Oh, what a shame, we lost those emails...

More evidence of massive covering up at the Bush White House has me convinced that what we don't know about must have been really bad, since what we do know about is so blatantly awful. While they were supposed to be finding and preserving their email, they were losing it, and they didn't care. Of course, this was a direct violation of the law. Of course this was a blatant attempt, especially in the case of the Plame affair, to cover up and protect senior members of the administration.

And, of course, nothing will be done about it.

Job losses pre- and post-Obama policies

Via Ezra, nuff said.

Creating More Stateless Refugees

This is what the xenophobic right wants to create: a country that denies citizenship to people born here. This will create stateless refugees--people with no nation, no rights, no protection of law, and no place to call home.

I'm sure this doesn't matter one bit to the people who want to deny birthright citizenship. Would they give a damn, I wonder, about Palestinians or even Jews and Gypsies under Hitler? Do they care about huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

But, hey, people who want to mess with the 14th amendment won't bother reading this Wikipedia page because they're convinced we should deny citizenship to people born here. Wouldn't want to cloud up your world view on citizenship with these kind of unintended consequences.

The right will just ignore the facts, or make up their own (like, is there really an invasion of pregnant Mexican women struggling through miles of hot desert to have their babies here?). They will plow on into this like they did with Iraq, unintended consequences be damned.

We are a nation of immigrants. We give chances to people who don't otherwise have them. In this case, we ruined small subsistence farming in Mexico with NAFTA and Monstanto, we have a whole bunch of businesses here that love the cheap illegal labor and hardly ever get busted for it, so what do we expect but a bunch of displaced people looking for work? Until we solve the problems of small farmers in Mexico and start punishing the companies that hire illegals here in the US, we will never stop or slow illegal immigration.

If the Xenophobes on the right get their way, we'll just create more problems, like statelessness, and never get to the core problem of poverty and joblessness that drives the immigration engine. Even George W Bush understood that.

"...when men are desperate no one can stand up to them." --Xenophon

in reference to: 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (view on Google Sidewiki)