Unfortunately, immigration reform and ALL of its implications is just another toy in the hands of politicians who are using it to better position their party for elections. The extreme right wing will play upon the fears of their pool of voters, and the Dems facing Nov elections will espouse how "something needs to be done and how they will make a difference", surely they mean right AFTER voted in.

I think we will see more folks like Crist leave their party because neither party reflects the values of that party anymore. I think we will start seeing more Independents ( YAY ) fighting for the real issues and dismissing the super-parties.

Unfortunately, what we will not see is the President keep his promise to Hispanic voters (who helped vote him into office), to work on reform laws in his first 90 days.

"Obama takes immigration reform off agenda" link to associated press article:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT



It seems to me that we ( collectively) paint a picture of our "oppressor" as Republicans ( whom we see as a bunch of bigoted old white privileged rich folks. We paint an image of Democrats as liberal hosts of freedom and equality who given the opportunity to affect positive change will leap at that chance. Neither of these images are true.

http://somosrepublicans.com/2010/04/...tion-inaction/

It gets increasingly difficult to see our country divided along the lines of race, when I think it is being divided at the hands of people in power playing the "common man" against one another. Both parties will do whatever necessary to hold steadfast to their party position. Or at least, the appearance of it.


Yes. This bill is THE single most actively racist piece of legislature I have seen in my lifetime. Yes, it is unconstitutional without a doubt. I said earlier in this thread that without action taken on the Federal level, we would see more states taking similar action and it looks like some now are.

We as a nation are being played like pawns at the hands of both parties and tear one another apart in our polarizing on this subject and many other currently being played out in the press.


Until our politicians find " US" more important than their party, we will continue to be mis-represented. Until we stop voting for them, we will continue to allow it.

The Bull Moose said it best
 

What is so heartbreaking is this definition was giving - and agreed upon - in 1912. Another version came 20 years later or so from FDR when he said "A necessitous man is not a free man" - Meaning if one cannot afford the basics in life, you are a slave to a broken system. "The basics" are defined below by Theodore Roosevelt (who had to leave the Republican Party to get out from the shackles of the corporatocracy if his day - sound familiar?)

Teddy Roosevelt 1912:

We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living--a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.

Key 2010:

Let me break it down.

A living wage must:

secure the elements of a normal standard of living. Wages must be enough to provide enough food, water, shelter, clothing, heat, cooling, transportation, and communication. These are the basics of modern living.

a standard high enough to make morality possible. So no one has to lie cheat or steal to have all of the above necessities of modern life.

to provide for education and recreation. To be able to relax (not working two, three, four jobs) and to be able to better your and your family's station through higher education.

to care for immature members of the family Childcare, tutors, education, special needs.

to maintain the family during periods of sickness To provide health coverage during illness and recovery. to be able to not have to work when you are sick.

and to permit of reasonable saving for old age. To be able to afford to retire.

And let me be clear, I submit that these measures should be met with one (1, a single) wage earner, not mom and pop each working two or three jobs. The reason why the Republicans do not want this. (seriously, there are some crappy Dems, but 100% of the Reps are crappy - on the side of corporations over actual human beings)

Is because when there is a thriving, educated middle class they start getting "uppity", they start demanding things like....Equal Rights, Democracy, like not fighting in rich men's wars, like stopping genocides, like doing the right thing for the planet. Republicans (and some Democrats) prefer that there be no thriving middle class to question their authority.

Pima County (tucson and the largest border with mexico) Sheriff Dupnik says he doesn't put undocumented folks in his jail. He calls ICE to come get them. I believe I said before that he detains and turns over to ICE more undocumented folks than anyone else in the US......and that is under current law (without this new racist law). Under this new law he will HAVE to put them in his jail.

Yes he (and the other jurisdictions) will get some money back from the Feds. That money will be used to pay the cost of putting that undocumented person in his jail. However, that is not a revenue generating stream of money. It is money already allocated and won't help AZ's state budget one bit. It won't go to the general food for use on roads, schools, libraries, fire police, etc.

The real question is: Will the federal money actually pay for 100% of AZ dollars spent on stopping, arresting, investigating, feeding, clothes, medical, transportation to and from courts, court costs, and other misc costs incurred by enforcement of the new state law?

The thing that still baffles me is Republicans are supposed to want LESS government, yet they keep creating more government on the state level with less tax revenue to pay for the more government they are creating.

---------
By the way they amended the new law. Something about making it more clear this is not profiling. Cops have to have another reason to pull you over than being brown while driving. They also included something about local/town/city ordinances. You know those pesky little racist laws that towns pass......no parking cars in your yard, no litter or debris in your yard or on your porch, no drinking alcohol in your front yard.....well local cops can say 'paper please' if they decide to knock on your door to enforce those laws. (And we all know mexicans are the ones who do those above things...snort).

That governor woman thinks the changes are good and will make the law more defensible when challenged in state and fed courts.

you know I got to thinking about this more.........

I wonder if the feds will pay a dime for someone jailed under a state law? At what point does that person cease to be a state prisoner and becomes a fed prisoner temporarily housed in a city/county jail.?

I think that the person will have to serve a sentence in State custody and then will be released to Immigration for deportation. That is why they made it a crime.

I know here in CA you serve the time for a crime if you are undocumented and THEN they turn you over to Immigration.

eta: I don't see Federal monies coming to the state of AZ for the incarceration of persons housed for breaking a state crime. When the Feds rent jail space for holding people in Federal custody, then monies change hands. Not so much for State custody incarcerations.

I cannot tell you how it will reduce the problem of guns and drugs being smuggled back and forth. I CAN assure you that the price of a good set of forged papers just went up exponentially though.

Please sign up and attend this event:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/...21559341189362

yes yes yes!

this invites government right into our lives! so, i have to wonder if it was government that the republicans were 'fearing' all along--or POCs..? --doesn't sound like government is *so bad* if it's WHITE.

boo.

Yes, I would like for people to be able to get to the US legally, as it were, though I have a problem with geopolitical borders, but I find it difficult to believe that this new legistation is to make immigration easier.

Gee, go figure....the hysteria around a murder that pushed this whole thing may be based on bad information

The killing of a Southern Arizona rancher that sparked an outcry to secure the border was not random, and investigators are focusing on a suspect in the United States, the Arizona Daily Star has learned.

linkyloo

Time Wise
 

Let the good times roll
 

So it's happening exactly as was predicted. Arresting ~ and holding ~ innocent folks based on how they look.

This STINKS. That poor woman.

Right?

I wanted to scoop her up and hug her she looks terrified..

:soapbox:

http://thebravoreport.com/

This just in
 

There's a new post being shared on facebook:

JUST SO I UNDERSTAND THIS...YOU PASS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YRS HARD LABOR, YOU PASS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET SHOT. YOU PASS THE AMERICAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET A JOB, DRIVER'S LICENSE, ALLOWANCE FOR A PLACE TO LIVE, HEALTH CARE, EDUCATION, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT SO YOU CAN READ A DOCUMENT. WE CARRY PASSPORTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES OR FACE JAIL TIME. REPOST IF YOU AGREE

Yikes!

I have been arguing with it every time I see it.

Again people wanting us to be like North Korea????

Someone said that if at 911 people had been asked for "papers" it would not have happened. Those people were from Saudi Arabia, and had FAKE papers.

*bangs head against wall*

Why do people especially queer people want the USA to be anything like NORTH KOREA?????? Afghanistan? Seriously?

Seriously? I do not get it.

sorry, but there's all kinds of hatred posted places on the internet--why re-post it here?

to be clear, i just didn't understand if there was some meaning to re-posting a racist blathering or if it was just to say, 'hey look at this'. no disrespect meant, i just didn't get it.

I did hear about this ..Nice !
Maybe this is going to be a defining "thing" , a .. point in which people seriously go .. wtf ?

Honestly I think it's a lot of folks who take living in America for granted. They don't realize just how amazingly good they have it here. One irony of this, for me, is that when war next breaks out on the Korean peninsula and we are fighting there (we have a treaty obligation to be there, we *can't* leave) they will paint North Korea as a nation no one should want to emulate (which it isn't). If confronted by their statement expressing admiration for the border security that North Korea has, they will then deny that they would EVER say such a thing!

What's more, the person who wrote this and every single person who sends this meme forward like it was a good thing is not even wrong about the Afghanistan border. They demonstrate their near complete ignorance of the Afghan border--when you have a moment, take a look at a good topological map of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most powerful, technologically advanced, and nightmarishly lethal war machine ever devised by the mind of man can't secure it. Think about that for just a moment. Our Air Force can pick any section of the sky, anywhere on this planet and say "we want complete and total control of that area in a week" and within a week we will have *absolute* air superiority over it. There is no body of water larger than a lake that the Navy cannot control pretty much at will. We have satellites that are *extremely* sensitive and yet, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is owned by no one--not the Pakistani army, not the American army, not the tribes living in the area. It's a free-for-all there.

I bring that up not to puff out my chest at the power of the American military but to illustrate a point: yes, if you cross the border into Afghanistan you very well might be shot. There are any of a number of ways to die crossing that border but it doesn't matter if you tried to ninja your way across that border or drove across in a convoy, your risks are about the same because it is lawless at that border. There's a real honest-to-goodness shooting war going on that and anyone who crosses into a war zone is taking their lives in their hands! The fact that people would use, on the one hand, the last Stalinist dictatorship on the planet (and Kim Jong-Il is a Stalinist more than a Maoist) and on the other an active war zone as examples of perfect border security shows that they haven't thought very much about what it is like to actually LIVE in those nations nor what it means to be a citizen of a liberal democracy like America.

At the risk of a Godwin's law violation, Hitler made the trains run on time. Could we have perfect border security? Almost certainly yes. We would also no longer resemble America and would more closely resemble either pre-1991 Russia or pre-Unification East Germany. Could we have near perfect internal security? Almost certainly. At that point we would BE pre-Unification East Germany or pre-1991 Russia.

Those folks who think that North Korea has such great border security forget that not praising the Dear Leader on queue or with insufficient enthusiasm or slightly out of time with everyone else will *also* land one in prison. They seem to want to trade their freedom (which they take utterly for granted) for security (even though the actual threat to them, personally, is relatively small) and, as such, they deserve neither.

Something I would like to see us American liberals do is revive a sense of what it means to BE an American. What our ideals are, why we hold them, and what the alternatives are. Yes, our history is spotty in a lot of areas and downright tragically horrific in others. And yes, all of the men who laid down the foundation of modern Western liberal democracy were white, many of them were slaveholders, most of them were sexists, and quite a number of them were xenophobic racists and cultural imperialists at that. I admit all of that. And yet, and yet...if you read the ideas, many of them are very good, sound ideas. I think that some of us who call ourselves liberal (as I do) or progressive (as others might) have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In our rush to point out their failings, we have decided that the *ideas* expressed aren't worth teaching and therefore, aren't worth carrying forward. Where we stand now, where on the one hand, people post things admiring the North Koreans for their brutal and Orwellian police state while on the other hand shouting USA! USA! and calling it patriotism, is in part a reflection of the fact that we do not know what it means to be a citizen of a liberal democracy.

I am trying to re-learn what it means because I am a grandparent now. It will be my job, as matriarch of my family, to pass on what it means to be a decent citizen to my grandchildren. One thing I know I will pass on is that being an American citizen is far more deep, far more worthwhile, and altogether more demanding than chanting USA! USA! and asserting, against quite a large amount of empirical evidence, that America is the greatest and best at everything.

i cant wait to see this movie it looks badass!!!
 

kick ass article about Robert Rodriguez's new movie " Machete" it looks awesome

http://gawker.com/5532034/robert-rod...you-to-arizona

I hope they DO make it into a movie. Sans LaLohan,.

looks like we have the same taste in movies lol and yes maam it is coming out soon hopefully

A couple of interesting reads.


Petition to Obama admin:

http://www.change.org/petitions/view/legalize_arizona

Article from ethnic collaboration site:

http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_...5d05c662791070

-just a thanks for a good thread-serious topic
--some other companies to boycott i hear are: fox animation studios,TGI fridays,Ramada,taco time and club jenna-guess i'll have to get my porn somewhere else....

So, more folks we have seen as the "good guys" may not be so "good" after all.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/miran...-in-agreement/

It is truly frightening that creating and/or even proposing legislature that it so blatantly unconstitutional is almost becoming a trend.

If Rachel Maddow can agree with Glenn Beck ( on anything, lol) these times, they are a changing.

It's so very hard to trust a "person" who does such good work and then turns around and undoes his credibility with something as heinous as this recent proposal.

Lieberman on DADT :

http://www.mediaite.com/online/miran...-in-agreement/

Lieberman on stripping citizenship:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plu...n-strippi.html

I hope this is not seen as a derail. I think it terribly important for us to begin looking at our politicians through very clear glasses. I fear the federal governments lack of action regarding the AZ case is simply fueling the fires for any "anti-American" legislature.

Praying Lieberman's proposal isn't another thing that just slips by because it is inconvenient timing for elections and party posturing.

Yes, I think it is so important for us to think about what it means to be a citizen of the United States of America. Why this country was formed and how hypocritical it is that we want to keep other people out.

I do not want us to ever be like North Korea, the USSR, the DDR or Nazi Germany.

I want us to work together to be the land of the FREE. But our rights seem to be eroding before our eyes.

I would rather be at more risk than have the Patriot Act and have everyone "brown" have to carry around papers. At that point, I agree, we have become we say we are trying to avoid.

Everyone needs to be read their Miranda Rights.

PERIOD.

And stripping people we think MIGHT be terrorists? The line between terrorist and patriot is a fine one.