Myths and Mistakes in the CNN June 2007 Presidential Debates

 

• A way to lower gas prices is to eliminate subsidies to the oil and gas companies.  How does that get us lower or even stable prices.  I agree that the oil companies are in no need of government subsidies, but eliminating an alternate stream of revenue would be an incentive for the companies to raise prices to make up for the lost subsidies.  
• The proposed immigration reform bill is crucial to either pass or to defeat.  A reporter for the Washington Times newspaper, whose name I forgot, said on a radio interview program that it won’t make any difference whether or not it passes.  How did Shakespeare say it, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”?  There is not nearly enough money in the budget to provide the security measures the bill would need for it to be implemented properly. 
• The Democratic members of Congress don’t have the 67 votes in the Senate that would have been needed to override a veto on a bill ending the war.  The Democrats didn’t need to pass a bill to end the war.  All they had to do was NOT PASS a bill funding its continuation.  They could have sent an open message to the President that he had to sign the bill or he would have to get the troops out of harms way before the existing funds ran out. 
• The Republican Party is the party of life.  Yes, it opposes legal abortion, but the Party has been very selective in which life affirming projects it supports.  For example, is there any doubt that legalizing recreational drugs in a controlled and regulated manner would eliminate the epidemic of urban deaths attributed to turf battles about illegal drugs, as well as save us the huge amounts of money our tax dollars used to fight the never-ending war on drugs?
• The Republican Party must protect the family.  Don’t all Republican candidates oppose all gun control laws, despite statistics that show that the most people killed by legal guns are family members killed either in acts of rage or accidents? 

 

 

Truths About Immigration

 

Money is the key.  With the current level of funding existing laws will continue to be at best implemented weakly.  Similarly, money is not there to implement the proposed new law that everyone is arguing about.  The main issue for most people is border security.  We need to control who and what comes into America to protect against terrorists moving here.  People already in the country who want to emulate al Qaida will need to be picked up through law enforcement methods, using authorized wiretaps and surveillance consistent with Constitutional requirements and other laws. 

 

Fences and intrusion detection systems can work, but they need a quick response force to catch illegals before they get lost.  They may need to be able to detect sophisticated tunnels, as Israel discovered belatedly in their highly fortified border.  Maintenance problems and nuisance alarms can plague any exterior intrusion detection system, and knowledgeable intruders can use them to their advantage.  Illegals can try to go under, over, or through fences.  They also could go around them, since the authorized but not built fence will not cover all of our borders.

 

Border security also requires an ability to detect falsified papers at border portals, and to detect weapons and explosives that may be hidden in ways designed to defeat detection. 

 

Without enforcing the law on employers, whether the existing or new law, the 12 million illegals reportedly already in our country (I’ve always wondered how they got a count on people who are hiding their illegal status) will not be motivated to come out of hiding.  If they did, we haven’t the resources to arrest or deport all 12 milllion.

 

The new law would require identification cards that can’t be falsified.  They would include some kind of biometric devices to ensure that the person using the card is the card’s rightful owner.  Neither the right wing nor the left wing of politics is willing to accept requiring everyone in the U.S. to have biometric national identity cards.  The left considers it a violation of civil liberties.  The right believes it will make it to easy for a totalitarian government to take away their weapons.  The new immigration law apparently would require only aliens to carry such cards; citizens, whether native or naturalized, won’t need them.  So if an illegal wants to avoid identification as an illegal, he or she can simply claim to be legal and not show a card.  Cost arises again.  Who is to pay for 12 million or more electronic biometrically encoded identity cards?

 

Immigrants are needed to do the work Americans don’t want to do.  Really?  Are there jobs that you can’t find Americans to do if the pay is high enough?  What seems to really be the case, if employment statistics and company personal managers are to be believed, is that unemployment is so low that companies in all sorts of industries are having a hard time filling positions.  What with all the jobs being shipped overseas and increasing automation, I have a hard time understanding this, but apparently its true.