The New York Times published yet another editorial proposing amnesty for illegal immigrants, along with asserting that illegals have a right to conduct their day-to-day activities here without fer of prosecution, and that local law enforcement should do nothing whatsoever about illegal immigration. You can find this editorial at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/opinion/26wed1.html?_r=1

Here's my response:

This editorial argues by anecdote. Anecdotes can illustrate an argument, but they can't prove it.

For every anecdote of illegals as innocent victims of Americans, you can find an anecdote of Americans as innocent victims of illegals. None of those anecdotes finds its way into this editorial, however. Nor does a single statistic. Nor does empirical reasoning.

All of which makes this editorial pure propaganda, playing on readers' heartstrings through a one-sided sob story treatment of a difficult issue, using loaded language to tilt the playing field even further. (Such as renaming illegal aliens "undocumented immigrants", which strips away the taint of trespass.)

It all works because even among the college educated, many get their BAs without any real exposure to scientific logic, quantitiative analysis, or training in how to spot propaganda and avoid being manipulated by it.

Once you scrape away the propagandizing, here's what this editorial claims:

1. The nation is inundated with hate crimes against illegals. (False—the FBI reported 7,622 hate crimes last year, meaning that 0.003% of the population is committing such crimes; and that number is down from 2006.)

2. Illegals are afraid to talk to police for fear of being deported, so crimes against them going unpunished. (Plausible, but also due to illegals coming from countries where police prey on you instead of helping you, and from countries that don't speak English; moreover, the offsetting value of local law enforcement helping rid America of illegals isn't even considered.)

3. Illegals are here to stay; we're powerless to expel them; therefore we must give them citizenship to avoid creating a permanent underclass. (The Left hopes that people will come to believe this trope through sheer repetition; but in fact, adopting E-Verify universally would make it impossible for illegals to work here other than as pick-up labor in front of Home Depots; and adopting a universal biometric ID system would force most illegals to go home the same way they got here.)

4. It's immoral to "tear families apart." (By this logic we mustn't arrest thieves with families; and of course illegals' families are welcome to leave with them. Moreover, those families are the product of the decisions of the illegals themselves, not us. It's called "responsibility." Look it up.)

5. Illegals have rights, just like the rest of us. (They have basic human rights, but they don't have the right to be here, nor to be paid for their labor, because it was illegal for them to do that labor for money in the first place. Nor do they have the right to "congregate in public places without fear" because, again, they don't have the right to be here, because they're trespassing.)

7. Local law enforcement should concentrate on keeping "off the books businesses from eroding pay and conditions for all workers." (You bet—but the easiest way to do that is through E-Verify and a universal biometric ID system, neither of which you mention or advocate, and without which local law enforcement is denied its best means of accomplishing this.)

This editorial's emotional appeal betrays total callousness towards the main victims of illegals: working-class Americans of all races and ethnicities, whose already low wages have been driven below the poverty line by competition from illegals.

For shame.

Bush, global warming, NYTimes, nuclear power

NYT editorial:

Empty Promises on Warming

President Bush’s Rose Garden speech last week seemed cynically designed to prevent others from showing the leadership he refuses to provide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22tue1.html
It garnered over 100 comments. None said this:

Granted, Bush has never met any opportunity he could profit by today that he wouldn't sacrifice his children's future for. And he faithfully mirrors the beliefs of a majority of folks who ironically call themselves "conservative."

OTOH it takes little courage for the New York Times editorial board to criticize a Republican.

You all could show great courage by going to bat for building nuclear powerplants--something opposed by a majority of those whose politics match those of the NYT editorial board.

Your peeps would be enraged. But you'd be right. You could point out to them that nuclear waste storage in dry casks is vastly safer than continuing to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from coal-fired powerplants. You could point out that other advanced countries have been using nuclear power for decades safely and cleanly--that their fears are based on outdated information and shibboleths.

You could also point out that power from wind, sun, waves and geothermal vents are all great but insufficient to our needs by orders of magnitude.

Don't just pander to people's primitive fears and ignorance like the far right does. Show that you're better.

I look forward to your pro-nuclear campaign.

The NY Times weighs in on illegal immigration again

Good grief, another New York Times' shortsighted editorial pandering to every special interest group but working class American citizens. See it at:

http://www.nytimes
.com/2008/04/17/
opinion/17thu1.html
?ref=opinion

My comment:

The NYT editorial board members surely don't think they dwell in an ivory tower, spooling out lofty proposals utterly divorced from gritty reality. No ivory tower thinker does, after all. They all imagine themselves veritable cynosures of sound thinking.

Yet nowhere in this anti-anti-immigration screed did they note the havoc being wrought in the Social Security Administration by illegals' rampant identity theft. People retiring today are discovering they can't start collecting until the SSA figures out who they are when there are several--sometimes many--people claiming to be you.

I can assure you that for people ensnarled by others' theft of their identity, this isn't a problem that can wait for endless committee meetings to hash things out. Meanwhile a MILLION illegal aliens flood across our borders every year--in part because our gummint has given them hope of yet another amnesty, like the one in 1986.

Imperfect as things are, doing nothing while we strive for perfection has a huge downside for the American workers the NYT board puports to adore: Chamber of Commerce types are using the availability of innumerable illegals to drive down blue-collar wages and strangle the unions.

The NYT board usse Orwellian GoodSpeak throughout, of course, referring to illegal aliens as "undocumented workers," and all opponents of illegal immigration as "Minutemen."

In their tower, I suppose they think that these illegals just dropped out of the sky, and that every single one of them is a worker.

Neither is true, but it's effective propaganda, hiding the indisputable fact that every single person in the United States is a citizen of a country. I'm a citizen of the United States. The vast majority of illegal aliens are perfectly documented citizens of Mexico, with smaller but still substantial numbers from parts south, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras etc.

And for every hard-working person there's a passel of relatives collecting welfare, stuffing the schools with children who aren't even literate in Spanish, and stuffing the ERs with patients, since they don't have doctors...all on the taxpayers' dime. Meanwhile they send much of what they make out of the country--which also hurts our economy.

The only people who profit from their presence are the bosses and the Catholic Church, which brazenly interferes with our society and our laws in order to fill its churches with far more doctrinaire, obedient members than most American Catholics have proven to be.

Of course these illegals aren't stuffing the schools or hospitals or churches that the NYT editorial board member use.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And the board dismisses out of hand the supposed argument that illegal aliens will self-deport en masse if they can't find work here. This is a hyperbolic straw man argument, since nobody has said they would. We've said that if they can't work here they'll leave our country no faster than they came, one by one, very reluctantly.

Of course it would go a lot faster if we adopted a universal biometric ID, as one advanced country after another is discovering it must do.

Underlying the NYT editboard aguments seems to be the philosophy that if it's hard to enforce a law you should just surrender. It would sure simplify our burdened court system if we applied that principle to a raft of crimes.

Anyone liking that school of thought needs to spend some quality time in a country with little or no rule of law. Nigeria, perhaps. Or Somalia.

Worse yet, the NYT editboard seems to live purely in the now. It wants amnesty for the illegals already here. Many claim that's 10 or 12 million people. But nobody knows, since we don't have a universal biometric ID yet. It could be 20 million, as some are now estimating.

And then what? Same as in 1986--millions upon millions of Mexicans and others will start moving to El Norte. That's how America's Latino population zoomed from .5% in 1940 to over 14% today: through illegal immigration and a succession of amnesties, along with a stunning birthrate--highest by unmarried teens of any ethnic group BTW.

And once more, with the NYT's help, Mexico's ruling elites will continue to dictate America's demographic composition and overall population size, as well as continuing to outsource their home-grown population crisis to America, along with outsourcing their social services infrastructure to us.

So how did a left-wing outfit like the NYT edit board become a tool of America's and Mexico's ruling classes?

I look forward to an editorial on THAT subject.