Homeland insecurity

A friend posted this link from her Google Reader recently, and it just got my head to swirlin’:

For those of you who don’t know who Joe Arpaio is, the Arizona sheriff is the proud “toughest sheriff” in America.  This letter was penned in response to a protest planned by Rev. Al Sharpton calling for Arpaio’s resignation following a series of reported human and civil rights abuses.  Arpaio maintains it is his job as a local sheriff to enforce federal immigration laws, despite the fact that he had been stripped of authority to do so by a recent policy change at the Department of Homeland Security (interestingly enough headed by former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano):

Original Video- More videos at TinyPic

This guy is no stranger to controversy (or paranoia, if you ask me). Last February, Arpaio moved incarcerated immigrants from the county jail to a different detention facility by marching them down public streets to their new tent city dwelling.  The local news covered the walk of shame [video].  Arpaio claimed that the move was a cost-cutting measure, but County Supervisors were unaware of any budgetary relief offered by the stunt.

In addition to that situation, the ACLU has filed a lawsuit against him for racial profiling that resulted in the arrest and detention of an elderly legal resident and his son, a U.S. citizen.

The ordeal was particularly humiliating for 66-year-old Julian Mora who, due to his diabetic condition, has difficulty controlling his bladder and had an urgent need to use the bathroom. MCSO personnel, however, rejected his repeated requests. Eventually, deputies escorted him outside where he was made to urinate in the parking lot. MCSO personnel later mocked his son Julio when he had to use the bathroom, because he had difficulty going with his hands still cuffed.

“To this day, I don’t know why the officers stopped us out of all the cars on the road,” said 19-year-old Julio Mora. “We were treated like criminals and never told why. I was very scared. I never thought something like this would happen to me. Now I know it can happen to anyone, citizens too. I don’t think it’s fair.”

The ACLU also has a class action suit alleging discrimination and racial profiling in other incidents involving Arpaio’s raiding bands of enforcers.  And Arpaio and Sharpton continue to battle it out in the media and in the streets of Maricopa County.

It would be nice to think that this one sheriff was an isolated case in local law enforcement’s increasingly overeager attempts to halt illegal immigration.  But unfortunately, this is not the case.  A couple weeks ago, an op-ed in the New York Times highlighted the Dallas Police Department’s ticketing drivers for not being able to speak English:

Police officers giving drivers $204 tickets for not speaking English? It sounds like a rejected Monty Python sketch. Except the grim reality is that it has happened at least 39 times in Dallas since January 2007, according to The Dallas Morning News. At least six officers in several different patrol divisions wrote the tickets, each time citing a driver for violating a law that does not exist. All but one of the drivers were Hispanic.

The authorities say they are investigating, though one possible explanation has been offered by the police department. The officers may have been confused by their squad-car computers’ drop-down menu of infractions, which displayed a federal statute on English proficiency that applies to commercial drivers. The Dallas Police Department does not enforce that statute.

But the local police aren’t the only ones jumping the gun.  Just this summer, a Florida jury, made up of U.S. citizens, mind you, decided a case in favor of a hospital that deported a severely brain-injured patient, Luis Alberto Jiménez (a victim of a vehicular assault by a drunk driver).  According to the Times:

Mr. Jiménez’s cousin and legal guardian, Montejo Gaspar, filed the lawsuit seeking nearly $1 million to cover the costs of providing care for Mr. Jiménez in Guatemala and seeking damages for what he essentially saw as the hospital’s kidnapping and deportation of his profoundly disabled cousin…

…In his instructions to the jury, Judge Midelis said the appeals court had already established three of the four elements that support a claim of false imprisonment: that Mr. Jimenez had been detained unlawfully, “without legal authority” and against the will of his guardian. But the jury, in just over a day of deliberations, concluded that the fourth element that the hospital’s actions were “unreasonable and unwarranted under the circumstances” had not been proved.

Seriously?!?  What will it take to end this madness?  It’s one thing to have right-wingers calling for us to wall up the border to protect Americans from the possibility of terrorist infiltration (which is, in many cases, a total ruse since this “defense” defense is usually only applied to the Mexican border).  It’s quite another for local law enforcement, hospitals, and U.S. citizens to be self-appointed agents of deportation.

I agree with the right on one thing:  these are scary times we’re living in.  But looking at how everyday Americans are handling immigration, it’s clear to me that the threat is not coming from beyond our borders.  It’s coming from within.

For my lady friends (and political enemies)

A few weeks ago I was at a MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) meeting at a church I don’t regularly attend.  Because many of the women in the group come from different churches, our host church gave us an opportunity to meet their pastoral staff in case we ever needed counsel or support from someone in leadership there.  The host church is a Southern Baptist church, so all the pastors were men, natch, but in my experience, sometimes these leaders can be more progressive than you’d expect from that denomination.  Unfortunately, this was not the case for the lead pastor.

As the man got up to introduce himself, he kept referring to us as “ladies.”  Ours was a ladies’ gathering.  Our staggering buffet was “fixed” by ladies.  If we ladies ever need anything, we can call on him or the other men on the staff.  Usually, I don’t have any problem with the term “ladies.”  I am not offended to pee, for instance, in a “ladies” bathroom.  I’ve even addressed some of my female work colleagues in an email, “Ladies,” (though that last one was more facetiously implied).  But, this guy had a swagger when he said it.  Like we were spinning our parasols in excitement that these here men folk were there to watch over us and compliment our vittles as they took a plate of food we’d made for each other back to their offices.

I had another “ladies” moment this weekend watching Meet The Press.  See if you can detect it in Mississippi Governor Barbour’s language and tone when he talks about Sarah Palin in this clip.  (transcript below, though the video says a lot more)

GREGORY:  Sarah Palin got involved in that race, she endorsed the independent conservative.  What role does she play right now in the Republican Party?

GOV. BARBOUR:  Well, she doesn’t play any official role in the Republican Party, but a lot of people care about her, a lot of people are fond of her and she’s like a lot of other politicians who are very well-regarded in our party.

GREGORY:  What, what do you think of her?

GOV. BARBOUR:  I like her.

GREGORY:  Is she…

GOV. BARBOUR:  Don’t always agree with her.  But, you know, my wife doesn’t always agree with me, either.

GREGORY:  But is she, does she an important Republican leader, in your book?

GOV. BARBOUR:  Oh, I think she is.  I think she’s got something to offer. One of the great things…

GREGORY:  Right.  Do you think she could be president?

GOV. BARBOUR:  One of the great things about when your party’s out of power, you don’t have a spokesman.

GREGORY:  Right.

GOV. BARBOUR:  You have a lot of–I don’t want to say let a thousand flowers bloom, but you have a lot of different people, and that’s healthy for your party.

GREGORY:  Do you, do you…

GOV. BARBOUR:  The Democrats do that when they’re out.

GREGORY:  But does she–do you think she speaks for the party?

GOV. BARBOUR:  I think she speaks for herself, just like I speak for myself.

GREGORY:  Do you think she could be president?

GOV. BARBOUR:  Look, it’s a long way away from there.  Every time, every time people ask me about president, I remember them, David, any Republican who cares about the future of our country needs to be focused on the elections of 2010.  Those are the elections that matter.  We’ll worry about president after 2010.

Wow.  ‘Sarah’s just one of those thousand flowers bloomin’, ya know, easy to ignore, like the little missus.’

Now I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, and you may hear more about that once I’ve seen her new book, so I don’t mind if people don’t like her much.  But I get really disgusted when people don’t like her (or in this case, say they do and then readily dismiss her as an opponent) because she’s a girl.  But what else would one expect from man who happily uttered this little ditty in 2008:

My wife loves [Sarah Palin] because…she doesn’t have a chip on her shoulder like some women politicians, she is very ‘normal’ — she doesn’t have to tell you how smart she is. But she is a bonafide energy expert…Sarah Palin knows more about energy policy than the other three put together.

As I’ve said on MITL before, I’m a Southern woman, so I can tell when someone’s just sloppin’ sugar to cover up their disrespect for another person.  But no matter where you’re from in America, there’s no excuse for this level of misogyny in politics.  Women aren’t to be trotted out like show ponies (or pageant queens) whenever you need a little something “fixed”, whether it’s baking your biscuits or revamping your domestic policy.

And another thing (or two) on the elections…

I’m really sick of hearing all this talk about how Tuesday “sent shock waves up Pennsylvania Avenue…yada yada.”  If the state elections on Tuesday were a referendum on the President or even on Congress, then the voters are seriously confused about how our levels of government work.  State elections are for choosing state leaders, federal elections are for choosing the President and Members of Congress.  If you’re one of the people who thought you were “sending a message” calling for change in a Congress that just got there eight months ago, maybe you should just try sending your reps an email.

And can we finally put to bed this pandering to independents?  The punditry is all aflutter about how this year the voters that went for Obama danced on over to elect conservative governors.  David Brooks wrote this week, “These shifts have not occurred because conservatives and liberals have changed their minds. They haven’t.   The shift is among independents.”

Okay then, let’s get real about who these “independent” voters are.  According to The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press,

due to the arrival of so many lapsed Republicans, independents are more politically conservative than they have been in a decade. Currently, 33% of independent describe themselves as conservative, up from a low of 26% in 2005.

A third of these voters are conservatives who ran so far from the Bush administration in the last election that they adopted anonymity among independents so they could vote for the first person (Obama) that promised to repair the damage inflicted by the GOP’s years of [mis]leadership.  This past Tuesday, no one persuaded these guys to be anything other than they already were: conservatives looking for a reason to go home.

And they got it.  In the form of the same kinds of  “we-can-save-you” promises that Republicans usually hate (at least when they come from the mouths of Democrats).  Brooks himself said:

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

For all the talk about the grand success of last week’s elections, the narrative of the win sounds a lot like a cozy bedtime story that the GOP is trying to tell independents in order to tuck them in at night.  We’ll just have to see how well those dreams for victory hold up a year from now.

You dropped a bomb on me, baby

Late last night, the U.S. House finally voted on and passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) by a 220-215 vote.  Democratic leaders were helped when just over three dozen holdout pro-life Democrats moved to support the legislation following the successful attachment of the Stupak-Pitts-Ellsworth amendment prohibiting abortion funding as part of the health care reform package.  While this development created a measure of controversy, by the end of the night, most of the Dems were celebrating together.

As for those who aren’t celebrating today,  one case in point is likely to be Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) who said earlier in the week that the passage of the bill would be more threatening to the U.S. than terrorism:

Well, Congresswoman Foxx, it looks like the mushroom cloud is running a little late.  We’re 15 or so hours post-vote and the country is still standing.  Guess you and your pals in the House will just have to find another hunt, dear.

Blue Virginia blues

Despite the Virginia Democratic Party’s attempt to cash in on last year’s Obama victory, the state just turned red.  And so did this mom watching the results roll in tonight.

At the gubernatorial level, I feel like Creigh Deeds (D) was consistently unimpressive.  He seemed to lack the new ideas that propelled his party to victory last year in what was once and now is again, a red state.  Deeds’ campaign was marked by early personal attacks against McDonnell’s (R) education with ads accusing McDonnell of being an ideologue based on opinions McDonnell wrote almost 20 years ago.  It was a cheap tactic and it was less-than-Machiavellian to use it so soon in the game.  McDonnell was able to rally against these particular ads, featuring working women allies who could vouch for McDonnell’s progressiveness in spite of his previous statements to the contrary.

For me, hearing these attacks only made me more curious about McDonnell’s campaign, to see if he could artfully and truthfully refute these claims.  While his platform and record definitely indicate his hostility toward core feminist issues, he managed to redeem himself a little and distance himself enough from the chauvinistic caricature that Deeds painted in the ads.

Deeds also tried to take advantage of Democratic gains in the 2008 election.  Anyone examining at his campaign’s “look” would be blind to miss the overt evocations of Obama’s now-iconic logo.  The wavy blues, the fonts, all intentionally reminiscent of Obama’s Presidential campaign.

His TV and radio ads also featured voiceovers and footage of the sitting President endorsing Deeds and calling Virginia to “do it again.”  But most of us knew that by electing Deeds, we wouldn’t be doing “it” again, we’d be electing another lackluster Democrat.  Deeds’ campaign was dwarfed by the historicity and optimism of the President’s success in the state.  While the Democrats wanted to make an advantageous comparison, all their ads showed was contrast between all that we had hoped for last fall, and what we’d settle for this time around.

As for the other races, I am more than disappointed at the election of Ken Cuccinelli.  Cuccinelli is among the most ideological conservatives in the Virginia legislature and his ambitions for the office of Attorney General are downright frightening.  He’s on record saying that he would not defend state laws that he believed to be unconstitutional, and a look at his record means that applies to any meager safe gun laws Virginia has on the books.  Talk about open season.

And while I would normally be happy that this position is held by a “pro-lifer,” Cuccinelli’s policies on the issue show no promise of actually helping women experiencing unplanned pregnancy other than protecting them from abortion.  His positions on immigration are laced with the “they‘re not getting any of our stuff” rhetoric of the Virginia GOP that I’ve already talked about before on MITL:

I think that people that are here illegally ought to be deported. And state government isn’t the primary level of government responsible for that, but it has tremendous impact on us on our budgets and our communities. And it is appropriate for us to deal with that.  -Cuccinelli in The Washington Times

And how, you might ask, did that race between Chuck Caputo (D) and Jim LeMunyon (R) go?  Well, as of this [word]press, it’s still too close to call, with the Republican leading 52 to 48 percent.  With only 31% reporting, I’m holding out hope that the GOP wasn’t able to (literally) scare up enough votes to usher in a new era of legislative “brown people”-bashing.

But given the trends of the evening, I am getting bluer by the minute.
***Morning after update: LeMunyon won.

Here we go…

Everybody’s got one.

People often talk casually about the pettiness and messiness of politics.  A friend of mine regularly uses the word “asshattery” and I think it’s generally an apt description of some of the political shenanigans our civic “flesh is heir to.”  But this week, we have a couple of real gems.

First (and kids we’re going in the order that the stories broke, so no partisan whining, please), we have a Facebook debacle involving the Republican Party’s inability or unwillingness to police it’s own Facebook page.  For those of my readers who have yet to succumb to the will of the social networks, I’ll give you this quick tutorial: organizations can have their own designated “pages” of which people can become “fans.”  The fan’s love of the organization is displayed on the fan’s profile and the fan may receive updates from time to time about the group/band/political party they adore.  Fans can also interact with an organization and its other fans, posting on message boards or adding pictures and links.

Well, this past week, fans of the Republican National Committee discovered this image on the RNC’s Facebook page.  Apparently, it took about a week before RNC staff saw it and had it removed from the page:

My pal Nikki over at Irene’s Daughters says, “Nothing Republicans do shocks me anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel completely disgusted.”  I agree on both counts.  It’s sad to me that a Party that prides itself on its moral Christian base has any tolerance for this overt display of racism.  I’m not as bothered by the fact that RNC staff didn’t see the thing (though they should be more vigilant about their public property here), I am very bothered by the likelihood that people in the group saw the photo and didn’t alert the RNC to its presence.  For a Party that’s trying to prove its inclusiveness (even when those efforts amount to little more than tokenism), they are doing a piss-poor job of educating their members.

In other news, and on the other side of the proverbial aisle, Democrats now have their hands full thanks to the misogynistic comments of one Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL).  In an interview that was recorded a month ago and circulated on the Hill this week, Grayson spoke about Linda Robertson, an adviser to Fed Chair Ben Bernake:

‘Here I am the only member of Congress who actually worked as an economist, and this lobbyist, this K Street whore, is trying to teach me about economics,’ he said.

It was just a few months ago that Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) made the infamous exclamation “You lie!” at President Obama during his address to Congress on health care reform.  This remarkably mature moment is turning out to be this year’s “I can see Russia from my house,” and it’s still being quoted and replayed on the web, on late night TV and in homes around the country.

While it’s no secret that both parties have their own line-up of buffoons and miscreants, it’s a shame when the leaders of either Party are slow to denounce inappropriate attitudes or behavior.  As for Grayson, several colleagues have responded to his actions:

‘There’s no call for that language. No call for it. That’s absurd. If he was standing here now, I’d say that to him’ said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.)

‘Is this news to you that this guy’s one fry short of a Happy Meal?’ asked Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)

We’re really making McDonald’s references here? I guess that’s what passes for a zinger in the New York 9th Congressional District.  Brooklyn would be disappointed, sir.  Thankfully the Congressman from New Jersey knows how to lay the smack down.  He’d give Grayson that famous line from Goodfellas, “that’s absurd.”

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer defended Robertson, whom he said he knows. ‘I think it’s inappropriate and unfair,’ the Maryland Democrat said. He decried the “heated rhetoric” that he said interferes with the ability solve problems.

What’s “inappropriate and unfair,” Mr. Hoyer is that there is a woman serving as the Speaker of the House and for some reason you and the old boys network have yet to learn that in a progressive society, nay in a progressive party whose political power entirely depends on the goodwill of the female half of the electorate, you don’t talk about women that way.  For that matter, you don’t think about women that way.

Moms, the way I see it, we have two jobs here.  The first is to raise children, boys and girls, who shun the stupidity of their forebears and move through the world with maturity and respect for those with whom they disagree.  This one will take a good bit of time and great effort.  Our second and more immediate job, is to remain watchful of our elected officials and to not tolerate hateful or vitriolic speech, particularly when it is an undeniable indicator of one’s attitudes toward entire groups of people.

It would be one thing to publicly roast Republicans or Democrats.  After all, these are groups we freely associate ourselves with, and we open ourselves to such mockery when we bind ourselves in that way.  But these recent behaviors aren’t merely partisan barbs flung at the enemy.  They attack our families, our loved ones, our birthrights.  It’s not enough to say of these fools, “well everybody’s got one.”  These are people we choose to represent us.  I don’t know about you ladies, but that’s just not what I’m going to be send forth on my behalf.

Media MIA when it comes to victims of color

Newsweek recently featured a web exclusive on How the Media Treat Murder.  The article’s focus is on the underreported story of a possible serial killer in the small town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

Ten women have been found slain or have been declared missing in Rocky Mount, N.C., in recent years. But the rest of the country hasn’t heard about a possible serial killer stalking the young women in this Southern town of 60,000. The latest victim, Elizabeth Jane Smallwood, was identified on Oct. 12. Why have the Rocky Mount homicides been largely ignored?

“When you think about the famous missing-person cases over the last few years it’s Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, and Laci Peterson,” notes Sam Sommers, associate professor of psychology at Tufts University. All these women had a few things in common—they were white, educated, and came from middle-class families. The victims in Rocky Mount—which residents describe as a “typical Southern town,” and is about 40 percent white and more than 50 percent black—were different. They were all African-American, many were poor, and some had criminal histories including drug abuse and prostitution.

Unfortunately, this level of blindness is an all-too-common characteristic of the media when it comes to crimes against people of color.  The article goes on to suggest that national media may be the worst about selecting for race when reporting on crime:

‘Nancy Grace called and wanted to have some of us on her show, but before it aired there was a white woman from Georgia that went missing. The Nancy Grace show was canceled,’  [city-council member and president of the local NAACP chapter, Andre] Knight says. HLN network, which broadcasts Nancy Grace, confirmed that Knight was booked for the show, which was ultimately canceled to profile the disappearance of Kristi Cornwell, a white woman from Blairsville, Ga., who went missing during an evening walk. Representatives from Nancy Grace told NEWSWEEK, ‘The booking was changed due to news that was breaking that day,’ and emphasized the change had nothing to do with the race of the victim. On Aug. 12, Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees covered the story.

I’m no fan of Nancy Grace and this story is partly why.  Despite her best attempts to portray what she does as an important service for the social good, her tactics and her focus on certain sensationalized cases suggest she’s mostly out for attention (and perhaps media martyrdom, swoon).

Many times I’ve wondered where are all the missing black kids?  or Latino kids?  or Asian kids (up until and perhaps beyond the case of Annie Le)?  A trip to the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows racially-proportional and accurate alerts to the abductions and disappearances of our nation’s children.  According to studies done by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Department of Justice, non-white children make up 42% of the total number of missing children, while they only comprise 36% of the U.S. population.  Yet we rarely see these kids’ cases on the national news.

Much of this has to do with the media’s desire to present a compelling narrative, rather than an accurate report of crime incidents in the community.  One MSNBC reporter, Alex Johnson, writing on the subject calls this “Catnip for TV types.”  Johnson cites Roy Peter Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., talking about the way journalists choose a story:

‘The example of a bad murder would be the murder of an African-American person from a poor neighborhood,’ he said. ‘The definition of a good murder is a socialite killed by her jealous husband, the debutante murdered by her angry boyfriend.’When it comes to police stories, Clark said, there is ‘this perverted, racist view of the world. White is good; black is bad. Blonde is good; dark is bad. Young is good; old is bad. And I think we can find versions of this story going back to the tabloid wars of more than a hundred years ago.’

Even more frightening is what advocates on the ground experience trying to get media attention for the sake of finding victims or delivering justice for their families:

‘We can’t get a young girl who may be suffering substance abuse and may be prostituting on the national news because they feel she’s not worth the time,’ said Kym Pasqualini, president of the National Center for Missing Adults in Phoenix. ‘But these individuals are no less important to their families, and their families are entitled to the same help’ in getting their cases before the public.  ‘We have found that it’s far easier for our agency to obtain national coverage on an individual who society, I think, identifies with,’ she said.

While all of this is alarming and deeply disturbing, it isn’t all that unexpected.  When one considers that our justice system has its own virulent strains of prejudice and inherent inconsistencies, it’s not terribly off-base that elements of the media covering crime would more than mirror, even magnify, the problem.  Most executions (80%) are carried out against defendants with white victims, even though half of all homicide victims are black.  Juries, studies show, are more likely to exact the ultimate penalty against a defendant whose victim is white.

These crimes, particularly the crimes against children, are terrifying realities for any mom.  I cannot imagine the pain of a mother denied justice not only by the actual justice system, but again by members of the media who are more intent on selling a story to white America than on reporting the important details about a crime to all of us in this country.

It’s tragic enough when our children are lost.  That tragedy is only compounded when our compassion and our attention is likewise missing.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Ever since David Grann’s excellent article this past September on the erroneous execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004, a specter of shame has loomed overhead for Texas governor Rick Perry. The article, featured in The New Yorker, has spawned a reexamination of the death penalty and emboldened activists who are using the case as a model of what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote about saying,

a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.

The state of Texas leads the nation in annual executions (with Virginia coming in at second) and has a long history of popular support for the death penalty.

Cameron Todd Willingham with daughter Amber

The Willingham case has been held up as an example of the justice system’s failure to protect an innocent man from death at the hands of the state.  Despite penetrating questions about the expert testimony used in the case, Governor Perry remains steadfast in his commitment to the state’s death sentence.  While he denies any wrongdoing in this or any other death penalty case, he has restaffed a third of the Texas Forensic Science Commission that cast aspersions on the so-called arson investigation that led to Willingham’s execution.

Perry’s Republican opponent, U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, has joined prominent voices in the blogging community in accusing Perry of a cover-up.  While Hutchison may be trying to undermine her opponent in an effort to restore execution’s “good name,” the whole thing reeks of malfeasance and makes me wonder why any of these people believe protecting the death penalty is more valuable than protecting the lives of our citizens.

Racism: REJECTED

Editors’ Note: This post originally appeared last night at Irene’s Daughters.  Republished here with permission.

In our state, ’tis the season for political mailers and at our house, we’ve been bombarded. We’re getting it from both sides, and almost all of it immediately hits the trash, but today, this ad sponsored by the Republican Party of Virginia caught my full attention:

In case your eyesight is about like mine, I’ll highlight some of the salient points. This ad is an attack on Virginia Delegate Chuck Caputo. The ad’s headline reads:

Chuck Caputo wants to use our tax dollars to pay for illegal aliens to attend Virginia’s colleges and universities even though there’s not enough space for our own students.

So, we begin with the Republican Party telling us that not only is space in the Virginia public university system rare (a fact that, in my opinion, greatly exaggerates the impenetrability of schools’ admissions criteria), but illegal aliens are taking our tax money and taking our spots at universities. Gasp!

The point is reinforced by language like:

Chuck voted for illegal aliens and against our deserving students…

This statement presumes that the “illegal aliens” had no qualifications and just walked right into class without any proof that they were competent. They were certainly less deserving than our students. Then, next to the sad white girl holding her rejection letter we read in bold green caps:

IT’S JUST NOT RIGHT.

I guess the expected response is, “You’re dang tootin’.” We are then told that despite the popular wisdom of the Republicans and Democrats in the Virginia House, Caputo remained steadfast in his support of illegal aliens in a 3 to 1 vote against his position. So now, Caputo’s fate has been sealed as an outsider, an extremist who wants to give away your money to people who broke into this country to learn.

I am consistently amazed at the lengths political operatives will go to in an effort to foster an already racist “us vs. them” mentality. We all know politics is dirty, but to create hatred toward the children of people who broke the (probably immoral and certainly un-American) law is shameful.

Several years ago, NPR featured a story on two different bills that would help undocumented students go on to college and follow a path to full-fledged citizenship. Many of these kids were brought into the U.S. by adults when they were children and had no say in whether or not they would enter this country. Imagine what life would be like for you if because of mistakes your parents made, you were barred from going to college, regardless of the work you had done academically or in your community to merit admission and affordable access to higher education.

About a week ago, some kid with a clipboard asked me (as I was trying to load wriggly children into my car) if I was voting for Mr. Caputo. I told the guy I didn’t know yet. I think I know now. I may also be keeping an eye on C-SPAN Friday to see if they cover the House and Senate briefings on the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors). It’s one of the stalled bills that the NPR report above was talking about…5 years ago.

We have to move forward here with compassion and hospitality. The vitriol and racist rhetoric in our discussions about immigration has to stop. It’s just not right.

A Woman’s Nation Should Change Everything

If you watch any NBC derivatives like MSNBC, the Today Show, News w/Brian Williams, or its print outlets, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to Maria Shriver’s latest project: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.  Shriver and some cohorts at the Center for American Progress released a study this week on the women of our nation focusing on issues like women in the workplace and the changing roles of women in family dynamics, specifically in marriage and child-rearing.

The report includes polling data as well as anecdotal information collected through interviews Shriver did with individuals and groups of women (and men).  The Today Show has been unveiling components of the report throughout the week, and that’s where I was first exposed to this research.  Shriver is preparing to host a conference on women in her home state of California. (Warning: Meghan McCain is an invited speaker, so expect to be overwhelmed by powerful feminist rhetoric like: “Women want to be judged by the size of our brains and not the size of our breasts or butts.”)

While many of us know that women are taking on increasing levels of leadership and responsibility outside the home, the report adds specificity to that understanding:

Today, four-in-five families with children still at home are not the traditional male breadwinner, female homemaker. And women are increasingly becoming their family’s breadwinner or co-breadwinner (see Figures 1 and 2). The deep economic downturn is amplifying and accelerating this trend. Men have lost three-out-of-four jobs so far since the Great Recession began in December 2007, leaving millions of wives to bring home the bacon while their husbands search for work. Women working outside the home, however, is not a short-term blip. This is a long-term trend that shows no signs of reversing.

Shriver’s work here may not be breaking new ground, though it is more comprehensive than most studies on these subjects and that makes it newsworthy.  Moms in the blogosphere are talking about this report and hypothesizing about its possible implications on policymaking.

Workplace and family has become a new focus for policymakers.  CAP worked on this study and has been talking about this branch of policy since its inception.  New America Foundation has a Workforce and Family program.  It’s a little tougher to find research on this stuff over at conservative think tanks like AEI (slim pickin’s since studies on race and gender are lumped together) or The Heritage Foundation.  But if you dig around in the work of the latter on labor, or marriage and family, you may be able to find occasionally useful information about these topics (though I will caution that most of it takes on a clear, advocacy-based tone/bias).

Shriver and CAP have gone to great lengths to generate buzz for their findings.  Apart from their omnipresence on NBC affiliates and programming, they have also been working the bloggers for attention.  One of my regular reads, PunditMom, featured a post on the report and included details of a bloggers-only conference call where Shriver talked about her intentions and her hopes for her research.  As I’ve already said, I didn’t see anything unexpected in the results of Shriver’s study, but I was taken aback by this comment she made on the bloggers’ conference call:

I asked Shriver, if women are still getting paid significantly less than men (77 cents on the dollar), carry the lion’s share of family obligations AND still have voices that are heard less than men’s, how can we move forward and make any real change, even if we have become a majority of workers?

Shriver’s response was surprising and shocking.  She said women felt afraid — afraid to go in and ask for time off to care for someone or ask for the flexibility needed to do their jobs and care for their families. Not hesitant or cautious, but afraid. She hopes that women will overcome that fear, see that there are lots of people in the same boat and find the strength and courage to demand what they need and embrace the power of being the majority in the workforce.

I’m surprised that Shriver didn’t know this.  While Kathryn Bowman over at AEI says, “Most adult women say they face very little discrimination where they work,” in my experience, I’ve seen different.  Most work environments are no friend to people raising children.  There is constant tension between the demands of work and family and intense pressure to choose between the two (which creates an inescapable carousel of choices because most folks only sacrifice family for work in order to better support their families).

Many women, particularly single moms or moms whose salary is a significant portion of the family’s income, feel that if they take too much time off or ask for flexible hours they will be passed over, punished, or worse, fired.  While it’s illegal to fire a woman because she got pregnant, it’s still permissible to hold a grudge about it (as if employers are entitled to make those kinds of personal decisions for men and women).  To say that women face “little discrimination” when we still have wage disparities and overt and covert pregnancy discrimination is flat-out denial.

Shriver finds that many men (like my husband) are taking on more responsibility at home, and I think that’s great.  Husbands and fathers should get to share in the challenges and rewards that women have so-long solely experienced.  But the fact remains that in a society driven by the dollar, families and mothers in particular, are often sacrificed on the altar of the almighty bottom line.  As Shriver points out, women are still underpaid, underinsured, and overburdened.

We say we value the work women do in the workforce as well as in the home, but until our society begins to walk out those “values,” we’ll continue to just let our “thanks” be a woman’s prosperity.  And no one can feed themselves or their kids on a “you go girl.”

I hope this report helps us to refocus our attention on women’s issues.  We are half of the population, half of the workforce and 80% of the consumers.  Even with all this progress, we are still behind the ball.  Shriver says it’s a woman’s nation, but I don’t think we’re there…yet.  Moms, we cannot wait for someone else to get this right.  It’s time we were heard.