GOP FAVORITE PAST TIME: MANIPULATING LANGUAGE TO TRICK AND SCARE VOTERS

I caught the head cheerleader for Bush's anti-American and twisted policies - you've guessed correctly - it was none other than Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, in a very fashionable blue suit, by the way, on CSPAN, while I worked out on a cardio machine at the gym today. Trying hard not to go into cardiac arrest or stroke mode while viewing Madame La Slippery Snake Oil Dealer, I finally caught on to what she does.

With proposed legislation on immigration Kay Bailey Hutchison is trying to sneak in an amendment to push through Bush's guest worker program. The Senator begins by distracting folks with a passionate plea for border security, and then went on to say that most immigrants from south of the border are good people who need to work here because they lack the education and skills to work in their home countries. According to Senator Hutchison, these immigrants believe our borders should be secure. She also said employers she knows in Texas who are trying to do the "right thing" also want border security. The Senator transitioned from border security and an unskilled labor force to Canada's "wonderful" guest worker program, how we should adopt it and blah, blah, blah, yaddy ya ya. I quite frankly lost interest in what the Senator said about this program because 1. I did not believe her. 2. She is rubbing stamping yet another Bush policy.

After extolling the virtues of Canada’s guest worker program, Mrs. Hutchison went on to say that said many if not most immigrants send money back to family in their home countries so dollars earned in the US are shipped out of the US and generate spending in other countries. This is apparently a good thing, according to Senator Hutchison.

OK - so - some countries south of the border don't have jobs for unskilled laborers who are so poor that they must send their to children work instead of school, thereby creating an endless cycle of abject poverty. They try to come here to work, educate their kids and send money back home.

Immigration is one issue. Border security is another entirely separate one. The people who are fleeing their countries to work here do not pose an imminent threat or danger to us. They come here to survive. (Of course, the criminals, drug dealers and human traffic slime are a different story, but they are a minority.)

Immigration today is more about a huge humanitarian crisis and politicians like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison are masking this reality with rhetoric whose ultimate goal is to create a cheap labor force, with folks who cannot vote and will work at or below minimum wage, for corporate America so CEO's will get fatter and richer and politicians like Senator Hutchison will have their pockets lined with more donations from these very same companies. Somehow in this mix of evoking emotion and manipulating language, the guest worker program makes our borders more secure.

Quite a leap isn't it?

As Professor Lakoff at UC Berkeley wrote in an article (posted recently below on how politicians use language to trick voters): "Can the mass migration and displacement of people from their homelands at rate of 800,000 a year be understood as anything else (than a humanitarian crisis)? Unknown numbers of people have died trekking through the extreme conditions of the Arizona and New Mexico desert. Towns are being depopulated and ways of life lost in rural Mexico. Fathers feel forced to leave their families in their best attempt to provide for their kids. Everyday, boatloads of people arrive on our shores after miserable journeys at sea in deplorable conditions." The professor suggests that the solution involves the UN or Organization of American States, the Secretary of State, conversations with Mexico and other Central American countries, a close re-examination of NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank to raise standards of living around the globe.

This is a highly complex issue and one that I am not sufficiently informed about to discuss at length… The point I am trying to make is Mrs. Hutchison and other GOP Senators are both dumbing down and masking the issues of immigration. They are linking illegal immigration to border security by stage-managing both language and emotion to drive through legislation that will benefit themselves and a few other high rollers in corporate American and in Congress.

This is shameless, absolutely shameless. But it is business as usual for the Bush Administration and all of its rubber stamping GOP Congress.

Politicians like Senator Hutchison are also using illegal immigration and border security to make us angry, scare us and take our attention away from the fact that Iraq is a colossal failure and nightmare that won't go away, our soldiers are being killed and maimed on a daily basis, benefits normally extended to our military have been slashed, the upper 1% of wage earners get the biggest tax breaks, our country is going bankrupt with the huge and ever expanding deficit that our great, great grandchildren will have to pay for, and we probably have more corrupted lawmakers now than ever before in our history.

I tried to look up Senator Hutchison’s amendment in the Library of Congress through the Thomas search engine tonight but it apparently isn't posted yet. I'll post it when I find it.

Keep on trekking and never give up the fight. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. LS

SHOCKING! ANOTHER GOP CONGRESSMAN UNDER INVESTIGATION.

Excerpt:

Despite a flat denial from the Department of Justice, federal law enforcement sources tonight said ABC News accurately reported that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is "in the mix" in the FBI investigation of corruption in Congress.

Speaker Hastert said tonight the story was "absolutely untrue" and has demanded ABC News retract its story.

ABC NEWS PIECE ON HASTART HERE