Some fetuses have more right to life than others

There's an old, tired, and spectacularly unfunny joke, usually told by people who aren't Jewish, that the ultimate Jewish dilemma is "free ham."

I was reminded of that joke today when I read this:

Since Senator Russell Pearce became president of the Arizona Senate this year he’s ushered in a barrage of anti-immigrant legislation, most famously the assault on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Now the original sponsor of the infamous SB1070 has introduced a new bill that should attract even more notoriety. This one has the ominous overtones of being all but guaranteed to cause great harm and even death to some of the people in this state.

Senate Bill 1405 reads as follows:

A. BEFORE A HOSPITAL ADMITS A PERSON FOR NONEMERGENCY CARE, A HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS OFFICER MUST CONFIRM THAT THE PERSON IS A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, A LEGAL RESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OR LAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES. THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER MAY USE ANY METHOD PRESCRIBED IN SECTION 1-501 TO VERIFY CITIZENSHIP OR LEGAL STATUS.

B. IF THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER DETERMINES THAT THE PERSON DOES NOT MEET THE REQUIREMENTS OF SUBSECTION A OF THIS SECTION, THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER MUST CONTACT THE LOCAL FEDERAL IMMIGRATION OFFICE.

C. IF THE HOSPITAL PROVIDES EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE PURSUANT TO FEDERAL REQUIREMENTS TO A PERSON WHO DOES NOT MEET THE REQUIREMENTS OF SUBSECTION A OF THIS SECTION, ON SUCCESSFUL TREATMENT OF THE PATIENT THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER MUST CONTACT THE LOCAL FEDERAL IMMIGRATION OFFICE.

D. A HOSPITAL THAT COMPLIES WITH THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS SECTION IS NOT SUBJECT TO CIVIL LIABILITY.

What this means is that anyone who is admitted to or receives emergency care at a hospital will have to prove that they are lawfully present in the United States. This of course presents a whole hornet’s nest of problems-- the least of which is hospitals will most likely not appreciate being saddled with the added responsibility of immigration enforcement.

Suppose a woman who's in the country illegally has a pregnancy emergency and shows up at a hospital. Does that mean that the wingnut position is to let the fetus die rather than allow a woman (vessel, in Wingnutistan) who is not in the country legally to receive treatment?

Just wondering, is all

How is it that Meg Whitman can afford to spend over $100 million out of her own funds for a political campaign, but she can't afford to hire a housekeeper whom she'd have to pay a living wage?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Special Life in a Pack of Mad Dogs Edition

Sorry about the silence from these here parts; I'm on a project deadline, the end is in sight, I'm in a state of paranoid panic about the external testing process, I haven't had a decent night's sleep in a month, and I'm pretty much a burnt-out husk at this point.

It's just as well, really, because when I look around me at the institutionalized lunacy that surrounds us, all I want to do is turn on the TV and watch stupid young people obsess about crown molding and granite countertops on HGTV and whatever Guy Fieri is scarfing down these days.

But life in Teabag America goes on, and right now Mexicans seem to have replaced Muslim terrorists as the favorite boogeyman of the right:

In Iowa, one of the whitest states in the country, a Congressional candidate wants to microchip illegal immigrants "like dogs".

How to respond when someone asks "Show me your papers" in Arizona.

If the idea of police being able to stop anyone they think looks "suspicious" and demand to see their papers sounds familiar, like something you read about when you were a kid, here's why.

It wasn't brown-skinned people who sent your job overseas.

More states you can take off your "nice place to retire" list if they pass planned legislation.

And you thought the alliance with evangelicals was weird. Idiots.

How about we deport this band of wackadoos instead?

Teabagger Epic Fail

Oh, this is priceless. Just stick with it and listen to what this kid says:

If these nimrod teabaggers had half a brain, the impish grin would have given "Robert Erickson" away immediately.

Note to INS: Star Trek is FICTION, you morons!

Oh, fer cryin' out loud:

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan was detained for two hours for questioning at a U.S. airport before being released by immigration authorities, a news agency report said Saturday.

Khan, one of the Indian film industry's biggest stars, said he was detained because his name came up on a computer alert list at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Press Trust of India news agency said.

"I told them I am a movie star," Khan was quoted as saying.

The reported detention made top news on TV stations in India.

Khan said he was able to message a lawmaker in India who asked the Indian embassy in Washington to seek his release. Khan was let go after embassy officials intervened, the agency said.

In New Delhi, U.S. Ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, said the U.S. Embassy was trying to "ascertain the facts of the case - to understand what took place."

"Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a very welcome guest in the United States. Many Americans love his films," Roemer said Saturday through an embassy spokesman.

Khan, 44, has acted in more than 70 films, and has consistently topped popularity rankings in India for the past several years. He is in the United States to promote his new film, "My Name Is Khan."

Idiots. It's THIS Khan:

Not this one:

Another hate murder

*Sigh*

Think back to all the ranting that Tom Tancredo and other Republicans and Lou Dobbs have done about immigration. Think of how they've been whipping people into a frenzy about marauding hordes from the south.

Now try to tell me that kind of talk does not lead to this:

An outspoken anti-immigration activist from Everett has been arrested in Arizona in connection to a deadly home invasion robbery.

Shawna Forde, the executive director of the Minutemen American Defense, is one of three accused in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Raul Flores and his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, at their home in Arivaca, Ariz., a town 10 miles north of the Mexican border.

Two others - 34-year-old Jason Bush and 42-year-old Albert Gaxiola - were arrested. All three have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault.

According to the Pima County Sheriff's Office, two men and a woman posing as police officers forced their way into the Flores ' home in the middle of the night on May 30.

It is not known exactly what transpired next, but Raul Flores and his daughter were shot and killed. The girl's mother was wounded and is recovering in a local hospital, deputies said.

Investigators believe the killings were premeditated by thieves looking for drugs and money.

On Thursday a tip led detectives to Bush, who was in a hospital in the Kingman area receiving treatment for wounds he allegedly sustained during the robbery.

On Friday deputies arrested Forde and Gaxiola in Sierra Vista and Tucson, respectively.

Investigators believe Forde masterminded the home invasion robbery, which Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described as "evil" and "heinous."

"It was a planned home invasion where the plan was to kill all the people inside this trailer so there would be no witnesses," he said. "This is perhaps the most despicable crime that any of us in this organization has ever been associated with."

Moments after her arrest, Forde turned to news cameras and denied involvement in the deadly robbery with the words "No, I didn't."

But the sheriff described the woman as a dangerous, unstable person.

"If you look at her history closely and you know what we know, she's, at best, a psychopath," Dupnik said.

The mission of Forde's group is to secure U.S. borders and coastal boundaries from unlawful entry, as well as to "increase the awareness of the devastation caused by illegal immigration to our state and country," according to the group's Web site.

MAD sends volunteers to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona for the purpose of "gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking (sic)," Forde wrote on the site.

When you have people abusing the public airwaves to spout crap like this, and you tell lunatics with guns to "take their country back", people get killed. In this case, one of them was a 9-year-old child.

More about Shawna Forde from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So how high will the body count go before the hatemongers and bigots admit their role in fanning these flames? And no, these are not isolated cases. I've linked to the terrific work Sara Robinson has been doing on the eliminationist movement in the last few days, but it's worth going back to look at what she wrote back in April, when the DHS report that was so derided by conservatives, came out:

The far right wing has been laying the groundwork for violent action for decades. Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first step down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action. The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same. First: their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near. Second: it divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social, or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.

Third: this split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that it shares a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts. Fourth: insiders feel like they're a persecuted, prophetic elite who are being opposed by wicked, tyrannical forces. Left to fester, this paranoia will eventually drive the group to make concrete preparations for self-defense -- and perhaps go on the offense against their perceived persecutors. Fifth: communities following this logic will also advocate the elimination of their enemies by any means necessary, in order to purify the world for their ideology.

All these ideas have been part of the discourse on the right for decades. You can trace their genesis all the way back to the 1950s, starting with the overheated apocalypticism of the anti-Communist movement. Over time, it came to include the dualism of the John Birch Society and assorted white supremacist groups; the persecution complex of Nixon and his Silent Majority followers; the anti-liberal eliminationism that's been gathering force for the past decade; and the war on evidence-based science and reason that's always been at the heart of conservative arguments. As J. Peter Scoblic argues in Us vs. Them, narratives that justify violence have always been deeply ingrained in the right-wing belief system.

Since the Inauguration, all of these themes are being played far more loudly and openly. And somewhere between November 4 and this 100th day, the right wing has also begun to act on these beliefs in ways that push the whole process to the next level -- the level where thoughts and beliefs begin to crystallize into action.

And here we are. Now the question is whether these people and the groups with which they affiliate are going to be treated as the terrorists they are, or if the Obama Justice Department is going to take some time out from throwing the gays under the bus and look at the domestic terrorism that is happening right here, right now. On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher, Botox Blonde and Bush Apologist Fran Townsend tried to draw parallels between PETA, Greenpeace and guys like the murderers of George Tiller, Stephen Johns, and others. Maher dropped the ball on this, omitting the reality that however misguided the efforts of PETA and Earth Liberation Front and other such groups may be, their primary objective isn't killing people, and these groups are not embraced by the Democratic Party the way the Minutemen, with which Shawna Forde is associated and Operation Rescue, with which Scott Roeder is affilated, is embraced by the Republican Party.

Sorry, but Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Michael Reagan and Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney and Tom Tancredo and Jeff Sessions and John Boehner and the entire Republican Party owns these people. They own them lock, stock and barrel. When you hold a mirror up to the Republican rhetoric about race and women and minorities for the last thirty years, ever since their patron Saint Ronald Reagan took office, it's the faces of Shawna Forde, James W. Van Brunn, and Scott Roeder that look back at them.

And damn it if they don't like what they see.

Augh! Your lawn care guy is going to to come after you with torches and pitchforks!!!

You know who I'm talking about. I'm talking about the guy from Guatemala or Mexico who silently weed-whacks your lawn every week; the one you don't think about how much he gets paid or IF he gets paid because it's just too uncomfortable. Well, not MY lawn guys, because the guy who owns MY lawn service charges five bucks more per mowing than his competition, and 65 bucks/man/hour for spring and fall cleanup, but he provides health insurance for HIS guys, who are actual employees instead of exploited day laborers.

These are the people Republicans fear even more than they fear gay marriage, Gitmo detainees with superpowers who can break out of supermax prisons when no one else ever has, Nancy Pelosi's scary genitalia, and liberals who kill babies for sport. They think Michael Steele gets them off the hook for their past Scary Negroes(sic) rhetoric, but Scary Brown People from South of the Border are still fair game:

Republican members of Congress have been trying to subtly raise questions about Sonia Sotomayor’s objectivity — simply because of her non-traditional race, gender, and upbringing. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said today that he is concerned Sotomayor has shown “personal bias based on ethnicity and gender.” Similarly, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said in a statement today that Sotomayor may be subject to the “undue influence” of her race and gender:

Of primary concern to me is whether or not Judge Sotomayor follows the proper role of judges and refrains from legislating from the bench. Some of her recent comments on this matter have given me cause for great concern. In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh her qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences.

Responding to Inhofe, The American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein writes, “Yes. Because the worldviews of John Roberts, Sam Alito, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Antonin Scalia are not impacted at all by their white male identities. White men are raceless and genderless, haven’t you heard?”

Sotomayor is a Bush Sr. appointee, in case you haven't heard that yet. Of course Bush Sr. is no longer regarded as a Republican by the Party of Psychopaths. But this is a stroke of genius by Barack Obama. Rake her over the coals and you not only piss off the Latino community, but also ensure that if you block this nomination, he'll give you a REAL liberal. Sort of like George W. Bush did when he imposed the activist Samuel Alito on us.

ACORN is the new illegal immigrants

Just the way illegal immigrants were the new Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists were the new Scary Negroes™. ACORN's voter registration drive plays right into the Republican "voter fraud" meme that Republicans are already using to try to justify their mass vote caging schemes in as many states as they can get away with it and the fact that the voting machines in many states are still not counting votes, and in some cases, switching votes from that which the voter intended. Funny, too, how the states with the biggest potential problems are also potential toss-up states.

But in a move that smacks of the continuing partisanship of the Bush Justice Department, the FBI has been sent to investigate ACORN's voter registration drives, even though not one registrant named "Mickey Mouse" has dared show up at the polls. Of course it's not about preventing "Mickey Mouse" from showing up at the polls, it's about preventing "Tyrone Jackson" and "Goldie Berkowitz" and "Juan Hernandez" and others who might commit the crime of voting for a Black Democrat for president from exercising their right to vote.

David Iglesias, one of the U.S. Attorneys fired by this very same Bush Justice Department for refusing to falsely prosecute Democrats for voter fraud, has seen this before, and calls it "a disgrace":

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."

Who's that speaking? And what's he talking about?

That's fired US Attorney David Iglesias talking about the news leaked today that the DOJ and FBI are opening a nationwide investigation into allegations that the community organization ACORN is somehow working to undermine the November election through fraud. For more from Iglesias and his fellow fired US Attorney Bud Cummins, don't miss TPMMuckraker's Zack Roth's interview post from earlier this evening.

Iglesias got fired not long after the 2006 midterm election because he wouldn't get off the dime and bring bogus vote fraud indictments against Democrats or time other indictments of Democrats to sway the 2006 election. In other words, he got canned for not doing what a number of his former colleagues at the DOJ are happily doing this very day.

Nor was Iglesias simpy a respected attorney with solid enough connections to swing a US Attorney appointment. He was a rising start in the New Mexico Republican party. Iglesias was the Republican nominee for Attorney General in 1998. (Not that it's immediately relevant to this question, but Iglesias was the Navy JAG lawyer on whom Tom Cruise's character in A Few Good Men was based.) This was that reassuring case where a political person's partisan attachments butted up against his integrity and the latter won the day hands down. This is someone who knows this scam from the inside and whose testimony -- literal and figurative -- comes not in line with partisan attachments but in spite of them. Everyone should listen.

This is not for one minute about sustaining the integrity of the voting system. These people who are registering under phony names are not going to show up at the polls. This is about selective prosecution of an organization that was once supported by John McCain when it was convenient and advantageous for him, because it is encouraging people to exercise their right to vote.

If the Republican Party does not feel Americans have the right to vote, then perhaps it ought to just say so -- and let the voters decide.

OK, can we please stop the wingnut hysteria about ACORN now?

It wasn't so long ago (2006, actually) that John McCain was perfectly happy to stand with ACORN:

Marc Ambinder:

It's important to know, as you watch this, that ACORN was, to Republican field operatives, a Dirty Word in 2006...and in 2004, but general awareness among politicians and activists of what it does was limited to those who had to deal with its voter registration efforts. See here. (A clue: they were part of the America Coming Together consortium in 2004...that should have been a clue as to their ideological leanings.)

A few weeks ago, House Republicans screamed bloody murder when it appeared as if ACORN would benefit from the bailout bill, although McCain, President Bush and House Republicans have supported legislation with similar provisions before and they spent billions on the Road Home project, which contracts with ACORN to help provide housing for Katrina refugees. (You can't say...ah, but ACORN wasn't suspected of doing anything bad earlier... you can't say that because ACORN has been doing what ACORN is accused of doing for several cycles now.)

In 2008, of course, ACORN has become a stand-in not only for the registration fraud allegations, but also for the coincident insinuations that Sen. Obama and his liberal allies are trying to steal the election in battleground states. Indeed, because "ACORN" has become a national political issue, it will be hard for Republicans to use it as a political wedge issue. Once an attack is associated with a party, it doesn't become an attack; it becomes part of party dogma and can service only party activists.

McCain had no trouble fraternizing with ACORN in 2006 when their political interests coincided with his. Now, his campaign is writing e-mails in his name bashing ACORN as a tool of the Obama machine.

And Ari over at Firedoglake shows how Republicans have been allied with ACORN for years.

So spare me the outrage about ACORN and "voter fraud" -- when ACORN has been doing exactly what it's supposed to -- turning over voter registrations it collects for election officials to deal with.

Troubling Statistics

Fewer N.J. women receiving prenatal care

The number of women receiving early prenatal care in New Jersey has declined slightly during the last decade, largely because many do not have regular access to doctors or cannot afford to pay medical bills, according to a report released today.

The Prenatal Care Task Force report, released by State Health Commissioner Heather Howard, found teens, minorities and unmarried mothers are at higher risk of poor birth outcomes, including low birth-weight babies. Yet they remain less likely to receive early prenatal care, according to the report.

Uninsured mothers in New Jersey had the lowest rate of trimester prenatal care - 73 percent - while women with private insurance had the highest rate - 96 percent - across all racial and ethnic groups.

The overall average for prenatal care in New Jersey was 89 percent, according to the report, based on birth and infant death certificate data from 1990 to 2004.

These are troubling statistics. Successful early prenatal care programs would show a continuous steady rise. We can guess at a few of the causes. One would be that poor women & teenagers wait longer before confirming a pregnancy, from denial or any number of reasons. Another would be the fear many undocumented women have of entering the public health care system & calling attention to themselves. Prenatal deportation? Sounds cruel, but it's happened. It could be up there on the right wing agenda along with overturning Roe v. Wade & ordering teenagers to stop having sex or else suffer the consequences. Let's call it the Sarah Palin Agenda until we hear otherwise.

These numbers are discouraging, but they they don't have to stay that way. The expansion of SCHIP to all uninsured children & a greater attention to child health in schools will bring many more families into contact with regular health care, & those families will become accustomed to using the resources & more likely to urge others to do the same. For those families, we need more family care clinics conveniently located in the neighborhoods where they are needed, not two bus rides away on the other side of the city, phasing out hospital emergency rooms as primary care providers.

I am an overnight sensation at 67

That's Rep. Barney Frank, who made a persuasive appeal on Charlie Rose's show last night for a promoting a liberal, populist agenda in '08. In Frank's talk about wage stagnation, it was pretty easy to make a connection between that & the scapegoating that fuels the immigration debate, although Rose didn't pick up on it. Just as well, probably. Scapegoating is the most reliable diversionary strategy in the reactionary playbook.

Why did Democrats win in the 2006 congressional elections? Partly the war, and partly because the Republicans stressed the economy, in their words a very healthy and robust, growing economy. But reality is that 95% of the population has had no growth in real income over the last 6 years. When people feel they are not receiving their fair share of a steadily growing economy, and not just that but losing their investments, their pensions, and their health care, they start to ask where is all that growth going?

Frank also hit on the need for unionization:

The greatest growth in jobs has been and will be in services, occupations that are not generally protected by unions. They should be unionized and can be because they cannot be outsourced; nobody in Mumbai can make the hotel beds in Peoria. That’s another big difference between the parties, Democrats support unions and Republicans try to destroy them.

He means all the lower tier "dirty" jobs that are largely done by immigrants, legal or not. Republicans have not been able to explain just exactly who will be cleaning nursing home bathrooms if a substantial portion of the labor force disappears, or why unionizing these occupations would be a bad thing if they expect native-born Americans to be doing that work.

The video isn't up yet at Charlie Rose website. Democratic presidential candidates should be listening to Frank. He's hardly a radical leftist. He's endorsed Hillary.

Illegal Immigrants are Hiding in the Hills Around San Diego, and the Surrounding Area...What About Them? ...Colbert Continues Sweep....

Its gonna be alot harder to ignore and under-serve the people of San Diego and LA in this deal than it was to screw the people of New Orleans, but it sure sent a shiver down my spine to see Skeletor Chertoff on TV today, mouthing the disaster talking points, just as Brownie did once before....
yeah, its chilling...and not even in as much as the search, rescue, and help can even start because the thing remains out of control...half a million people are currently displaced, and I expect that number to grow exponentially as the days go on. There is no way to fight this fire except to hope that the winds don't come back as strong as they have been and to keep on fighting. Its definitely not under control.
According to 1010 WINS in New York City, some big stadium is offering gourmet food and massages. Who knows if that's true, but they are definitely being very careful to keep the people as comfortable as possible and to have Chertoff right on the scene to report the exact number of cots that they've got. Of course these people are a slightly different hue and class than the majority of the people who were housed and then shipped off from in and around NOLA.

It turns out that , tragically, many of the neediest people wont go to the stadium and shelters, because they are illegal and living in the hills. The fact that immigration raids in San Diego were suspended when the fires broke out aren't likely to make many of the illegal people ask for or accept help, considering how rabidly illegals are under fire in the area. So far only around 50 illegals have "turned themselves in" due to the fires. With thousands living in the area, this is what could be the big humanitarian toll in this thing.

As the fires spread into Mexico there is also a question about the conditions there and if the workers on farms will even be allowed to evacuate. I'm looking for this to be the big story in this thing...and I only hope that it brings to light the real plight of the illegal immigrants who are searching for a better life and will risk everything for a chance to be productive Americans and try to help their families back home. Im not in a place right now to discuss how globalism and outsourcing has hurt local economies even as they helped in some other ways, but having the local balance upset in favor of large American corporations, as opposed to foreign aid to help with a country's development, surely has not done much for the people.

...And like clockwork, Bush's people said that it was "premature" yesterday for the man to visit the area....are they crazy? I know he doesnt give a shit anymore abotu what anyone out here thinks, but as far as his legacy goes, I would think that he would want to strap on a parachute and jump! This is the worst fire ever out there, and its destroying, not only some of the most beautiful and important parts of our country, but many, many houses and lives. I can only imagine what its going to be like when this is all over.....

Rule of thumb for the White House: By the time that Schwarzenegger and his crew have been over to the stadium...by the time that the networks are on their way and Charlie Gibson is on the ground delivering talking points from the embers, its too late!
I can imagine that they're eventually gonna send Bushy in his cowboy boots and jeans to talk about the finer points of clearing brush....Because its all about clearing brush.


My father is just north of LA, but he still has a house down there that he rents out...its all probably safe in that area because its an upper class area...but he said that the air is so bad that its sickening to even go out in it. The place where he lives now is pretty fancy and the big move there has been to cut back all the dry brush from anywhere there are houses, and in recent years communities plan brush cuts so as to prevent big fires. I don't know if anything like that works, but clearly, you can't cut all the brush from everywhere. You also cant make it rain...maybe locusts and frogs, but apparently god has no water for the west.

The drought out west is another tragic example of how fast climate change is effecting us. What was previously something that might effect our children's children, seems to be speeding up, as if its gaining speed as it rolls downhill. We had been pleasantly surprised at how quickly the ozone hole repaired itself and how quickly the Clinton-Gore administration was able to begin to get a handle on emissions from trucks and plants...the levels of deadly, environment damaging poisons were reduced significantly, before the Bush-Cheney administration came in and canceled all of the programs and pending lawsuits...just like that. This was done in favor of big business, just like almost everything they do. How quickly things returned to where they were and got worse, is illustrative of just how bad this administration has been as a steward of this country's health and in keeping America's part up as a part of the world community.

Meantime....I feel like Im Dorothy in Oz and the shiny bubble is floating down..."Heres someone who can help you!" Who has moved up to #4 in the Democratic presidential race?...who is that man?...and is it wholly possible that a brilliant clown can sweep in and become our candidate for president?...well, we know that a chimp could do better than Bush/Cheney...so, take it as you will.







Ok, so the Sunday Tim Russert Interview wasn't all that great, but put him with Jon Stewart and you've got a little slice of magic. The really funny thing is that I already had the bumper sticker and the buttons from last year....As Colbert says, all I've got to do is to cut off Stewart's name...

C/P RIPCoco

From Heroes to Sellouts

I'm always a bit wary of making a list of Heroes in the fight against increasing the numbers of H-1B visas and Green Cards being issued. One must always contend with the possibility of Today's Hero becoming Tomorrow's Sellout.

One name that always keeps popping up in the "Heroes" category is Dino Perrotti from ComputerWorld. Yesterday, he came through again with his excellent article, "IEEE Betrays American Engineers and its Members".

Here's a brief synopsis of the issue. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has consistently been working on behalf of its members to lower the number of visas issued to foreign technology workers. Last March, IEEE-USA (the political action arm of the organization) came up with this seemingly generous compromise, guaranteed to make people from both sides of the issue hold hands and skip down the path, smiling happily ever after. Instead of dealing with that pesky issue of H-1B visas, where low-wage workers are here today and gone tomorrow, why not issue more EB-4 and F-4 immigration visas, which would allow workers to start on the path towards U.S. citizenship, and therefore somehow level out the playing field for American workers?

As I read this March 20, 2007 article earlier today, (written by, of all people, Dino Perrotti), I rolled my eyes and thought "How could these people be so gullible?" I've been getting a steady diet of these "You don't like H-1B's? Let's issue Green Cards and keep the jobs in the US so they don't get offshored" articles for the last several months. I've interpreted each of these articles as exceedingly clumsy attempts to try to fool people into thinking that this path will magically lead to more jobs for American workers. However, a lot has happened since March. Who knows? If I was somehow transported by a time machine to seven months in the past, maybe I'd think it was a good idea.

Fast forward to October 11, 2007, when the IEEE-USA and the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) issued a joint letter to Congress that not only asked for higher limits for EB and F-4 visas, but also recommended that all graduates in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) be able to get their Green Cards as quickly as possible, without having to wait the usual 5-10 years! Excuse me, but, how is this supposed to help the American worker? Since American industry will not hire American engineers, they'll hire foreign workers instead, and their taxes will help pay for displaced American engineers to start their own landscaping businesses?

To Dino's credit, he is fighting mad! He doesn't sugarcoat anything in his article. Here's some interesting background on how all of this started:

Once all the engineers sat down for a pre-lobby meeting [in 2006], the chief lobbyist began explaining that what engineers should ask their representatives for is EB and F-4 visas instead of H-1B visas. EB and F-4 visas are a form of legal immigration for high-tech workers. Most engineers became upset and started to argue why they should ask for more green cards instead of asking for less H-1B guest workers. They argued that in both cases, American engineers are getting undercut by foreign labor.

Then the IEEE-USA lobbyist explained that legal immigration is better for American engineers because it takes "much longer" to process [emphasis is mine]. So this would put the potential H-1B engineers on the slow track of legal immigration, which will give IEEE-USA time to lobby in favor of American engineers. He said that it is safer for America because legal immigrants must go through a rigorous background check for ties to terrorism. He argued that it is better for the foreign nationals and it is better for Americans.

Most of the engineers were confused but believed that IEEE-USA was looking out for their best interests. After all, nobody else seems to even care about American engineering careers. So off they went to speak with congressional representatives or their staffers about this new EB and F-4 agenda, hoping that it will bring some relief to their career problems.

Some activists warned that IEEE was using the engineers as pawns to push legal immigration for engineers in addition to guest worker programs. At the time, it was hard for most to believe that such a conspiracy existed [emphasis is mine]. Now, almost a year later it is revealed that the chief proponent of H-1B visas, the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) has joined with IEEE-USA to support more green cards for foreign nationals with the caveat that they are fast-tracked. In other words, any foregn [sic] national who has a job offer at the time of graduation, gets an instant greencard. [Emphasis is mine.) American engineers felt betrayed. Is it possible that IEEE used these engineers as pawns as part of a grander scheme?

Why the sudden about face by IEEE-USA?

After, the article titled "IEEE-USA vs. Bill Gates" was printed; a delegation of top Microsoft representatives went to IEEE. They told IEEE that they contribute financially to many IEEE programs and asked why IEEE-USA is fighting Microsoft on the H-1B issue. At the time, IEEE-USA representatives told Microsoft representatives that the H-1B issue was what engineers indicated was their most important issue. At the time, IEEE-USA leaders told this author that they stood up to Microsoft to defend its members.

What happened since then? Well, you can probably guess, but you can read the rest of Perrotti article for the rest of the story. As part of the coup de grace, Perrotti gives us this gem:

Is it possible that there is no country called America, that the world is truly flat? Is it possible that there is just an agglomeration of super-wealthy international corporations who claim to be American companies but are actually countries without borders? Do these corporations care about America or the American people? Do they control America?

Then Perrotti reminds us:

This is no longer a battle for the H-1B visa cap. The H-1B visa cap is now moot because there are so many other fast-track proposals to bring in foreign engineers, computer scientists and other high-tech professionals. Other professions are next. Nurses, doctors, accountants and every other profession are also being targeted. This is now a fight for the heart and soul of America and what it stands for.

This is precisely why this battle does not just affect tech industry workers. If corporate America can turn their backs on Americans who possess skills that are supposedly in such high demand, what does it mean for the rest of us?

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Quick Green Card Post

I have to post and run before Blogger's scheduled outage at 4PM PDT. Two quick links. Kim Berry at Programmers Guild put together a letter rebutting the calls from SIA and IEEE-USA to ask for a substantial increase in Greed Cards to be issued. If interested, he'd like people to sign the letter by 5:00 PDT today. This is probably too late to be of any use, but I thought I'd try.

Also, check out the comments in this InformationWeek article from October 11, 2007. I think the writers wrote some of the best comments I've seen in a long time.

Ciao!

"She Can't Hold On Much Longer, Captain"

I mentioned in my recent SNARK ALERT! post the number of articles that have been published recently, all decrying the supposed "high tech skills" shortage. I've noticed that each author has his or her own unique spin on this catastrophe, making it impossible for us bloggers (since we are not being subsidized by Big Business to spend eight hours a day pounding out the party line on our keyboards) to keep up with the task of refuting all of the misinformation being spewed forth.

I give you the following examples:

• Poor Billy Boy has no choice but to open a new software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to skirt the limits on H-1B visas issued in the United States.
• Equally poor Rob Preston from InformationWeek tried his best, but all he could do was come up with a confusing article that seemed to imply there is a talent shortage, but could not seem to muster up any convincing facts or statistics to support his claim. At least he had the guts to face his accusers!
• Moira Herbst's article at BusinessWeek came up with an interesting twist. Sure, there are plenty of IT professionals and engineers out there, but most of them have the wrong skills sets. Enrollment in computer science and engineering programs at colleges and universities is predictably bottoming out, forcing Bill Gates to go on a public relations tour to urge students to switch their majors back to technical degrees.

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, Anne Broache from CNET comes up with this gem, "Allow More Green Cards for Foreign Techies, Congress Told".

"But what's sometimes forgotten in the debate is a key point of agreement among at least some representatives of the warring sides. A new joint letter (click for PDF) to Congress from the Semiconductor Industry Association and IEEE-USA, the U.S. branch of the world's largest professional society of electronics engineers, seeks to remind politicos of that common ground, which is this: we need more green cards."

No, Anne, WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT GREEN CARDS! And, no, Anne, WE DO NOT NEED TO ISSUE MORE GREEN CARDS! We do not mention Green Cards every time we write about this "high skills" debacle because we don't have time to write 300-page treatises debunking these claims each and every time you and your colleagues decide to write another article full of cheap shots aimed at American workers! And besides, have you Googled "Green Cards high tech skills shortage" lately? I came up with 805,000 results!

During the massive KoolAid-sipping debauchery amongst corporations in the 1990's, the decision was made to lower costs by downsizing thousands of experienced American professionals, and either replace them with lower cost H-1B or L-1 visa employees, or just to ship the jobs outright overseas and be done with them, once and for all. Surprise, surprise. We now ONLY HAVE A SHORTAGE of professionals who are perfectly matched for each and every esoteric little high tech position being created, and students, who are smarter than Bill Gates and his Strong American Schools cohorts realize, are REFUSING to major in technical career fields after having seen an entire generation of tech workers given the shaft and having no reason to believe it could never happen again.

U.S. corporations made their beds, now make them sleep in them! Just like the American households that must live with the consequences of their spending habits, U.S. companies should be forced to live with the available American talent pool that their policies have repeatedly diluted and destroyed over the past 15 years. Don't let these guys off the hook by letting them bring in workers from overseas.

I don't have time for any more of this nonsense. Tomorrow I'm going on a fall color tour. Don't anyone DARE try to publish another one of these phony talent shortage articles while my back is turned!

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Update to Lyre, Lyre, Pantz & Fier

(Update to Lyre, Lyre, Pantz & Fier)

ComputerWorld has provided a link showing letters from both Cohen & Grigsby PC and the Department of Labor that were issued in response to letters sent by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), in which the congressmen demanded a response to the statements made by the lawyers in the infamous YouTube video. ("Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker".) The images of the scanned letters in the .pdf file are of poor quality, but should be legible with increased magnification.

I thought it would be fun to have a contest to see how many inaccuracies we could spot in the letters, starting with, from Cohen & Grigsby, "Moreover, the employees for whom we file H-1B visa petitions are typically highly skilled and highly educated employees of U.S. companies who get wages above - often well above - federally mandated 'prevailing wages'." (On second thought, that statement may be correct, since the prevailing wage might be close to $0.00. Hardly any native-born Americans are performing the work anymore.)

(Cross-posted to Carrie's Nation.)

Lyre, Lyre, Pantz & Fier

Do you remember the YouTube video giving annotated highlights of a seminar put on by the immigration lawyers at Cohen & Grigsby PC? The goal of the seminar was to advise employers on the legal framework in which to hire foreign workers and guide them through the PERM Green Card process. You may also remember the famous bombshell from attorney Lawrence Lebowitz, ""Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker."

I just found a cute, but informative, link in the Comments section at Patrick Thibodeau's ComputerWorld article from October 5, 2007, "Hiring Video's Aftermath: Law Firm says Words Ill-Chosen, But Advice Proper." The folks at Job Destruction.info put together a fake website for the equally fake law firm of Lyre, Lyre, Pantz & Fier, advertising the firm's expertise in lowering your company's costs by helping you replace your expensive American employees with lower cost workers from overseas. But remember, "So hurry and get your piece of the pie before it's gone. If you don't, someone else will. "

The real beauty to this website is the link to the original footage of the now infamous Cohen & Grigsby seminar. We can now judge for ourselves as to whether the doctored-up YouTube video misrepresented the law firm's presentation or instead showed a factual representation of the highlights of the seminar.

According to the ComputerWorld article, the law firm is desperately trying to back off of their original statements by stressing the legality of their advice. I'm sure it's all perfectly legal, and Cohen & Grigsby, PC are doing an excellent job in representing both the letter and the spirit of the law. Americans need to realize that there is no fraud being committed by anyone. Stepped up enforcement of the law to eliminate "abuse" will not do any good and may even be counterproductive. Only a comprehensive overhaul of the entire Visa and Green Card processes will eliminate this current rate of job destruction for American workers.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

Stealthy Little Piggies on the Senate Floor

I don’t normally like to write alarming articles about bills that are being considered in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, particularly during the early stages of negotiations. As my dad once said, he used to constantly get these email alerts begging him to call or fax his senator or representative right away about some huge issue before the world collapsed. My dad would usually do nothing, and Congress would usually vote the right way.

As early as today or tonight, our U.S. Senators could be voting on various proposals that would, in the words of NumbersUSA, "….when taken together, would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and dramatically increase the importation of foreign workers at a time 10 million Americans are looking for jobs and can't find employment." Naturally, since similar proposals were overwhelmingly rejected in June of this year, these proposals are in danger of being piggy-backed onto H.R. 1585, the Defense Authorization bill for fiscal year 2008.

I took notice after seeing how grass-root activism helped the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 go up in flames on the Senate floor on June 28, 2007. Among other measures, the Act would have raised the annual H-1B visa limits for "highly-skilled" workers from 65,000 to 115,000 per year. I knew that business oligarchs led by Bill Gates at Microsoft would not go away quietly. I also knew that these business leaders would use every means necessary, from soft-sell tactics to playing hardball, to get the visa limits raised this year. Knowing that stealth would be their weapon of choice, I resolved to keep my ears open for any new developments. I also resolved to get off my butt recently and start following this story a little bit more closely.

Here’s a little background on the whole saga. In 1990, thanks in part to my U.S. Senator at the time, Spencer Abraham (R-MI), Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1990, which established the H-1B category of "highly skilled" guest workers who were brought in to fill open positions due to a perceived shortage of qualified American candidates. The number of H-1B visas allowed per year fluctuated at various times between 65,000 per year to a peak of 195,000 per year. (Rob Sanchez has a nice history at his Job Destruction website.) From that point on, employers have been falling over themselves to slash as many American information technology and engineering workers as possible from their payrolls and give the jobs to lower paid and (often lower qualified) foreign guest workers, mostly from India.

When the Senate failed to approve the bill raising the H-1B limits to 115,000 in June as mentioned above, the assault began.

On July 5, 2007, Microsoft announced they were forced to open up a new software development office in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to get around the current visa limitation of 65,000 per year.

On July 10, 2007, Hillary Clinton made a video-conference speech to the Indian Institute of Technology 2007 Global Alumni Conference in Santa Clara, California, and affirmed her support for expanding the H-1B visa program.

On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the U.S. Senate supporting measures for the "….temporary relief for companies in need of highly skilled workers."

On August 23, 2007, Microsoft filed a lobby registration form with the US Senate showing they were hiring the firm of SC Partners LLC for purposes of lobbying on issues surrounding H-1B visas and Green Cards for tech workers.

On September 11, 2007 (talk about horrible timing!), a bipartisan group of 13 governors sent a joint letter to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate urging our lawmakers to pass legislation to raise the H-1B limit to 115,000 visas.

On September 18, 2007, about 1,000 "highly skilled" legal immigrants rallied at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. to "…protest long delays and vast bureaucratic backlogs in the immigration system." Paul Donnelly, one of the godfathers of the current H-1B system and now a consultant for American Families United, was quoted by the New York Times as saying. "It is a significant thing to have foreign-born people, who are notoriously hard to organize, organizing themselves." Oh, so this was a grassroots, spontaneous assembly, huh?

Not to mention various well-placed articles appearing here and there talking about the difficulties in hiring qualified people for tech positions, how the public school system contributes to our country’s failure to compete with foreign workers, and the benefits of free trade.

I’ve been vaguely disgusted with the U.S. visa policies for a number of years as I’ve seen high tech workers laid-off, forced to train their lower cost replacements, told their skills were irrelevant, told they lacked work experience after spending time and money to update their skills, and told they were overqualified on the rare occasion the potential employer could find nothing wrong with their work history. I’ve become a very recent convert in the drive against amnesty for illegal aliens when I started witnessing something I thought I would never see – highly educated American workers competing directly against illegal aliens for jobs in the building trades. Big government and businesses have been able to push around American workers for far too long now, and it’s time for all of us to put a stop to it.

Please don’t be afraid to contact your Senators and urge them to vote against any measure that would take away jobs from American citizens.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

But don't look at this, look at the guy pushing the lawnmower in front of your house! It's his fault!

You'd think after Reagan that Americans would have learned that "trickle down" refers to what falls on your head after the corporatocracy pees on you -- and doesn't even have the decency to offer you an umbrella.

Krugman on the "Bush Boom":

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down — that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.

Well, Friday’s dismal jobs report showed that the Bush boom, such as it was, has run its course. And working Americans have a right to ask, “Where’s my trickle?”

It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure — and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.

[snip]

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.

Meanwhile, benefits have deteriorated: the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance through employers, which plunged along with employment during the early years of the Bush administration, continued to decline even as the economy finally began creating some jobs.

And one of the few seeming bright spots of the Bush-era economy, rising homeownership, is now revealed as the result of a bubble inflated in part by financial flim-flam, which deceived both borrowers and investors.

[snip]

Yet the overall economy has grown at a reasonable pace over the past four years. Where did the economic growth go? The answer is that it went to the same economic elite that received the lion’s share of those tax cuts. Corporate profits rose 72 percent from the second quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2007. The real income of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans surged by 51 percent between 2003 and 2005, and although we don’t yet have the data for 2006, everything we know suggests that the income of the rich took another upward leap.

The absence of any gains for workers in the years since the 2003 tax cut is a pretty convincing refutation of trickle-down theory. So is the fact that the economy had a much more convincing boom after Bill Clinton raised taxes on top brackets. It turns out that when you cut taxes on the rich, the rich pay less taxes; when you raise taxes on the rich, they pay more taxes — end of story.

But it’s not just trickle-down that has been refuted: the whole idea that a rising tide raises all boats, that growth in the economy necessarily translates into gains for the great majority of Americans, is belied by the Bush-era experience.

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.

And this, folks, is why you have the Republicans scraming about illegal immigrants, as if it's illegal immigrants who are the reason why the jobs numbers were so dismal last month, or why the Bush Administration's economy has produced not even enough jobs to handle new entrants into the work force -- and those jobs are largely in hospitality, food service, and retail. Is this really the economy that Republicans want to tout; one in which because high-paying professional-level jobs are being outsourced to low-wage countries, those who used to have those jobs are now competing with illegal immigrants for the jobs cleaning hotel bathrooms and dishing up Big Macs to screaming children?

I've often used the imagery of Republican politicians directing Americans' attention DOWN the economic ladder instead of paying attention to their back pockets, where corporate fatcats, their pockets bulging with taxpayer cash and huge profits, are lifting their wallets. It used to be black people who were the boogeyman; Reagan's famous "welfare queen in a Cadillac." Now it's illegal immigrants. Either way, as long as Americans continue to fall for this kind of three-card-monte diversionary tactic, the haves and the have-mores will still be the ones slipping the wallet out of your pocket and then the shiv into your back to make sure you don't complain.

Joe Sudbay liveblogged the GOP debate so you could watch Bill Clinton on Larry King instead

...or not watch either. I myself was watching "Fantasy Fruit Sculptures" on the Food Channel.

But if you want to know how the Party of Immigrant-Bashers did, here it is.

See also: Other intrepid souls who sat through this exercise in jingoism, hate, and cynicism.

The idea that any of these nimrods could become president is enough to make me want to stick an icepick in my own forehead.