Goldy

As has been the case throughout most of our nation’s history, the public debate on immigration is fueled by emotion a helluva lot more than it is by logic. But former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich cuts through the heat to suggest how our immigration policy can have a significant impact on our efforts to assure long term solvency for Social Security and Medicare:

Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. Within a couple of decades, there will be only two workers per retiree. There’s no way just two workers will be able or willing to pay enough payroll taxes to keep benefits flowing to every retiree.

This is where immigration comes in. Most immigrants are young because the impoverished countries they come from are demographically the opposite of rich countries. Rather than aging populations, their populations are bursting with young people.

Yes, I know: There aren’t enough jobs right now even for Americans who want and need them. But once the American economy recovers, there will be. Take a long-term view and most new immigrants to the U.S. will be working for many decades.

Get it? One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States.

Immigration reform and entitlement reform have a lot to do with one another.

But then, why be logical about such things when there’s so much to gain politically by blaming brown people for our economic woes.

According to an article on TPM, the teabaggers are attempting to rebrand their “movement” as less violent, less racist and less, well crazy. But judging from Eli Sanders’s coverage of a Tea Party rally in Yakima over the weekend, they still have a ways to go.

Whether it’s explaining that “the only difference between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler” is the Jew killing thing, or inexplicably attempting to vilify Patty Murray by magic-markering a yarmulke on the Senator’s head, the Yakima teabaggers haven’t quite internalized the kinder/gentler message yet. The crazy/racist/anti-semitic stuff though, now that they have down pat.

And yet these are the folks to whom Rob McKenna has chosen to pander in attempting to solidify his position as the GOP frontrunner for governor in 2012. Go figure.

Answer: they both blame Google for stealing their business…

At a staff meeting this afternoon, the managers of the Lusty Lady announced they were going out of business and would permanently close their doors in just two months.

[…] The internet has also steadily eroded business. “We had our all-time high in 1998,” Davis said. “The fact that you can get massive amounts of fairly high-quality pornography for free has had a definite effect.”

As it’s had on the Times.

I’ve never patronized the Lusty Lady (as I’m way too uptight to enjoy women stripping for money), but I’m guessing as far as Seattle institutions go, there are many who will mourn the Lusty Lady a helluva lot more than they would the Times.

Proverbs 12:26
The righteous should choose his friends carefully,
For the way of the wicked leads them astray.

Proverbs 13:20
He who walks with wise men will be wise,
But the companion of fools will be destroyed.

Proverbs 22:24-25
Make no friendship with an angry man,
And with a furious man do not go,
Lest you learn his ways
And set a snare for your soul.

Normally I just post these verses without comment, but considering his recent embrace of his party’s angry, violent, radical fringe, this week’s HA Bible Study is dedicated to Rob McKenna.

Discuss.

Speaking backstage at the 10,000-strong pro-immigration reform rally in Seattle today, Rep. Jim McDermott puts aside the moral argument for reform, and presents it as a straight-up pocketbook issue:

“People have to understand there is a direct connection between cheap food in this country, and the fact that we have this workers who are coming from other countries.”

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food now than they have at any time in our history, steadily falling from 24.2% of income in 1930 to  9.6% in 2008, and part of what makes our food so cheap is all that cheap immigrant labor. So while I suppose we could, with great effort and expense, seal off our borders and deport millions of immigrant laborers, we all better be ready to give up those 99-cent value menus in return.

I’m at the pro-immigration reform rally in Occidental Park, where thousands of enthusiastic supporters have already gathered in advance of today’s program.

No angry sign-waving white people, so we’ll see if the media gives the rally the coverage it deserves.

I guess this is the kinda thing that many in the teabagger rabble fervently wish for President Obama and the Democratic Congress:

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 96, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland’s political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

It’s not hard to imagine the Pat Robertson types celebrating such a tragedy as a vengeful act of God. I wonder if the Polish opposition is as twisted politically as ours is here in the U.S., or if democracy is still so novel and cherished to them that they honor it even in losing?

Gary Randall’s Faith and Freedom Network blasted an email to its list yesterday (essentially duplicating the content of this blog post), informing them of an important letter from the very official sounding “American College of Pediatricians”:

Out of concern for the health and well being of all youth, the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has mailed a letter to the superintendents of all public schools in the country, expressing their concerns.

In the first paragraph of the letter, the ACP states, “We are increasingly concerned, however, that in many cases efforts to help students who exhibit same-sex attractions and/or gender confusion are based on incomplete or inaccurate information.”

They further state that when dealing with adolescents experiencing same-sex attractions, “It is essential to understand there is no scientific evidence that an individual is born ‘gay’ or ‘transgender’, in fact there is evidence that there are multiple factors—primarily social and familial, that predispose a child to homosexual attraction and/or gender confusion.”

The email goes on to guide readers to a new website set up by the ACP, FactsAboutYouth.com, purportedly “created by health professionals to provide policymakers, parents and youth with the most current medical and psychological facts about sexual development.”

So what is the ACP? If we call it astroturfing when a business or other special interest creates a puppet “grassroots” organization in order to create the appearance of popular support, what do we call it when they create a supposedly scholarly or professional organization in order to fake the appearance of expert authority? Ass-troturfing? Well, whatever, that’s what the ACP is.

The American College of Pediatricians was created in 2002 by 60 of the 60,000 members of the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics, in response to the latter organization’s passage of a statement supporting second-parent adoptions by gay and lesbian parents.  In its own published history, the ACP states that it was founded by “a small group of pediatricians who vocally opposed the AAP’s support of homosexual parenting.”

Opposition to homosexual parenting was the guiding principle of the ACP’s founders, a group of self-described “Judeo-Christian, traditional-values” doctors who numbered barely one-tenth of one percent of the AAP’s national membership. But reading their website — or Gary Randall’s email — you’d think the ACP was some sort of respectable, scholarly professional association representing the mainstream of pediatrics rather than only a tiny, reactionary fringe. (You can read more on the ACP and their new website at the excellent Pam’s House Blend.)

How fringe? I was actually sitting in the waiting room of my daughter’s pediatrician yesterday when word of Randall’s email came across my iPhone, so I asked him if he’d every heard of the American College of Pediatricians. Um… “No.”

It is one thing for the Faith and Freedom crowd to push their religious views on their followers, but when they attempt to back it up with fringe science from some official sounding faux medical organization (and I say “faux” because the ACP was founded on religious principles, not medical ones), their misinformation does everybody a great disservice… but especially the unfortunate gay and lesbian teens who are sure to be tortured by parents and teachers following “medical” guidelines that 99.9% of pediatricians officially disavow.

One of the more amusing/infuriating moments from last week’s public hearing on the Space Needle’s proposed annexation of the Fun Forest, was the well-heeled supporter who fretted how his wife and young children are afraid to visit the Seattle Center in its current scary state. Really. And this is the kinda suburban dandy who we should be looking to for advice on how to redevelop an urban park at the center of our city?

Indeed, the project’s backers appear to be tremendously out of touch with the wants and needs of the typical Seattle resident, as evidenced by their lack of preparation for (and apparent disbelief of) the overwhelming public opposition their proposal has faced. But why should they be in touch with Seattle residents, when the proposal’s main architects don’t even live in Seattle.

Of course I’m referring to Space Needle Board Chair Jeffrey Wright and Space Needle CEO Ron Sevart, who commute to work from Hunts Point and Issaquah respectively.

Now I don’t expect wealthy, out-of-city purveyors of mushy, $17 crab cakes to fully appreciate the way us common folks use the Seattle Center. But I don’t expect them to deign to tell us what to do with it either.

To add an exclamation point to Jon’s post below:

an·ar·chist –noun

1. a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
2. a person who seeks to overturn by violence all constituted forms and institutions of society and government, with no purpose of establishing any other system of order in the place of that destroyed.
3. a person who promotes disorder or excites revolt against any established rule, law, or custom.

Far be it for me to suggest that the teabaggers’ violent, anti-federalist rhetoric is in any way anarchistic, but it seems downright silly to attempt to lump anarchists in with us liberals and progressives who admittedly seek an expanded role for government in the economic sphere.

Anarchism is not an ism of the modern left. If anything, it is libertarianism taken to its logical extreme.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has announced he will retire this summer, giving President Barack Obama his second appointment to our nation’s highest court.

A Republican, appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, Stevens was originally considered a center-right vote, but with the extreme ideological shift of the court in recent years he has since become the leader of the bench’s “liberal bloc.” In that capacity, the 89-year-old Stevens gamely and nobly survived the Bush administration, saving the appointment of his replacement for a president not seeking to place our Constitution in the hands of a radically partisan, activist court.

In addition to being its liberal leader, Stevens is also the court’s lone W.A.S.P., the other eight justices being Roman Catholics and Jews of varying ethnicities. With that heritage in mind, and with an eye toward diversity, many court observers expect President Obama to appoint another white, Protestant to the “W.A.S.P. seat” on the bench, much like the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to fill the “black seat” vacated by Justice Thurgood Marshall.

UPDATE:
The Republican Senator from Cloud Cuckoo Land chimes in:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member of the committee, issued a statement calling for Obama to avoid “activist judges.”

You mean the kinda “activist judges” that ignore a century of legal precedent on campaign finance? Yeah, well, eat me.

Must be another one of us violent, extremist liberals, right?

An East Texas man who federal prosecutors allege left explosive devices including pipe bombs in multiple area mail boxes, was motivated in part by anger at the government, Brit Featherston, first assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas tells TPMmuckraker in a phone interview.

Perhaps the Palin/Hannity/Teabagger crowd is betting the that the crazies they inspire are just too crazy and/or stupid to successfully carry out one of their domestic terrorist attacks? I sure as hell hope so.

I was reading through the felony complaint filed against Sen. Patty Murray’s would-be assassin, reading the transcript of his threatening phone calls, and the hateful, violent, offensive prose just sounds so familiar… well… I was wondering if anybody here had heard from HA troll “manoftruth” since Charles Alan Wilson’s arrest?

Just curious.

10,000 immigrants, refugees and their allies are expected to descend on Pioneer Square this Saturday, in what is surely to be one of the largest pro-immigration reform rallies in the nation. So I wonder… will our local media bother to muster the same kind of coverage they routinely lavish on a couple hundred angry teabaggers?

If history is any indication, I’m guessing not.

Nearly one in six Washingtonians are Latino or Asian and 12.3% are foreign born. Immigrants comprise 14.2% of the state workforce, and pay 13.2% of state and local taxes. And of course our state’s vital agricultural industry is as dependent on immigrant workers, documented or not, as it is on the vast network of dams and ditches that irrigate its fields.

But although “New Americans” — naturalized citizens or the U.S.-born children of immigrants — account for 7.5% of Washington’s registered voters, and despite the huge impact immigration reform would have on our state’s residents and economy, the immigration reform debate receives surprisingly little attention from our local politicians and journalists beyond the usual hyperbolic sound bites.

Well, you can help the establishment types take notice and join the Stand Up in Seattle for Immigration Reform Rally, Saturday, April 10, in Seattle’s Occidental Park. Gates will open at 11 a.m., and the program of entertainment and featured speakers is scheduled to start at noon, so please stop by and show your support for rational, humane immigration reform.

I know it’s not quite as compelling a story as a few dozen angry old white folks with scary, misspelled signs, but together, perhaps we can make up in numbers what we lack in a marketable trope.