Friday, June 08, 2007

Chronicle's readers admit to hiring undocumented workers

Farmerjones wrote:

Sadly, this is just a result of many of the stupid laws we have in place right now. I hire "wetbacks" because they will work...if they don't work I can get rid of them and not worry about being sued for discrimination. If they do work, I pay them and treat them quite well. I would prefer to hire US citizens, but I need them to work and not cry about how they are victums and how much they are owed.


minniemax wrote:

Want to talk about cheap labor?? You go try to hire someone off one of those street corners. Tell them you're looking for someone to work for less than $10 an hour, and watch them walk away laughing. I know what I'm talking about because I've done just that...


These are but two recent examples of Houston Chronicle posters to news stories freely admitting that they're hiring or attempting to hire undocumented immigrant labor.

That is against the law, isn't it?

It's a unique strain of chronic conservatism that runs rampant here; people who type on the daily newspaper's website about the "scourge of illegal aliens", that they ought to be "rounded up" and so on are, when they're not at their computers, out driving down North Sheperd in their pickup trucks trying to hire a few unauthorized laborers to do their odd jobs for five dollars an hour.

As they have said so many times themselves: what part of "illegal" do they not understand?

Clue to you, goonbats: if you're hiring an undocumented worker, you're part of your immigration "problem".

You might want to stop that. You might want to stop hiring them to do your lawn or clean out your garage or look after your children -- or your parents. In fact, just stop eating at your favorite Mexican food restaurant, because the person cooking -- or serving -- your food, or bussing your table might not have papers. In fact, it's possible none of them do.

And you just wouldn't want to support all of this "illegal" activity with your dollars, would you?

Morons.

We're going to StopCornyn.com


If it's the last thing we ever do.

John Cornyn, the junior Senator from the Great State, has been the epitome of bad representation in Washington during the past six years. He was elected in the first Bush red tide of 2000, getting a promotion from Texas Attorney General.

I wrote to him earlier that year, asking him to kindly give back the contributions he received from the Enron Corporation (some of us may recall the implosion of the World's Leading Energy Company that same year). One of Cornyn's lickspittles wrote me back to tell me that Cornyn never took money from Enron for his Senate campaign. Well, that was accurate; he took money from them for his attorney general race. I wrote back to say that I thought it was quite disingenuous to make that statement, and that if this was the kind of forthrightness Texans had to look forward to that we would be better off without him in DC.

That was the last time I ever got a written response from the Senator's office, and I have probably written, e-mailed, and faxed him over one hundred times since.

Since then John Cornyn has spoken eloquently -- even lovingly -- about torture, about inter-species relationships, and about his relationship with Our Leader, George W Bush. Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, casually mused that physical violence against the judicial branch is just an unfortunate consequence of their unaccountability to the public. As attorney general he gave an award to the law officer who participated in the Tulia drug bust, now discredited as a racial frame-up.

Among the many insipid things he has said, this one is classic:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead."

Six years is long enough to endure this man's crap. To that end, a merry band of bloggers has launched StopCornyn.com, dedicated to the retirement from elective office of this abomination. We'll use it to chronicle the coverage of the final months of his tenure, to support the person(s) who stand up to challenge him, and to laud the champion of the people who will end this darkness.

You're welcome to join us in this quest, if only just to read along.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Melissa Monday, on Thursday

To say I have been remiss in reminding my six loyal readers, four of whom live in Houston, to vote for Melissa Noriega for Houston City Council is, as the title implies, an understatement.

So join me and Kuff and Stace at an early polling location today through June 12th to cast your vote for Houston's next exemplary councilwoman.



If you'd like to do more than just vote, contact the campaign office for phone lists to call voters. info@melissanoriega.com or 713-MELISSA (635-4772). They are easy calls to make, and they are to Democrats, so the reaction is usually "thanks for the reminder" or "I thought she already won!" They'll send a script along with the names.

Polling locations will be condensed to a greater degree on Election Day, June 16th from what they were on May 12th due to the anticipated low turnout. It's going to be confusing as to where to vote, so get it out of the way early.

Block walking will be conducted this Saturday and next Saturday (election day) from 9 a.m until 1 p.m. It breaks down like so:

-- Arrive at headquarters, 7401 Gulf Freeway 77017, at 9 a.m. for donuts, training and to pick up supplies
-- Out at your block walk location at 10 a.m.
-- Back to HQ by 1 p.m. with your completed lists

Once we complete the process of getting Melissa elected, we can turn our attention to getting her husband to run for the Senate.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

If the Democrats would only listen to them

Melinda Henneberger, former NYT reporter, former Newsweek contributing editor, regular contributor to Slate and political editor of The Huffington Post is the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of Amazon.com:

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

March 28, 2003

The Girlfriend Gap

"What you've got to understand is that nobody ever asks us what we think."

I made the mistake of letting my seven-year-old twins watch President George W. Bush address the nation before we invaded Iraq, and they both burst into tears: Would Iraqi children die in the attacks? What about their moms? They were still upset -- and I was still annoyed at myself -- as I drove to West Virginia a few days later to meet up with my three closest friends from high school. The timing was not the best; there was snow in the forecast and "multiple terror attacks" predicted in the event of war. The threat level had just been jacked up again, so all of Washington was a little extra twitchy -- and we were not a real low-key bunch to begin with.

Now that Baghdad was in shock and awe, I was tempted to stick close, with my duct tape and bottled water at the ready. But this weekend had been planned for months, in part to celebrate the end of my treatment for breast cancer, and it was a big deal for the four of us. Pam, Kim, Cathy, and I have supported each other through first dates and divorce, teen pregnancy and infertility, good fortune and loss. We've dissected every relationship in our lives and lately listened together for the disquieting little scratch of mortality. In our forties, we still need to check in.

We grew up together in Mount Carmel, Illinois, population eight thousand, on a bluff overlooking the Wabash River. It's a pretty little farm town -- or was, before the Target moved in, wiped out Market Street, and then moved on, like a bad storm. They all still live around there, six hours south of Chicago, in an area so conservative it went for Alan Keyes over Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate in 2004. And though I'm over a day's drive away now, we try to meet up somewhere at least once a year -- sort of a Same Time Next Year for girlfriends -- to tell secrets, swill girlie drinks, laugh at ourselves, and thank God for one another. After thirty years of friendship, I would have said we knew just about everything there was to know about one another. But I would have been wrong, because until that weekend, politics had never really come up. When it did, we found that we were as divided as the rest of the country, over the war and more.

It all started when Kim suggested that we sing patriotic songs as we hiked along, in support of the troops -- and ended in a fairly astringent disagreement over whether weapons of mass destruction had been discovered in Iraq. "FOX News would have told us" if they had not been located, Kim was sure. But no such weapons had turned up yet, I insisted. She wanted to know where I got my news, and when I mentioned The New York Times, she laughed at what she dismissed as brand loyalty to my old employer. "You have your sources of information, and I have mine," she said.

I had just spent some time at the United Nations, working on a profile of Kofi Annan for Newsweek, and I had to say that nobody there seemed to think there were any WMDs to be found in Iraq; from the lowest-level functionary to the guys on the top floor, they were convinced that Iran and North Korea posed far more certain threats. But America was not about to let a bunch of wilting, Saddam-coddling diplomats tell us what was what, so telling my friends "Hey, I heard it at the UN!" was about like saying Harry Potter's house elf had come to me in a dream.

The last time any of us had quarreled like this had to have been in high school, when my friends decided I really ought to break up with my boyfriend if I had no intention of marrying him. They all did marry their teen sweethearts, the last of them at age nineteen, and had high school kids of their own by the time I made it down the aisle at thirty-three. As adults, the four of us had always respected one another's choices and taken one another's part. But now, over George W. Bush, we found ourselves taking umbrage and taking sides. Pam lined up with me, though a tad to my left; she couldn't quite bring herself to acknowledge Bush as our legitimately elected president, she said, and the other two blanched. "Are you a Democrat, Miss?" Cathy asked, calling me by my childhood nickname. There was something I had never heard before in her voice, though, and I doubted she liked it any more than I did. Was it possible that in all our hours of heavy talk, we'd never really gone there?

In Washington, political discussion is the preferred elevator music, and even children go around humming the tune. When my son, who was eight by then, learned early in 2004 that a relation of ours would be supporting neither John Kerry nor John Edwards in that year's presidential contest, he assumed this could mean only one thing, and was incredulous: "She likes Dennis Kucinich?" In '06, at the height of Plamegate, he burst into my room early one Saturday morning shouting, "Karl Rove has been indicted!" Then, after I snapped to consciousness: "Not really. Could you get up and make me breakfast?" My friends have alerted me to the fact that most of America does not live like this -- and wouldn't want to.

We survived the contretemps, of course, and retreated to our respective bubbles. In my suburban Maryland village of aggressive recyclers, a Bush-Cheney yard sign was the talk of the town in the fall of '04, and at my polling place, John Kerry received 76 percent of the vote. Back in Mount Carmel, the smattering of "other candidates, mostly" who turned out for a campaign speech by the Democratic Party's brightest star had a hard time hearing Obama, Pam reported, over the sound of workers putting up the carnival rides for Ag Products Days. And on Election Day, 70 percent of Wabash County went for Bush. Had Kerry won the White House, I would have said that proved we'd take back the last four years if we could -- that Americans do not condone torture as a tool of interrogation, or consider the Geneva Conventions even remotely "quaint." I would have said we know a mess when we see one. When he lost, however, I had nothing but questions: What did that outcome say about us? What did that result prove? For therapeutic as much as journalistic reasons, I really wanted to know.

True, I'd never met a single person thrilled beyond reason by Kerry's candidacy, including his own wife, whose underawed staff sometimes referred to him as "the husband." Yet until the very end of his timid campaign, I thought he had an even shot -- because Gore did win the popular vote, and I had a hard time imagining that too many Gore supporters would look back over the last four years and conclude that Bush sure had proved them wrong.

Some did, though. Both parties improved their turnout, and "Values Voters: Myth or Must-Have" became the favorite post-election chew toy of political analysts. Another factor in Bush's win went virtually unnoticed: a small but consequential shift among women voters, who have long preferred Democrats as more reluctant to make war and more willing to fund schools and social programs. Women still favored Kerry, but the gender gap narrowed to seven points from the ten-point advantage Gore had in 2000. And in a contest this close, it mattered. As the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University put it in a post-election report, "Despite the gender gap, President Bush succeeded in increasing his overall share of the women's vote this year... a major reason why he took the popular vote this time around." A look at exactly who defected made the slippage look a little more ominous; Kerry not only lost ground with blue-collar women, he did worse than Gore had with the college-educated women the party counts on. He lost support with every female demographic, in fact, except women under thirty. Black women still voted overwhelmingly for Kerry, but the margin there also narrowed, by four points. Of the total increase in Bush's support from women, "two thirds came from black women," says David Bositis, a senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies. "The shift had the most to do with moral values, and this is something that the Republicans are using to win elections." For those defectors, what had changed? Were American women becoming more conservative?

We are not some monolith, of course, politically or in any other way, and campaign season efforts to appeal to us as such -- "W. Is for Women" was surely the most overt -- can seem patronizing. As the Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg says, with some irritation, "We're fifty-two percent, not a minority special interest group." Still, Kerry had made the bluntest, most straightforward appeal -- on pay equity, affordable health care, early childhood education and a Supreme Court dedicated to upholding Roe v. Wade. Yet we were not sufficiently won over. Why was that? The pat answer during the campaign was that "security moms" focusing on terror threats saw Bush as the better protector. But was that the case? What do women want from their president?

After George W. Bush was returned to the White House, I could not wait to ask them. And for answers, as usual, I turned first to my oldest friends. As 2008 approaches, the Democrats ought to be turning to them, too. They need to know how Kerry's pitch on fairness in the workplace could fail to resonate with Kim, despite the long years she put in as a secretary, making male bosses look good in a company that only recently began considering women for executive positions like the one she now holds. They need to understand how Cathy, a nurse who cares for the elderly and cites health care as her number one priority, could possibly blame the Democrats for "broken promises" on that issue -- even in the years they were in charge of nothing. Like Kim, she went with Bush, which made about as much sense to me as the fact that Pam and I -- Catholics who voted for Kerry without a twitch or a blink -- must have made to them. Clearly, I had a lot to learn.


Henneberger spent some time on the road with Barbara Radnofsky during her campaign for the US Senate; here's a shorter sample from the chapter entitled "In the Belly of the Bubba", where they visited with some women in Abilene:

But the biggest problem her party faces here, as Anna ( Martinez Vedro, the president of the Big Country chapter of the Texas Democratic Women) sees it, is that so many Hispanics "are just one issue, abortion, which means that on the local level, we need to do more work on the third part of 'safe, legal, and rare'. We've been neglecting the 'rare'." Bah, Jewell (Halford) says: "Everyone's against abortion until your thirteen-year-old comes up pregnant." Barbara Bachus thinks Democrats have gotten too intimidated to talk about social issues at all any more. "We're scared, and the far right has made us this way." Nooo, Anna answers. "Losing elections has made us this way." Barbara Bachus says what she is pining for is a candidate who "would get up there and tell us what they really feel" -- the true F-word for Democrats, who seem to have lost all confidence in themselves while trying to behave like slightly more reasonable Republicans. "They're good and decent, but they're frightened."


Henneberger will be the guest of Radnofsky Friday, June 8 to sign her book and also speaking at the River Oaks Area Democratic Women's "True Blue Texas Women" luncheon on Saturday June 9. She will appear just prior to the luncheon at the Heights Area Democratic Club's meeting at Chatter's Restaurant, 140 S. Heights Blvd, at 10 a.m.

RSVP to any of these by contacting Katie Floyd at katie.floyd@radnofsky.com or at 713-858-9391.