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March 28, 2006

Spinally Challenged, Or Simply Stupid?

The first thing I saw when I got online to do my start-of-the-day news reading this morning was this bunch of idiocy.

WASHINGTON -- Against a backdrop of massive demonstrations by immigration advocates and pressure from the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation to create two guest-worker programs and a plan for legalizing the status of millions of immigrants now in the country illegally.

The measure is the most generous of several immigration proposals before the panel, and passed with the support of committee Democrats and some of the Senate's most conservative Republicans.

In accepting the measure, which among other things offers guest workers the chance to eventually become U.S. citizens, senators rejected another bill sponsored by two border-state Republicans that would have required guest workers and illegal immigrants to eventually return home.

Now, what is wrong with these idiots we have elected and reelected, and continue to pay to enact the laws that govern this country?

Every day we hear figures citing a criminal alien population from Mexico alone as being somewhere between fifteen and twenty million. That doesn't even include the large and constant influx of undocumented Asians, South and Central Americans the U.S. Government has incompetently permitted to enter this country and remain here.

Instead of the government taking responsibility for having allowed this fiasco to become the legal and physical quagmire it is, even the President gives us excuse-based, lame explanations for the policies most of our lazy politicians are dead set on foisting upon us:

The bill passed only hours after President Bush made his strongest appeal yet for a law that would provide employers with enough immigrant workers to keep the economy humming. Appearing at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens, Mr. Bush attempted to head off arguments within his party that a border-security law must come before any effort to help immigrants or their employers.

He called a temporary-worker program "vital to securing our border" by providing a legal channel for workers and freeing up border agents to patrol for criminals and terrorists.

Provide employers with enough illegal, undocumented, should-not-even-be-here, criminal immigrant workers? Millions of 'em? Hey, I might be wrong, here, but doesn't the law stipulate that employers are supposed to confirm that these folks they hire are eligible to work in this country?

And how about all the folks who come here -- illegally -- and live off the taxpayer? And how about all those undocumented, untaxed income dollars that are Western Union'd back to family in the old country? You know, that money that could be better served if spent here in the U.S. to keep our economy moving?

That's pretty much how the system works here, or at least is supposed to work. If taxes are paid by all workers and they reinvest their net pay in the economy by spending it in the United States, American firms of all sizes would have more money to pay employees, and, with the enforcement of employment and immigration laws executed the way they are supposed to be, these employers might feel less compelled to hire criminal aliens under the table, off the books, whatever.

Sounds kind of convoluted, doesn't it, when you really think about it. First, our politicians, who are forever collectively spending our tax dollars on superfluous projects that the people who founded this nation{Smart bunch, those were, they put together the greatest political concept in history and made it work. Too bad they didn't have cryogenics back then, we could have used 'em about now} would have stomped thunderingly down beneath furious size fourteen boots.

Taxation without representation?

How much did that self seeking pillar of politics in Alaska manage to get "earmarked" to rip us off financing construction of the thankfully ill-fated "Bridge to Nowhere"? Even though the bridge allocation got nixed due to a surplus of voter backlash significantly attributeable to the Blogosphere, "the funds", as they undoubtedly regard our tax dollars to be, remain "earmarked" for the same larcenous local politicians to use for other things, instead. But therein was a single excess of wasted taxes that got caught out, and only because the grand larcens in question were a little too hungry.

If Africa's population wasn't as largely Muslim as it is, we could overfeed the entire continent, through decades of famine, disaster and doom with all the pork our Congress generates.

I know, my terrible habit of digressing has joined in...

So. Back on topic, sorry about that.

Not really. :-)

While money has been getting pissed away by irresponsible, self seeking politicians from both sides of the aisle, once-backburnered issues that now constitute an in-your-face political battleground were doing what they do when no one responds to them: growing.

Now a whole bunch of career politicians who know exactly why we have the problem -- decades of their keeping the problem as far away from the table as possible, for reasons related to votes -- they failed to adequately secure our borders or to seriously enforce immigration policies, which, as a collective resume item, well...

Now the usual politics will come into play. Instead of overwhelmingly voting to take strong, positive steps that might be a little painful at first(you know, re-"earmarking" the money that was to finance the preservation of some anti-American graffiti in a small southwestern town, or to subsidize private educational institutions that balk at allowing military recruiters on campus), transforming our pork pesos into border securidad, the career politicians on the Hill will attempt to apply a Band-Aid to a gushing wound so as not to offend anybody who might vote for them.

Here's the kind of thinking these knuckleheads do on our behalf, in exchange for our allowing them to occupy all the trappings of a ruling class on our dime:

The Senate-passed measure is largely based on language offered by John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. Their temporary-worker plan, passed on an 11-6 vote, would grant visas to 400,000 immigrants a year initially. They would be able to bargain for wages, change jobs, unionize and would be allowed to travel home and return.

Separately, the committee passed a pilot guest-worker plan for agriculture workers that would be capped at 1.5 million workers and cut off after five years. That measure was passed at the insistence of California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who said she feared that workers admitted under a general guest-worker program would spurn farm jobs for easier work in service or construction industries.

The committee also deferred to the McCain-Kennedy bill in its plan for dealing with an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants now in the country. Those people would have to pay a $1,000 penalty, pass a background check and get a work permit in order to stay in the U.S.

The political solution will only hurt us, big time. We are on the verge of setting a precedent by shoving federal law aside in order to accommodate political convenience, and in so doing make light of all laws. If politicians can advocate breaking the law because it makes finding solutions easier, they're definitely operating outside the boundaries of public service as we define it.

The political solution will also send a message to all potential illegals to "Come one, Come all!", and we'll be swamped by a wave of "immigration" that'll be nothing nice. If our borders aren't secure now, how will we be able to secure them then?

If that's the kind of vim we're getting for our vote, we'd do a whole lot better finding some people who graduated with Jethro Bodine and replacing both the House and the Senate with them.

Posted by Seth at March 28, 2006 06:13 AM

Comments

Posted by: GM Roper at March 30, 2006 01:22 PM

Posted by: Seth at March 30, 2006 02:30 PM

Posted by: Raven at March 30, 2006 03:15 PM

Posted by: Seth at March 30, 2006 03:49 PM

Posted by: Ogre at March 31, 2006 04:53 AM

Posted by: Seth at March 31, 2006 05:46 AM