Science uses some of the SINEs and LINEs of our times to track our common ancestry, and determine some of what had to be true of your evolution and mine.
Our great national shame is that only Turkey has lower belief in the science of evolution than we do. We can not hope to maintain our lead in science, technology and to keep our pre-eminence as a world power if this ignorance continues far into this century.
We got a rotisserie a while back, and here’s what’s cooking tonight.
The moon’s been rising in the wee hours of the morning so instead of staying up overnight to catch it I am snapping it in the am before it sets. These two were taken with a Canon Rebel XTI, and a Canon Rebel T2I equipped with a 70-300mm EF-S lens. They’ve been cropped down and optimized a bit for the web, but you can still detect the difference between the 10.1 Mpxl and 18.0 Mpxl cameras.
Kasey went for a ride to the bank today, this is how she looked once she figured out that the drive up teller passes out dog biscuits.
…and how I stopped being a tool.
In a last minute move after seeing a huge media and blog outcry Arizona has altered the vague sections of their Immigrant law that were crafted by a hate group lawyer, and now it’s more reasonable. Indeed, it’s something similar to what I suggested in 2006.
Lawmakers on Thursday night changed the language to require scrutiny only of people who police stop, detain or arrest. They also changed a section of the bill that barred officers from “solely” using race as grounds for suspecting someone is in the country illegally; opponents had argued that that would allow race to be a factor. The legislators removed the word “solely” to bar race from being used by officers enforcing the law.
Note that since that 2006 post and others like it, I’ve moved more to the center on immigration. I’ve seen it become the wedge that split the Republicans apart as I predicted, and I saw moderates leave and extremist groups like the Birchers swarm in to fill that vacuum. Here’s something else I wrote along that path – the more I researched the less I could support the Xenophobic fears driving the debate.
If treatment of the illegals is too harsh this will backfire as well. Many who feel firm now will quail before the hordes of MSM and liberal deportation horror stories to come. For make no mistake, in many cases enforcing this will drive a wedge into one of conservativism’s key values: Family Unity. Some families will be torn apart. The father or mother will be deported — so whatever the outcome of the conference committee two major conservative values will clash. With that said I refer you back to the quote at the start, and remind you that in the end all problems are solvable if one factor is patience, and the other persistence.
It was after this — when I saw large segments of the party really turn on Bush, McCain, Graham and others that I realized this this was the issue that would split us. I saw partisans full of bile attacking Republicans harder than any Demagogue from the Democrats would and began to research. My queasiness about recognizing the need for immigration just due to the sheer demographics of the aging baby boomers (who is going to care for and nurse all of the gray hairs in a few short years? ) turned to outright alarm when I saw that many of the cheerleaders, like Michelle Malkin, were aligned with Peter Brimelow and the Pat Buchanan tea cup racist crowd at the odious VDARE site. I began to realize that “Culture” and “Identity” weren’t just code words for the Eurofascists, they were code words for the racists here as well.
Do you suspect some of the legislators in Arizona started looking into things like Kris Kobach’s background and actually realized what tools they had been, like I did? I can only hope so.
Here’s a picture of the first Cardinal I’ve seen out back this year.
Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in and added much more information to the puzzle of the new Arizona immigration law and I’m going to reprint a lot of it further below to back up my previous post on this subject. In a forum the other day after my first post many argued that Kobach really didn’t help craft the bill — but now the evidence that he did is crystal clear.
I think the people trying to distance Kobach are vested in denying the connection due to his long association with a known and designated hate group (F.A.I.R.) Kobach also has associations with the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank that has sired other lobbyists and political operatives who skate the very thinnest borderlines of acceptability.
Kobach has spoken the past four years to any wingnut who will listen to stir the anti immigrant furor, from populist Lou Dobbs to Phylis Schafly’s far right religious fundamentalist group, Eagle Forum, and the list even includes Faux libertarians who operate in a wasteland of cognitive dissonance from actual liberty.. you know like freedom from invasive carrying of papers…. He’s a single issue operative who is trying to parlay fear of immigrants into a lucrative career. So far it seems to be working, as you can see from the article he’s no stranger to crafting legislation for the Tanton Nativist crowd.
He’s drafted other pieces of anti-immigrant legislation that have ended up in courts and cost the governments who were fooled a pretty penny in fees etc. (I’ll wager a nickle that Kris gets called in these cases as an “expert witness” although I don’t know that for certain.) The people of Arizona need to take their legislators to task for being such tools for a hate lobby since this is going to go down in the courts and cost Arizona some money when it’s all said and done. Kris Kobach’s Konstruction really hinges on the vagueness of a new concept of “lawful contact” and how far zealots can stretch it. If you search google you can see that everyone is wondering what the hell the bill means by “Lawful Contact.”
Can the city librarian ask you for your papers? Your child’s principle? Both come into “lawful contact” with citizens of the US all day every day, and both are “City officials”. See how vague this is? It’s billed as “anti-immigrant” but it’s really anti-Freedom, anti-liberty, and it’s really crazy that purported Libertarians are supporting this.
UPDATE: Much more on FAIR at LGF
With all of that said here’s the meat from the SPLC Hatewatch article:
Kris Kobach, the author of the Arizona law and a lawyer at FAIR’s Immigration Reform Law Institute, has been the prime mover behind numerous ordinances that seek to punish those who aid and abet “illegal aliens,” including laws adopted in Farmer’s Branch, Texas, and Hazelton, Pa.
The laws have not done well and have cost some localities immense sums of money to defend. Recently, the city of Albertville, Ala., refused to work with Kobach on just such an ordinance, reportedly because of the high legal costs incurred by these other communities.
Before joining FAIR, Kobach served as U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s top immigration adviser. He then moved on to take charge of Department of Justice efforts to tighten border security after the 9/11 attacks. There, he developed a program — the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System — that called for close monitoring of men from Arab and Muslim nations, even legal U.S. residents. The program collapsed due to complaints of racial profiling and discrimination.
Given Kobach’s history with racial profiling, it is particularly alarming that he was tapped by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio in February to train his officers. A federal grand jury investigation is under way amid a slew of complaints that Arpaio used racial profiling techniques to round up suspected undocumented immigrants. The grand jury is also reportedly looking at whether Arpaio used his office to target political opponents.
FAIR’s poison is now spreading. Legislation similar to Arizona’s has been introduced in Texas, and six other states are considering doing so.
It’s not surprising to find a group like FAIR behind this repugnant law. FAIR has an extensive track record of racism and bigotry. The group, for example, has accepted $1.2 million from the racist Pioneer Fund, a foundation established to promote the genes of white colonials and fund studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has employed key staffers who have also joined white supremacist groups; it has board members who write regularly for hate publications; it promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latino immigrants; and it has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.
FAIR has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder and current board member, John Tanton, who has written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” Tanton’s role model for FAIR is John Trevor Sr., founder of the racist American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and a key architect of the racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Trevor also distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America. Tanton once said Trevor should serve as FAIR’s “guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, has warned that immigrants are engaged in “competitive breeding” aimed at diminishing white power. He led efforts to win funding from the Pioneer Fund, saying in 1993 that his “job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer’s money.” Stein also served as editorial adviser to Tanton’s hate journal, The Social Contract, at a time when it ran its ugliest edition ever, “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.” The issue’s lead article argued that multiculturalism was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.” Stein has declined to offer any criticism of FAIR’s founder, instead characterizing Tanton last September as a “Renaissance man.”
The principal sponsor of the Arizona law, state Sen. Russell Pearce, has his own history of hate. In 2006, Pearce forwarded an email to his supporters from the neo-Nazi National Alliance titled “Who Rules America?” The article criticized the media for promoting multiculturalism and racial equality, and for presenting the Holocaust as fact. More recently, Pearce has been photographed hugging J.T. Ready, a Phoenix-area resident who is a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.
Rachel is not making this up, I’ve researched these groups and this background myself. If you need confirmation on Russell’s nativist and White Supremacist ties, you can reference the long history at The Feathered Bastard. (While Lemmons is definitely partisan and goes over the top sometimes, he is factually correct in the background to the articles and that’s really what matters.)
I’ve experience with seeing Kris Kobach speak myself – with coded anti-immigration nativist dog whistling in many speeches and his birtherism he’s not a mainstream Republican, he’s also fixated on Acorn and whatever the conspiracy outrage of the day is on the right; and his crowing over creating this legislation and association with FAIR speaks for itself. Kobach also seems to be one of Fox New’s “go to guys” anytime the issue of immigration comes up, and he’s worked to promote the Nativist cause for Arpaio, and in Nebraska. This all boils down to the fact that Kobach is really a single issue candidate for an insidious lobby with roots in eugenicist movements, he’s not running for Kansans, he’s running for Nativists.
Of course, Kobach is listed as an attorney with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, as its “national expert on constitutional law.” Aside from doing legal work for FAIR, when Kobach was running for Congress in Kansas’ 3rd District in 2003 and 2004, he took $10,000 from a FAIR-related political action committee, the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC, formerly FAIR PAC.
The president of the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC is Mary Lou Tanton, wife of John Tanton, the founder of FAIR. Tanton still sits on FAIR’s board of directors.
FAIR is a pretty nasty anti-immigrant enterprise, having taken $1.2 million in the past from the eugenics-loving Pioneer Fund, a group founded on the idea of scientific racism.
I’m still registered R for now, and I will be voting against the wingnuts like Kobach in the primaries. If the wingnuts win, I will switch parties.
UPDATE: As can be seen here, Kris Kobach has a vested interest in this bill.
Another infamous “Faked Macro” photo… to do this you put the subject on the floor, stand on a stool or chair, and shoot the photo with your telephoto lens well extended. It’s tricky as you have to minutely move your head back and forth to get the camera to focus, and you are sunk if you don’t have image stabilization in the lens because otherwise it’s near impossible to get the shot without some blurring.
