Author: Greg Saunders

Prepare yourselves to be shocked. Are you ready for this? Apparently Parents Television Council, the American Family Association, and their thousands of deputies in the self-appointed moral police are completely full of crap. It’s bad enough that they’ve taken it upon themselves to decide what you and I should and shouldn’t be allowed to watch (and hiding their crusades behind “the children”), but they aren’t even watching the damn shows they’re complaining about :

Virtually none of those who complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the teen drama Without A Trace actually saw the episode in question, CBS affiliates said as they asked the agency to rescind its proposed record indecency fine of $3.3 million.

All of the 4,211 e-mailed complaints came from Web sites operated by the Parents Television Council and the American Family Association, the stations said in a filing on Monday.

In only two of the emails did those complaining say they had watched the program, and those two apparently refer to a “brief, out-of-context segment” of the episode that was posted on the Parents Television Council’s Web site, the affiliates’ filing said.

“There were no true complainants from actual viewers,” the stations said. To be valid, complaints must come from an actual viewer in the service area of the station at issue, the filing said.

“The e-mails were submitted … because advocacy groups hoping to influence television content generally exhorted them to contact the commission,” the CBS stations said.

These lying crybabies, who are apparently too stupid to use their V-chips, are but a very tiny minority compared to the millions who watched the broadcast :

About 8.2 million people saw the Dec. 31, 2004 broadcast, which was a repeat of an earlier airing of the same episode that drew no indecency complaints. E-mails about the episode began arriving at the FCC on Jan. 12, the same day the PTC sent an alert to its members, the CBS stations said.

The FCC in proposing the fines of $32,500 upon each of 103 CBS stations said they had “broadcast material graphically depicting teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.”

Even if we took the 4211 complaints at face value, that’s still only 0.05% of the viewing audience for a show being responsible for more than $3.3 million dollars in fines. Predictably, PTC president Brent Bozell is wrapping his wrapping his little witchhunt in a patriotic package :

“Every complaint filed comes from a United States citizen who, last I heard, had the constitutional privilege to petition his government,” Bozell said. “Rather than these stupid legal maneuvers, CBS and Viacom should spend time pondering why it’s wrong to broadcast scenes of teen orgies in front of millions of children.”

Ahhh…it’s nice to see a patriot like Bozell defend our democracy by exercising his “constitutional privilege to petition his government”. Inspired by his bravery, perhaps we can use our first amendment right to email Brent and tell him that if he doesn’t like something on television he should change the fucking channel.

Clumsy tribute to the late Lloyd Bentsen aside, in his previous post Bob engaged in one of my favorite blogosphere sports, bashing Pat Robertson. My favorite thing at Pat’s website is this interesting bit of Biblical scholarship for sale on his online store :

I guess I missed the part of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus said “Ladies, if you start feeling funny down there, drink a lot of cranberry juice.” Don’t worry fellas, there’s more books in the “Bible Cure” series, including cures for Heartburn, Chronic Fatigue, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Hepatitis C, and Weight Loss (though that last one seems like something you’d want to cause, not “cure”).

Uggghh….the “jobs Americans won’t do” meme will never die, but who am I to argue with anecdotal evidence?

Some economists say such accounts don’t mean that Americans won’t do some jobs, but that employers such as Gurney simply aren’t paying enough.

“Every time someone says illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans or do jobs Americans don’t want, I want to scream,” UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg says.

This argument makes Smallwood want to scream herself. On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.

“How high can you go?” she says.
. . .

Last week Smallwood wrote a flier that says she would pay $34 with experience and $14 without. The notice cautions that no application would be accepted “without verification of proper identification that allows you, by law, to work in the USA.”

The flier is up in more than a dozen landscaping supply stores. So far, Smallwood says, there have been no calls.

It’s times like these when I feel like the world has turned upside down in the last few years. After all, how else can you explain a situation in which conservatives are begging for government intervention in the economy and liberals (or at least some of us) are insisting that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to resolve a situation?

The thing I find so damn frustrating about this never-ending argument is the fact that the “jobs Americans won’t do” are jobs Americans did do, at least until employers figured out they could pay illegal immigrants less and not have to worry about getting in trouble for it. From what I’ve read, the massive influx of Mexican immigrants didn’t pick up steam until the late 60’s or early-70’s, but it’s not like we had self-picking fruit and lawns that didn’t require mowing before then. The implication that Americans aren’t willing to get their hands dirty and put in a honest day’s work is not only factually incorrect, it’s insulting as well.

And none of this is to denigrate the work ethic of immigrant laborers. I’ve been saying for years now that anyone who comes to this country to do manual labor for next to nothing has worked a lot harder to achieve the American dream than I’ll ever have to, so if anyone’s earned the right to pursue citizenship, it’s them. If they’re already here and working hard, why shouldn’t they be allowed to become citizens and participate in all of the rights and responsibilities that come along with that?

Please spare me the hand-wringing about people who “skip to the front of the line”. The reason there’s a line in the first place is because the number of people we allow into the country is based on an arbitrary quota preference system that doesn’t accurately reflect the number of people entering our country. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the fraction of immigrants who are allowed to begin the path towards citizenship, the process for becoming a citizen is often prohibitively expensive and a bureaucratic nightmare. The naturalization process isn’t indicative of the needs of our country or the immigrants themselves.

Which, in the toxic terms that define the current immigration debate, means that my position would be described in a sneering, Lou Dobbs-ian tone as “supporting amnesty“. As conservatives work towards making the word “immigrant” synonymous with “criminal”, this strawman argument is a way of modernizing the Willie Horton slur and broadening it to include almost every Spanish-speaking immigrant. If you support giving “illegal aliens” citizenship, you support criminals (unlike the God-fearing, flag-waving patriots in the Republican party). The racist subtext of this debate is starting to make itself clearer, but it’s not like this is the first time the GOP has exploited racial tension in an election year.

Besides, there’s a big difference between giving people who are already here a clear path to citizenship and granting citizenship to a large subset of our population automatically (a position I haven’t heard anyone endorse). As far as I’m concerned, if they’re already working here, we should be doing everything we can to further integrate them into our society, not cement their status as second-class citizens residents through a “guest worker” program that does nothing but cover the asses of employers who have been disregarding our nation’s labor laws. If the President truly believes that immigrants are an essential part of our economy and are doing jobs that we “won’t do”, then there’s no reason to exclude them from our American family.

Of course, the greatest irony is that the only halfway decent excuse for keeping immigrant laborers segregated from the rest of the working class is the faux-righteous outrage that the immigrants in question are “breaking the law”. One wonders where these defenders of civic virtue have been over the past few years as the Bush Justice Department has made a deliberate effort to cut down on the enforcement of laws that make it a crime to hire undocumented workers. Apparently the only crimes worth shedding crocodile tears over are the ones committed by poor Mexicans. Perhaps we should take a cue from the Republican response to the President’s own lawbreaking by working to bring immigrants’ residency status back “within the scope of the law”.

As I said above, my position is that we should expand our citizenship to more accurately reflect our population and ensure that the American dream is within the reach of anyone willing to work hard to achieve it. If you want to call that “amnesty”, so be it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a reasonable naturalization process, strong border security (at both borders), and increased enforcement of the laws that are already on the books. Of course, such an approach might put the needs of the working class and the nation’s security ahead of those of lawbreaking businesses, and we can’t have that.

Heh. The President is going to give a major primetime address on Monday to try to convince the public that, four and a half years after 9/11, he finally cares about illegal immigration. It’s sorta quaint how the White House still thinks the public likes Bush enough to sit through one of his speeches and respects him enough to believe what he’s saying. It’s been a long, long time since he was a speech away from reversing his political fortunes. Too little, too late, Junior.

The big idea that’s apparently important enough to interrupt 24 to tell us about is a plan to deploy whatever National Guard troops the President can scrape together to help secure the border. This might be a good idea if illegal immigration was a sudden crisis, but the immigration “problem” has been brewing for more than thirty years. It’s not like the President can just pretend this snuck up on him. Besides, we already have an agency that patrols the border….they’re the border patrol. If you’re responding to a semi-permanent security situation on the border, you should devote more resources to that agency, not misuse the National Guard again.

Regardless of the merits of the Presidents proposals or their popularity with the public, as someone who’s firmly opposed to this latest bit of pandering, I see very little to worry about. After all, if we learned anything during Hurricane Katrina, it’s that the President’s promises to deploy National Guardsmen are worthless. Just like his pre-hurricane assurances to Louisiana state and local officials, George Bush just wants to give everyone the impression that he’s on top of things, but he doesn’t want to bother with paying attention to a crisis or taking any responsibility whatsoever. The only “crisis” the President is concerned about is the likelihood of Republicans losing the House. So on Monday night, he might give a cute little speech, but we all know it’s not going to mean a damn thing.

Have you heard the big news? A member of one of America’s most powerful political dynasties was caught drinking and driving! Even worse, it looks like he might have recieved special treatment from the authorities because of his family connections!

I agree that DUI is a big deal, but let’s keep the faux outrage to a minimum, okay?