I Vant To See Your Papers! Schnell! Schnell!! (Updated)

Via Balloon Juice:

"Race and racism has nothing to do with it:

"Just a week after signing the country's toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

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"Arizona's superintendent for public instruction, Tom Horne, has said he's backing the measure because ethnic-studies programs encourage 'ethnic chauvinism'; he's also suggested that such programs could breed secessionist sentiment among Hispanic students.

"Since when is secessionist sentiment bad? Also, apparently accents will soon be verboten:

"The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

"State education officials say the move is intended to ensure that students with limited English have teachers who speak the language flawlessly. But some school principals and administrators say the department is imposing arbitrary fluency standards that could undermine students by thinning the ranks of experienced educators.

"Arizona wants to make it clear that the only acceptable accent is a proper German one."

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Update: Added the link to the original post on Balloon Juice and corrected formatting.

Do you have any scars on your body? If so, how'd you get them?

Lots of scars. The biggest ones from heart surgery.

Ask me anything

What if...?

Here is a quote from a blog that has been cited quite a bit in the last few days (I'll put up a link to it later:)

"Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn't like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that's what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation's capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country's political leaders if the need arose.

"Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington."

Tea Party Hypocrisy

Eugene Robinson from the Washington Post nails it on the head:

"Activists for Latino and immigrant rights -- and supporters of sane governance -- held weekend rallies denouncing the new law and vowing to do everything they can to overturn it. But where was the Tea Party crowd? Isn't the whole premise of the Tea Party movement that overreaching government poses a grave threat to individual freedom? It seems to me that a law allowing individuals to be detained and interrogated on a whim -- and requiring legal residents to carry identification documents, as in a police state -- would send the Tea Partyers into apoplexy. Or is there some kind of exception if the people whose freedoms are being taken away happen to have brown skin and might speak Spanish? "

Palin distorts the President's words ... will the media notice?

Via Daily Kos

Palin distorts the President's words ... will the media notice?:

As long as the traditional media is going to report on every utterance from the former half-term governor of Alaska, will they bother to fact-check her?

Via The Plum Line, the latest distortion from the hand of Sarah Palin:

Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?

Asked this week about his faltering efforts to advance the Middle East peace process, President Obama did something remarkable. In front of some 47 foreign leaders and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, President Obama said that “whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”

Whether we like it or not? Most Americans do like it.

Here’s what the President actually said:

But what we can make sure of is, is that we are constantly present, constantly engaged, and setting out very clearly to both sides our belief that not only is it in the interests of each party to resolve these conflicts but it’s also in the interest of the United States. It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

Well, that's quite a bit different, isn't it? The President wants to resolve conflicts because of the cost to the United States both in money and American lives, and Sarah Palin distorts his words for personal political gain.

There's only one person with a problem here.