Texas Tidbits: The Yanks were down 9-0, but came back for good with two outs in the ninth, winning 14-13. Texas needed Doug Flutie, but darn if he retired, to do a drop kick extra point. Talking about Texas, Prof. Colb does a good job covering various bases re the ongoing lethal injection cases. Meanwhile, don't see any thing to convince me Bush's illegal immigration speech Monday night wasn't just more b.s. Surely not this. Better use of your time: giving blood.
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As to that immigration plan, a truly amusing bit was in the local paper that leads me to add to this stub. Our dear attorney general / Bush's personal lawyer admitted that he wasn't sure if his grandparents -- Mexican immigrants/migrant farmers -- came here legally. The whole matter reminds me of some remarks in an introduction (or rather, preface, comments by another on the work, not directly a part) to a volume of one of my favorite books, Around The World In Eight Days by Jules Verne (none of the movie versions really did it justice -- ironically they tended to be long affairs though the book was pretty short).
The preface (prologue) remarked that it was revealing how easily our heroes travelled around the world without much ado -- no passports issues and so forth. The start of such things was suggested by the ever traveling warrant for PF's arrest (it turns out to be all a mistake with time zones helping our heroes) as he went through various points of the British Empire of the late 19th Century. Same with immigrants. My paternal grandparents came to this country around when Phineas Fogg met his beloved, and I saw my maternal grandmother's papers from Italy. So, she was legal. My maternal grandparents came here further back from Ireland. It is unclear how far back -- some vague talk suggested it was after our independence. But, they wouldn't need "papers" to come here.
Times change, and the laissez faire days of the past really do not work any more. Still, per a recent editorial by conservative John Tierney in the NYT (hey, even Tom Friedman is right now and then), it is unclear how much we should be concerned -- with national guard troops being cheated out of their training time in the process -- with the illegals at issue here. As he notes, we damn them for coming here to do agricultural work, low rent service jobs our citizens aren't crying too much about, and so forth.
This is sort of why so many are here -- somewhat comparable to drugs, it is a demand matter more than a supply one. The supply matters too, of course, and recent free trade agreements can be shown to be but one reason why this is also something to look toward ... again criminalization of the immigrants themselves seems a questionable solution. This does not mean free movement, but yes, some leakage is acceptable.
[As with my recent talk about Overthrow, this sort of thing raises my leftist side ... a sound solution must look globally, including when we negotiate trade agreements and deal with other nations overall. But, this bunch is loathe to work with other nations in any global sense -- put aside bilateral agreements where we have the upper hand -- since it might restrain our flexibility in some fashion. Sort of not getting married to stay independent and being miserable in the process ... still you have your independence!]
It is interesting actually why suddenly it is deemed not to be now -- I guess every 10-15 years, some re-entrenchment is deemed necessary. [But see here.] This issue is especially interesting since it divides the Republican Party, which is concerned about election year races that promise to be tricky. When political concerns match up with issues that divide the public (though I do wonder how many are really THAT concerned about this matter), the best one can hope for actually is some middle path mixed with some political ass covering. This might actually turn out to be the case here.
It's amazing how things turn out when the system sort of works as it is intended to. An imperfect, but acceptable, ending to this whole affair might be possible.