For all of you conservatives who love to praise the “free market”, let me call bullshit on this enduring lie that the President frequently cites to sell his immigration plan. From yesterday’s speech :

As we enforce our immigration laws, comprehensive immigration reform also requires us to improve those laws by creating a new temporary worker program. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. Workers would be able to register for legal status for a fixed period of time, and then be required to go home. This program would help meet the demands of a growing economy, and it would allow honest workers to provide for their families while respecting the law.

The “jobs Americans won’t do” lie was also recently advanced in the Washington Post by a spokesman for the Labor Department and a “panicking” farmer (via Kevin Drum) :

“There are just some jobs people don’t want to do,” Nassif said. “It’s the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal.”

Jack Vessey said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. “We got one person,” he said. “He showed up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’”

The key to unraveling this bullshit is that the anonymous laborer quoted above likely ended his gripe with “unless you pay me more”. The President wants you to think this is because American workers are shiftless elitists, but it’s the employers and their shills who are the assholes here.

What people like the George W. Bush don’t understand is that capitalism is not a one-way street. When the demand for workers is high and the supply of laborers is low, the rational solution would be for employers to raise wages, increase benefits, or both to ensure that supply catches up to demand. But that would mean actually spending more money, and we can’t have that.

Instead, employers have found a way to get around their obligations by employing “undocumented” workers (and thus creating a demand for illegal labor). Why are these men and women willing to do the same job that Americans are unwilling to do for less money? Well, they’re here illegally, for one. They probably don’t speak English well and have little familiarity with existing labor laws. They’re doing a job that’s unskilled while under the constant threat of deportation. Sounds like the new face of indentured servitude to me, but the President and his allies are trying to figure out ways to make it acceptable.

But here’s the key to all of these proposals : These illegal workers aren’t being offered citizenship, but membership in a “guest worker program”. Bush and co. don’t give a damn about the working class in this country, they just want to make sure that the crooks aren’t penalized for breaking our labor laws. The solutions bandied about would create a pseudo-citizenship which will protect employers but do little to lift immigrant workers from the bottom rung on the economic ladder. When residence is closely tied to employment, the threat of deportation doesn’t go away, it just gets hidden a little better.

Which makes this whole debate even more galling. Immigrants are being exploited, American workers are getting screwed, and the whole debate is happenening as if these two groups of victims are on opposite sides. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don’t need to build a fence. The supply of illegal labor will go away once the demand for it ceases. We don’t need new plans, we need to rigorously enforce the laws already on the books. If that means that employers are going to have to pay more to the people doing the jobs that “Americans won’t do” and pass those costs on to the consumer, then it’s hardly our place to question the wisdom of the invisible hand, right?

Also, it should be stressed again that George Bush and his allies should be ashamed of themselves for slandering us with their anti-worker rhetoric. Aren’t you paying attention, America? The President of the United States just called you an indolent snob. He thinks you’re too lazy to do an honest day’s work and too effete to do work that will get your hands dirty. Doesn’t that piss you off? It should.

I hope you’re sitting down. This isn’t that shocking to people who have been following this stuff closely, but it’s absolutely terrifying to think it thorough to its logical conclusion :

HERSH: Suffice to say this, that this president in private, at Camp David with his friends, the people that I’m sure call him George, is very serene about the war. He’s upbeat. He thinks that he’s going to be judged, maybe not in five years or ten years, maybe in 20 years. He’s committed to the course. He believes in democracy.

He believes that he’s doing the right thing, and he’s not going to stop until he gets — either until he’s out of office, or he falls apart, or he wins.

BLITZER: But this has become, your suggesting, a religious thing for him?

HERSH: Some people think it is. Other people think he’s absolutely committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He’s been sold on this notion.

He’s a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn’t have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn’t able to change.

I’ll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they’re not sure how you get to this guy.
. . .
BLITZER: Here’s what you write. You write, “Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.”

Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn’t want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I’ve been talking to — I’ve been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They’re beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don’t want to sound like I’m off the wall here. But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able — is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years.

I think all of my neuroses are bubbling to the surface.

We’re screwed.

I love the way Thomas Ayres describes the “discovery” of America :

On October 12, 1492, the natives on a small island in the central Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus. They found him lost on their beach, along with several equally pallid companions who could not speak well enough to be understood and all of whom had an atrocious sense of fashion. If the natives had been able to understand the gibberish spoken by these strangers, they would have been surprised to learn that, although he did know where he was, Columbus was claiming their island for Spain - whatever that was.

That seems like a more reasonable way to describe the “discovery” of land that’s already inhabited.

The newest Harpers Index references one of the best articles on the Ten Commandments I’ve read anywhere. Unfortunately, The Decatur Daily’s Thou Shalt Debate by M.J. Ellington is now only available in Google’s cache. To ensure that you all get to read it, I’m going to mirror the entire article.

MONTGOMERY — When 25 state senators signed a bill to put protections for Ten Commandment displays in the state constitution, they said they were doing what voters want.

Yet a survey of 10 of those senators who backed the measure in the special legislative session that ended Monday found only one, the bill sponsor, who could name all 10 of the commandments. Three of the lawmakers surveyed represent Morgan, Limestone and Cullman counties.

(more…)

This is fun. Once of the things that comes along with writing about politics, as you can probably guess, is the occasional hate mail. I usually either ignore them or respond with something clever like “screw you”, but yesterday I got the urge to respond to one of these missives with an earnest attempt to have a discussion about the issue that enraged him. What I found so amusing about the exchange is how much the person I was arguing with would try to put words in my mouth. It was as if he wanted to have an argument with a liberal strawman, but couldn’t find one so he ranted against me instead.

The full email thread is in the extended entry, slightly edited for clarity, but with typos intact.
(more…)

Out of curiosity, is it common for a media company to completely rebrand themselves less than a week after launching? Even if they’re just going back to their old name, it still seems like a pretty dumb idea for a brand new company to do something this drastic (especially after vigorously defending their right to steal someone else’s name). Now that they’ve settled on what to call themselves, perhaps the dozens of bloggers all over the world can concentrate on putting more than 6 posts per day on the site. Destroying the MSM™ is going to take a little extra work, guys.

“Okay, Greg,” you’re saying, “enough of the overly-verbose posts about patriotism, history, and pajamas media. When are you going to post a photograph of President Bush shaking hands with a robot with the head of Albert Einstein?”

Well, here you go (via BoingBoing) :

It’s a good thing that’s the only embarrasing photo from his Asia trip (via Atrios) :



But there’s nothing more embarrasing than going on vacation and running into an ex-girlfriend from the Skull & Bones days :



I wonder where the President’s “Run Away From Bad Poll Numbers” tour will take him next?

Like Chuck Klosterman, I think Billy Joel is an underrated artist who’s completely devoid of “cool”, but that’s not what I’m interested in writing about. Instead, I’d like to highlight this introduction to the Billy Joel essay in his last book :

Several months before nineteen unsmiling people from the Middle East woke up early on a Tuesday in order to commit suicide by flying planes into tall New York office buildings, I sent out a mass e-mail to several acquaintances that focused on the concept of patriotism. At the time, “patriotism” seemed like a quaint, baffling concept; it was almost like asking people to express their feelings on the art of blacksmithing. But sometimes I like to ask people what they think about blacksmithing, too.

So ANYWAY, here was the content of my e-mail: I gave everyone two potential options for a hypothetical blind date and asked them to pick who they’d prefer. The only things they knew about the first candidate was that he or she was attractive and successful. The only things they knew about the second candidate was that he or she was attractive, successful, and “extremely patriotic.” No other details were provided or could be ascertained.

Just about everyone immediately responded by selecting the first individual. They viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn’t too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren’t just undatable, but totally [freaking] insane. One of them wrote that the quality of patriotism was on par with “regularly listening to Cat Stevens” and “loves Robin Williams movies.” Comparisons were made to Ted Nugent and Patrick Henry. And one especially snide fellow sent back a mass message to the entire e-mail group, essentially claiming that any woman who loved America didn’t deserve to date him, not because he hated his country but because patriotic people weren’t smart.

That last response outraged one of my friends, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had been the only individual in the entire group who claimed to prefer the extremely patriotic candidate to the alternative. He sent me one of the most sincerely aggravated epistles I’ve ever received, and I still recall a segment of his electronic diatribe that was painfully accurate: “You know how historians call people who came of age during World War II ‘the greatest generation’? No one will ever say that about us,” he wrote. “We’ll be ‘the cool generation.’ That’s all we’re good at, and that’s all you and your friends seem to aspire to.”

Now I’ll admit that I’d choose the candidate that doesn’t consider themselves “extremely patriotic”, but it has nothing to do with wanting to be “cool” and I definitely don’t see patriotism as a downside. The way this question is worded, “extremely patriotic” is a loaded term. More than that, however, is that the term when applied that way, is a divisive one.

Let’s take a step back and imagine this question in a different way. If you had to choose a friend between two people who are for all practical purposes alike, except for that fact that one “really loves Jesus”, who would you pick? I would choose the first, not because I see loving Jesus as a negative, but because “really loves Jesus” implies a certain level of religious devotion that I’m not comfortable with. Considering the religious makeup of our country, I see it as almost a given that anyone I meet would self-identify as a Christian. That being the case, saying that someone “really loves Jesus” isn’t done to emphasize their normality but to but to differentiate them from an already Christian majority. For that reason, my interpretation of “really loves Jesus” isn’t that the person in question is merely religious, but a zealot.

The same holds true with the original question. I consider myself “extremely patriotic”, but I’d never think to describe myself as such. To do so wouldn’t send the message that I love my country, but that I think other people don’t love the country as much as I do. If someone else was described to me as “extremely patriotic”, I would jump to the conclusion that the person in question is not necessarily a patriot, but a self-righteous nationalist. Even before 9/11, the overzealous patriot archetype was a breed of American that was used to divide people ideologically, not celebrate their common heritage. I won’t bother delving into the specifics of this stereotype, but you probably know what I’m talking about.

Of course, this all opens up a further line of questioning. Why do these hypothetical Christians and patriots bring to mind a particular right-wing variety of Christianity and patriotism? I’ve explored the religious question plenty of times on this site (most recently in “Take Back Jesus”), but the patriotism question is a little more elusive. There’s a long history of politicians of all stripes beating back opposition by questioning their opponents patriotism, but this is something that’s really intesnified in recent years and something that conservatives excell at.

Which is really just a long way of saying that, with the exception of the “exceptionally snide fellow”, I don’t think Chuck Klosterman’s friends are America-hating jerks. They’re just exhibiting a predictable reaction to a social climate that’s sought to make “patriotism” seen as a conservative value. It’s not, of course, but making that point relies upon making to careful distinction between patriotism, nationalism, and jingoism. Considering the results of last year’s election, I don’t know if the American people have a tolerance for subtlety.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but I’m posting over at Crooks & Liars for a few days while John is attending a funeral. You’ve only missed two posts so far, but here they are anyways :

Open Sores Media

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the orgy of self-congratulation that is OSM™, let me quickly highlight this section from their press release yesterday :

Open Source Media currently features content from more than 70 bloggers worldwide, primarily focused on political and current events. However, the goal is to expand its scope to eventually include all forms of coverage, from local news to pop culture to sports, fashion, food, hobbies and more.

Along with this bit from the National Review’s puff piece earlier this week :

Bloggers don’t work nine-to-five; they post around-the-clock. They don’t file one story a day; they might update dozens of times throughout a 24-hour period. And they are everywhere. The New York Times has 53 bureaus worldwide (16 of them in the New York area). Pajamas Media plans to easily top that number, and at a fraction of the cost.

Wow. With $3.5 million in funding, more than 70 contributors, and a 24/7 posting schedule, I’m sure the guys in pajamas are blogging up a storm, right? Well, only if you consider five posts a storm. By comparison, The Huffington Post had 65 posts in its first day.

I guess it must be hard to pat yourself on the back and type at the same time.

What She Said

Since it’s already a few posts down, let me highlight and endorse what Avedon said below :

I actually meant to include this in my previous post, and judging from comments it’s just what some of you want - a media contact list. So let me encourage you to tell the media how outrageous you find it that they give so much coverage to ludicrous right-wing talking points and then don’t cover the response from the Democratic leadership - or from the majority of Americans.

Even better than FAIR’s media contact list is this section of the Democratic party’s site :

All you have to do is enter a zip code and it will bring up a form for you to contact multiple local and national media outlets at the same time. This is an especially useful resource if you wanted to, let’s say, contact the Arizona Daily Star and tell them that John McCain is a fraud whose “toughness” only comes out when it’s politically safe to do so or The Greenville News to tell the people of South Carolina that their Senator wants to destroy some of our most basic rights as Americans. With the public finally starting to wake up to the moral cowardice of the Republican majority, I can think of quite a few places that could use a friendly reminder that their representatives are part of the problem.

So take advantage of the Democratic media contact page, folks. It’s a damn good resource that people don’t use nearly as often as they should. Then again, it might be more popular if the site’s webmaster hadn’t (a) hidden the form under the site’s non-descriptive “Action” tab and (b) failed to include a redirect from the forms old URL (democrats.org/media) to its new one democrats.org/page/speakout/letterstoeditors). Just in case it gets shuffled around again, you might want to bookmark this one.

Yes, I’m still posting over at This Mordern World as well, though I haven’t posted there in a few days.