it OK to torture, to drug by force, etc. There are two moral codes: one for US, and one for THEM - whoever "they" may be - watch out! One day YOU may be one of THEM. And you won't know until you're blindfolded.