So Much for the Latino Vote

"I think we should catch 'em [illegal immigrants], we should document 'em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support micro-chipping them. I can micro-chip my dog so I can find it. Why can't I micro-chip an illegal?"

Pat Bertroche, running for the GOP nomination for a House seat from Indiana

High Times at the GOP

Back in 2008, some people who were hired by the community group ACORN to sign up new voters figured out they could pad their earnings by submitting fake registrations for Mickey Mouse and other fictional characters. ACORN submitted the registrations to the county clerks because they had to - most states require canvassers to submit all received registration cards regardless of fraud or error. (The reason is simple: to prevent gatherers backed by one party from arbitrarily discarding registrations for other parties based on made-up allegations.) The group alerted the clerks' offices, the fakes were caught and invalidated, and the dishonest canvassers were charged with voter registration fraud.

In other words, the system worked. But it was a huge scandal at the time, with the Republican Party and its media divisions (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc) all screaming about how the election would be tainted by a flood of fake ACORN votes. It was one of the reasons why the national group went under earlier this year.

Final tally of proven fraudulent votes based on ACORN registrations: zero.

So now we have another tale of fake voter registration, but it's somewhat different than the ACORN one. Earlier this month, the Orange County Register reported that the county Republican Party paid "bounties" of as much as $8 per head to canvassers who signed up new GOP voters. So the canvassers went around asking people to sign petitions in support of beach cleanups, cancer cures and even marijuana legalization - but didn't tell them that by doing so they were registering as Republican voters. (Does that mean you have to be high to vote Republican?) Hundreds of complaints have now arrived at California state elections offices from people claiming they were duped in this manner.

One canvasser, who submitted three registrations from people complaining they were lied to, dismissed them as morons: "I can tell you that half the people out there don't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat." (And Tom Tancredo says we should bring back literacy tests since President Obama was supposedly elected by stupid voters. Perhaps he was looking at the wrong party.)

It's tempting to brush this off as an ACORN rerun, but it's not that simple. You see, back in 2006, the newspaper received the same sort of complaints, did some digging and found the same sort of GOP fraud that would be uncovered four years later. Back then, eleven canvassers were convicted of falsifying voter registrations, and eight of them went to jail. So they're trying the same thing again. Add in the fact that the "bounty" was paid directly by the Republican Party via the signature-gathering firm they hired and this is getting serious. The county Democrats are now demanding that the local US Attorney investigate the charges.

I don't care what your position or party is - if you have to con people to get them to register as a member of your organization, you have no business being in politics. The Orange County Republicans still have time to fix the mess, but only if they do some major housecleaning:

• Take all the crafty canvassers, and the party officials who gave them the green light, and throw them to the wolves.
• Contact all involved registrants and invalidate all registrations which were signed up fraudulently.
• Stop offering "bounties" to canvassers based on how many registrations they bring in and support state legislation to bar the practice.
• Promise never to pull such a scam again and submit to random checks to make sure they're being honest.
  

That should help clean things up. Because signing up marijuana proponents as Republicans makes the Harold and Kumar jokes just too easy.

Open Season

With Arizona's new anti-illegal-immigrant law SB 1070 making waves across the country and the world, state and local police now have blank-check power to stop and arrest anyone with a "reasonable suspicion" of being in the country illegally. Of course, this raises the question of just how to determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant, and it always comes back to racial profiling.

We all know the law will not be used against white people. It's aimed squarely at Hispanics, and it is Hispanics who will pay the price. It doesn't matter whether they were born in the US, have green cards or really are here illegally - if they have brown skin, they will be targeted. Leave your wallet at home and you run the risk of going to jail. It will be ugly.

(And is it just me, or do the same teabaggers who wave Gadsen flags and scream about "Obama fascism" think it's just peachy when that very same government stops people on the street at will and demands their identity papers? Gee, maybe all that stuff about freedom and tyranny is only for white people.)

But there is a potentially even uglier consequence to this new law, one which I doubt its authors intended: namely, that it is now open season on anyone who is in the country illegally. Yes, once the law goes into effect this summer, any illegal immigrant basically has no legal protections against anything. You can do anything you like to them - robbery, rape, murder, whatever - and they won't go to the police. Why? Because they know that the instant they pick up the phone to call 911, out come the handcuffs and clang goes the jail-cell door.

Basically, the law creates "nonpersons" in Arizona. Sure, there is nothing in state law which specifically excludes illegal immigrants from police protection, but that's the effect of SB 1070.

With various people now calling for an economic boycott of Arizona, the same people who shot their state in the foot now have a chance to undo the fiscal damage. Since undocumented immigrants will now essentially be fair game, why not profit off it? Set up a facility somewhere off in the desert where the most beautiful and handsome illegal immigrants will be sent and housed. Then invite in wealthy sickos to do whatever they like to these people, secure in the knowledge that no one will go to the police. Think of it as a real-life version of the 2005 horror-porn film Hostel.

Terrible idea? Sure it is. But so is the whole idea of making people criminal suspects based solely on their ethnicity. My advice to the Arizona legislature is to find another way of solving the problem, preferably one not so blatantly un-American.

Papers, Please

It's a scene out of a seemingly infinite number of movies. Someone is walking down the street and minding his own business when a policeman (secret or otherwise) appears out of the blue, demanding to see his papers. Something is not in order and the helpless hero is dragged away, never to be seen again.

Okay, so it's not quite like that in Arizona, even after Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law late last week. The new law, officially called the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act," allows Arizona police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant - but just how does one determine that? Skin color? Accent? Clothing? I mean, people don't walk around with helpful signs saying "I'm In This Country Illegally." Maybe they will just demand to see the person's birth certificate. Is there anyone out there who makes a habit of taking their birth certificate when they leave the house?

We all know what will happen with this law. Someone who looks like an illegal immigrant (translation: Hispanic) will be stopped and required to provide proof that he is in the country legally. If said person can't immediately produce the right paperwork, he will be arrested, thrown in jail and maybe even shipped across the border to Mexico. High-dollar lawsuits will ensue and the law will eventually be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Or perhaps he will simply be killed by vigilante "border patrollers" for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Oh, and when Tom Tancredo - the immigrant-hater extraordinaire who last distinguished himself by demanding that people pass a "literacy test" before they can vote - says it's a bad bill, you've got a big PR problem.

Is illegal immigration a problem? Of course it is. Illegal laborers drive down wages for lower-rung workers and can commit identity theft by using other people's Social Security numbers to get work for themselves. Not to mention that illegal immigrants are more at risk for being crime victims.

But is criminalizing a vast swath of the population the answer, especially when it can all too easily ensnare many thousands of completely legal people at the same time? No. There has to be a better way.

Authentic Frontier Gibberish

To quote Sam Cooke, Sarah Palin don't know much about history, not to mention energy, religion, economics, government, science and geography. She really is appallingly ignorant, not to mention incoherent (on a good day, she can make George W. Bush sound like an Oxford debating champion) and her popularity among the teabaggers says a whole lot more about them than it does about her. What she does know about, though, is how to cash in.

Last week, ABC estimated that ever since she got bored with being governor of Alaska and quit halfway through her term, Palin has raked in about $12 million (that's one hundred times her former gubernatorial salary) with most of it coming from her ghostwritten tale Going Rogue, her appearances on Fox News and especially her speaking gigs at a reported $100,000 a pop.

You'd think that at those prices, she can afford her own travel, but no. A contract unearthed by some enterprising California students requires anyone hiring Palin to provide either first-class plane tickets or a private jet which "MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger," not to mention deluxe hotel suites and bendy straws on her water bottles. It doesn't quite fit the folksy, "plain hockey mom" image she and her handlers try so hard to project.

Oh yes, and she is apparently so petrified of "real Americans" that she won't take any direct questions from them: "For Q&A, the questions are to be collected from the audience in advance, pre-screened and a designated representative...shall ask questions directly of the Speaker."

So what do you get for a hundred grand? Well, Palin spoke last week at a charity banquet for which 900 tickets were sold at $200 apiece. She isn't saying how much she made for this speech, but if it was her usual fee, she pocketed more than half of what the group collected. Charity begins at home, it seems.

Anyway, here's a sample of what she had to say:

I'm wanting to, though, kind of shift away from the political. I'm just getting off the trough from doing a lot of Tea Parties across the US, man those are a blast. [applause] They're rowdy and they're wild and it's just another melting pot, there's just diversity there and all walks of life and all forms of partisanship and non partisanship just wanting good things to happen in this part of the world. It's been a blast. The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things. I was telling Todd, okay, this is like [inaudible] on the vice presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you were interviewed. Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview. Obviously!

If anyone can extract any meaning at all from that mess, I salute you. I half-expected Olson Johnson from Blazing Saddles to stand up and say, "Now who can argue with that? Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed the courage little seen in this day and age."

The rest of her speech was only slightly less jumbled. I suspect that as Palin rhetorically wandered all over the place, committing various crimes against the English language, the charity organizers realized just how much of their reputations they had flushed down the drain in pursuit of their "big name" speaker and were backstage drinking hemlock.

A hundred thousand dollars for that? I am definitely in the wrong business.

GOPman Sachs

Even with all the tales of greed and fraud coming out of Wall Street over the last two years, the allegations against investment bank Goldman Sachs are pretty appalling.

The story so far: a big Goldman client named John Paulson packaged a derivative based on subprime mortgages and pitched it to Goldman as an investment opportunity for their other clients. Goldman agreed and sold it as such - but never told the buyers that Paulson deliberately designed the investment, named ABACUS 2007-ACI, to lose value. Knowing that the subprime market would tank, Paulson sold short, made a killing and left other clients holding the bag.

So where does Goldman figure in all this? Well, it seems they did one of two things:

1. They were unaware that ABACUS was purposely meant to fail, in which case their lack of due diligence was criminally negligent, or
2. They knew all along that it was a scam and sold it anyway, in which case they coldly ripped off some of their clients to make another one richer.
   

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Goldman Sachs in civil court for fraud, the popular anger is once again brewing. When we invest our money with Wall Street, whether it's in a 401(k), a stock or bond portfolio, or something else, we expect the company we're working with not to screw us over. This is why the White House is trying to rein in the Wall Street casino, to put back the regulations which have been repealed since the early 1980s and which would hopefully prevent future economic meltdowns.

But since the White House supports putting the crooks and connivers under control, the Republican Party must, by definition, be against it. Yes, the Party of No has once again emerged as the party of Wall Street, vowing to do everything it can - filibuster, offer endless amendments, hold its breath until it turns blue, etc - to derail the financial-reform bill. They evidently still don't realize that the American people are mad at Wall Street for very nearly sending the whole economy down the toilet, and are unlikely to reward its backers in November.

So now the GOP is weighing in on behalf of poor downtrodden Goldman Sachs, saying they're being picked on by that meanie in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Yes, Senator Orrin Hatch went on the tube yesterday to complain that the SEC timed its lawsuit filing to fit the White House's legislative schedule and desire to pass the Wall Street reform bill. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets predictably ran with it, accusing the White House of "meddling" and darkly wondering whether they're "exploiting the charges to build the case for their financial regulatory overhaul."

Of course, the people doing all the shrieking and conspiracy-theorizing ignore two things: as an independent agency the SEC doesn't coordinate any enforcement action with the White House, and Goldman Sachs actually donated more money to Democrats than to Republicans. If the White House really was making an example of a Wall Street powerhouse, wouldn't they have picked one which supported the other side? Just sayin'.

Will the GOP realize that they're playing a losing game? Will they continue to sell their souls for Wall Street's tainted campaign cash? Of course they will. Expect the fall campaign to be especially nasty as the Republicans try and divert voters' attention from this simple fact.

Bring a Chicken to the Doctor

Having failed to stop the nation's badly broken health-insurance system from being reformed, the Republicans now say they want to repeal the entire law (including the parts which prevent insurance companies from yanking your coverage when you get sick) and start over - meaning, of course, to do nothing at all. Part of this latest GOP push comes from Nevada, where Sue Lowden, running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, says that patients should barter with their doctors over the price of care.

I am not making this up:

Yes, your intestines may be falling out or your skull may be cracked, but you can still paint your doctor's house to make sure you get treatment.

With Lowden quickly becoming a laughingstock, her campaign tried to insist that she actually said "bargain" rather than "barter," but the video clearly shows her saying the latter. Bargaining isn't such an attractive prospect either; can you really imagine someone with a broken leg saying he'll hobble out the door and try getting a better price from the doctor down the street?

Apparently believing that she hasn't gotten enough flak ever since her comment came to light, Lowden yesterday doubled down on it. Appearing on the talk show Nevada Newsmakers, she fondly remembered the time before people had access to health care and said it's a great idea to just bring a chicken to the doctor's office when you get sick:

So in Lowden's world, instead of asking which insurance you have, do doctors ask whether you're bringing Original Recipe or Extra Crispy? I have this image of a doctor saying, "Sure, I'll take out that appendix, but I need my car's oil changed first."

You know, I suspect that she really doesn't want this job and is trying to find a way to sabotage her own campaign. She cannot possibly be this callous or this dumb. Every time she tries to get herself out of this hole she blasted and then jumped into, she just keeps on digging deeper.

Reid, who's facing a tough re-election fight, must be on his knees right about now, thanking God, Jesus and Brigham Young for this manna from heaven. If he has any political savvy at all, he will run ads mocking Lowden's health care "plan" until she drops out in disgrace.

It's going to be a fun campaign. Tastes just like chicken.

A Modest Proposal on Gay Marriage

For years now, the self-righteous wing of the Republican Party has insisted that allowing gays and lesbians to get married will cause all sorts of chaos, from earthquakes and volcanoes to, in the words of Bill Murray from Ghostbusters, "dogs and cats living together."

Well, same-sex marriage is now legal in five states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa and Connecticut) and the District of Columbia, and the world is still here. But the usual suspects keep shouting that allowing such weddings will doom us all, insisting that only men and women can get married because only men and women can reproduce.

Fine by me. Allow me to present a modest proposal to deal with this issue once and for all. If we're going to protect marriage, let's really protect it without all that mushy love business getting in the way. Since the right wing says marriage is only for making babies, let's treat it as such.

1. All couples who wish to get married must undergo fertility testing (at their own expense, of course) to see if they are mutually capable of making babies. If the test comes back negative, the marriage will be denied.
2. No one who tests as infertile will be allowed to get married.
3. No woman past the age of menopause will be allowed to get married.
4. All couples who test as fertile and still wish to get married must sign a sworn statement promising to produce a child within three years of the wedding date. All marriages of couples who do not produce a baby within three years will be annulled.
5. No divorce or annulment will be allowed for any reason other than the failure to produce a child.
   
6. All babies born in the third year must undergo DNA testing to make sure they really are the biological offspring of their parents and not merely "borrowed" to beat the deadline.
   
7. No one will be allowed to adopt who has not already made a baby the old-fashioned way.

I await the response of all those who insist that letting gays and lesbians marry will destroy civilization.

Bad Medicine

Dr. Jack Cassell, a urologist in Mt. Dora, Florida, doesn't like the new health care law. That's fine. He is quite vocal about it. That's fine too. This is, after all, America, where everyone is free to speak their minds, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But he went too far when he put up a sign on his office door earlier this month saying, "If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere."

After a furor erupted, Cassell backtracked slightly, saying he hasn't actually told any Democratic-voting patients to go away, "but if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it." Since he evidently relies on his patients' identifying themselves as either real Americans or traitors, I wonder just how he plans to weed out one from the other. Will he put up a big poster of Sarah Palin to scare away pinkos as a crucifix scares away vampires? Or maybe he'll use such phrases as "socialist dictator" with patients and gauge their reactions.

Rep. Alan Grayson, the firebrand Florida Democrat whose district is home to Cassell's office, said he would file an ethics complaint with the state medical board on the grounds that refusing to treat Democratic patients is the same as refusing to treat black patients. He's wrong; the two are very different, and Grayson comes off as just trying to cash in on the fuss politically.

That is not to say that Cassell is acting professionally - quite the opposite. Even more so than in other fields, a doctor is expected to put his patients' needs above his own prejudices, and this goes double for something as (comparatively) unimportant as partisan politics. Telling sick patients who voted for the "wrong" candidate to get lost is, to put it mildly, extremely unprofessional, not to mention childish. And I would say the same thing had he put up a sign telling McCain voters to "seek urologic care elsewhere."

Cassell should rethink his choice of office decor. Either that or get a job which doesn't directly affect people's lives and health.