What I Want My Congressman to Do

Congressman Rogers,

I do not doubt that you are doing what you believe is best for our district, Michigan's 8th. Though I’m sure you know I disagree with you on a lot of the positions you take with regards to social issues and the War in Iraq, I’m not going to give you a hard time here about those things you’ve done that I disagree with. I’m going to take the time here to tell you what I want you to do. So here goes.

Here’s what I want you and the rest of the U.S. Congress to do, Mike.

I want you to cut off the money to fund this bungled, ill-conceived, ill-planned war in Iraq that has spawned a Civil War that our men and women in uniform (and contractors) can not stop. That the President and Vice-President misled this country of ours into this war is criminal. Unfortunately for our men and women in uniform, the only people who can bring peace to Iraq are the Iraqi people themselves. If they would rather fight with guns instead of ballots, then that’s their horrific choice. It is not worth one U.S. soldier’s life to referee this war. Besides, thanks to this diversion, Al Qaeda is now as strong as ever.

I want you to hold Harriet Miers in contempt for refusing to testify before Congress about the U.S. Attorney firings. Dean worked for Nixon, but Nixon didn’t tell him to ignore Congress. Miers seems to think she’s supposed to support Bush over the Constitution. When you were an FBI agent, how did you react toward people who ignored subpoenas on cases you investigated?

I want you to call for Alberto Gonzalez to step down as Attorney General. He’s either a liar or incompetent or both. He tells Congress that the FBI hasn’t abused people’s civil rights under the Patriot Act, when, only days before, he’d received reports informing him that the FBI had in fact violated laws protecting civil liberties and privacy. That’s called perjury. A previous Congress attempted to impeach a President over lying about a blowjob. Covering up abuses of citizen rights strikes me as a higher order of crime.

I want you to work to close Guantanamo Bay and try those detainees for whatever crimes they have committed, following due process. John Walker Lindh got 20 years in the civilian court. Why is our own justice system, or the International criminal Court, not good enough?

I want you to work to stop the CIA’s rendition program. That the United States of America, the country that’s supposed to be the standard-bearer of freedom and democracy, is kidnapping people off streets and taking them to undisclosed locations around the world for interrogation and torture is a travesty. It is a method used by the likes of Pinochet and the Junta of Argentina’s Dirty War. Those methods don’t preserve freedom and democracy. They suppress it.

I want you to shut down Bush’s NSA spying program (the one that ignores the FISA) because it is unconstitutional.

I want you to tell Speaker Pelosi that Impeachment should be ON the table. Ridiculous, you say? Purely political, you say? It’s not ridiculous when President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney show contempt for the Constitution of the United States. Just because it’s political doesn’t mean it’s unjust. You are a politician. Every elected official in this country is a politician.

Most importantly, as an FBI agent you swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. As a member of Congress, you took a similar oath. Not to your party. Not to the President. Not to Congress. Not to the military. Not an oath to anyone or anything else. Just the Constitution: the contract, that brilliant document, that binds every citizen of this country together with the three branches of our government.

We have a President and Vice-President who at best view the Legislative branch with contempt, as merely a bank with unlimited funds, and as a rubber stamp for their ideas.

The two of them must be kept in check so that their successors don’t even get the chance to abuse the power of the Executive Branch. Do you really want a Democrat in the White House acting this way? Even as a Democrat myself, I don’t.

I know this is a lot. But our country has been violated repeatedly by a President and Vice-President who have little regard for the concepts of accountability and responsibility. You weren’t elected to make easy decisions. You were elected to serve the people and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

[Cross-posted on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.]

Recall! Recall! Recall!

Saying last Fall’s election that brought control of the House and the Governor’s seat to Democrats was an unwise election decision by the state’s voters, the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance (MTA), the conservative anti-tax group headed by former Rep. Leon Drolet, has launched a recall drive

Drolet said the fact that a tax increase of any kind has even been talked about is a sign that the Governor and House Democrats are out of touch with the voters who elected them in the first place. He wants Republicans to control both chambers, and for himself to be installed as Governor. “Democracy is not about compromise,” said Drolet. “It’s about reflecting the will of the people.”

Asked what he thought of a possible recall drive, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop said, “Bring it on. I’m tired of having to deal with the Governor.”

Asked if he was afraid a recall drive could give the House back to Republicans, Speaker Andy Dillon said, “no comment.”

Governor Granholm, for her part, stated flatly that any recall drive was a waste of time and taxpayer money, especially given the ongoing negotiations over the state's budget and the multitude of challenges Michigan faces today.

After a successful recall Drolet plans on having both chambers pass his budget proposals which will include the repeal of the State income tax, the Michigan Business Tax (the SBT-replacement recently signed into law), along with numerous other fees, and ending all state subsidies to universities, making them private institutions. This will be followed by the closure of the Departments of Education and Environment Quality, and the MEDC.

Asked if he thought those moves might be considered extreme by Michigan’s voters, he replied, “Not my Michigan voters.” When it was pointed out that he didn’t have voters anymore now that he is retired from the state House, he exclaimed, “It doesn’t matter. When are you guys [in the press] going to get it? I want my way, dammit!”

Drolet also unveiled a large white banner with the campaign’s logo and motto. It shows a fat pink pig standing on top of the black-lettered phrase, “Squeal like a pig!”

Sicko, Moore, and Socialized Medicine

I saw Sicko Friday night and I have to say it is Moore’s best film. It’s much less propagandistic than his others. He also does a better job connecting the many idea threads he throws out there.

In the film he relates the horror stories of people who thought they were insured. One woman took her 18-month-old daughter, who was running a very high fever, to King-Drew hospital in L.A. Her insurance company Kaiser Permanente told her they wouldn’t pay for her daughter’s care because she hadn’t taken her to a Kaiser hospital. King-Drew refused to treat because they wouldn’t be paid. The woman demanded treatment. King-Drew threw her out. She took a cab to a Kaiser hospital. By then it was too late. Her daughter had slipped into a coma and then died a half-hour after being brought to the Kaiser hospital. As the father of a toddler, this story hit me very hard in the heart.

Then there are the stories of the 9/11 volunteers who can’t get treatment for their ailments. This filled me with even more outrage.

I do believe there is something morally wrong with the CEO of an insurance company making $22 million a year. Why is it that other Western industrialized nations view health care as essential to human existence (like public education) but not the U.S.? I think the answer has partly to due with the fact that we have so much faith in the free market system that we’re not comfortable ceding control to a centralized system and we have an innate hatred of taxes. The latter despite the fact that health insurance premiums are effectively a tax on people and employers. The former despite the fact that profits don’t measure health or happiness. We’ve also been fed a lot of propaganda about the “deplorable conditions” of European health care systems. Moore does an excellent job of showing the role of the AMA and Ronald Reagan in killing the movement for socialized medicine back in the 1950’s.

So it’s no surprise that I would like to see universal health care in this country.

But I am not a big fan of Michael Moore or his style of “documentary.” His trip with the 9/11 volunteers to Cuba was a stunt. An effective one, allowing Castro to stick it to the U.S., no matter how irrational our foreign policy towards Cuba. Did Moore really think that if he showed up with a camera crew the Cuban government was going to deny treatment to those people? Of course not.

I have followed the debate between CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and Michael Moore himself. (You can read about it here, here, here, here, and here.

Even with the disagreements over figures and sources, CNN did not (nor could they or anyone else) dispute Moore’s fundamental argument: the U.S. Health care system is a mess that leaves over 40 million people without care, does not provide efficient needed care to those people who pay for health insurance, and is run for profit at the expense of the insured.

One thing Moore doesn’t do in the film is get the point of view of the insurance companies. A documentary (a dispassionate, non-grandstanding take) would have done so. For me, this is a big weakness. Insurance companies often help to negotiate down the prices hospitals charge for services. In some ways they are the only check against doctors over-prescribing or performing unneeded tests and procedures.

That said, I think I’m like a lot of people, who either have had first hand bad experiences with health insurance companies or have family and friends who have had bad experiences with health insurance companies.

Unfortunately, Moore takes a selective look at the health care systems of Canada, Britain, and France. He picks the worst examples from our system and compares them to the best examples from their systems. I’m sure someone could easily find the worst cases from those systems and compare them with the best of ours. He does not present a balanced view of socialized medicine nor of our own health care system. If we’re going to reform our system, then we need a more balanced, clear-eyed, view of both systems.

Go see “Sicko.” It is worth it. You’ll be rightly outraged at the failures of the U.S. health care system. Just keep in mind that Moore is a polemicist and provocateur not a documentary filmmaker.

Dana Gioia's Commencement Speech

Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gave the commencement address at Stanford University. He said, in part,

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world--equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being--simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.

And I couldn't agree more.

Harry Potter and Literature

I am probably one of the few people who hasn't actually read a Harry Potter book. It is not because I don't want to or am turned off by the hype. It has more to do with my TBR list than anything else. I have enjoyed the movies so far and hope to embark on reading through the entire series at some point.

Meanwhile, with the fifth movie out and the final book coming out in a few days, people are predictably sniping about the series and its success. But Charles Taylor has a very thoughtful piece of commentary in the L.A. Times defending the series.

And that's why those who ascribe the popularity of the Potter books to nothing more than the bad taste of the masses are so off the mark. The most prominent of those naysayers, that drooping defender of the canon, Harold Bloom, has, in his attacks on Rowling, provided us with fine examples of another reason for the Potter books' popularity: the insularity of a literary culture that willfully ignores what it is that makes people readers in the first place.

Critics like Bloom are from what I call the Literature As Medicine crowd. Yes, there are difficult works like "Ulysses" that are rewarding to read (I happen to be a fan of Joyce). But the Literature As Medicine crowd always seems to be trying to suck the fun and life out of reading. Or be completely clueless to the fact that people read a bit of everything: from "genre" fiction to literary fiction. Readers are readers. They might go from Hemingway to Cartland to King and then to Morrison, depnding on their moods.

Hemingway's House in Cuba

Ernest Hemingway's house is falling apart. Many lovers of his work would like to assist in its preservation. But because the house is in Cuba, sanctions are making it nearly impossible for Americans to contribute.
Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, 10 miles east of Havana, is the place Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960, and it is there that the author's abundant tastes, in literature and in life, are on display. Visitors can see where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, where he dined with Errol Flynn and where Ava Gardner was reported to have skinnydipped.

Hemingway liked trouble, and the chances are he would have enjoyed the fact that he is still creating it almost 50 years after his death. Finca Vigia has become a symbol of the struggle between the US and Cuba.

For the past two years, a group of American organisations has been working to restore the battered house and save the manuscripts and books. But US sanctions against Cuba have hindered the group's attempts to collaborate with the Cuban government. The Bush administration's response has been mixed, flitting between acquiescence and obstruction.

Okay, I'm no fan of Fidel Castro or of his policies toward and treatment of the Cuban people, but something is seriously wrong with our our foreign policy when we can't even preserve the home of one of the most important writers in the English language. As if Cuba still posed a serious threat to our national security. Whatever.

(Moore's publicity stunt in Sicko, which I haven't seen yet, is yet another trap the Left often falls into with the brutal but saavy dictator down there.)

Be sure to check out the accompanying slide show in the Guardian's article. Needless to say, there are a lot of mounted animal heads.

"One Wild Crazy Thing"

Who says California has the market cornered on weirdness?

During the six years I lived in L.A., I came across some of the lovely weirdness that is particular to that region of the country. This included people extolling the virtues of colonics, people with fake boobs, fake lips, and fake pecs, the televised car chases, women who wear size 2 who worry they're fat, a person sentenced to community service who told his friends to wave to him if they saw him cleaning up along the 10 freeway on their way to work, people who claim to hate L.A. but insist on living there anyway, and once I saw a guy on Sunset just up and shout "It's tough being me!"

But nothing like what this man did down in Jackson County, south of where I live.

A man who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for taking his daily run while wearing only a stocking cap, gloves and reflective tape said that the nude jogging made him "feel alive," according to police.

Russell Rotta, 49, told police that he had been running naked since he was a teenager and that he generally woke up each day around 4 a.m. to conceal the activity from his wife.

Rotta reported running in the nude six miles a day every day, weather permitting.

Yes, nude jogging. A one-man-fad.

Review - Homes of the Heart

My review of Homes of the Heart: A Ramallah Chronicle is up over at PopMatters.

Elegant, though it often is, Homes of the Heart is inconsistent as a memoir. Its chapters are short and often broken up into veritable snippets. The story meanders as the unnamed narrator, a writer much like Wadi, meanders around Ramallah on foot. The sights of structures as he remembers them versus how they are now causes him to ruminate on his childhood, his schooling, his friends, his teachers, his family, their neighbors, and the complex history of and relationship between the twin towns of Ramallah and al-Bireh. His reminiscences read as singular short reports rather than one engaging narrative. Still, moments shine, as in the narrator’s forced comparisons between the Ramallah he remembers, the one he loves, longs for, and used in his fiction, to the Ramallah he now sees. What the narrator finds very quickly is that everywhere it seems is “quite different from what I’d stored up in my memory.”

Guest Post at Liberal, Loud, and Proud

My wonderful friend Julielyn over at Liberal, Loud, and Proud has been kind enough to let me guest post over at her site today. It's an honor. Julielynn is one of the best blogger activists around.

Take a look. My post is called How I Became Involved in Michigan Politics.

Thank you, Julielyn!

Independence Day

Have a happy and safe 4th of July, everyone.


I'll be back next week.

Image courtesty of Enjoy Illinois.

Why Republicans Can't Be Trusted With Immigration Policy

I normally don't do this kind of thing; respond on a point by point to an opinion piece. But Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard's piece in the Detroit News (yes, I know, not so much a newspaper as a propaganda rag for Michigan Republicans) on immigration is so wrong in so many ways, that it is a textbook example of the misinformed, misguided, scare-mongering, willful ignorance put out by the Republican party and its conservative element nationwide on this issue.

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Never before has protecting our borders and securing our homeland been more important. Yet, a bill in the United States Senate would allow an estimated 12 million to 20 million illegally in America a pathway to citizenship with relative ease.

For a Sheriff, he shows a surprising ignorance of the law. It is not technically against the law (a criminal offense) to enter the U.S. without documentation or to overstay a visa. No fines or jail terms are assessed for such an infraction. You are not charged with either a misdemeanor or a felony offense. What does happen? You get deported back to your country of origin.

Remember, that to gain a legal job, they must also commit identity theft. That is one of the fastest growing crimes in America. Giving illegal entrants to America citizenship sends the message that it is OK to break the rules, even though we are a nation governed by laws.

Nice slide of logic. Equating undocumented workers with identity thieves who trash people's credit rating. Two different groups of people. Any statistics for this accusation? No. The Sheriff also doesn't mention the businesses who hire undocumented immigrants and never bother to check the validity of their social security numbers (SSNs). It's not as hard as one would believe.

What's often lost in this particular aspect of the debate about undocumented workers is the fact that those with fake SSNs do end up paying income taxes, medicare, and social security. Here's the kicker: when they retire, they never collect from the social security system because they aren't eligible.

Not only does citizenship reward this illegal behavior, but it ignores an important question -- how many of these illegal immigrants are in the United States to cause harm to the American way of life? That is a scary precedence to set, particularly when the challenge to secure our homeland remains a top priority.

Nevermind that he means "precedent." Any Michigan Republican can make a sanuzism now and then. I like how he asks a question and then doesn't answer it. Any facts there, Sheriff? No? Didn't think so. Because they don't support the Sheriff's claim. In fact, according to the Immigration Policy Center the undocumented actually tend to have lower rates of crime and incarceration than the general population.

According to the report, it is a myth that immigrants increase the rate of crime in the United States. Data from the U.S. census and other sources show that for every ethnic group -- without exception -- incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants. This is true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented immigrant population. Moreover, these patterns have been observed consistently over the last three decennial censuses – a period that includes the current era of mass immigration. And they recall similar national findings reported by three major government commissions during the first 30 years of the 20th Century.

Crime in the United States is not caused or even aggravated by immigrants, say Rumbaut and Ewing, regardless of their legal status. The misperception to the contrary undermines the development of reasoned public policy responses to both crime and immigration.

For example, as part of an amnesty program in 1986, Mahmoud "The Red" Abouhalima was granted legal status in the United States, even though his application information was fraudulent. Little did we know that "The Red" was a terrorist who eventually became one of the leaders in the attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993. Moreover, his conveniently acquired legal status allowed him the freedom to travel and participate in terrorist training overseas.

This is known as the Willie Horton Attack: cite one egregious example to indict the whole. You could make the same argument against law enforcement; they should have stopped the attack before it happened. But I won't make that ridiculous argument because it's not a fair one to make, smearing law enforcement merely for the sake of a political point. Just like smearing undocumented immigrants because of one terrorist.

Even closer to home is a recent incident where a Romanian refugee entered the United States illegally -- twice. His story ended after he beat, cut and kidnapped a couple from Rochester Hills before turning the gun he stole on himself.

Worse yet, this was not his first encounter with the law or our court system. The last time he snuck into America and showed up in Oakland County he was arrested for another crime involving a gun.

Again, the Sheriff shows his ignorance of immigration law. If the Romanian in question was a refugee, then he was not in the U.S. in any undocumented manner. Refugee status is awarded to someone by the U.S. State Department after a long review process. And again the Sheriff uses the Willie Horton Attack to whip up fear.

It is important that our borders remain open to those who aspire to find a better life, an American way of life, on U.S. soil. We know that the vast majority of those coming to America are coming for the good reasons-to make a better life for themselves and their family. I respect that a great deal, we are a nation of immigrants. My grandfather came through Ellis Island.

By this logic his grandfather was honest and all of the undocumented immigrants aren't. Nice. He also forgets that we are not entirely a nation of immigrants. There are still a few million Native Americans who survived the wars and disease brought by Europeans. Their input on immmigration policy is ignored.

But there is a right way to do things and a wrong way.

Here the Sheriff uses President Bush's "you are either with us or against us" reasoning, meant of course, to persuade readers in a calm reasonable manner. Notice that he doesn't even offer up an immigration reform plan anywhere in this piece. Not even on his web site either. Eight months after he lost to Stabenow, apparently he's still running for the Senate.

We need immigration reform that is secure, timely, balanced and accountable. However, the clear and pressing need is to secure our borders first. Anything less will only bring further financial, economic and social trouble to the United States.

He believes that we have to think of everything in terms of 9/11. Everyone is a suspect. And as we all learned from Brazil, "Be Safe: Be Suspicious" and "Suspicion Breeds Confidence".

Webster's Dictionary defines amnesty as, "government pardon granted to a number of offenders." That definition and provisions in the recently introduced immigration reform bill sound very similar.

In 1986, then President Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants.

Including that terrorist the Sheriff mentioned earlier. Yes, you heard it right from a Republican. Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to someone who became a terrorist. Therefore amnesty is wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter how hard-working the vast majority of these undocumented immigrants are.

Today, that number has grown extensively. History shows anytime you reward something, you get more of it. Simply stated, as written, this bill improperly places politics and expediency over the rule of law and security.

Businesses have been rewarded continuously for hiring undocumented immigrants. Restaurants, hotels, meat-processing plants, farmers, home builders, etc. They knew then that if they hired undocumented immigrants that they would not be prosecuted for it, so they have continued to do so in order to sell cheaper goods and services and make fatter profits. Even though employing undocumented immigrants is a criminal act. Funny how the Sheriff seems to have forgotten that portion of the criminal code.

But what he ignores is that the reason people keep coming here, documented or not, is that they are rewarded with jobs. What we have here is an illegal employer problem. Not an illegal immigrant problem.

For Michigan, this is a close and personal issue. ICE and the Border Patrol do all they can in the face of this tide, but they are not given the tools and support they need. The northern border has one-tenth the border patrol agents as the southern border. The only terrorist stopped at a border crossing on the way to commit an act of terror was at a northern border.

By which he means when the terrorist was caught the system worked. But he wants more money anyway to hire more police to patrol our northern border because he doesn't trust Canada to control it's own borders. Oh, and just ignore the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were all given temporary visas at U.S. consulates around the world, including 15 in Saudi Arabia.

Immigration reform is an issue which will shape our future and the future of our children for years to come.

In other words: since the majority of these undocumented people are Mexican or Latino, this would be bad news for the future of the Republican party. Once they do become citizens Latinos tend to identify strongly with the Democratic party. This simply can not be allowed.

If you are here illegally, you have to go back and pay three out of the last five years in taxes. American citizens pay five out of five.

And businesses will pay what for having employed said undocumented workers? Nothing.

Again he ignores the fact that those with fraudulent documents do in fact pay taxes. And those that don't have documents still pay taxes on whatever goods and services they buy, just like everyone else. They also effectively pay property taxes if they're renting.

The Senate actually voted against prohibiting all felons from being given this amnesty including those that are convicted sex offenders and failed to register. (That includes both of Michigan's senators.)

I've had some difficulty tracking down the actual vote on this. All I can find is that the Senate voted to move the bill to the floor for debate. This bill died two days later when the Senate couldn't muster enough votes to end debate on it. Voting to send a bill to the floor for debate is not the same as voting for the bill. Notice that he doesn't say felons are now given amnesty.

Also, there's something that doesn't make sense about the Sheriff's claim or even need for this provision. If an immigrant, documented or not, is convicted of an aggravated felony (rape, murder, sexual abuse of a mnor, drug trafficking, etc.), that is grounds for their deportation. In fact, there appears to be a problem now with overzealously categorizing crimes allegedly commited by immigrants as aggravated felonies in cases where a misdemeanor ought to be the classification.

Let me close with the words of Theodore Roosevelt on immigrants and being an American penned in 1919:

Translation: what follows is a quote from someone far more eloquent than I, someone who used to write his own speeches and op-ed pieces, unlike me who works from Conservative Republican talking points.

"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. ...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

This is another Republican trope: patriotism. There isn't a single global corporation that does business in the United States that is loyal to anyone but its shareholders. If a business leaves a state, for some reason they are not considered disloyal; it's because the economic policies/conditions are too harsh. Businesses that incorporate in the Cayman Islands or Dubai to avoid paying U.S. taxes, or outsource labor to markets that provide little if any protections for workers or the environment, all get a pass from the Republican party. Yet somehow, people are supposed to be "more loyal" (whatever that means) to the U.S. when they live here. I don't know how much more loyal you can get to our country than by living, working, paying taxes, and raising a family here, good English skills or not. The person who immigrates here but has trouble learning English, or insists on displaying a flag from their home country inside their own house, is somehow disloyal and deemed a bigger threat to our democracy than the relocating corporation.

As usual it's okay for capital (that thing that creates jobs) to flow freely across borders, but not people (those beings that need jobs).

Michael Bouchard is a Sheriff who (like most members of the Republican party on this particular issue) clearly can't be bothered with facts. Which is troubling, since he's in charge of enforcing the law and establishing the facts of criminal cases in Oakland county so that prosecutors can convict alleged perpetrators of crime and have them put in jail. Maybe he should refocus his energies on serving his current constituency (brushing up on the law to do so) instead of publishing poorly-informed screeds meant to give himself a platform to run for higher public office. As long as he continues down this path, I can only hope that the voters of Michigan continue to frustrate his aspirations.