Citizenship

Now is the time to be engaged as citizens. First, there is today's meeting at the White House on immigration reform. A majority of Americans support some form of path to citizenship despite the cries from the ultra right. It's up to us to put pressure on our legislators to move forward on this issue. But immediately, President Obama can change how immigration raids, arrests, detentions, and court proceedings are held. He can do that by executive order and by having Attorney General Eric Holder order a more dignified, constitutional, and humane way to treat the men, women, and children who come here for refuge.

Second, it's time to press for confirmation of both Dawn Johnsen and Sonia Sotomayor for their respective positions: Dawn Johnsen as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, demeaned by the Bush administration into rationalizing torture and Sonia Sotomayor as associate justice on the US Supreme Court.

Get out your pens and paper, my friends. It works better than an email.

Hypocrisy in High Places, Oh, Gosh, Not Again!

So now the illustrious senator from Nevada, Republican John Ensign, is screwing his aide's wife, despite his public outcry that Bill Clinton should have resigned back then because of Monica, that Christianity prohibits adultery, and all of the other bullshit that goes along with this ultraright agenda. Human frailty is not a capital crime.

Most disturbing however is the report that forty major news organizations kept the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde quiet for seven months, fearing that any publicity might risk his life and the lives of his companions who were also held by the Taliban.

How are these stories connected? In both instances, news organizations made decisions not to publish accounts.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the hypocrisy of these politicians who claim a higher ground and then we find out they are corrupt, actually more corrupt than we are because most of us don't claim to judge everyone else for their human failings, and don't get paid with taxpayer money to rail against their enemies. I'm also sick and tired of these diversions. Who sleeps with whom doesn't interest me.

I want the senate to do the work of the senate, to get these nominations through: Dawn Johnsen, Harold Koh, Sonia Sotomayor. I want the senate to pressure the White House to investigate the use of torture as part of our national security, a practice that might not have ended with the change of administration. And I want the news media to regain our confidence by doing some investigative reporting again, not about affairs, I don't care about affairs. I care about the money, where the money flows and how decisions are made. Like in financial bailouts, TARP, banking regulation, and the home mortgage industry. There seems to be a lot of work to be done on these issues.