Illegal immigration is a problem for this country.

There, I’ve said it. But it’s not quite the problem some make it out to be:

According to a New York Times article on April 5, 2005, “…the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year….Moreover, the money paid by illegal immigrants and their employers is factored into all the Social Security Administration’s projections.”

However, since illegal immigrant workers are here illegally, and ostensibly presented fake ID to the US employer, they will never collect Social Security benefits. “For illegal immigrants, Social Security numbers are simply a tool needed to work on this side of the border. Retirement does not enter the picture,” reports the New York Times.

The Social Security Administration remains solvent in large part due to deductions taken from the paychecks of illegal immigrant workers, yet Social Security will never pay benefits to those workers. The workers pay in, but they never receive back.

Wouldn’t the federal government detect fake Social Security numbers? According to that April 6, 2005 New York Times article, “Starting in the late 1980s, the social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect—-sometimes simply fictitious—-Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the ’earnings suspense file’ in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to.

The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990s, two and a half times the amount of the 1980s.

But that’s not important right now. Look, a government run solely by business interests will never, ever, do anything to control immigration. Want proof of this, as well as proof of Republican hypocrisy? Here it is:  Read more 

Recently I added some new contributors over at my place, and I’m constantly thrilled by the quality of what they write.

Sailor, who lives in Rep. Carson’s Indiana 7th, wrote this poignant piece today:  Read more 

Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

To every Right-winger who cheered this war on; to the hawks on the left who seriously thought it was a good idea; to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who still talk in glowing praise of GWBush’s Noble Adventure™ in Nation Building™, I dare you, I DARE YOU, goddamnit, to read the story of James Blake Miller, who became the iconic image of the tough Marine, the brave soldier fighting for democracy, the poster boy for the Neo-con dream, and who, like a real human, paid a terrible price for your blood-soaked fantasies.

From today’s LATimes, and the photographer who snapped that image and thus became inextricably joined to Miller, for good and bad:  Read more 

(photo by Marianne Mather/STNG)

I love to read mystery novels, for pure escapism and fun. And my special subset of interest is female protagonists, in books written by women. The absence of visible testosterone makes these books more interesting and intellectual, IMO.

One of my favs is Sara Paretsky, who authors the V. I. Warshawski series of books. But it seems she also writes some riveting non-fiction as well, about the totalitarian and authoritarian goals of the religious Right towards womens’ reproductive health in her beloved Chicago:

My grandmother watched her father die when an anti-Jewish mob broke into their small home and shot him as he lay in bed with his wife. The mob was jubilant and exuberant at his death; their neighborhood priest in Vilnius, Lithuania, led the crowd through the streets chanting a Te Deum to show their thanks to the Lord at the death of someone they considered a nonbeliever.  Read more 

I’ve occasionally been asked why I make my own wine when there’s an abundance of reasonably priced, decent quality wine so readily available. I admit, I frequently dip into that well (I’m sipping a hearty California Zinfandel right now). But making your own wine gives you possibilities and a perspective that you’ll never get from merely making a purchase.  Read more 

Hello! I’m FeralLiberal, and I’ve been invited to guest post at Corrente. Those of you who spend much time in the comments at Eschaton have probably run across me. For those of you who haven’t, I’d like to tell you a little about myself.  Read more 

Quote of the day, from Paul Rieckhoff on Hardball:

“Our troops are not political props, and they aren’t chew toys”.

Indeed.

Remember that Rieckhoff is an Iraq War vet, and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He was responding to the GWBush speech today to the VFW, and also to Ari Fleischer’s (R-Warmonger) new war porn group.

Here’s from the IAVA response to the speech:  Read more 

(picture from worldwide anti-war protests, Feb. 15, 2003)

My friend Kevin Drum takes on the war skeptics, who, as he says:

This meant that war skeptics had to go way out on a limb: if they opposed the war, and it subsequently turned out that Saddam had an advanced WMD program, their credibility would have been completely shot. Their only recourse would have been to argue that Saddam never would have used his WMD, an argument that, given Saddam’s temperament, would have sounded like special pleading even to most liberals. In the end, then, they chickened out, but it had more to do with fear of being wrong than with fear of being shunned by the foreign policy community.

Perhaps. His reasoning, and further commentary about the Very Serious Foreign Policy Community, with quotes from Atrios and Steve Clemons, are pretty good.

But this:  Read more 

The OCRegister, in what I’m sure is a Libertarian rant with no intention of irony, says:  Read more 

Dr. Preston Burke isn’t the only doc with an employment problem these days. Much has already been written about GWBush’s seemingly tone-deaf nomination of Dr. James W. Holsinger, Jr., for Surgeon General. From Think Progress:

But as BarbinMD points out, Holsinger’s nomination to be “America’s doctor” is troubling. He has a long history of prejudice toward gays and lesbians. Some examples:  Read more 

I was always a little uncomfortable watching 3 Stooges films while I was growing up. Sure, they were funny, sort of, but I always wondered when Curly, after being endlessly poked, slapped, and abused by Moe, would just say “enough!”

That’s about how I feel reading the revelation that Matthew Dowd has ’lost faith with Bush’:  Read more 

Sometimes, even in the deepest, stinkiest dungheap, you find a flower growing. From Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt’s place:

I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW BAD I FEEL FOR ELIZABETH AND JOHN EDWARDS. I’m familiar with the body-blow of a sudden diagnosis that turns your world upside down. It’s incredible – you walk into a doctor’s office and within a span of minutes you find out your life will never be the same. In the back of your mind you nourish the hopes of miracle cures or that you might be like that guy in Dubuque who got the same diagnosis but oddly enough lived forever, but the reality of the situation sits there in your mind. You can’t shake it – it just won’t leave.  Read more 

In re: Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, pictured above with Compassionate Conservative™ Mary Matalin, almost gets it right, once in a while:  Read more 

My favorite Right Wing Nut lays a big one today. First comes the bait:

I was too young for the May Day protest against the Viet Nam War held in Washington, D.C. in 1971. My friends and I talked about going for weeks prior to the event, seeing ourselves as something as a cross between Che Guevara and Abbie Hoffman.

(April 1967 war protest rally)

… Those not alive at the time cannot fathom the depth of feeling engendered by the anti-war movement. It was magical, powerful, uplifting, and joyous. We thought we were changing the world. We thought we were ushering in a new era of democracy.

But now comes the switch:  Read more 

Bill, Bill, Bill, are you just too lazy to even phone it in? Crooks and Liars has the video, but it’s just so …weak. I mean, blaming the victim. That’s for 2nd tier wingnuts like Nancy Grace, not a Peabody Award winning journalist like yourself:

O’Reilly is a lunatic, plain and simple and yes Bill, this is a personal attack. He has the nerve to attack one of the kidnapped victims (Shawn Hornbeck) because he didn’t try to get away. Something along the lines of ’he didn’t like school so he stayed with his assailant.’

Bill: The question is why didn’t he escape when he could have? There are all kinds of theories about that…  Read more 

“Meet the new boss,
same as the old boss”

From Faux News we have this:

Bush Vows to Keep U.S. Troops in Iraq to Support Iraqi PM Al-MalikiAMMAN, Jordan — President Bush said Thursday the United States will speed a turnover of security responsibility to Iraqi forces but assured Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that Washington is not looking for a “graceful exit” from a war well into its fourth violent year.

That’s this al-Maliki:
 Read more 

Government repression comes in many forms. From the always radical Christian Science Monitor we learn that:  Read more 

In a breaking story, the L.A. times is reporting that:

A former House page says he had sex with then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) after receiving explicit e-mails in which the congressman described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances.  Read more 

Words can be pesky little things. They can express love, hate, and anything in-between. A single word can cause, in certain circumstances, death, or worse. And words can tell a story, not just in the presence of a narrative, but by their very use.  Read more 

These recipes have no political content of which I am aware, and by Gum I am not going to strain my brain to come up with one on a flippin’ Friday night. Although I am quite sure anyone who was awake on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning could think of one particular Flipper to whom some snark could be applied without great difficulty.  Read more 

File this one under “Bombing From the Moral High Ground”

+++  Read more 

As I watched the train wreck that was The Larry King Show tonight, with David Horowitz defending Ann Coulter, I was struck by something he, and Coulter said. They make the point that the Left “parades” the 9/11 widows, and Cindy Sheehan, and amputee vet Max Cleland, and that they (the right) can’t attack them because they lost loved ones/limbs/whatever.  Read more 

The Big Brains and Bold Hearts of the Bay Area Blogosphere were out last Wednesday drowning their existential angst in endless pitchers of Death and Taxes at Ben n’ Nicks Bar and Grill in Rockridge, near Berzerkeley.

Not only is the Blogosphere a support group for people suffering from Bush Regime Outrage Fatigue (medical term), blogger happy hours are a support group for blog addicts. We discussed how to balance the demands of blogging against the distractions of work, the perfect number of posts per day, how group blogs are (or should be, for f’s sake) absorbing the excess capacity of A-list blogs… the important questions, basically.

Your intrepid blog celebrity reporter (in the words of Sly Stone: “everybody is a star”) ascertained the following tasty tidbits:  Read more 

Only Lambert, our esteemed Janitor, has the keys required to fix the page layout. He should be back from his extended nap under the stairwell… momentarily.

Tip for commenters: links do not work in comment headlines. Also, if you post as Anonymous, you can’t edit your comment booboos.

We control the vertical, but not the horizontal…