Showing posts with label illegal aliens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illegal aliens. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that worse. Much worse!

Important questions are NOT being asked in South Florida: With President Obama coming to South Florida today re his immigration/amnesty plan, when was last time you heard an honest public discussion in South Florida about African-American unemployment rates in Miami? I think Obama's amnesty plan makes that long-term problem worse. Much worse!






















The news that President Obama was coming into South Florida today got me to wondering and musing over the weekend, and not surprisngly, some of this sentiment clearly echoes things I've asked and answered in this very space many times over the past 8 years.

Simply put, have any of you attended a public meeting anywhere in South Florida in the last two years where, either together or individually, Representatives Lois Frankel, Debbie Wasserman 
Schultz or Frederica Wilson have spoken about immigration issues and attempted to make the case that President Obama's immigration plan for amnesty for up to 5 Million people would NOT 
negatively hurt long-term unemployed workers in South Florida, esp. African-Americans?
Or seen a similar public discussion in your area? 
Why do you suppose that is?
And why fdo you suppose that the local news media ignores that obvious question, just as supposed South Florida-based public policy groups do as well?

When I was a kid growing-up as a news and politics junkie in 1970's South Florida, on the day that unemployment 
rates came out of the Dept. of Labor Statistics in Washington -i.e. the BLS- I seem to recall that it was usually the case that then-WTVJ anchor Ralph Renick -when he was the dominant media voice in all of South Florida- would make a point of mentioning not only the national and state numbers, but the ones for Dade and Broward, too, along with the local unemployment rate for Blacks.
And those numbers would usually appear on screen, along with a very simple graph that would be embarrassing to put up these days.

The idea being that accuracy mattered, of course, but also that it's important to have 
useful context and nuance to draw upon before making any reasonable conclusions about what was happening with unemployment and the economy.

That seems like such a simple thing, but before I left the area last June for an extended 
period of time, I can't think of the last time I actually heard the long-term unemployment levels for African-Americans in Miami getting either mentioned in print or on TV or brought into the larger discussion about their relative economic standing only getting worse if that action took place.

Especially since I think it's fair to say that based on my living in South Florida again for 
the past 11 years, there are many less Black adults or children in South Florida who can speak even passable Spanish, compared to when I was a kid growing-up taking Spanish for 6 years and French for 4.

Those Latin American entrepreneurs coming to Miami that seemingly everyone in South Florida's incurious media horde likes to make a fuss over in often over-the-top sycophancy, with some TV stations being especially egregious about making no pretense of being anything but Chamber of Commece cheerleaders, are NOT going to be hiring people who are NOT bilingual, except for low wage jobs.

So what group is that going to be in Miami-Dade County?
Precisely, but instead, everyone just pretends they don't know what the logical result of this will be.
#Despair

I guess we'll all have to just wait until after the next riot and have yet more foreign and out-of-state reporters fly into the area to comment again on the self-evident short-term attention span of reporters that is actually much worse than South Florida residents as a whole.
Which is why those out-of-towners will again be speaking about South Florida reporters continuing to ignore the legitimate concerns of Black Miami, preferring to do ponintless stories about breast surgery, food fads and fashion and crime lowlights among visiting celebs and rappers on South Beach.

But then isn't that lack of energy and foresight the same reason why local news media don't exert any energy at all in pressing local South Florida Congressional representatives on policies that are harmful to such a large share of the populace?
Their own constituents!

Recently, Rasmussen Reports released a national poll on the Obama Amnesty plan.
Guess what it said

Voters Weigh Costs of Obama's Amnesty Plan
Voters still view President Obama's order exempting up to five million illegal immigrants from deportation as illegal and tend to think Congress should try to stop it. But they're evenly divided over whether a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security is the way to do it.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2015/voters_weigh_costs_of_obama_s_amnesty_plan

Monday, July 15, 2013

More bad MSM analysis of Marco Rubio 2016 and immigration reform that includes the usual convenient forgetting of facts/polls that disagree with the central thesis of both La Raza and the GOP Consulting Class. Wow, this is getting tiresome! Jill Lawrence in National Journal: The Myth of Marco Rubio’s Immigration Problem; what's NOT a myth is Miami Herald's recent censorship of criticism of Rubio over immigration reform, esp. Ryan Lizza essay






My comments are after the frustrating column in Beltway Conventional Wisdom at bottom.

I know I can't be the only former Democrat who voted for Marco Rubio for U.S. Senate
in the 2010 Florida primary and general election who will publicly admit that he's unqualified
to be President or Veep in 2016, and who also think he's wrong on immigration.
The one thing I know that GOP pollster Whit Ayres can't seem to accept is that Marco Rubio can't possibly do anything in the future politically without votes from voters like me.
If voters like me ever turn on him for good...

-----
The National Journal
The Myth of Marco Rubio’s Immigration Problem
He’s taking heat for supporting a path to citizenship. 
But almost every other GOP 2016 prospect does too.
By Jill Lawrence
July 15, 2013 | 6:00 a.m.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is losing altitude with some conservatives because he’s the Republican face of immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Yet he’ll have a lot of company in the 2016 field if he runs for the GOP presidential nomination.
In fact almost every Republican weighing a 2016 race – from Jeb Bush and Chris Christie to Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal – favors some path to citizenship like the one in the comprehensive reform bill passed by the Senate, or is open to a variation of it.
Read the rest of the column at:

This is unintentionally funny, that is, if you think biased or uneven reporting is funny, given  that like a 1,001 of these media pieces on Marco Rubio the last few weeks,  The  National Journal's Jill Lawrence never actually talks to a serious and articulate person who is actually against Schumer-Rubio and who can make the case that there is a lot everyone can agree on and it's precisely THOSE policies of agreement that should be done FIRST on immigration 
reform, and the Gang of Eight prescription of a path to citizenship is NOT one of things that a majority of Americans agree.

But when confronted with that fact and numerous polls in all parts of the country showing this,
Rubio and the rest of the Gang, along with their various sycophants and proxies in the news media, Think Tanks and the Beltway GOP Consulting Establishment, esp. those with a tie to big-time corporate Agribusiness, want to grab their football and run home -and sulk.

And send email to supposedly-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks about how unfair it all is that some voters in the country, especially the active GOP grassroots, are openly resistant to the demands of the GOP Beltway Crowd that this should be rammed thru or swallowed whole, despite the fact that its own supporters clearly haven't read it all and even now still can't explain all its ramifications to well-prepped reporters with a straight face.
Which, last time I checked, is what one of the public's principal criticisms of Obamacare were.
Correctly as we all know now.

Of course, like all those other pieces on Marco Rubio that have run the past few weeks that are almost always largely pro-Rubio -even if they do feel the occasional need for PR purposes to rap his knuckles or take him to task for some element of his amnesty position that doesn't please La Raza, Univision or the Democratic left- Jill Lawrence's 
conscious choice to NOT speak to someone smart and knowledgeable about what's going-on like Mickey Kaus, who can make that logical and persuasive counter-argument that includes Border protection, and do it in an interesting and informative way, Lawrence makes it much-easier for her to write her column.
And in the end, isn't that what's really most important to her?!











The one person she does quote a lot, GOP consultant Whit Ayres, seems to me to be laboring under one very large false illusion, and it's a sign of how disconnected so much of the GOP Consulting Class is that this can happen without someone who knows him grabbing him by the lapels and snapping him out of zombie-like trance chanting counter-intuitive nostrums about why it's correct for this bad piece of legislation to get passed the way he and the GOP Establishment want -expecting any new-ish group of voters in the future to be "thankful" to the GOP for passing it is preposterous and shows no understanding of either human or voting behavior in this country.

But then what are we to make of this?
It’s not a given that Republicans will lose if they stay the course. Those who are well funded, strong in their convictions, and persuasive on the stump might just prevail. Defiance might be worth a try, since the stakes are kind of big: constructive governance and the future of the Republican Party.
Funny, Jill Lawrence herself wrote that.
But she didn't write it within the context of the immigration story, even though it would be true, perhaps more so than any other issue.

Nope, she wrote this back in March, and the title that The National Journal came up for that tells you everything you need to know about the way she views the world, making her piece today seem all the more predictable:

Republicans Need to Think for Themselves, Even in Election Years
The GOP will never get fixed if its candidates keep running scared from primary challenges
By Jill Lawrence
Updated: May 30, 2013 | 12:31 a.m., March 4, 2013 | 11:22 a.m.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/republicans-need-to-think-for-themselves-even-in-election-years-20130304

Call me crazy but my intuition based on actually paying attention to what happens in this country is that those future new permanent residents-turned voters will walk into the voting booth in their town's city hall or rec center or Senior's Center and calmly vote against Ayres' GOP candidates and not think about it twice.

Meanwhile, Ayres will still be trying to talk his failed candidates off a ledge by rationalizing the bad decision he made, as if that will do any good to his defeated candidates, after-the-fact, like they were sacrifices to appease the PC media gods.
And the candidates will remind him that he never said anything BEFORE th election about them being sacrifices, since they were paying him full-price.

It's all so very predictable, even without benefit of my handy Time Machine, but as usual, instead of someone with moxie like Kaus, who isn't afraid to fire back, it's pro-amnesty Establishment GOP Ayres whom Lawrence decides to make the conscience of her piece, which is why he'll still keep getting quoted in the future, no matter how wrong he is and illogical his analysis proves to be for years in retrospect.

This situation with Ayres is the precisely the sort of thing that, whatever else is wrong with American sports and the sports media punditocracy these days, and there's a lot, it shows that it is much more self-correcting than the world of political consulting and broadcast/print punditry.

Sometime, like a MLB pitcher with an un-hittable fastball who never learned to adapt and develop any other consistent pitches in crucial situations that could get strikes and not be hit in the air, a pundit just loses their honed intuition.
That's it -the end. 

An Ayres could not last for very long on Fox Sports game day coverage of the NFL or even ESPN/ABC's stranglehold of college football game day coverage, by consistently being wrong about what happened and what will happen next.
But because Ayres has been inoculated by a member in good standing of the MSM, he'll continue to be able to sound-off on politics with reporters from outlets all over the country with no idea of his poor judgment and analysis.
It's our New Normal.

And if you still haven't read the great Ryan Lizza essay on Rubio and the Gang of Eight's bill that the Miami Herald consciously prevented from ever being publicly mentioned in print by their reporters or in their blogs, as I wrote about last month a few times, see:

The New Yorker
GETTING TO MAYBE
Inside the Gang of Eight’s immigration deal.
BY RYAN LIZZA
JUNE 24, 2013

Saturday, June 29, 2013

How do you solve a problem like Marco Rubio? With lots of fact-filled Kaus-centricity! Mickey Kaus continues to write honestly about Rubio while Florida news media remains too cowed to report truth about him; After 19 days of Marco Rubio censoring his own Twitter feed, @MarcoRubio, just like the Miami Herald's two week #newsblackout of anti-amnesty, anti-Rubio news in-print and online, Rubio tweeted, well, more piety; @kausmickey, #RubiosFolly


Rush Limbaugh on reluctance of Republicans to openly criticize Marco Rubio for his pro-amnesty first position. Uploaded June 28, 2013. http://youtu.be/gaFXjKb7UYE.


Caller to Rush Limbaugh Show from El Paso, Texas area relates conversation he had with illegal aliens from Mexico about what they saw as the downside to Schumer-Rubio bill from their perspective: more competition for menial jobs from coming surge of people across border, people who don't want to become citizens. Uploaded June 28, 2013. http://youtu.be/HetlXjLrhqY
How do you solve a problem like Marco Rubio? With lots of fact-filled Kaus-centricity! Mickey Kaus continues to write honestly about Rubio while Florida news media remains too cowed to report truth about him; After 19 days of Marco Rubio censoring his own Twitter feed, @MarcoRubio, just like the Miami Herald's two week #newsblackout of anti-amnesty, anti-Rubio news in-print and online, Rubio tweeted, well, more piety; @kausmickey, #RubiosFolly
Unlocked! 
Now you can finally see for yourself what the Miami Herald has desperately trying to keep quiet about in Ryan Lizza's New Yorker column for the past two weeks, where never was heard a discouraging word -about Rubio (and the Herald's) pro-amnesty first policy.

The New Yorker
GETTING TO MAYBE
Inside the Gang of Eight’s immigration deal
By Ryan Lizza
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/06/24/130624fa_fact_lizza



Here's what Rubio wrote after 19 days of nothing on Twitter:




























































































Sunday, June 16, 2013

More bad news about Team Rubio: Contempt for Floridians 24/7! Not that you'll hear about this from Miami's sleepwalking press corps but... Rich Lowry tweets what Ryan Lizza's new New Yorker piece re immigration reform reveals about Marco Rubio's staff, and Politico adds fuel to the fire: "Marco Rubio's office shows their contempt for American workers" (More interested in legalizing illegal aliens than plight of average Floridians.) And then some!;






















More of the inherent weaknesses of Team Marco are being revealed every day.
That is, IF you are paying attention. (Like me.)

Sounds to me like the anonymous Rubio staffer quoted here,
http://www.politico.com/playbook/0613/playbook10932.html?hp=l6
is talking about Overtown, Liberty City, Opa-Locka and Carol City and Miami Gardens and large swaths of Fort Lauderdale to me.
Do Reps. Frederica Wilson and Alcee Hastings agree with this assessment of their constituents?

Too bad for this country and this state that so many Florida-based reporters and columnists are in-the-bag for Rubio, even those who disagree with him philosophically or politically. 
They continually pull their punches and don't challenge him enough -just like they pull their punches for almost everyone else, too.
That used to be called gutless, but now called "new normal" in American journalism.

As many of you regular readers of the blog may recall, while I lived and worked in Washington for 15 years, I always thought that Tim Russert was very over-rated and very fortunate to be a top dog in an era where there were so many no-talent journalists in the Washington Beltway who were more publicist than journalist, people who carried water for policies, not honestly examine them.

Still, despite my feelings about him, I'm 100% certain that the late host of NBC News 'Meet the Press" would've absolutely humbled Marco Rubio and brought him down a few pegs the past few weeks as the immigration debate has once again become one of the main issues in D.C. now that the Beltway media have decided amongst themselves that the the Benghazi and IRS scandals don't really matter since they would require lots of legwork during the hot D.C. summer.  

I think Russert would've positively undressed Rubio like a storefront mannequin by running one of those incisive video sequences he was so noted for that would show Rubio's recent penchant for flip-flopping in ways that would be hard to get out of your head.
He'd then come back from the videos with a LIVE interview and ask, "When will you be changing your mind again? And will you be just as certain then as you were this week and last month that you were right, right before you changed your mind?"

It's the bell that isn't ringing, that punch that nobody in DC seems interested or willing to deliver to Rubio's glass jaw, which is absolutely frustrating the hell out of me, especially given Rubio's very pious comments about his role and his comments about how necessary it is that all of the 11 million illegals get to stay.
Where's the proof that they should ALL stay, especially the ones that aren't interested in becoming citizens? 
Shouldn't we able to make some distinctions? 

Like the ones that Mickey Kaus talked about?
Serial drunk drivers!




http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/the-secret-dui-factor/

So why is Rubio so mum about other supporters of S.744 saying they think requiring people to be able to speak and understand basic English before becoming a U.S. citizen, as he would require, is a bridge too far?
Nobody even asks him!
What kind of people think THAT common sense requirement is unreasonable?

Since you asked, the very people and groups who are constantly emailing the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times and the Orlando Sentinel and being quoted there, which are then picked-up and run on TV station websites.

Still, say what you will about how contemptuous Rubio's staff may be, they can't be worse than the many unprofessional female staffers Connie Mack III had for years while he was Florida's junior senator, who would order beauty and health supplies for themselves over the main telephone in the front reception room while you waited to see someone.
Retin A anyone?


Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich: total cost for illegal immigrants to LA County taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year; LA County Dept. of Public Social Services study: children of undocumented immigrants cost L.A. County $54 Million a MONTH, represents 20% of all CalWORKs and food stamp issuances in the county; Sen. Boxer Boxer to push funding for health costs of uninsured illegal immigrants


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Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich: total cost for illegal immigrants to LA County taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year; LA  County Dept. of Public Social Services study: children of undocumented immigrants cost L.A. County $54 Million a MONTH, represents 20% of all CalWORKs and food stamp issuances in the county; Sen. Boxer Boxer to push funding for health costs of uninsured illegal immigrants

LA Times: Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services study: Children of Undocumented Immigrants Cost L.A. County $54 Million a month and represent 20% of all CalWORKs and food stamp issuances in the county

http://ktla.com/2013/06/15/study-claims-children-of-undocumented-immigrants-cost-la-county-54-million-a-month

 “These costs do not even include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually for education.”
Post-Midnight addition to the post:

I caught a LA Times has story about Senator Barbara Boxer doing what she does best -asking for taxpayer dollars.

Boxer to push funding for health costs of uninsured immigrants
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-boxer-healthcare-costs-uninsured-immigrants-20130613,0,6087718.story

340 reader comments as of 3:11 a.m. Eastern
http://discussions.latimes.com/20/lanews/la-pn-boxer-healthcare-costs-uninsured-immigrants-20130613/10