Obsidian Wings

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt

by Fiddler*

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 22:21)

In Arizona, where anti-immigration fever appears to be burning hotter among hardline Republicans than the Sonora Desert in August, the state legislature is considering yet another bill targeting illegal immigrants. This one is designed to deny citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. But its purpose reaches beyond state borders.

The 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

It was adopted in 1868 after the U.S. Civil War to ensure citizenship for former African-American slaves.

The immediate aim of the [Arizona] legislation "is to trigger ... a Supreme Court review of the phrase 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' in the 14th amendment," [Arizona state representative] Kavanagh told Reuters in a telephone interview.

It ultimately seeks "to deny citizenship to any child born of parents who are not citizens of the United States, be they illegal aliens, or foreigners on business or for tourist purposes," he added.

This bill is being pushed by Kris Kobach, the "anti-immigration architect", who served as chief immigration advisor in the Justice Department during John Ashcroft's tenure.

In the absence of congressional action, Kobach is after what he says is the best alternative: ÒPeople often see federal immigration policy as a dichotomy between amnesty and deportation. But the most rational approach is a third one: you ratchet up the enforcement so that people make their own decisions to start following the law.Ó In other words, take away the reasons people come to America illegallyÑeducation, work, housing, and, yes, citizenship for their kidsÑand, Kobach says, they will Òself-deport.Ó

This isn't just happening in Arizona. Other states where Republicans hold majorities in state government are considering similar bills, but some are finding that it's not as easy, economically beneficial or practical as they thought.

In Indiana, a similar bill has been introduced; along with targeting suspected immigrants for status checks, it requires the use of the English language in state business, eliminating the current use of Spanish as well. It would also shut down businesses that hired illegal immigrants.

In Florida, a similar proposal has been scaled back, so that status checks on legal citizenship could only be done if the person in question is being investigated for criminal wrongdoing. However, Florida's businesses are lobbying against the bill, citing damage to the state's tourist industry and business climate. Quoting from the second link:

...During a special Senate committee meeting in Tallahassee on Monday, representatives from the Florida Chamber of Commerce shared a report examining the impact of immigration on the state's economy.

Among the key points:

Immigration boosts productivity, improves the economy and has a small positive impact on the wages of native-born workers.

Despite the perception that the United States is being overwhelmed by immigrants, the inflow of legal and illegal immigrants "is well within historical norms," data shows.

Though unauthorized immigrants cost the state money in terms of education and criminal justice, many studies demonstrate a net positive impact on the economy and tax revenues.

"The immigrants that come to the United States come to work," said Dale Brill, president of the Florida Chamber Foundation and co-author of the report.

The numbers tend to ebb and flow with the economy. He pointed to research that shows the 10 states with the highest concentration of immigrants between 1960 and 1990 had a median unemployment rate that was lower than the 10 states with the fewest immigrants....

In Kentucky, questions arise as to where illegal immigrants would be jailed, since the state has approximately 30,000 or more illegal immigrants and an estimated 250 empty spaces in jails.

In Virginia, the more conservative portions of the Commonwealth are taking aim at Arlington County to prevent local jurisdictions from restricting enforcement of the entire federal immigration law. Arlington County, where I used to work, is multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural. Business is conducted at the county level in more than 70 languages; people who worked in the county office building and were fluent in more than one language might be called to help with translation in court or in another office in the building, if necessary. It's been a while since I worked there, but I have not heard that that had changed.

In South Dakota, three bills are being sponsored, including one that penalizes anyone who knowingly transports, employs or conceals an illegal immigrant.

...The bill dealing with citizenship seeks to require that a child born in the U.S. is a citizen only if at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant. It would create a compact with other states to issue different birth certificates for those who are citizens and those who are not. Such compacts would have to be approved by Congress, but do not require the president's signature...

Much of the proposed South Dakota legislation appears to have been sparked by the murder convictions of two illegal immigrants there last year; the state is estimated to have about 2,000 illegal immigrants.

In Nebraska, hundreds of people turned out for a protest in Lincoln, the state capitol, and talked about concerns about harassment and appearance-based profiling of citizens and legal residents.

In Tennessee, state legislators approved an Arizona-style bill; however, they put the cost of some enforcement on businesses, which would be required to conduct citizenship status checks on employees, to reduce government spending.

I'm a bit surprised by the emphasis on requiring employers to verify citizenship for their employees -- because they've been doing that for more than 20 years. This was mentioned, back when it was started, as a barrier to getting able-bodied and mentally fit homeless people off the streets, because one of the first things that gets stolen when someone is homeless is personal ID, and it takes money to replace it. Are lawmakers now thinking that employers shouldn't just look at someone's birth certificate, green card or passport, but conduct a detailed analysis of the paperwork to determine if it's genuine?

In Mississippi, city and county officials are concerned the new law might open them up to expensive lawsuits by citizens who think they're not enforcing the law sufficiently. And an editorial in the Clarion-Ledger calls the bill 'election pandering'. Quoting the editorial:

...Illegal immigration is a complex and difficult issue. It is a national issue to which the president and Congress should seek a solution. It is not a major issue for Mississippi nor one in which the Mississippi Legislature should be getting involved.

It is an issue that clearly is popular with some voters. That is why the Senate passed it and most likely why the House allowed representatives to record a "yes" vote.

But a state immigration enforcement bill is bad policy. It would increase costs to local governments and, even worse, could lead to profiling and harassment of American citizens.

Immigration reform is a job for members of Congress, not the Mississippi Legislature.

The Arizona law this one is modeled after is being challenged and should be overturned. It is as un-American as any illegal immigrant could ever be.

Mississippi legislators shouldn't be wasting time with such political pandering.

*posted on her behalf by Doctor Science, while the ObiWiTariat tries to evade offspring, infectious diseases, and this week's meteorological armageddon long enough to get her a login code.

Tea Party Decoder Ring, please

by Doctor Science

The NY Times article Tea Party Gets Early Start on G.O.P. Targets for 2012" quotes Indiana Tea Party supporter Mark Holwager:

“Heartland America doesn’t feel the same way as people in the cities,” he said. “We do believe in religion, we go to church all the time, we shoot and fish, and love our families."

Two-thirds of this matches the "God, Guns, Gays" formula for "social conservatives", and covers issues where Mr. Holwager may suspect he differs from a typical New Jersey coastal elite (that's a joke, son).

God: I guess by "religion" and churchgoing Holwager means "Protestant Christianity", because NJ is not irreligious compared to IN. But we do have an awful lot of Catholics, not so many just plain Christians.

Guns: Mr. Holwager is nicely ambiguous about what kind of "shooting" Indianans do a lot of. In 2009, Indiana hunters legally killed 132,752 deer, while NJ hunters only bagged 52,784. At the same time, Indiana also has a higher murder rate than NJ, especially by firearms. So whether he's talking about shooting animals or shooting humans, he's quite right: Indianans *do* shoot more.

Gays?: But how might Holwager think "we love our families" is something that is *different* between Indiana and, say, New Jersey? And how might that difference map to the "Gays" part of the social conservative trinity? Or is he aluding to something else -- is "love of family" a code phrase of some sort?

I mean, to my decadent ears "we love our families" implies, "and we love & accept all the queer people in them." I'll go out on a limb, here, and guess that's probably not what Holwager means. Is this code for abortion rate, which is definitely higher in NJ? That could be it, given that energized Republican Congressmen are all charged up to reduce federal funding for abortion by re-defining what kind of rape "counts".

What else might "we love our families" mean? Does anyone have a decoder ring?

We Can Haz Kitty Open Thread With No Guns!

by Gary Farber

One Thousand and One Nights of no Open Threads it has not been, but let one begin! 

Tell your stories! 

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎ Kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; Persian: هزار و یک شب Hezār-o yek šab) is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.^[1]

The work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.^[2] Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.

Let me frame that for you.  I foreshadow.  We are all unreliable narrators.

But some of us haz friends who are kitties.

 

Download We Can Haz Grooming Vid 2011-01-30 002

the things that were not said

by russell

So, I listened to the State Of The Union speech last Tuesday on my way home from an early gig.  It was a good speech, full of grand 30,000 foot ideas for Moving The Nation Forward, delivered in the optimistic, avuncular style that Obama is so good at.

Here are a number of things I did not hear, and which are also part of the state of our union ca. 2011.

Millions of people face severe financial hardship, if not ruin, due to the obscene and irresponsible greed of a very small number of folks.  Because the Congress is captive to anybody with large sums of money to spend, nothing particularly effective will be done to prevent things like this from happening again.

There are about 25 professional registered lobbyists for every member of Congress.

As we enter our tenth year of war in Afghanistan, it's clear that we have a tiger by the tail there, and whatever opportunity we might ever have had to bring about a constructive outcome was pissed away years ago.  We can't simply walk away without losing face, so we will stumble around there for a while longer, at great expense and further loss of life, until we can find a sufficiently non-embarrassing way to cut the Afghans loose.

We should probably consider our presence in Iraq to be more or less permanent.

We will never bring any form of justice to Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri.  Nobody even really thinks about them anymore.

The country goes deeper and deeper into debt on a daily basis.  The greatest financial threat the nation faces is the cost of health care, and nobody in a position to actually make or enforce policy has any freaking clue how to manage or control that.

Over the last 30 years, the American middle class has been gutted by the loss of jobs to offshoring and automation.  We continue to have a strongly entrepreneurial and innovative economy, but when it's time for bright new ideas to scale up to an industrial level of production, much if not most of that happens overseas.  So, wealth, but jobs, not so much.

We no longer waterboard (apparently) but other forms of "enhanced interrogation" are still in use, and the basic legal arguments that justify their use still stand.

The rash and often illegal ways in which "global war on terror" related prisoners were captured, held, and handled over the last ten years has made it impossible to proceed with straightforward due process for many of them.  We will therefore be maintaining our facility at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, probably until the last of them dies of old age.

We have very low inflation, unless you include food and energy.  So if you don't eat, heat your home, or drive, the dollar you make today will we be worth about what it is today for quite a while.

About 2 million Americans are in prison, where they are subject to sexual assault and general brutality.  Prisoners in highly secure prisoners are subject to isolation conditions that reliably make them severely insane.

Two and a quarter centuries into our big experiment in self-government.  We haven't crossed over into that promised land quite yet.

The Unbearable Triteness of Whiteness & Why The Term "Political Correctness" Must Die

by Gary Farber

Always read Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He's one of the best.  In The Unbearable Whiteness of Pro-Lifers and Pundits, he reminds us of how Santorum became a Savage Google bomb.

And Rick Santorum is still running for the Republican plum.

Santorum has said he is considering candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2012 presidential election. On September 11, 2009, Santorum spoke to a group of Catholic leaders in Orlando, Florida. He told the leaders, "I hate to be calculating, but I see that 2012 is not just throwing somebody out to be eaten, but it's a real opportunity for success." He also scheduled appearances with political non-profit organizations that took place in Iowa on October 1, 2009.

Santorum re-iterated his consideration of a 2012 run in a e-mail and letter sent on January 15, 2010 to supporters of his Political Action Committee saying, "After talking it over with my wife Karen and our kids – I am considering putting my name in for the 2012 presidential race. I'm convinced that conservatives need a candidate who will not only stand up for our views, but who can articulate a conservative vision for our country's future," Santorum also writes. "And right now, I just don't see anyone stepping up to the plate. I have no great burning desire to be president, but I have a burning desire to have a different president of the United States."

He gives me different burning desires. 

Coates: 

Last week Rick Santorum proved himself to be Rick Santorum:

Desperation Is the Devil's Work

by Eric Martin

While details of the story have been partially buried the piles of snow blanketing the northeast, the frenzy of attention paid to the State of the Union address and the draw of the potentially paradigm-shifting events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, in what should be a newsworthy event, Al Jazeera recently received a large cache of leaked documents pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and peace process, as played out over the past quarter century or so.

With details being revealed on a rolling basis, Matt Duss' early take is worth a read.

First, the documents seriously challenge the theory that unquestioning U.S. support for Israel is necessary to give Israel the confidence to make concessions for peace. From what I’ve seen so far, mostly from the George W. Bush era, the documents show that unquestioning U.S. support for Israel mainly gave the Israelis the confidence to continue to expect and receive ever more concessions from the Palestinians, while absolving them of any real pressure to actually make a deal.

This transcript of a March 2008 meeting is a good case in point. The Palestinians would like a discussion of future borders to proceed from the 1967 borders, that is, the 1949 Armistice lines, an approach grounded in international law and successive United Nations resolutions. The Israelis, on the other hand, prefer to start from a discussion of “reality on the ground” — a reality which Israel is, of course, in the process of changing every day through settlement expansion and wall construction.

In any normal negotiation, one party demanding that those negotiations occur within a frame of reference that that party is constantly unilaterally changing in its own favor would probably be laughed out of the room. But here, by virtue both of being the occupying power, backed unquestioningly by the world’s dominant actor, Israeli negotiators are able to sit back and do just that, and their Palestinian opposites have little option other than to note objection, and agree to disagree for now, knowing that when they next return to the table, reality on the ground will have changed again.

The second part of Duss' analysis is equally, if not more germane, and it contains the elements that will prove "disastrous" to Abbass and other Palestinian groups involved:

That brings me to the second takeaway from these documents, which is how starkly they reveal the massive disparity in power between the two sides. In an ironic sense, it turns out that the right-wing canard about there being “no Palestinian partner for peace” is true — they’re more like supplicants for peace. When one reads the extent of what Palestinian negotiators have, at various times, offered the Israelis — such as Saeb Erekat’s alleged offer on Jerusalem — it’s almost a relief that the Israelis didn’t accept, as it’s hard to imagine any Palestinian leadership, certainly not one this weak, selling capitulations that extensive to their own people. This would be an issue of concern to any genuinely honest broker. It does not appear to have been for the U.S.

Which brings me to the final point, which is not directly addressed in these documents but hangs over almost every page, and that’s the weakness of the Palestinian leadership itself. At this point, how much do these negotiations really matter in the absence of genuine political legitimacy for those doing the negotiating? The release of these documents is a disaster for Mahmoud Abbas and the current P.A. leadership, and a bonanza for Hamas and other critics of the peace process, which is now revealed as little more than a surrender process. While that may be good in terms of an honest reckoning, it does little in the short term to actually make anyone’s life better, or bring us closer to a resolution of the conflict. [emphasis added]

As noted, the documents reveal that, not only have Palestinian leaders been willing to compromise, and then compromise further and again, but that the Israeli side of the equation has been the more obstinate and reluctant to make genuine concessions.

Getting in your Face(book)

21st Century Gary Farber presents:

A guest post by liberal japonicus:

I got pulled into Facebook when my horn teacher got into it and cajoled/threatened/ordered us to join. I did and immediately hooked up with a number of people who I had lost touch with, which was a gas. However, within a day of joining, I had friend requests from 3 people from my 1st grade elementary school class. At that point, I made the decision to not send friend requests. I'd still accept friend requests, (and still do) accept friend requests, but by drawing a line there, it makes it a bit easier to manage.

So I was curious who in the ObWi family is using Facebook and how they are using it.

Introducing Fiddler: Paging Charles Dickens

by Doctor Science

Your ObiWi front-pagers are doing some re-shuffling, again, as various people find they have less time for blogging than they'd hoped. I'd like to introduce a new candidate, "Fiddler", and her first post.

I've e-known Fiddler under another pseud for years (since before the '04 elections, IIRC) -- she was long one of my main sources for news and links on politics, energy, art, feminism, and interesting stuff. She lives in the DC area, very broadly speaking, and has worked in the newspaper business (when there was one) and politics. She's also a musician (guitar, cello, fiddle), hence the choice of pseud for Obsidian Wings. And of course, there are cats.

In terms of the political landscape, Fiddler is on the lefty side (as am I, of course), but with a *really* solid understanding of the nuts & bolts of policy -- much of what I know I've learned from her. Give us your usual forthright yet civil feedback, and we'll see how this works out. Herewith:

---

Paging Charles Dickens, by Fiddler

Back in the 1980s, I spent a time working for a daily newspaper in a small city in New York state. The newspaper was part of a media chain owned out-of-state, and the pay scale was set for the other state, which didn't have New York's higher taxes. Because of this, as a single working person, I was qualified to receive government assistance for food in the form of free cheese and other occasionally available food products. I won't deny it came in very handy at the end of the month, particularly in midwinter with sub-zero temperatures and high heating bills. But at the next desk, the reporter was a man who made the same money I did and who was married and had children. He and his family were on food stamps in order to keep food on the table all the time, although he, like me, was working full-time. In a different industry, we might have been able to work overtime to make up some of the difference, but according to company policy none of us were allowed overtime except on election night, which didn't pay for a lot of groceries.

One Way To Connect

by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

The Fantasy of the Gun

by Doctor Science

I've spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: "The Arizona shooting FAQ"; Esquire: "The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixon, and Our Quest for Narratives; Conor Friedersdorf: Tone Versus Substance and many, many more.

I'm going to just talk about one aspect of the Massacre and the resulting discussion. In brief:

a) we have too many guns, and the guns are too big

b) a major reason for this is that guns are more important as fantasies than as tools

c) in particular, guns have starring roles in our filmed fiction (TV & movies), and those roles are what we think of when we imagine "guns".

In not-so-brief: