Illegal aliens and the gestapo in AZ (late posting, never got back to this draft)

My wife and I went to Arizona on our honeymoon and went all over the state, Phoenix, Sedona, and the Grand Canyon along with many points in between, I am at a loss as to where the problem actually is. Obviously undocumented migrant workers in this country from Mexico and Latin America is a big issue, we hear about it practically everyday from the rightwing noise machine. I'm pretty tired of hearing the same tired meme, "they steal jobs, they suck up welfare, they don't pay taxes, they cause crime, they bring horrible diseases in to the US," and of course drugs and terrorists, that old chestnut. No evidence needed, in fact, no amount of counterevidence makes a dent in this frame. So we have the white-supremacists camping out on the border with guns and beers, playing militia. And all solutions point to "kick them out, what part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"

I'm writing this because I'm tired of the non-debate I was having on facebook, as in, I posted this:

"America’s diversity is our strength. Our immigration system is broken, but we can’t undermine fundamental principles that define us as a nation in order to fix it. We have to stay true to who we are—a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants."--President Obama

And got back this:

"And my rebutall would be quite simply: Mr. President, if we are a nation of laws... THEN ENFORCE THE LAWS PLEASE! Enforce the laws or change they if you feel they are wrong, but the fedeal approach of "Yeah, thats a problem... wow, it's getting worse... meh, you wanna get lunch?" Sure isn't working for the border states.


I've got no problem with... See More immigration. It's a big country, we got room for alot of ya, but we'd like to know you're here and paying your fair share! It's like my house. I have no problem with people hanging out, but let me know you're coming over!

You want to debate that the legal immigration process needs reform, frankly that's not even a debate anymore. EVERYONE agrees that system is broken (and has been for decades!) so why has nothing been done?

At a very minimum, even if the law doesn't stand up in court, Arizona has forced the government to deal with a problem it either didn't want to or wasn't capible of dealing with.

Take a listen to that podcast I posted yesterday. Carolla is politically an outspoken centrist/political agnostic, and I agree with him that it breaks down as a common sense deal."
 
At least it wasn't a bunch of racist crap. The system is broken because the employers of these migrants want it broken, the same agribusiness conglomerates responsible for driving them off their land in the first place now employ them here for wages Americans don't find appealing. The reason new laws aren't put in place is the same power struggle that we just saw take a year and a half to (barely) pass a half-assed health insurance reform law. It is a win-win for conservative elites, they get a slave labor force, a surefire way to fire up the base, and wonderful excuses to put repressive police state measures in place such as in AZ.
 
There's no way to persuade the angry working class Americans of anything different. Having recently finished The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right by David Neiwert, I am starting to get a little scared for even the incredibly flawed democracy we have.

If I won the lottery...

I would love to open a (maybe the first?) organic, sustainable, green-power pizzaria. If money was no object I could buy a little hobby farm and grow my own supplies, greenhouse tomatoes and herbs yum. How hard can it be? I worked in a pizzaria for a few weeks, didn't seem all that complicated. You need a big oven, probably larger than this one Fusion 508FC 12" Single Deck Countertop Deluxe Pizza and Snack Oven even though it is kinda cute. But again, money not being a concern it would be about doing one thing I enjoy, cooking, and trying something new, gardening or farming. I can see it now, a few acres of wheat and an old-school windmill to grind it into flour, greenhouses for all the veggies so I can have fresh produce year-round. Maybe I could expand it to raise some dairy cows and pigs, then the supply chain would be practically self-contained :) Then, put up solar panels and windmills, heck I found this one on Amazon pretty cheap Windmax HY1000-5 1,000 Watt Max 24-Volt 5-Blade Residential Wind Generator Kit and even this Sunforce 39126 246-Watt High-Efficiency Polycrystalline Solar Power Kit 

Then what. Hmm, I know I love to make pizza and so far haven't been able to for anyone other than my lovely wife. The place I worked at got almost all of their ingredients from Sysco, a food-service outfit, and it isn't that their stuff was bad, I'd just like to get somewhere between that and Carl Sagan's idea of making food from scratch lol. It would be pretty satisfying I think to make my own dough and sauce. This is the biggest mixer I could find on Amazon and I'd probably need something considerably larger Hamilton Beach CPM700 Commercial Stand Mixer, Silver not that any of this silly idea would be the least bit economical. It would really be more of an ego thing. If I really got serious I would probably need to look into a biogas digester as well, recycle my garbage to fire the oven. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Beck SLAMS Olbermann: 'He Is Such A Joke'

Dish out but can't take it much?

Isn't this the same cult leader who regularly cries whenever someone calls him on his lies?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Obama Disappointment and Its Cost

"Sometimes you have to sacrifice the present to better the future."



Our country requires intensive care treatment at this point after the mess left to our president, but the bailouts and taking ownership without control or accountability is really more of a "sacrifice the future to save the financial interests of the few in the present."



Yes, there has been progress, and I appreciate the student loan reforms too. However, it isn't rational to bend over backwards to try and please people who utterly hate you and, by judging some of their signs and slogans, want to hurt you as well, while ignoring the people who support you and want you to succeed. Yes, Barack Obama is everyone's president and just like a father who sometimes has to drag the kids kicking and screaming to what is right, he needs to make the hard decisions that are going to incur the whining and loud noises from fox et al. For the good of everyone, the benefits to the majority really do outweigh the slight loss of money and privilege to the few. If he can't, then we are going back to he Dark Ages when he is defeated.
About Afghanistan
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

We're in a One-and-a-Half Dip Recession

Candidate bush jr. pushed his tax cut as the central theme of his campaign, the number $1.6 trillion over 10 years was used so many times you'd have to be braindead not to remember. His next round in '03 was also large and the republicans did not even hint as to cutting any spending to offset the loss of revenue, remember the rather large "transition cost" attached to SS privatization? So that is at least a trillion. As to 50% of the country not paying any taxes, how does this myth ever get traction? If you're going to make this claim at least qualify it as "Federal income taxes" because even if you have no income at all you still pay all sorts of excise and sales taxes and FICA is deducted from the first dollar of your income. Also, most of the business tax cuts you cite were actually rebates given to well-established multinationals, given even when the company weaseled out of any tax liability. The failure rate of business startups has not improved by these gifts, so how exactly do tax cuts help the rich people who "took the risk to start a business" benefit anyone?
About Financial Crisis
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Olbermann SLAMS 'Lame Duck' Campbell Brown, Includes Her In 'Worst Person' List (VIDEO)

False equivalency is at the heart of the matter. How can anyone report two or more sides of a story with equal weight? But as Keith says, conservative opinion shows toss out propaganda and lies in an attempt to mentally contort reality to fit their worldview in spite of facts, while the shows on MSNBC simply point out the silliness and ignorance in the conservative movement. It really takes discipline for the fox viewer to ignore what they see, if they see reality at all, and instead believe the bizzarro world manufactured by propaganda. This is a big country and it is impossible to experience everything firsthand, therefore we need the media to know what is going on, but the noise machine continues to distort that transmission mechanism. It is too easy for propagandists to set up caricatures that play into people's alienation and society's atomization, unfortunately there probably are many people who didn't know that Nixon resigned, or that at one time the Republican party was able to put nation first instead of the feudalist rigidity of today.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

What is so great about owning vs. renting?

Everyone's experience with the fundamental need for shelter may be different, but having heard from the elite for so many years about the virtue of owning a house I would like to apply some personal experience to this aspect of life. Individuals and groups make decisions based on the utility, value, or benefits of those choices, trying to maximize gains or minimize losses. At least that is how humans operate in the economic world of rational actor theory. Tradition, propaganda, and ignorance can influence the rationality of actions. I recall Paul Krugman writing about the particular fixation on home ownership in the Anglo-Saxon world in The Conscience of a Liberal, "an Englishman's home is his castle." 

So, it might be a question worth examining in light of the financial meltdown that was caused by too many exotic mortgages and too many buyers not ready for them. I'm not going to play the "blame the victim" card so many do, that it is the fault of people buying and not the brokers and banks. All you have to look at is who gained and who lost to tell the real story, banks bailed out and millions foreclosed on out in the street. But that really isn't the point of why I'm writing.

Maybe it is just me, but we seem to be living in a much more transient society these days, changing jobs and residences far more often than in the past. When I got out of the service I had to live with my folks for a few months while I got a job and readjusted to civilian life but rented my first apartment soon thereafter. It was a modest Cape Cod house that my stepfather was trying to sell, so I was the "caretaker" in the short term. He cut me a deal on rent so that he had someone to mow the lawn and stuff until it sold and not eat the whole mortgage payment. That arrangement only lasted a few months as well, as did the apartment after that, and the apartment after that. I even traded my compact car in on an SUV so I could pack easier and never really bought any furniture beyond the handmedown bed, couch and dresser my parents gave me since I never lived anywhere long enough to need it.

I finally said 'enough!' and bought a modest Cape Cod house just like the one I started out in, but for three times the rent (mortgage+escrow) and twice what I was paying on my last apartment. Society teaches us that, even on such a modest scale, buying and owning is superior to renting because of tax deductions and the value of property always goes up. Right? How many people have found that to be true, show of hands? I think I did get a bit of a tax advantage through the years (I actually lived in that house longer than any other place in my life) but I do not think I came out ahead of friends who rented comparable houses. How about rising value and increasing equity? Well, as most people did in those days, I refinanced to a lower rate and my payment went down but it added in fees more than what I had paid down in principle.

Then, after two layoffs and a divorce I finally said goodbye to that house. The initial sale price was 19% higher than what I paid 6 years previously, which is not out of line by any means (the previous owners doubled the price in 7 years) but that was a seller's market and I needed to move during a buyer's market. I moved in December and the house didn't sell until the next November, after paying the realtor's fee I came out $5k ahead but had to pay $7k in mortgage payments during that time. So, it was pretty lousy for me but good for the realtor and bank. I'm not saying owning=bad, renting=good. Twice before that I was kicked out of apartments because the house sold to someone new, but man, does it have to be so hard just to keep a roof over your head?

My wife and I are thinking about moving, whether in the next three months or three years, and hoping that what happened to my old place doesn't happen to us with this one. But with job changes, school changes, and a growing family, the future is pretty uncertain right now. I know I had a greater point to this post, but it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I think it was that the benefits of owning, mostly the tax deductions, have been meaningless because our standard deduction was greater than itemizing (I know that jarrs against the popular myth of how overtaxed Wisconsinites are) and units in our building are selling for less than what we owe on the mortgage, right now with the commission we'd probably lose money selling. So, I think the point was, in my family's situation, we have all the responsibility and none of the benefits for owning. It seems to all come down to luck, just like Arriana Huffington said recently. In the On-Your-Own society, there are a few winners and a lot of losers and the deck is stacked pretty far against us regular folks.