Here's a piece by a friend's 8-year-old nephew...

...his name is Sabri, and President Bush ain't get nothing past him:

Fascinating immigration-related facts...

from 2 agencies withhold key data on workers - Records could help find illegal immigrants
by Liz Chandler, Knight Ridder News Service

The IRS and the Social Security Administration routinely collect strong evidence of potential workplace crimes, including names and addresses of millions of people who are using bogus Social Security numbers, their wage records and the identities of the bosses who knowingly hire them.

But they keep those facts secret... The two agencies don't analyze their data to root out likely immigration fraud – and they won't share their millions of records so that law enforcement agencies can do that, either. Privacy laws, they say, prohibit them from sharing their files with anyone, except in rare criminal investigations.

But the agencies don't even use the power they have. The IRS doesn't fine even the most egregious employers who repeatedly submit inaccurate data about their workers. The Social Security Administration does virtually nothing to alert citizens whose Social Security numbers are being used by others...

To work lawfully in the United States, individuals must have valid Social Security numbers or authorization from the Department of Homeland Security. But the law doesn't require companies to verify that workers give them names and numbers that match Social Security records. So most companies don't check. That loophole, created by Congress in 1986, makes it hard to prove whether employers know they're hiring illegal workers.

There's another War we need to end...

...it's the War on Drugs, and in a way it's even more twisted than Iraq, as it's largely a war our country fights against its own citizens. But don't forget that - by fostering a massive black market whose tentacles slime through dozens of other countries - our War on Drugs is in many ways as much an affront to the rest of the world as is our seige of Iraq.

Take this news item from the city of Acapulco, one of Mexico's major resort destinations. To me, it seems that the cloak of fear that shrouds this city is akin to one of terror - and is woven by policy here in the States.

Two Mexican Police Officials Decapitated
By NATALIA PARRA Associated Press Writer
April 20,2006 | ACAPULCO, Mexico -- The decapitated heads of two police officials were found early Thursday dumped in front of a government building in this Pacific coast resort, authorities said.
The heads of police commander Mario Nunez Magana and officer Jesus Alberto Ibarra were found at the same site where four drug traffickers died during a shootout with law enforcement. The heads of the two -- who were involved in the Jan. 27 shootout -- were accompanied by sign that warned, "So that you learn to respect."
...Federal investigators link the violence to a turf war between drug gangs in northern Mexico for lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.

Here's a timeline of Iranian history...

...from The Sun magazine, the latest issue of which includes an insightful collection of blog entries by Iranian citizens. Note how Western intervention disrupted the country's development 50 years ago - and how Iran's current president, Mr. Angry Nuclear Guy, was elected just last year...a reaction to more-recent Western meddling in the Middle East, perhaps?

1953: To protect Western oil interests, U.S. and British intelligence agencies orchestrate a coup, overthrowing the Iranian prime minister and reinstating the traditional monarch, the shah, a pro-American dictator.

1979: The shah is deposed during the Iranian Revolution, and Iran becomes an Islamic republic. A president and parliament are elected, but true power is held by a council of clerics headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

1980: Iraq invades Iran, starting the Iran-Iraq War.

1988: A cease-fire is declared, and the war ends in a stalemate.

1997: Iranian voters reject the state-approved presidential candidate and elect reformist Mohammad Khatami by a wide margin.

2001: Khatami is reelected, but meaningufl reforms are blocked by the conservative clerics who control the government.

2005: Hard-line conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president.

In a partnership with AfterDowningStreet.org...

...and with San Diego-area peace activist Barbara Cummings, we began offering "Impeach Bush!" shirts in February of this year. Thanks to an ad at the top of the awesome After Downing Street blog - and to the growing realization that Bush's Iraq-related activities have included impeachable offenses - we've shipped well over 200 shirts to concerned citizens across the United States.

Proceeds from sales of "Impeach Bush!" shirts help support Barbara's tireless activism. This week, she's back in Crawford, TX, where Bush was supposed to take a spring vacation. Last month, Barbara helped a group of UCSD students put together a big anti-war rally, which featured speakers like Cindy Sheehan and After Downing Street's David Swanson.

After Downing Street is a coalition of over 100 veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups that pressure both Congress and the media to investigate whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The coalition takes its name from the emergence in 2005 of several documents that quickly came to be known as the Downing Street Memos.

OMG, is this Iran stuff for real?

If you're like me, you're dumbfounded by the Bush administration's Iran saber-rattling, and you're wondering what to make of the whole thing. Well, here's some good news: a recent Bloomberg/LA Times poll shows that 54% of Americans "don't trust" Bush to make the right decision about going to war with Iran. Dude, there's my country.

So what the hell is Bush's rationale this time - and how separated is it from reality? Here are some key takeaways from an excellent article by Bill Scher of LiberalOasis.com:

Bush frames the case against Iran like this:
1. Iran is close to getting nukes.
2. Iran's President is crazy and irrational and committed to wiping Israel off the map. He can't be reasoned with.
3. Bush is trying real super hard to get the UN to do something about it, but if they won't...

Here's a less war-happy way to look at the situation:
1. Iran has legitimate, rational, self-defense-related incentives to want nukes.
2. To resolve the current stalemate, we need to address those incentives.
3. Because Iran is at least 5 years from getting nukes, time is on our side.

Check out Scher's full article - a short but reassuring read - for more details. And then start spreading the word!

Cheney Surreality continues...

...with this picture and accompanying caption from MSNBC.com. Maybe I am becoming unhealthily fascinated with the guy, or hating on him as kind of a physical representation of war and greed and all that...but sometimes the situations I see him in strike me as ironic or just bizarre. Check out all the symbolism going on in this photo...

Vice President Dick Cheney waits outside the dugout to be introduced before throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of the home opener baseball game between the New York Mets and Washington Nationals at RFK Stadium, Tuesday, April 11, 2006, in Washington. Behind Cheney, from left, are Purple Heart recipients Army Staff Sgt. Derek L. Drew of Goldsboro, N.C.; Marine Cpl. Jamel Daniels of New York; who were injured in Iraq and Army Spc. Javier Torres of New York, who was injured in Afghanistan.

Got a nice note from a Wavelength shopper...

...named Michelle, who recently ran into someone with similar sensibilities:

"I was on vacation and I saw your Impeach Bush shirt...the man said his wife gave it to him...I saw his wife and she told me about your web site. I cracked up...I showed her my daughter's Wanker shirt and she laughed. I don't drink, but she offered me one, just want to tell you that....nice to see that really one person makes a difference..."

Indeed, it is nice to see that one person makes a difference, and that Wavelength shirts are helping foster some positive communication. Thanks for the note, Michelle - and if you receive any more complimentary drink offers in the future, feel free to pass them our way!

Fiscal 2005 was kinda tough for Wavelength...

...at least from a profit/loss perspective. The business lost a significant amount of money, most of which came in the form of an "inventory write-down." Let me explain.

Wavelength Clothing hit the web in June 2005, unveiling nine t-shirt designs and marketing them with Google's AdWords program (which I've described in a much-earlier post to this blog). As sales receipts came in, it quickly became clear that only 4 of the 9 designs were decent sellers. With impressive regularity, shoppers ignored the other 5 designs nearly completely...to this day, I've only sold one or two shirts with the So Money design, and the same is true for each of the designs in the WackWear collection, with the exception of W is for Wack.

Whether I should have seen this coming is the topic of another discussion. My point here is that - because no one wanted to buy them, even at severely discounted prices - the shirts with the unpopular designs were worth nothing. They had no cash value. And as a result, the money spent on them could be written off as a loss.

This loss combined with 2005's other expenses to total significantly more than the sales revenues brought in by the business during the year. The difference between total expenses and total sales is the amount I, as sole proprietor of Wavelength, was able to declare as a "business income or (loss)" on my tax return. In the end, the IRS had to cut me a substantial refund check.

Now, I don't mind paying taxes - in fact, I try to look at paying taxes as a duty and an honor, and I also think I get a pretty good return on the money I send to Uncle Sam. But this year I'm going to indulge myself and enjoy knowing that I took a little loot back out of W's war chest.

I had no idea how close the FBI came...

...to potentially preventing the 9/11 attacks. Here's an excerpt from The New York Times that captures some incredible details from the Zacarias Moussaoui trial. It's like the chance to avert 9/11 evaporated in a situation straight out of Office Space hell:

A Minnesota F.B.I. agent, Harry M. Samit, warned in a memorandum that Mr. Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamic extremist whose study of how to fly a Boeing 747-400 seemed to be part of a sinister plot...

Gripping testimony came from Mr. Samit, who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16 [2001] and quickly became convinced that he was a terrorist who knew about an imminent hijacking plot. Mr. Samit said that he sent about 70 warning messages about Mr. Moussaoui, but that they produced no results.

The agent said he was puzzled at the reluctance of Michael Maltbie, a supervisor with the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at bureau headquarters, to seek a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings from a special intelligence court.

Mr. Samit seemed unable to satisfy Mr. Maltbie's demand that he provide a tangible link between Mr. Moussaoui and a foreign power, a requirement for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. He thought he had sufficient evidence from two French intelligence reports showing Mr. Moussaoui had recruited someone to fight in Chechnya for an Islamist group allied with Mr. bin Laden.

But on Aug. 24, 2001, a frustrated Mr. Samit sent an e-mail message to Charles Frahm, a friend and, at the time, an F.B.I. liaison to the C.I.A., asking for information to help make his case. "We're trying to close the wiggle room for F.B.I. headquarters to claim there is no connection to a foreign power," he wrote.

Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers asserted that Mr. Maltbie undermined the effort to obtain a search warrant by deleting some details from Mr. Samit's requests. Mr. Samit said Mr. Maltbie told him he was reluctant to press for a warrant because it would be risky for his career and "he was not about to let that happen to him."

Growth in the Corporate Suite...

...is the title The Wall Street Journal gave a recent news item that spoke to an important trend in income distribution across the United States. Here's an excerpt, along with a related chart with 1997 data from The Economist:

The economy is certainly doing well - for the corporate sector...Since the last business cycle peak - the first quarter of 2001 - "the share of GDI going to corporate profits has risen by 3.9 percentage points, while the share going to labor compensation has fallen by 1.4 percentage points."

Overall, the economy grew at a 1.7% pace in the fourth quarter [2005], but analysts estimate it picked up sharply in the first quarter to around a 5% growth rate. Whether this will translate to stronger growth in wages and benefits as the economic cycle continues is another story... "This strong productivity growth provides the potential to generate broad-based increases in American living standards, but, so far corporate profits have been the only clear winner."

This means that - unless your income is tied closely to corporate profits - the economic expansion is leaving you behind. It's precisely what should happen in a Republican era...tax burdens on big-money earners are lightened, services for low-earners are scaled back, and the scales do some tippin'.

Is the immigration debate a distraction...

...conjured up to sow contention among the American public, just as we seem to be reaching a consensus against the war in Iraq and against corruption in Washington, D.C.? I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but immigration reform sure seems hot and divisive, and sure has managed to ply its way into the national spotlight pretty quickly- just like the gay marriage debate did in 2004. Do our leaders and their strategists actually play us like that? Argh. I think I almost have to believe that they don't.

Anyway, from day one, our country's invasion of Iraq has struck me as clearly wrong, as unnecessary violence always will. The issue of immigration, however, is much more complex. I'm pretty sure that felonizing undocumented migrants is not the answer, but I'm not sure what is.

I do know that the free-markets-friendly finance major in me is very uncomfortable with the notion of a guest worker program. If an employer wants to fill an undesirable job, the employer should boost the job's pay until the job is no longer undesirable - end of story. A market in which some employers can skirt this fundamental rule of economics is not a free market at all.

ADDENDUM: I heard Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, discussing immigration reform on NPR this morning. He pointed out that, if U.S. employers stopped hiring "illegal" immigrants, most of these immigrants would no longer have a motive for sneaking in. This is the key to the whole issue, amigos. It means that one group of Americans, by simply deciding to follow the law, could pretty much solve the problem of illegal immigration on their own.

As 500,000 people rallied in LosAng...

...and thousands more did around the nation, including 300,000 in Chicago, I think the rest of us got an update on how the hispanic community feels about House Republicans' immigration reform plans. Here are a couple excerpts from a smart analysis in The New York Times:

"It's an entirely predictable example of the law of unintended consequences," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who helped organize the Chicago rally and who said he was shocked by the size of the turnout. "The Republican party made a decision to use illegal immigration as the wedge issue of 2006, and the Mexican community was profoundly offended."

...others, noting that foreign-born Latinos voted for President Bush in 2004 at a 40 percent greater rate than Latinos born in the United States, said that by pursuing the proposed legislation, Republican leaders might have squandered the party's inroads with an emerging bloc of voters and pushed them into the Democratic camp.

...The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that of more than 11 million illegal immigrants, 78 percent are from Mexico or other Latin American countries. Many have children and other relatives who are United States citizens. Under the House measure, family members of illegal immigrants — as well as clergy members, social workers and lawyers — would risk up to five years in prison if they helped an illegal immigrant remain in the United States.

Republicans: You are being ripped off

...just like the rest of us are, and this Bill Moyers article sums it all up. Moyers cites dollar values, names names, and takes you inside the culture of corruption that has tightened its grip on Washington since Bush was first "elected" in 2000.

You might call it The Dirty Details. Or It Really Is As Bad As You Think. Or This Is How They Screw Us. Moyers strikes a more optimistic tone: he calls the article Saving Democracy. Be warned, it will turn your stomach, whether you are Democrat or Republican. To be sure, both parties are knee-deep in funny money.

To read the article, take a deep breath and click here. If you want the lighter, fact-free version, see the post below.

How awesome is this...

...which I just received via email:

DON'T IMPEACH; IMPALE
By Will Durst, AlterNet
Posted on March 15, 2006, Printed on March 16, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/33598/

I don't know about you guys, but I am so sick and tired of these lying,
thieving, holier-than-thou, right-wing, cruel, crude, rude, gauche,
coarse, crass, cocky, corrupt, dishonest, debauched, degenerate,
dissolute, swaggering, lawyer shooting, bullhorn shouting,
infrastructure destroying, hysterical, history defying, finger-
pointing, puppy stomping, roommate appointing, pretzel choking,
collateral damaging, aspersion casting, wedding party bombing, clear
cutting, torturing, jobs outsourcing, torture outsourcing, "so-called"
compassionate-conservative, women's rights eradicating, Medicare
cutting, uncouth, spiteful, boorish, vengeful, noxious, homophobic,
xenophobic, xylophonic, racist, sexist, ageist, fascist, cashist,
audaciously stupid, brazenly selfish, lethally ignorant, journalist
purchasing, genocide ignoring, corporation kissing, poverty inducing...

the gospel continueth HERE

I've heard about boys falling behind girls...

...in U.S. education: the main crux of that argument is that more girls and fewer boys are attending American colleges and universities, which might be a legitimate problem. But when it comes to the battle of the sexes among the world's grown-ups, I think the gents' side is still doing pretty well. Assorted stats from an item in The Independent, a UK paper:

As of Wednesday, March 8, 2006...

• 1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women.
• 21% of the world's managers are female.
• 9% of judges, 10% of company directors and 10% of top police officers in the UK are women.
• 85 million girls worldwide are unable to attend school, compared with 45 million boys. In Chad, just 4% of girls go to school.
• 700,000,000 women are without adequate food, water, sanitation, health care or education (compared with 400,000,000 men).
• 67% of all illiterate adults are women.
• In the US, 35% of lawyers are women but just 5% are partners in law firms.
• 12 is the number of world leaders who are women (out of 191 members of the United Nations).
• Men directed 9 out of every 10 films made in 2004.

If you didn't see him during Bush vs. Kerry '04...

...Jimmy the Cab Driver (actor Donal Logue) did an important public service by explaining why he supported Bush. Check out my favorite, Episode 6: Halliburton, and the rest...they're scattered in the left column of this page from MoveOn. Somehow even more glorious, nearly two years later.

Here's a gem from Dan Savage...

...who has written a delighfully sassy sex advice column in my favorite newspaper, The Onion, for years. Savage is proudly and loudly gay, and once dedicated a lot of energy to circulating a new meaning for Santorum, the surname of the huge homophobe senator from Pennsylvania. Looks like Dick Cheney's birdshot-related mishap has inspired Savage to focus on a new phrase-of-the-moment:

Confidential to everybody:
"Pearl necklace" is out.
"Cheney" is in.
Pass it on.

I love stencil art...

...talented people can do some compelling work in the medium, be it on the street or on a more formal canvas. Stenciling is fairly simple but often quite visually engaging - and when political symbolism enters the mix, stencils become a great example of a picture being worth a thousand words. Here's a striking design I came across on the Internet...I've misplaced the source, unfortunately, but I think the piece is interesting enough to share anyway:

I've mentioned Bob Filner before...

...he's the U.S. Representative for California's 51st District, which includes the southern chunk of the city of San Diego and stretches eastward along the US/Mexico border all the way to where California meets Arizona at the Colorado River. I just discovered Filner last year, and he is one of my favorite players in politics - one of the most persuasively progressive voices in the House, and the type of person whose background and positions strike me as embodying precisely what I want in a politician.

I've seen Filner speak on two occasions; he spoke intelligently, and with charisma, and I'm growing to like his writing, as well. Here's an excerpt from a recent editorial on health care for veterans he penned for The Nation:

A decade ago American veterans' healthcare system had become notorious for its deteriorating facilities and mediocre quality of care. It was no way to treat our veterans. But under President Clinton the VA system underwent a sea change. Where it had mainly offered inpatient care in often dirty, antiquated hospitals, the VA system was rebuilt to focus on outpatient care in modern clinics built in locations readily accessible to veterans. Equally important, eligibility requirements were changed so that every veteran could enroll. The number of patients doubled to nearly 5 million a year, and the quality of care rose with it.

By 2003 a study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that veterans' healthcare, once ridiculed by conservatives as a travesty of "socialized medicine," had come so far that it equaled or surpassed the quality of even the most expensive private healthcare systems in America. VA healthcare had transformed into a promising model for a full-scale public healthcare system.

In the full article, Filner goes on to note that, in contrast with Clinton's budgets, President Bush's spending plans have stopped well short of fully funding the VA system, which sure seems like a strange way to "support the troops," and could be related to the VA's success as a publicly financed and managed healthcare program. Filner also endorses a recently introduced bill that would ensure the VA system is adequately funded from year to year.