On the whole are illegal immigrants like slaves things, a lot of you are pointing out that many if not most illegal immigrants face serious mistreatment at the hands of their employers due to their lack of meaningful legal rights. Wholly agreed. It’s worth noting, though, that Rep. Sensenbrenner doesn’t propose to do anything about it. An enforcement-only approach to immigration will take current illegals from being in a bad situation to a worse one. Redressing very legitimate concerns about the treatment of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants is one reason to support the approach Sensenbrenner rejects — one that would make it relatively easy for illegals without criminal records to get on the path to citizenship with appropriate payment of back taxes and some kind of fine.
At any rate, Sensenbenner’s one of the good guys on the net neutrality issue, so maybe he wants to bust out with an inappropriate analogy in that regard.
E.J. Dionne has a great column on the endlessly annoying movement to declare English our ‘official language’ in some way. I would only re-emphasize that not only is it the case that “the evidence is overwhelming that Spanish speakers and their kids are as aware as anyone of the importance of learning English” but the evidence is also overwhelming that the kids of Spanish speaker do, in fact, learn English and that linguistic assimilation is total in the third generation.
This has been implicit for some time, but Carl Hulse in The New York Times brings it to the surface — the Democrats’ efforts to run on ethics and a “culture of corruption” are, apparently, undermined by William Jefferson‘s transgressions. Obviously, we are seeing what everyone already knew — that the Donkeys aren’t pure as virgin snow. Certainly, Jefferson been up to no good and richly deserves punishment.
But there’s no serious comparison here.
Jefferson was a corrupt freelancer . . . a more-or-less random member of congress abusing his office for personal gain. Compare this to the case of Tom DeLay, the key mover-and-shaker in the Republican caucus for many years and an important one for years before that. His muck-worthy activities not only accrued to a more significant player, but also bore a direct relationship to the creation and sustenance of the GOP machine.
Beyond DeLay, the salient point about, say, the Dukester is that his cash-for-contracts scheme was in many ways continuous with standard operating procedure for the Republican Party. It was different. But a difference of degree, not of kind. Normally, the cash comes in as campaign contributions or lobbying jobs for yourself and your retainers rather than pocket money or boats. But the public policy auction is happening at all levels. Look at the energy bill, or the farm bill, or the Medicare bill. Legislation is for sale to the highest bidder in all cases. That — and not the fact that this or that Republican may or may not be under indictment — is the point. And it connects up with the pattern of executive branch lawlessness and malfeasance. The overall attitude is that the institutions of government are the property of the people who happen to be holding power; power that can be deployed without constraint on behalf of its holders or their paymasters.
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is the #1 recipient of lobbyist cash, according to a new report. And according to local Dems, he doesn’t live in the Pennsylvania house he calls his primary residence. That, plus more reactions to and analysis of the Jefferson raid than you ever thought possible, in today’s Daily Muck.
CIA briefer Craig Schmall and Robert Grenier a former Islamabad station chief and CIA Counterterrorist Center director to testify against Scooter Libby.
Via Mickey Kaus, watch Jackie Shire catch Judith Miller hyping the WMD threat from Libya. I think she just can’t help herself.
There’s been a wave of Congressional outrage over the FBI’s raid of Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-LA) congressional office – yesterday Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) even promised that he’ll “seek a means to restore the delicate balance of power among the branches of government that the Founders intended.”
High-minded defense of the Constitution? Or Congress, with an eye toward other creeping investigations, just protecting their own?
Common Cause requests an investigation into links between Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Mitchell Wade.
I’ve been looking for a pretext to plug Greg Sargent’s new blog, The Horse’s Mouth, over at my other employer‘s growing blog empire, so let me say I liked his post on Patrick Healy’s bizarre inquiry into the state of the Clintons’ marriage.
Let me just also note that I find the all-too-American combination of prurience and puritanism really tiresome. Every three grafs or so you get to some point where Healy won’t just say what he means. In theory, I suppose, this is to guard the delicate sensibilities of New York Times readers. In reality, it’s a way for Healy and his editors to hide — much more from themselves than from their audience — what it is they’re doing.
I don’t have a problem with tabloids and celebrity gossip pages. And politicians are a kind of celebrity, after all. But real gossip sheets don’t display all this shame and self-loathing. They are what they are and they just put it out there. Most of all, US Weekly doesn’t pretend that its celebrity gossip is actually highbrow film criticism.