The following originally appeared on Project Economic Refugee:

Excellent point that George Lakoff makes on this TruthOut OpEd piece titled Disaster Messaging that tackles what Project Economic Refugee has been covering on the [In]Secure Communities Program:

End a Bad Law: 287(g)

Bad laws, laws that hurt far more than they help, should be eliminated. Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is a bad law. Here’s why.

On the Left we often talk about the Republicans as conservatives. The assumption is that conservatives are generally Republican and Republicans are generally conservative. I am quickly coming to the conclusion that while this might have been true at some point, continuing to use conservative as a descriptor for Republicans is no longer accurate.

Dictionary.com defines conservative as follows.

con•serv•a•tive
Show Spelled[kuh n-sur-vuh-tiv] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2.
cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3.
traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4.
( often initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5.
( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.
6.
having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.
7.
Mathematics . (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.

Tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions or institutions, this is what I was taught as a kid was the really mark of a conservative. Unfortunately the modern Republican party is showing in its policy that it is not in any way conservative, but instead is radical.

It is time to start hitting the Republicans in the Senate and one Democrat (I am looking at you Ben Nelson!) on this totally bogus look to the future but screw the present issue of extending unemployment benefits, and more importantly the issue of another major stimulus package to get people back to work. So, lets hit them where it hurts, let’s call them out on their total lack of patriotism.

There has been a flight to patriotism in the Republican Party since the 9/11 attacks. They have reaped the benefits of being (falsely as it turns out) the party that stands for the good ol’ U.S. of A. and it is time to make that flag they have wrapped themselves in a hell of a lot less flattering.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

In the USA:

Why Small Business Loans Are Important

The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Small businesses employ the majority of the American workforce, although the largest single employer is still the federal government.

When the economy starts to recover small businesses rely on loans to bring up their inventory levels. Large banks and smaller institutions have been reluctant to introduce new loans after the failure of a large number banking institutions.

Small banks do not have the resources to start lending again, and the number of new loans have gone down since the start of the recession.

Banks that received funds from the Troubled Asset Relief program. The larger banks that were branded as too big to fail have also reduced the number of new loans they make to small businesses. They have reinvested the funds in lower-return, lower-risk treasury bonds instead.

And elsewhere …

During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6).

In the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3).

Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century.

Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.

America the Illiterate
Chris Hedges — Nov 10, 2008 (pg 2)

I think, I’m detecting some sort of trend here …

One of the things which have always gotten up my nose is the way that Conservatives will call undocumented immigrants “illegal immigrants”. It is a little bit of framing that just rubs me the wrong way. The problem is it is hard to dispute. Being and working in the United States without a visa or a green card is illegal. There is no getting around that. The thing is it is a really low level crime. It is not even a felony. Still it is a crime so if you want to be pejorative about it, you can call people in that situation illegal immigrants.

Well the time to turn the tables on these folks may very well be at hand. Today is the day that your census information is supposed to be filled out and returned (or at least have it postmarked) by. There has been a rather insane and self-defeating push from the Conservatives urging that any of their true believers either not fill out the census or give strange information.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is reporting today that Kirk Lyons, an Neo-Confederate lawyer, is urging people in the South to check the “other” box and write in “Southern Confederate American”. From the SPLC’s website:

Lyons insisted that “Confederate Southern American” is an appropriate designation because the South seceded to form an independent nation for four years during the Civil War — or, as he puts it, the “War of Northern Aggression.” “If there can be Cajun Americans, if there can be Serbian Americans, there can be Confederate Southern Americans,” Lyons said. Proclaiming their national origin as Confederate Southern Americans would send the message that they “will not sit in the back of the bus anymore.” He added that the Confederate community constitutes “the largest single minority group in the United States today.”

It’s counterproductive for Democrats to make budget deficits an issue. Instead, we’re better off focusing on supporting popular programs and eliminating wasteful ones.

I’ve reviewed the highly negative effects of premature political framing of issues in the bank bailout, economic stimulus, Afghanistan policy re-evaluation, and health insurance reform areas. But, we can also see the same thing going on in cap-and-trade, credit card reform, and the discussion just beginning on a possible jobs bill. The frames of this Administration begin by excluding politically infeasible solutions. We will probably see this again in the areas of education, energy, and the environment, and in any other problems the Administration tackles. And we will also see it back solutions that create similar dynamics in the Media, the blogosphere, the public, and the Congress. This pattern however, does not serve us well. It has a bias toward political expediency at the price of real practicality – getting to solutions that work. If we can’t disturb this pattern, if the Administration is allowed to “pre-compromise” on solutions by using the political feasibility frame, before it has used a “how well does this solution work relative to others” frame, we will continue to get bad results.

What we need to do to get out of this box, is to be truly pragmatic. All of us, including the Administration, need to consider all the ideas that may work to solve a problem, and compare and debate them without first considering their political feasibility. We need to suspend judgment about that while we evaluate a solution on its own merits. That’s because political feasibility can’t be pre-determined. It is not a pre-condition of the legislative process, to be divined intuitively by the experienced and self-annointed political gurus. It is an outcome of that process. It has to be determined by political conflict and negotiation, and also by how well proposed solutions perform in actual debate. In its focus on “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” the Obama Administration has forgotten that “the timid is the enemy of the good,” also. In issue after issue, it has embraced the timid, and the result is that its solutions to the nation’s problems don’t work.

The 60 vote frame is still all over this week. Very few people are talking about either reconciliation or the nuclear option. Good examples of this bias are provided by WaPo health care framing team members, Ceci Connolly and Shailagh Murray. Their answer to the queston “Why does everyone keep talking about 60 votes in the Senate?” is both biased and incomplete.

the ol’ either-or argument doesn’t hold waterboards….