Painful realization: Too many immigrants

Here is yet another painful realization. We have too few jobs and too many immigrants taking them. This is painful to say because I love immigrants and identify with them. My immigrant grandfather inspires me, and I'll never be half the man he was. I love the cultural diversity that immigrants bring, especially the differences from American norms. It's good to see how other people do it.

So it is with visceral pain that I acknowledge that the level of immigration, particularly illegal immigration, needs to be curtailed. We need to tighten up the borders, but more than that we need to crack down on businesses that employ illegal immigrants (and legal immigrants with special visas). This is going to be painful, especially to immigrants who have built better lives for themselves. They had very American hopes to work and prosper, and it's going to end for some even though they are good people. Yes, this will hurt good people. Make no mistake about it. However, good people are also being hurt by the lack of jobs, so it's not as though no one benefits.

I won't give a detailed proposal because I don't know the numbers well enough and, heck, any detailed proposal from an amateur wouldn't get a second look. However, I think we should have a certain number of guest workers. We definitely need immigrant workers for agriculture if we want abundance on our grocery shelves. We should also allow some of the 12 million illegal workers in the US stay to prevent a humanitarian disaster that would occur from throwing so many out of work all at once.

Many people don't want to face this. We hope everything will work out OK. Maybe we'll have amnesty for those hard workers who have been in the country for so long, or maybe we'll keep the status quo, which is better for the immigrants than returning to their home countries.

However, some groups support amnesty or the status quo for reasons baser than love for immigrants. Business owners like cheap, reliable labor. Democrats look forward to more Dem-leaning voters. Too bad. What they want isn't for the overall good of the country, so it shouldn't matter.

Image: zimbio.com

Short: Tea Party Babies

Some Tea Partyers are the biggest whiners. They say some horrid things about their opponents, like they're ruining the country, or they plan to reduce Americans to slaves of the government, and such. But they whine like two-year-olds if you put up a fight or show that they have some faults.

Here's what was said about a Tea Partyer who allegedly helped someone sneak into a nursing home and take unauthorized pictures of Senator Cochran's old, crippled, demented wife:

"It was an attack on a good man that is well respected... It’s shocking to those in the state who knew the demeanor and quiet dedication of the real Mark Mayfield. He ... didn’t deserve that kind of treatment."

This "great Christian man" killed himself rather than face the criminal charges. And it sure wasn't his fault! This time, personal responsibility has nothing to do with it!

Image: time.com

Somewhat related: The Tea Party in Mississippi is extremely (always extreme with the TP) angry about Cochran's successful appeal to black Democrats to vote for him in the primary. Opinions are mixed about whether the GOP establishment and the Tea Party can make peace after Cochran's win.

Last outpost of crazy: Annoying birthers

I just wasted time refuting another birther who says the long form Obama birth certificate is a forgery. To prevent the effort from being a total waste, I'm saving the links to the expert information. This investigator printed out a copy of the birth certificate (so a piece of paper with ink on it), scanned it, looked at the resulting PDF using Adobe Illustrator, and found layers! You can get layers from a regular scanned document.

This investigator looks very closely at the various bits in Adobe, and does a great job explaining why some text is on one layer while other text is on a different layer. It's due to optimization of the image in order to compress the size of the file. Some text is flat black, other is gray scale. Thank God a program makes the decision and it doesn't require human oversight. Otherwise, the decisions would drive us crazy (just like a birther).

Image: rcradioblog.wordpress.com

Update 1/7/18. I'm still having arguments with annoying birthers. One today claimed that the phone call with Obama's elderly step-grandmother was believable evidence that Obama was born in Kenya. No, not at all. A long distance phone call to an elderly woman with a translator involved and a carnival atmosphere, with others immediately correcting her statement (via translator). No followup clarifying what she said. That is so incredibly weak. Here's a report.

Update 1/11/18. In researching info to refute the latest annoying birther (who was so uninformed that he didn't know of the long form certificate), I found this interesting compendium of birther lore. Sure there are some of the common debunked objections. There's also a comparison of Obama's birth certificate versus the birth certificates of twin girls born a day later at the same hospital. But the real gem is located further down the document, where it's revealed that DARPA and the CIA have time travel abilities, and contact presidents in advance of their election.

The Tea Party is local, not national

Cantor's loss showed something that I already knew: the Tea Party isn't a national organization or closely-aligned or competing national groups. Most Tea Party groups are local networks.

This runs counter to a talking point that some Dems/liberals/progressives use. They claim that the Tea Party is astroturf--drummed up by political professionals whose salaries are paid by the Koch brothers and the like.

In Cantor's case, he was up against well-organized county Tea Party groups, as reported here. They turned out their voters--Cantor didn't. (I haven't verified this by checking this primary vs. typical primary and general election numbers, but it would be possible, if I was willing to commit to the effort.)

So the national Tea Party groups are probably a sham. Unless they have huge lists of voters, and can mobilize large numbers of those voters, they can't do anything but make a lot of noise. Nationally that's what they've done. It's been noise--not a coherent plan or coherent policy goals.

What has always been true is that the strength of the Tea Party is on based local conservative networks, so the real difference is at the local level. Does the Tea Party group have a large local network that they can turn out on primary and election day? Can the local Tea Party group decide on one candidate to support, or is their support split? Finally, how cohesive and influential are the Tea Party members? If it's all blather, it probably doesn't matter. However, if the Tea Party opinion makers are logical and influential enough, they probably can make a difference, like they did in Cantor's former district.

Image: greencountyteaparty.ohlc.org

Extra. Local reporting about the Brat/Cantor race showing that the locals were organized enough to defeat Cantor's choice for local convention chair prior to the primary. It should have been a wake-up call.

Last outpost of crazy: I wish this was an outlier

I have to document this for posterity. The top US news story on Google is the sexy mug shot of a felon (convicted at least once already). He's just been arrested with three other gang members on weapons charges, but that doesn't matter because he's dreamy. His picture (mug shots are public records, I guess) isn't the only thing being passed around. There are websites trying to raise money for him, including one run by his mother.

I am so hoping that this fad lasts one week at most. If it's more, that is just further proof that the internet is evil.

Image: eonline.com

Update 6/29/14. Good news. This fad faded in less than a week. 

To reparate or not to reparate

Ta-Nehisi Coates had a long article on reparations back in May. It caused a lot of buzz and consternation, but only for a short time, and mostly among liberals/progressives or whatever the correct term is now.

At first I thought that it's crazy--there is no effing way the US is going to pay reparations to our black population. We aren't exactly flush with cash right now. To raise taxes on someone or everyone to pay reparations isn't going to fly.

That's absolutely true. There won't be any reparations paid anytime in the foreseeable future, or probably ever. However, it did drum up a lot of conversation. And people didn't just talk about slavery and Jim Crow--they talked about redlining and segregated housing, two issues that are a lot closer in time than slavery or Jim Crow. It got people thinking about how poorly civil rights were protected as recently as the 60's and 70's and maybe even more recently. That's a good reminder and a good history lesson. It got people asking whether we still have too much segregation--definitely a worthwhile conversation.

So I may not want to pay reparations, but I sure know that there is much to atone for. Are we really to the point that we've done all the changing we need to? Are we in a colorblind era where people are judged only on the content of their character? Not yet.

It's good to get a reminder so that we keep moving forward and don't slip back.

Image: urbanology.org

Extras. Critique by another black columnist--this view isn't productive, so let's stick with what is more likely to be. Conor Freidersdorf's column with a block of good comments including this scathing insight:

"Coates' socialist instincts prevents him from examining the issue of legal plunder without more legal plunder."

Noah Millman's thoughtful response includes this:

"You make the case that your people has been brutalized and stolen from and raped and murdered with impunity. That case motivates the determination to rise up and prove your collective manhood by throwing the foreigner out of power. Depending on the circumstances, that might mean expelling an occupier, ... or carving one’s own state out from larger structure..." 

This is the closest to my thinking. The best reparation is creating a country that is fair and the way you want it to be--not a payoff from the government.

Candidates Implode--Two in one day!

No, I'm not even talking about Rick Perry or Chris Christie.

This time it's Scott Walker (for campaign finance shenanigans) and Brian Schweitzer (for gay and whore slurs against members of Congress). Schweitzer's verbal gaffes were bad enough that they could have been perpetrated by Rick Perry, but not this time.

This is good. I'm happy when the stupider ones eliminate themselves. Actually, these problems may not rise to a strike-out for these candidates, but they're getting closer.

Image: news.stv.tv