I suppose next he’ll be saying we need racial purity tests to “prove” that citizens are American enough. If you don’t want to click a WashTimes link I understand.

Mike Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens, according to his top immigration surrogate — a radical step no other major presidential candidate has embraced.  Read more 

I see a screenplay blooming. Dealing with a favorite theme: time travel. You now think you’ll steal this zeitgeisty gem from me, but you cannot because in the future, I have already finished it, and am mailing it to myself yesterday in a walnut sealed in Presidential earwax and pressurized to resist even election-year terror alerts.

OUR TALE BEGINS with a man who desperately seeks an answer to his deepest, heart-sprung questions, headed up by the quintessential and Googlicious How Do I Get Rid of the Mexicans? You see, our protagonist feels his very nation is under dire attack by the filthy mongrel hordes from the South, those who bark that most Arrogant and Sickening of Languages—Español, those who dare to settle into his beautiful nation, hellbent on storming the kitchens and fields and meatpacking plants and canning plants and steel factories or to otherwise seek to implement that most foul of Mexican behaviors: the trading of work for pay.  Read more 

I hate the thinly veiled racism and know-nothing-ism and sheer mean ignorance at the bottom of so much of the immigration “issue.”

And I understand very well that Our Betters have used wedge issues like this very effectively to divide and conquer.

But I can’t help thinking that when I want to uphold the rule of law for Bush, I ought to want to uphold it for everyone.  Read more 

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Oddly, or not, I don’t see Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson offering this perspective to their extremely serious readership. That’s why we like McClatchy. I missed this on July 3:

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said to an aide, “We just gave the South to the Republicans.”

Indeed, Democrats lost their hold on the old Confederacy over the next decade, turning it into a bastion of Republican strength, first in presidential elections and later in congressional elections.

Now, another Texas president might well ask whether his Republican Party just gave away another section of the country, the Southwest and Mountain West.

President Bush had a way with Hispanic voters, steadily increasing his party’s share of the once-solid Democratic bloc from a dismal 21 percent in 1996 to 35 percent in 2000, 37 percent in 2002 and 40 to 44 percent in 2004.

His comprehensive immigration proposal might have helped build on those gains, with its path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

But his proposal outraged his party’s conservative base. That base opposed the proposal for the last two years — contributing to a drop-off in Hispanic support for Republican congressional candidates last year — and finally killed the plan in the Senate last week.

With it went Bush’s hopes of a growing Republican share of the nation’s fastest- growing demographic group.

Excellent. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of mendacious, racist, mercenary, lizard back-brained teenie-weinied overcompensating autocoprophagic torture-loving page-molesting Pharisaical Fucks.  Read more 

WaPo, actually on A01 (for a change):

The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations.

Well, big deal. I bet The Decider wrote a secret law that renders this law “quaint”! Because the Dear Leader would never, ever, do anything illegal!

And who needs expertise?  Read more 

AP:

By a vote of 33-63, the Senate fell far short of the 60 votes that would have been needed to limit debate on the immigration measure and put it on a path to passage. Republicans — even those who helped craft the measure and are expected to support it — banded together to oppose that move, while a majority of Democrats backed it.

If the bill serves as an apple of discord, and gets all the Republicans to compete on who hates brown people the most, great, but actually passing the bill means a National ID card.

Which you would have to “prove ID” with when you applied for a job. For starters.

Do you really want to give the people running this country that much power?  Read more 

The Immigration Bill really, really sucks:

The American Civil Liberties Union today expressed grave concerns about the due process and privacy implications of the Senate immigration bill.
The proposed legislation would create a vast federal database to verify the work eligibility of all job applicants in America - including U.S. citizens; expand indefinite detention; and deny effective judicial review of Department of Homeland Security errors denying immigration status.

“The bill denies essential due process, seeks to overturn Supreme Court limits on detention and fails to guarantee meaningful judicial review,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Substantial changes must be made to ensure that the legislation adheres to the values of our country and our Constitution. Without effective judicial oversight, any new program enacted by Congress can be gutted by an overburdened, incompetent or hostile bureaucracy.”

The proposed legislation would require every job applicant in America to have their eligibility to work verified by the DHS, using the error-plagued Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS). EEVS creates a massive government database containing extraordinary amounts of personal information on everyone in America, tied to each individual’s Social Security number. If DHS makes a mistake in determining work eligibility, there will be virtually no way to challenge the error or recover lost wages due to the bill’s prohibitions on judicial review.

And, oh yeah, there’ll be a national identity card:  Read more 

This simply cannot stand.  Read more 

Ian wonders of it would make good Canadian policy to more aggresively recruit Americans who are feeli  Read more 

Ho ho, those funny, witty, ever-dependable College Republicans are at it again:

A Boise State University student group has angered area Hispanic leaders and others by promoting a speech about immigration with a “food stamp drawing” that requires climbing through a hole in a fence and offering fake identification for a shot at winning dinner at a local Mexican restaurant.
Owners of Chapala, the restaurant named in a promotional flier for the event, also aren’t amused — and say they are considering a lawsuit against BSU’s College Republicans.

Faviola Marin, co-owner of the local restaurant chain, said Chapala had nothing to do with the promotion or the student group.

“We’re really upset about it,” Marin said Sunday night. “We’ve had a lot of upset customers and phone calls.”

Marin said one of their Boise restaurants has been broken into twice in the past week, and she believes the vandalism is connected to the flier.

“We want an apology,” Marin said, noting that Chapala has supported BSU’s Cinco de Mayo activities and scholarships for Hispanic students. “Nobody has said anything to us.”

BSU College Republicans President Jonathan Sawmiller said Chapala’s name was taken off the fliers as soon as the restaurant called and complained to a BSU official. He said he believes that quick response should quell a lawsuit.

“There was no intention on our part to defame them in any way,” Sawmiller said.  Read more 

Street Prophets has a good post up about authoritarians and how they use religion in the war on undocumented people.

Traditionalist authoritarians don’t see themselves as having much in common with immigrants (or gays and lesbians, or residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward), because they don’t perceive themselves as playing by the same set of rules. They (the authoritarians) work hard, raise their kids right, and obey the law. Illegal immigrants cheat their way into the system, break laws to keep themselves here, refuse to contribute to the good of the country, take jobs from Americans, and when they’re all done, go home leaving Mom apple pie and America in sorrier shape than when they arrived. It’s going to be difficult to bring Christian traditionalists around on this issue, and you can forget the true authoritarians. They don’t give a crap about Mexicans because they don’t think Mexicans play by the rules, and they’re never going to think Mexicans play by the rules. The limit to the use of the common good ideal as an outreach strategy is precisely where it buts up against racism, tacit or overt , because racism is incapable of accepting The Other as neighbor.  Read more 

Somebody shake me this can’t be real.

“The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn’t go out of business,” state Rep. Dorothy Butcher said. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work.  Read more 

Please don’t ever say “we” won’t do these jobs. An immigration raid left, in its wake, work.

By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain

The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.  Read more 

Legal, illegal, they’re just brown people so who cares, right? But one part makes me wonder:

The paper confirms that the federal agents took an undisclosed number of people away in buses away to an undisclosed location.

Given that there may be tens of thousands of people in secret prisons, and given that our “fighting” forces are known to enjoy a little forced prostitution now and again, who here thinks it likely that the more attractive “illegals” will wind up servicing DHS officials? These days, it’s no stetch to wonder about it.

I guess I should rejoice that city fathers aren’t proposing to ship all Black folks back to Africa. Look out, Latina Vols: it’s roundup time.

“In last month’s city meeting, Alderman Ken Cherry expressed concerns for safety in the parks because of the big Hispanic crowds on weekends. Monday, he admitted his sentiments are not limited to the parks. He said, ’If I could do what I wanted to do, any illegal alien would be holed up in a barbwire tent and we’d haul them up to where they came from and turn them loose.’”

“When asked to comment on the possibility that not every Hispanic using the park was an ’illegal immigrant’, Alderman Cherry responded, ’If they’re speaking Spanish, I tend to think they are illegal.’ …  Read more 

I am a fortunate Black American; I can honestly say that I’ve never had a problem finding employment when I try hard enough and look for it. Part of that has to do with the way I speak, and look, and the fact that the areas in which I’ve worked have usually been places in which ideas like “diversity” hold sway. But for many, many African-Americans, this is not the case. In response to this brave Alternet piece, Cyrus responds:

There are some lies that go down easy and some that are just brutally, shall we say, un-lubricated. One such yarn is that of black unemployment. For years Black males have been described as endangered, lazy, shiftless, more obsessed with flash and bling than with opportunity or substance, but … there is another side. When are we going to talk about the systematic discrimination that creates a forty percent unemployment rate for Black America? Why? Forty percent is higher than the unemployment rate for the depression. Black America has endured this for over a decade even in the middle of one of the greatest economic boom cycles to date.  Read more 

Interesting that the import and rightness of the NY Times revelation of yet another classified program initiated by the Bush administration on its own, sans oversight, was presented as of equal importance, from a Fox standpoint, Iraq or immigration.  Read more 

Mom keeps me posted on the rantings of certain members of the family, you know, the “special” ones. She sent me this one tonight:

http://www.resist.com/other/border_patrol.swf

Cute. It’s a game called “Border Patrol.” You get to blast what are meant to represent illegals coming over the border. Reminds me of that wonderful Christian game making the news recently. You know, the one where you get to:

join the Christians and kill nonbelievers, or join the demonic forces and smite Christians, in “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” a video game due this fall as part of the wildly popular “Left Behind” franchise.

“Eternal Forces” is the latest effort by Tyndale House Publishers to profit from the “Left Behind” novels, a fictional series about the apocalypse that its authors claim has won converts to Christianity.  Read more 

I’ve mentioned before my friend in TX who is a business owner; many times we’ve had conversations about how difficult it can be to do business if you’re not “in” with the right people (fundies). So I read this and also a comment from here and I got to thinking.  Read more 

How perfect is that Chris Wallace’s initials can also stand for “conventional wisdom,” which as reader, Hobson, pointed out to me in an email, is a another way of saying “convenient lies.”

Today’s Fox Sunday was rife with CW, so much so that both the guests, the panel and the host looked bored as all get out.  Read more 

Loons. First, what happens when your immigration identity check fails? You get fired:

Fernando Tinoco, a 51-year-old Mexican immigrant, has been working in the United States for three decades and has been an American citizen since 1989. But when he reported for his new job at a Tyson Foods Inc. factory in Chicago in March, an automated search of government records raised questions about his status. Two hours into his first day of work, Tinoco was fired.

So, how many times is this going to happen? Let’s do the math, because it’s going to make Medicare D look like a well-administered program:  Read more