THIS MODERN WORLD

Where so many of our conservative friends seem to spend their time:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Americans mistakenly worried the
United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 — U.S. Independence Day — are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.
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“I myself have received over 100,000 letters from the U.S. public, criticizing me personally, saying, ‘You are having this conference on the 4th of July, you are not going to get our guns on that day,”‘ said Prasad Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka’s U.N. ambassador.

“That is a total misconception as far as we are concerned,” Kariyawasam told reporters ahead of the two-week meeting opening on Monday.

* * *

The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site of a July 4 plot “to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection.”

Story.

Immigration reform is dead for the time being because the Republicans in the House refuse to consider a bill that provides a path to citzenship for illegal immigrants (or even the President’s back of the bus “guest worker program”). Then again, my description of the House Republicans’ stance on the issue is a little misleading, since it implies that they actually give a shit about the issue. If they cared at all, they would have done something about it over the past five years. They haven’t, so now the issue is really just another pointless wedge issue that won’t get addressed at all after the election :

Some officials added that Republicans have begun discussing a pre-election strategy for seizing the political high ground on an issue that so far has served to highlight divisions within the party. Among the possibilities, these officials said, are holding votes in the House or Senate this fall on additional measures to secure the borders, or on legislation that would prevent illegal immigrants from receiving
Social Security payments or other government benefits.

“The discussion is how to put the Democrats in a box without attacking the president,” said one aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

What’s especially funny about this whole thing is that the Bush Administration has worsened the problem they claim to be so concerned about solving :

The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
. . .
Statistics show that the numbers of fines and convictions dropped sharply after 1999, with fines all but phased out except for occasional small cases. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a 2003 memorandum issued by ICE required field offices to request approval before opening work-site cases not related to protecting “critical infrastructure,” such as nuclear plants. Agents focused on removing unauthorized workers, not punishing employers.

ICE also faced a $500 million budget shortfall, and resources were shifted from traditional enforcement to investigations related to national security. Farms, restaurants and the nation’s food supply chain “did not make the cut,” Reed said. “We were pushed away from doing enforcement.”

You should read the whole article because it describles some of the raids that were conducted in the 90’s and the hypocritical response from members of the House and Senate, concluding :

Members of Congress at first hostile to immigrants embraced “all the same people who were so repugnant to them before,” Reed said, “and they prevailed.” Operation Vanguard — which was designed to expand to four states in four months and nationwide the next year, eventually including the lodging, food and construction industries — was killed.

Congress “came to recognize that these people . . . had become a very important part of their community, churches, schools, sports, barbecues, families — and most importantly the economy,” Reed said. “You’ve got to be careful what you ask for.”

That’s why any real solution to this issue needs to have three prongs :

– Tightened border security. Not just the physical borders, but any path through which someone might enter this country (ahem, airports)

– Tougher penalties against employers and better tools for law enforcement to track down identity thieves, trace fake Social Security numbers, etc.

– Path to citizenship (not “automatic citzenship” or “amnesty”) for immigrants who are already here. The President’s guest worker program (which ships immigrants out of the country after three years) doesn’t cut it.

Anyone who claims to care about immigration, but can’t provide for all three of these needs, is either unserious about the issue or doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Any editors for children’s books (i.e. preschool age) out there? Email me.

… to be clearer: I do not need help with the process of editing. I need someone who works at a publishing house, who is in a position to make an offer on a manuscript, and who is preferrably a fan of my work.

You’ve probably seen Lieberman’s much-discussed bear ad by now. Well, the print edition of this morning’s New Haven Register has an intriguing teaser headline, above the paper’s logo:

Lieberman Having Fun

Says controversial ‘bear’ cartoon wasn’t about Lowell Weicker after all

Given that the ad featured a grumpy old bear named Lowell Weicker kicking the little Ned Lamont bear into the Senate race, this certainly piqued my curiousity. If Lieberman was actually trying to backtrack somehow, it would be (a) laughable, and (b) a genuine scoop for the New Haven Register.

The article starts off on a promising note:

NEW HAVEN — Contrary to what his spokesman said last week, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman Monday said his bear cartoon ad on his Web site wasn’t really about former Sen. Lowell P. Weicker after all.

Ah ha, you think, at least if you are me. It’s a metaphor for Lieberman’s general cluelessness! Just as he denies the obvious when it comes to Iraq, he’s denying what any marginally sentient human being can see for themselves by clicking on the ad! This is potentially huge!

But then, if you are still me, you remember that you are reading the New Haven Register, which is perhaps not the finest example of the journalistic profession you are ever likely to run across. And indeed, this extraordinarily odd assertion is not remotely backed up in the body of the article. In fact, in the second paragraph, the Register goes on to quote Lieberman explaining that the ad is about Weicker:

Heavily criticized on the Internet by supporters and foes alike, Lieberman said, “We put it up after Weicker came out last week to have a little fun. Every now and then, you want to do that.”

A little further down in the article, Lieberman elaborates — and again, the opening paragraph is in no way substantiated:

Lieberman, who met with the New Haven Register’s editorial board Monday, said they had the ad for awhile, but didn’t put it on television because it would “send a mixed message. We thought that it gave the wrong impression.” They instead put it on their Web site.

“This campaign is about the choice that Democratic primary voters have between Ned Lamont and me and they can make whatever conclusions they want about who is supporting each of us, but ultimately, they’ve got to decide which one of us will do a better job for them,” the senator said Monday.

Mostly the Register’s amateur hour approach doesn’t really matter, but in the rare instances in which they are on the front lines of actual news, it does makes you want to bang your head against the table.

According to Los Angeles Times reporter Carol Williams, there was another attempt at mass suicide at Guantanamo in 2003 involving 23 detainees.

IN THE BEST of times, covering Guantanamo means wrangling with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, with logistics so nonsensical that they turn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour day, with hostile escorts who seem to think you’re in league with Al Qaeda, and with the dispiriting reality that you’re sure to encounter more iguanas than war-on-terror suspects.

In the worst of times — this past week, for example — those quotidian discomforts can be compounded by an invasion of mating crabs skittering into your dormitory, a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an unceremonious expulsion to Miami on a military plane, safety-belted onto whatever seat is available. In this case, that seat was the toilet.

* * *
I’ve been to Guantanamo six times. It was during my first visit in January 2005 that I learned how expressions of polite interest in minute details can elicit some of the most startling revelations. As Naval Hospital commander Capt. John Edmundson showed off the 48-bed prison annex, for instance, I asked, apropos of nothing, if the facility had ever been at or near capacity.

“Only during the mass-hanging incident,” the Navy doctor replied, provoking audible gasps and horrified expressions among the public affairs minders and op-sec — operational security — watchdogs in the entourage, none of whom were particularly pleased with the disclosure that 23 prisoners had attempted simultaneously to hang themselves with torn bed sheets in late 2003.

I’ve only heard about it secondhand, but apparently Bill O’Reilly is saying that he made a trip to Gitmo and saw no evidence of abuse, and therefore there isn’t any. The rest of Williams’ piece is well-worth reading, if only to put such nonsense in context. It’s not exactly as if journalists get free run of the place, even if they work for the official news network of the Bush administration.