redlegphi

I reply to this inadequate poll with a pair of apocryphal stories. 1) A man breaks into your house, rapes your wife, kills your dog, and steals your TV. While leaving your house, an illegal immigrant sees him and could desribe him to the police. Why would that immigrant go to the police to help them solve the crime if he's afraid that they'll deport his happy ass once they're done taking his statement? 2) An illegal immigrant has a contagious, but treatable disease. In the normal course of his day, he interacts with dozens of American citizens and their food. Would you prefer he go to the hospital to get treated or that he be afraid to go to the hospital because they might deport him if they find out his immigration status? In short, illegal immigration isn't a black and white issue. I think illegal immigrants found committing a crime should be deported. I think those found by the INS should be deported. I think it would behoove our society (through lower crime rates and better disease prevention) if illegal immigrants aren't afraid to talk to normal police or go to a hospital. I think you need to weigh each case individually, because the 26 year old immigrant who just crossed last week isn't the same as the 19 year old who has lived in America for 16 years and was brought here illegally by his parents. I also think Wendy's right: if we hammer the businesses that hire illegal immigrants, there'll be less incentive for them to come or stay here, which would allow a lot of the problem to fix itself.

Harder than Dutch? It's not that hard to learn Dutch spelling. They have some basic rules that you need to know, but once you know the rules they're followed much more uniformly than the rules in English. Pronunciation is somewhat harder.

I saw this in Stars and Stripes today and thought it was worth sharing: http://www.stripes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/an-iraqi-s-appreciation-1.104852 As the daughter of Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S., I want to send a message loud and clear to the good servicemen and women of the United States that I, as an Iraqi, am truly indebted to you and your families for the many burdens you have shouldered and tragedies you have experienced. In liberating Iraq, you have given me, and all Iraqis, an opportunity to have a say in our government, to vote, to speak freely, to experience rights and freedoms that are easy to take for granted until they are taken away. A friend of mine, a serviceman, is in Iraq right now. I told him I didn’t know when I’d be brave enough to go to back Iraq myself. He said to me, in these words: “You getting to go to Iraq whenever you want to is why I’m going.” He is a hero to me. His wife, who has gone to stay with her parents a few weeks to avoid sitting in an empty house, makes a sacrifice too. Today is the day that sacrifices you, and others like you, have made (and are making every day) are truly appreciated — not just by Americans, but by Iraqis like me. Today I join others in celebrating and honoring you. But not a day goes by that I don’t think of and remember you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rend Shakir Washington

And what's up with those damn Irish-Americans waving Irish flags and dancing around dressed up like leprechauns on the 17th of March every year. And don't even get me started on the Italians! Amirite?!?

If is wasn't 'something of value', then why was it offered as an incentive? The fact that it was offered (instead of just asking nicely) leads me to believe that the people offering it certainly believed it had great value. So, to sum up, every time somebody offers you a job, your consider that an attempt at bribery. Good to know. Also, I find it amusing that we're still ignoring the fact that Saint Ronnie and W did the exact same fucking thing.

I usually don't like historical fiction, but I really enjoyed that book.

So, a sitting President directs his Chief-of-Staff to ask a former President, whose wife is the Secretary of State, to talk to a former Admiral who is a Congressman about an "advisory" board position if he stays in the House versus run for the Senate? No, no, no, no, no...you don't use a hot-knife-through-butter team like that for some meaningless non-paying board job. This is turning out to be bigger than I thought. Offering something of value as a political favor per se, is black-letter in violation of the statute. The problem is that AG Holder won't assign an independent prosecutor for this. He doesn't have the political moxy. No one on the democrat side of the aisle is saying anything...they're really going to sweep this under the rug? Really? Really?! This amounts to electoral manipulation at a minimum...denying (or attempting to deny) voters a "qualified" individual in a valid primary election. The advisory position was unpaid, so "something of value" just went right out the window. Also, they withdrew the offer when they realized that he couldn't serve in the advisory position and remain a member of Congress, due to conflict of interest. This is quite possibly one of the most meaningless "scandals" yet. You right wingers are getting desperate. Also, not that this really does anything to make it "right" (especially since it's not wrong in the first place), but Bush AND Reagan did it first, so the outrage looks more than a little hypocritical and phony.

But, can you fit tacos into an MRE? 1) We already have fajita MREs. 2) I am all for allowing foreign citizens to earn their way into the US through military service. That said, I'd prefer if our homegrown citizens were filling the quotas (which they currently are) because I think an Army full of foreign Soldiers would be even more likely to be misused than our current one. 3) To go back to the original topic, I fully agree with you Amazon. We need the best Soldiers we can get, and DADT has been making it harder for that to happen. I really look forward to the day when it becomes history.

I love my dog. She's a member of my family. And, being a lab, she likes to run around outside. Which is why I invested several thousand dollars to have a fence put up around my backyard. Just letting your dog roam a residential neighborhood is rude.

THAT is no surprise whatsoever - there are A LOT of things he said he would do and hasn't. Yes. How dare President Obama not develop a time machine and use it to simultaneously travel to Arlington Cemetary on all present, past, and future Memorial Days and Veterans Days to lay wreaths there.

Terry Jones' Barbarians.

I'm definitely for the repeal of DADT. That said, I just felt I had to point out that people aren't running away from serving their country any more. None of the services have had any issue meeting recruitment or retention goals recently. Turns out that when the economy turns to shit, people suddenly get a whole lot more patriotic.

I hate to break this to you, but we invaded in 2003, not 2004. NO SHIT!? Maybe that's why I wrote words like "had to continue" and "couldn't leave" when talking about the second phase of the war. Must be past your bedtime in Chicago. It's the typical role played by the winner. It's what we did in 1991. And what do you think happens to Iraq when we leave? What if the Democrats had succeeded in 2007 in forcing the pullout then? No different, but leaving in 2004 would have saved them 6 years of fighting with our guys. I'm kinda confused about what exactly you think would happen in each of these scenarios and what the right thing to do would have been in each case. For the record, I thought it was a bad idea to invade in 2003. Once we did invade, I thought the plan for invasion was poor (specifically, the complete lack of planning for what to do once we had finished crushing the Iraqi military). However, once we invaded, I thought we had a moral obligation to get Iraq stood back up. Despite this moral obligation, I don't think it's clear yet that we'll achieve our goals in Iraq, regardless of how much longer we stay or how much more money we dump into this country.

I noticed that you didn't answer the questions I asked. I think Bush had the best intentions in mind. He acted on the information that he had, and the reccomendations of his advisors. He also might have drawn his deceisions from public statements of people like Gore and Clinton and Kerry. It seems that he had quite a few more players, and (heavyweights at that) giving him unreliable information than just the one history prof in hypothetical I presented for you. Wow. We've come pretty far from "The buck stops here." Sad, really.

I wonder why everybody doesn't agree with a statement that appears to be popular on a white supremacist/neo-Nazi website. Hmmm... Also, I'm curious why turtle thinks everyone SHOULD agree with this. The summary of it is basically "Democrats are fucking up our country by voting Democratic politicians in to office." There's no reason "everyone" should agree with that anymore than everyone should agree that GWB was the worst President ever. Neither even comes close to approaching the status of an absolute truth. It's just more opinionated drivel that somebody thought was clever.