Year: 2007

Give Us Your Tired But You Keep Your Poor

Trish

Without even waiting for the other snobbish and judgmental rules of the new immigration bill to go into effect, the Bush administration is plowing ahead to put all the costs of coming to this country on the new residents. No matter how much benefit you believe we get from immigrants — whether it’s a lot or a little — this hardly seems fair.

But no one ever accused George W. Bush of being fair. The new asking price for citizenship tells us that in his view, the only good immigrant is a rich immigrant.

When my grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Italy in the 19-teens, his family could have never afforded fees like these

…the Bush administration made final Tuesday a new set of fees that will significantly hike the cost of becoming a U.S. citizen or legal resident.

Beginning July 30, the citizenship fee will rise to $595 from $330. Those seeking to become legal permanent residents will see the cost nearly triple to $930 — plus a fingerprinting charge.

The $930 is higher than the $905 fee proposed for legal residency in February, when critics charged that the government was pricing residency beyond the reach of many potential applicants.

But, in what Citizenship and Immigration Services chief Emilio Gonzales said was a change in favor of families, the cost to process a child as a legal resident will be cut to $600 from the proposed $805.

That means a family of two adults and two children will pay $3,060 to become legal residents, compared to $1,100 under the current fees.

But, see, we really need the money. We have to grow the government even more, as we have at unprecedented rates already, under Bush.

Citizen and Immigration Services needs the additional $1 billion that the fee increases will raise to hire personnel, upgrade computer systems, train employees and make other improvements…

Gonzales acknowledged the fee hikes are steep, but vowed that the increased revenue would help reinvent the agency, with a 20 percent improvement in service in the first year…

The agency gets more than 90 percent of its funding from the fees and will have a budget of about $2.3 billion after the new fee structure goes into effect, officials said.

I don’t know about you but I’d say that having the Immigration Service work 20 percent better is money well extorted.

When my grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Italy in the 19-teens, his family could have never afforded fees like these. It was all they could do to scrape up the money for some fake papers and a ticket on a boat bound for Ellis Island.

Unfortunately, Grandpa spent the whole voyage arffing over the rail or passed out in steerage, so he failed to memorize the false information in his papers, such as what his name was supposed to be, who had sponsored him, where he would be living, who his closest relatives in America were, etc. He was shipped right back to Italy. The next time he made the crossing, he studied harder and gave the right fake answers. He passed his citizenship test for real in the 1950s.

Guvs Starting to Dole Out Endorsements to Prez Candidates

Buck Banks

Is it me, or does it seem way early for governors to be backing candidates in the run for the White House? Nonetheless, they are choosing their horses early, with Hillary Clinton and John McCain getting more goodwill of the guvs:

New York’s U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Arizona’s U.S. Sen. John McCain have garnered the most gubernatorial endorsements with three each.

Stumping for Clinton are Democratic Govs. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Eliot Spitzer of Clinton’s adopted state of New York. In McCain’s corner are Republican Govs. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jon Huntsman of Utah.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) enjoys the backing of Democratic Govs. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Rod Blagojevich of his current home state of Illinois. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has the endorsement of Republican Govs. Matt Blunt of Missouri and Don Carcieri of Rhode Island.

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds (R) backs former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R). The only sitting governor in the presidential race — Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson — has yet to be politically blessed by any of his gubernatorial colleagues. Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) also has not been endorsed by any current governor to date.

Predictably, governors of early primary states and caucus states are showing admirable restraint by not endorsing any candidate, preferring, it seems, to let their voters decide for themselves — next year.

It’s Official: Plame was Covert – So Federal Law Was Broken, But ‘Rule of Law’ Only Applies to Dems

Jon Ponder

From the beginning of the scandal around the outing of the CIA secret agent Valerie Plame by top White House officials, Bush’s spinners and GOP operatives have worked as hard as they could to create confusion about Wilson’s status as a covert agent. The desperation with which they have tried to muddy the waters about Wilson’s undercover status is a clue to how dangerous they consider this piece of information to be.

Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.

For starters, if the public believed Wilson was covert, the fact that her cover was blown by top White House officials, including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — who was working under instructions from his boss, Vice Pres. Cheney — would be construed as unseemly, at the very least.

Of course, White House officials are restricted from revealing government secrets by their security clearances. But what had many top West Wingers concerned was the fact that there’s also a specific law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), that forbids government officials from revealing the identity of covert personnel. In fact, former White House spokesperson Ari Fletcher was so concerned that he may have run afoul of the IIPA that he sought, and was granted, immunity from prosecution before he testified.

When Valerie Wilson testified before a House committee in March, she said, under oath, that she was covert. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) also read a statement from Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, that stated that Wilson was covert at the time she was outed. And yet, the White House and GOP operatives have continued to lie about Wilson’s status.

While it is doubtful that anything can stop them, there is finally official confirmation now from the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald — writing in a recommendation for Scooter Libby’s sentencing for perjury related to the case — that Valerie Wilson was indeed covert:

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, who was a colleague of Wilson’s, says this confirmation of Wilson’s status bolsters the charge that Rove, Libby and others violated the IIPA when they revealed her identity to reporters:

Fitz makes the following points:
– Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations and headed a unit that covered weapons proliferation issues concerning Iraq.
– While in CPD Valerie traveled overseas seven times to more than ten countries always, repeat always, undercover.
– Valerie was a covert officer on 14 July 2003, when Novak identified her as a CIA employee.
– The CIA was taking "affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."

Despite this development, there remains little or no chance that these White House officials will be held accountable for revealing Wilson’s identity — which is egregiously compounded by the fact that Wilson was a specialist in tracking black-market sales of weapons of mass destruction. We will probably never know what sources and counter-proliferation activities were compromised by the treasonous actions of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.

At the very least, we are left to wonder why Karl Rove still has a security clearance for working at the White House.

It was just a decade ago that Republicans hounded the Clinton White House over every perceived and/or fabricated infraction.Their strategy was to hobble and render ineffective an American president proved unsuccessful, so they switched their focus to Pres. Clinton’s sex life, which led them to impeach him over a sex lie.

All the while they were leading the nation down the dangerous path toward overthrowing its duly and twice-elected government, they claimed they were only concerned with “the rule of law.” Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.

Cindy Sheehan’s Parting Shot

Trish

Almost from the beginning, I had mixed feelings about Cindy Sheehan. I say “almost” because back at the very beginning, before I read anything she said or wrote and only heard there was a mother of a fallen soldier protesting the Iraq Occupation, I thought, “Wow, that’s wonderful.”

What Sheehan said or did never moved me precisely because of the way she said and did it.

But when I got more exposure to the actual person — through the press of course — I had my doubts. I felt I had met Cindy, and one-issue crusaders like her were the reason I got out of party politics. I found it much more fulfilling to work with individual candidates because at every party meeting, there was a Cindy or two who caused a complete and utter logjam with their inability to see shades of gray or look on compromise solutions as anything but defeat. Everything was a zero sum game to them.

I think all of our hearts go out to Sheehan for the loss of her son and for her determination not to back down. But admiration and liking are two different things. She’s a hard person to like.

Take, for example, her pity party today in which she both announced she’s quitting her protest of the Occupation and lashed out at every single American except herself.

I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

That’s the kind of stuff, bordering on codependence, that made me tune Cindy out.

On the other hand, she’s right about a few things.

Casey died for a country that cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months…

Good-bye America… you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Of course we’ll manage to go forth without Sheehan and I’m not trying to be snippy about that, only stating a fact. In the end, I feel the same way about her as I did almost at the beginning. What she said or did never moved me precisely because of the way she said and did it.

Poll: Americans Seeking the Anti-Bush for Next Prez

Buck Banks

When I was a kid, I used to read comic books where the plots explored alternate universes (apparently due to a lack of plausible plot ideas). In these alternate comics, Superman would use his powers for evil and was a really unlikeable character, etc. In a recent Zogby poll, it appears that, after nearly two terms of George W. Bush, Americans are ready for their own version of an alternate universe, one featuring the anti-George. You know, someone with diplomatic, managerial, verbal and math skills:

On the traits most important to voters, the front-runners of both parties — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — were deemed well-equipped to deliver.

The results suggest that Americans are looking for strong, unifying leadership skills both at home and abroad. About eight in 10 said it was very important to elect a “competent manager” and someone who could “bring the American people together.” Also very high on the priority list: someone who could take charge of the military, promote the United States’ image abroad and demonstrate “personal morality.” Lower on the list of priorities were party loyalty and resume-oriented measures such asbusiness, diplomatic or legislative experience.

On the traits most important to voters, the front-runners of both parties — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — were deemed well-equipped to deliver. They were the top two out of 19 prospective candidates characterized as competent managers. On foreign policy matters, Clinton topped the list, with 24 percent saying she could best promote the U.S. image abroad; Giuliani came in second with 16 percent.

Who’d most likely be a “uniter, not a divider,” for the American people? Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., came out ahead of Clinton on that measure, tying Giuliani for the top spot with 22 percent. But when it comes to uniting partisans on Capitol Hill, more respondents had faith in Clinton (19 percent) than Obama (15 percent).

On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain’s military experience is still his greatest asset, with one-third saying he’d be the best candidate to command the armed forces.

Meanwhile, the “moral values” question remains Giuliani’s Achilles’ heel. Only 6 percent of respondents said he displayed personal morality, while McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) registered in the teens. In a CBS News/New York Times poll last week, 37 percent of respondents said they did not think Giuliani shared the same values as “most Republicans”; the same percentage said he does. But in that poll’s primary matchup, Giuliani still topped McCain and Romney among Republican voters.

Stats Show DHS AWOL on Terror – Biggest Catch To Date Is the Guy Who Didn’t Kill JonBenet

Jon Ponder

Katrina-ization of terror: A report released on Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a thinktank based at Syracuse University in New York, details the types of immigration cases filed by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2004. The results are startling:

It shouldn’t be surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would play politics with homeland security.

[Out] of [814,073] cases filed in federal courts by the Department of Homeland Security since 2004, only 12 were related to terrorism. Another 112 cases were filed using national security charges…

[The] report found that 86.5 percent of all cases involved some sort of immigration violation, such as entering the United States without inspection, not having a valid immigrant visa or overstaying a student visa.

If this is true, DHS officials and the Bush administration have been lying to Congress and the public about what DHS has been up to:

[TRAC co-director David Burnham] said the agency continually sells itself as a central player in the war on terrorism.

“Despite the repeated statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters,” concluded the report.

According to calculations by another source, the 12 terror cases filed since 2004 show that only 0.0015 percent of DHS cases have been terror-related. Is it really the best use of precious resources to have routine immigration cases being filed by DHS?

This smacks of the sort of gross incompetence (and lying about it) we have come to expect from this administration, but much more alarming is the fact that DHS turned up missing in the investigations that thwarted a pair of high-profile terror attacks in this country over the past few weeks. The department’s glaring absence from these investigations appears to stem from the Bush administration’s other persistent bad habit: politicization.

In April, a rightwing terrorist was caught before he blew up a woman’s health clinic in Texas. Last week, a planned bomb attack on ultra-rightwing protesters at the funeral of Republican political agitator Rev. Jerry Falwell was uncovered and a militant rightwing student at Falwell’s Christian college was arrested. Both cases were handled primarily by local and state law enforcement, with minor assists by non-DHS feds.

What has politics got to do with DHS being AWOL in these investigations? It is in the interest of the Bush adminstration, whose base is dominated by Christian extremists, not to give the public the opportunity to connect the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists Bush uses as his bogeymen — and whom DHS was ostensibly set up to fight — with the domestic Christian fundamentalist terrorists in our midst, even though both Islamicists and Christianists have the same ultimate goal: the establishment of theocratic states.

In fact, the only high-profile arrest that has involved DHS to date was the capture last August in Thailand of John Mark Karr, the emotionally disturbed man who falsely claimed to have killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. DNA tests later excluded Karr as a suspect in the murder.

Capturing child predators is important work, but it’s hard to see how it falls under the purview of the agency tasked with protecting U.S. terrority from terror attacks.

It isn’t surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would also play politics with homeland security. After all, Bush appointed a prime political hack, Michael Chertoff — whose previous high-profile gig was as a Clinton-hating talking head in the 1990s — as its cabnet-level leader. So, unfortunately, it won’t be any less surprising if we find out the hard way that no one in the administration gave any thought to the downside of politicizing DHS.

If the unthinkable were to happen, and terrorists, foreign or domestic, successfully attacked the homeland while DHS was busy filing routine immigration cases or tracking pedophiles overseas, this situation could be transformed in an instant from a typical bureaucratic boondoggle into a tragedy of historic proportions.

Wolfie Says It Wasn’t His Fault

Trish

It’s not just George Bush who has never made a mistake.

Neocon Paul Wolfowitz has the same gift. You see, it wasn’t his fault that the World Bank wanted to can him as its president for promoting and upping the salary of his employee girlfriend. Whose fault is it then, you ask?

Give yourself a gold star if you answered, “the media.”

“I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I’ll leave it at that,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp…

“I accept the fact that by the time we got around to that, emotions here were so overheated that I don’t think I could have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish for the people I really care about,” he said.

It tells us more about the media than the bank? Nobody was asking about those two institutions, Wolfie. This is about you, you Iraq-losing, twisted, Dumbo-earred freak.

Good Lord. So he wanted to accomplish even more for the people he really cares about? Like what? Hummers and Rolexes on the house, everybody!