A mish-mash of stuff, some immigration-related, some not.
...Congressman Harry Mitchell is having an active week, what with the Senate approving his bill to block this year's automatic pay raise for Congress and the VA ducking and running from a Mitchell-chaired hearing that had been scheduled to look into the VA's lackluster efforts to address the epidemic of suicides and attempted suicides among veterans of the U.S.'s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Mitchell press release on the matter here).
Can't wait until one of the Rs running against Rep. Mitchell tries to label reining in Congress' pay and protecting America's veterans as being "too liberal."
...In signs that Arizona isn't the only place with whackadoodle nativists (we do seem to have the highest concentration of them, though) -
- A GOP candidate for Congress wants to implant microchips into undocumented immigrants (I'm OK with this...as soon as we find a way to implant souls into extreme GOPers)
- A GOP congressman from California, Duncan Hunter (the younger), wants to deport natural-born American citizens if they were born to undocumented immigrants...because their souls aren't American enough. (I'll concede the Congressman's evident expertise on that subject of souls that aren't "American enough")
- However, there is a least one ray of sanity breaking through the cloud of bigotry that has seemed to sweep over Arizona - Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County has called the newly-enacted law "stupid" and "racist." (Probably too much to hope for, but if he moves to Maricopa County and challenges our would-be tin horn despot, I'll campaign and vote for him.)
...In a potentially scary development, and one that I hope I'm misreading and overreacting to, a co-worker of mine of Latino descent recently visited an office at an East Valley hospital and was asked for ID.
Not a big deal, except that this co-worker has been going to this office for years (literally) and was well-known to the staff there.
Even worse, this person was the only Latino in a full waiting room, and was the *only* one there asked for papers.
I've got an email out to the hospital in question. I'm hoping that this is a case of misreading the situation. As such, I'm not going to name the hospital until I see a pattern of bad behavior.
I'll update if I get a response, or if the behavior is shown to be part of a pattern.
BTW, because some nativist is going to ask: the co-worker is a third-generation Arizonan and has lived their entire life here. Not that it really matters to the nativists who are totally gaga over Arizona's "breathing while brown" law.
...It turns out that the Rs raging bigotry could cost Arizona some national influence. Not in a "Arizona will spend a decade as the nation's punch line" sort of way, but in a "they've intimidated Latinos into not responding to the Census, so Arizona won't be properly represented in Congress" sort of way.
There's more to be snarky about, but I have to head to bed.
Later...
2 comments:
Mitchell certainly works industriously on his good government efforts. I don't think it is going to be enough. The pay raise will get about 1/500'th the coverage that passing a health care mandate did. Voters can only care if they know enough to care.
And while holding hearings is great but if the US wants to end suicides among occupying American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq they need to bring the troops home (in my opinion).
We definitely agree on the need to bring home the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As for the success of Harry Mitchell's work in Congress, we'll see come November.
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