Health Care Bill

So what's really in this health care bill?

The uninsured and self-employed would be able to purchase insurance through state-based exchanges with subsidies available to individuals and families with income between the 133 percent and 400 percent of poverty level. People receiving subsidies cannot be eligible for Medicare, Medicaid and cannot be covered by an employer. Eligible buyers receive premium credits and there is a cap for how much they have to contribute to their premiums on a sliding scale. This will close the so-called “gap” between people who are welfare-eligible and those who have health coverage.

Separate exchanges would be created for small businesses to purchase coverage -- effective 2014. Personally, I would like to have seen huge tax breaks for small businesses as well.

Funding available to states to establish exchanges within one year of enactment and until January 1, 2015.

Closes the Medicare prescription drug "donut hole" by 2020. Seniors who hit the donut hole by 2010 will receive a $250 rebate. In other words, seniors will find it easier to get their prescription drugs.

Beginning in 2011, seniors in the gap will receive a 50 percent discount on brand name drugs.

Expands Medicaid to include 133 percent of federal poverty level which is $29,327 for a family of four.

Requires states to expand Medicaid to include childless adults starting in 2014.

Federal Government pays 100 percent of costs for covering newly eligible individuals through 2016.

Illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid. Illegal immigrants will not be allowed to buy health insurance in the exchanges -- even if they pay completely with their own money.

Six months after enactment, insurance companies could no longer denying children coverage based on a preexisting condition.

Insurance companies must allow children to stay on their parent's insurance plans until age 26

The bill segregates private insurance premium funds from taxpayer funds. Individuals would have to pay for abortion coverage by making two separate payments, private funds would have to be kept in a separate account from federal and taxpayer funds.

No health care plan would be required to offer abortion coverage. States could pass legislation choosing to opt out of offering abortion coverage through the exchange.

A quick reminder to my conservative friends on both sides of the aisle... ABORTION IS LEGAL!

In 2014, everyone must purchase health insurance or face a $695 annual fine. There are some exceptions for low-income people.

Employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance or pay a fine of $2000 per worker each year if any worker receives federal subsidies to purchase health insurance. Fines applied to entire number of employees minus some allowances. This means that companies like Wal*Mart will have to start providing health care or face a hefty fine.

So there you go. There it is. I didn't include information on paying for this, because, as I stated before, cost should not be the issue.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

An Act of Terrorism

Yesterday a group of religious extremists in Michigan were arrested for conspiracy. They had planned to kill a police officer and then attack his funeral with RPG's and IED's.

This is a terrorist attack, right?

You'd think. Except the religious nuts in question this time aren't Muslim… they are "Christian". (I use the quotes because the conspiracy and their beliefs don't strike me as being particularly Christ-like.) Also, their religious affiliation wasn't mentioned in the indictment.

I have to wonder… is this BECAUSE they are Christians? Or claim Christianity, at any rate? If a Muslim extremist group commits an act of terrorism, aren't they identified as a Muslim extremist group and accused of terrorism? Then why aren't these guys?

They can't even claim that they didn't KNOW the religious affiliation of the group. Take a look at their website http://hutaree.com/. I mean, right at the top of the page is John 15:13 (Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends), about halfway down on the right is group's logo, CCR, and under that is what the acronym stands for (Colonial Christian Republic) and their insignia is the CROSS. You know, guys, when Jesus said that his followers had to take up the cross, I think that this ISN'T what he had in mind.

Also, when you look at the indictment http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/03/29/stone.pdf, they are named as being members of the organization "CCR" without any explanation as to what the acronym stands for. Creedance Clearwater Revival? Crazy Creeps Reorganized? Granted, I haven't seen a lot of indictments in my time, but when they contain an acronym like this, don't they usually follow it with a parenthetical explanation of what it stands for?

I think that what we're seeing here is an example of what has come to be called "soft racism". My favorite explanation of this was on The Daily Show several years ago. Jon Stewart was presenting a piece on corporate criminals, who are almost uniformly white. He was talking the piece over with the show's "senior black correspondent, Larry Wilmore (meaning he was the only black correspondent on the show at that time), and Stewart said "So what you're saying is that the face of American crime is now white?" And Wilmore, with a smile said "No, not really. But it's good to know that you think that it used to be black."

It also rather forcibly reminds me of the Oklahoma City bombing fifteen years ago. Very little is made of the fact that this terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, was a blond haired, blue-eyed white boy.

This is a terrorist act. WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE NOT BEING INDICTED AS TERRORISTS?

I think that part of the problem lies in the fact that we are reticent to define exactly WHAT constitutes terrorism. The reason for this, I believe, is that if we DO define terrorism as something other than "Something that we don't like that brown people do", then we'll have to start prosecuting the war on terror here. Home grown, all-American groups like the KKK will have to start being prosecuted as terrorists.

To my brothers and sisters in Michigan… please DEMAND that your government prosecute these people as terrorists. Don't be blinded by the fact that they claim the same religion as you.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

A Brief History Lesson

Let me say something real quickly about the non-conservative people who currently call themselves conservative, and they way that they argue. They believe that if they can shout loudly enough and long enough to make everyone else stop arguing with them, then they win the argument. If you define victory in an argument as being the last one talking, then they're right. If you define it by proving your point (which is really the objective of an argument) then they're wrong.

Part of my day job is to ask customers if they would like to include postage stamps with their order. And let me tell you… I am grievously tired of hearing pea-brains right now who feel the necessity of telling me how they "no longer support our government" when I can't really say anything back. I mean eight years of a guy who drove us deeper into debt than any man in the oval office before and pissed all over the Constitution was fine… but you want to give me HEALTH CARE? Fuck you, I'm not playing no more. Morons.

Anyway, I had another of these morons through my line today, and couldn't completely hold my tongue. So I quoted Ben Franklin to him. "A democracy deserves the government that it gets." And trust me, I had to keep this firmly in mind through the Bush years. It was tough for me to accept that we basically allowed our democratic process to be highjacked, but we did. So a co-worker who fancies himself conservative (he's not) came up behind me and shouted "IT'S A GOOD THING THAT WE LIVE IN A REPUBLIC THEN, ISN'T?" Now I know… KNOW in my heart that having intellectual discourse with this guy is a little like trying to talk a rabid pit bull out of biting you, but I said "Technically what we have in America is a democratic republic." He shouted back (because remember - when you don't have facts, volume is the next best thing) "THAT'S A REDUNDANCY, MY FRIEND!" So I stopped. Not the place or the time, and I realized that, even if he didn't.

So I thought the next best thing to trying to replace the rhetorical 8-track perpetually running in his head with facts was to put those facts here for the record.

First off, if I'm speaking a redundancy, then democracy and a republic are the same thing, which they aren't.

Second off, I wonder if there's any way to stop people like this who are not my friend and never will be from calling me their friend? Or worse… another sobriquet that he likes to apply to people… brother. Granted, he has more in common with the other two sons of my parents than I do, but that's beside the point.

Finally… and perhaps most importantly… is this guy trying tell me that Benjamin Franklin… one of the people who CREATED our government is wrong about what he was creating? Man. That statement takes not just stupid, but a very special variety of stupid.

Our founders had the right idea. Republic was good, but it didn't work. Democracy was also good… also didn't work. So they created a fusion of the two systems.

Republic is what they had in ancient Rome that eventually led to empire. In a republic, the people are represented in government. They do not have a direct voice. The question is… how are those representatives appointed? In Rome, the representatives… called Senators… were appointed by the pro-council, or procurator. The last procurator (and first emperor) of Rome, Julius Caesar, figured it out. If HE appoints the senators, then they are all loyal to him. And he can get them to make him emperor. Of course, he was eventually assassinated by his senators, but that's a different kettle of fish, and by then it was too late. The empire was established, and the emperors of Rome were called the Caesars, after him.

In a pure democracy, the people make all of the decisions. The closest thing that we have to a pure democracy in America is California, where the decision making process is so slowed by the process that it effectively doesn't work at all.

So what the founders set up was a process by which our decisions are made by representatives, who are guided by a Constitution and elected by the people. A democratic republic.

I also saw a book come through my line today called "A Patriot's History of America". I read the first paragraph of the back of the book which said something like "Is America a land that was established by Columbus coming here and killing all the Indians and stealing their lands, and then went straight into enforced slavery and Jim Crow…"

The answer, of course, is no. But the questions are amazingly over-simplified. I think that when we ignore the dark parts of our history, we are not only being unpatriotic, but also intellectually dishonest. And I think that we do this at our peril. In point of fact, Columbus dealt fairly with the Indians. The massacres of both Indians and whites didn't really start until the early 1800's. And what was the impetus for this? The whites breaking treaties with the Indians. For instance, by treaty, the Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux Indians, was promised to them as long as the sun shone and the grass grew. Or, as it turned out, until gold was discovered in the Black Hills. Then the cavalry was sent in to force the Sioux off of this land.

All I can say to people like this is get your head out of your ass and learn your history. Read "Conscience of a Conservative" by Barry Goldwater, who was called "Mr. Conservative" by his peers. He is vilified by modern liberals for opposing the federal civil rights law. In fact, he spearheaded amazingly progressive civil rights legislation in his state, Arizona. He simply didn't feel that the federal government had the right to impose civil rights laws on the states. I'm not saying that he was right or wrong, simply that that's the way that it was.

Learn your history, people. Being the loudest person in the room doesn't make you right… it simply makes you wrong WITH VOLUME.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Health Care FINALLY Part 1

All right. Now that health care has finally passed (state lawsuits notwithstanding), I want to take a look at the arguments against health care and what's actually IN the bill. I won't be looking at the costs of the bill, as I'll explain in the next paragraph. The CBO says that it'll reduce the deficit, the republicans argue that's wrong, I don't know and really don't care. BECAUSE:

ARGUMENT 1: IT'LL COST TOO MUCH.

This should not be about money. We call ourselves a Christian country. If we're going to do that, then we need NEED to behave as Christians IE doing our best to follow the teachings of Christ. And Christ spoke out uniformly against the gathering of wealth and uniformly for helping the poor. These are the two most common threads in his teachings. "To follow me, sell all that you have and give the money to the poor." "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go through the gates of heaven." "Store up not treasure on Earth where thieves steal and moths corrupt." "That which you do unto the least of these, my brothers, you do also unto me." See what I'm saying?

I was in a cigar room in Houston, TX last weekend and found myself in conversation with a group of very intelligent, very thoughtful people. One of these identified himself by the same non-existent affiliation that I hold: liberal republican. He also made the same lamentation that I have heard from many republicans in this day and age; that he felt abandoned by his party. Like Bob Barr, he didn't leave the republican party, the republican party left him. One thing that he said struck a resonant chord with me. He was a little older than me, fifteen years or so, and he commented that when he was a kid if there was someone in his community who needed help, the community simply HELPED them. They didn't ask how much it would cost, they just did it. I remember, from my own childhood in a small town, my grandmother and others bringing food baskets to a neighbor who had lost his job. And we were pretty poor. Not living on handouts ourselves or anything, but just getting by.

So to me, the cost argument is completely irrelevant. Also, the city of San Francisco HAS a public health care option (much more than our federal bill offers) and they are one of the few cities in California to actually REDUCE their deficit over the last few years.

ARGUMENT 2: IT'LL PUT THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY OUT OF BUSINESS

Well, let me answer that in two parts. The first part is "no it won't" and the second part is "so what if it did?"

I say "no it won't" because part of the bill creates insurance pools that Americans can buy insurance from. From PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES.

The second part of my argument derives from the fact that I view private insurance companies as being unethical and borderline criminal. Insurance companies started off like car insurance. I pay premiums, if I get sick you pay the bills. The mega-profits that private insurance has seen over the last twenty years or so have come from DENIAL of coverage. Seventy percent of your insurance premiums are converted directly to profit, with about thirty percent actually going to coverage. That sucks. Hopefully the requirement in this bill that sixty percent of premiums go to care and forty percent to profits will honest the industry up a little, although I really have no doubt that they'll find some way around it.

ARGUMENT 3: POLLS SHOW THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICAN PEOPLE OPPOSE HEALTH CARE.

First off, bullshit. The largest numbers that I have seen, on polls sponsored by F-word News is 50%. That's not a vast majority, that's half.

Also, I realize that republicans want to pretend that the Bush years never happened, but they did. And to refresh your memory, polls show that the VAST MAJORITY of the American people (seventy to eighty percent) opposed the war in Iraq. That neither stopped nor slowed the advance to war.

ARGUMENT 4: IT WILL INCREASE THE DEFICIT

I won't belabor this point, I've made it before, but where were you deficit hawks between 2000 and 2008 when our deficit went from five trillion to ten trillion dollars, largely to support the mess in Iraq?

Okay, either later today or early next week I'll post a rundown of what is ACTUALLY in the bill (no death panels), depending on time.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Protecting Children

I will talk about the health care bill, but at a later time. I want to have time to do my research as I write, so I'll probably do it on Thursday or Friday.

Let me start by saying that religious billboards bug me. When you can reduce your God to the same equation as Pepsi or Coke, there's a problem with your religion. But I seem to see them EVERYWHERE since I moved to the Midwest. The one that bugs me the most, probably, is the one that simply says JESUS! I'd like to buy billboard space right next to this one that says SO?!

Also, despite the fact that I am a Christian, I reject the idea of the judgment. I won't outline my arguments against it at this time. If anyone is interested, drop a comment and I'll put it in a future entry. I think that it is a pretty and logical little argument. Briefly, I think that it is incompatible with the idea of an all-knowing and all-loving God.

Having said that...

I saw a billboard (actually two billboards, one atop the other) as I was driving home from Texas the other day that really BUGGED me. It said, briefly, “When you stand in judgment before God, what will you say when he asks if you protected unborn children?”

First problem: the unborn are, by definition, not children. They are variously zygotes, fetuses, embryos, etc. So let's get our terminology right, shall we?

Also, why does God care about the unborn, and not children themselves. Does God's concern only go from conception to birth (or abortion or miscarriage, or whatever)? I mean, does God love you until you're born and then stop?

I guess that my point is this... if this billboard were put up by someone who truly understands what Christ commanded us to do, it would say “What will you say when he asks if you protected CHILDREN?” And I've gotta tell you, my conservative Christian brothers and sisters, you are doing a really SHITTY JOB of protecting children. You support George W. Bush, who put a sixteen year old CHILD to death in Texas. You oppose health coverage for poor children. You oppose school lunch programs. A “Christian” school somewhere in the Midwest or Texas recently kicked two kids out of school because their mommy and her lover are gay. HOW DOES ANY OF THAT QUALIFY AS PROTECTING CHILDREN YOU SIMPLE, IRRITATING, GREEDY, MONOMANIACAL BASTARDS?!

Er... um... sorry. Let my emotions get the best of me for a minute there. But...for GOD'S sake (literally)... please THINK about these issues. Don't walk around parroting “abortion is bad, abortion is bad” until you actually take some steps to fix the problems that we are not fixing among CHILDREN. Not fetuses, or zygotes or embryos. Living, breathing, playing, starving, suffering CHILDREN.

Any idiot stupid enough to believe that abortion is the biggest problem facing our children is an idiot who proves that abortion CAN be a good thing... after all, it should have been done to THEM. These are people who live in the over-privileged and under-thinking USA. This is a world where a child dies of hunger every five seconds. A CHILD. EVERY FIVE SECONDS. No, it doesn't happen in America. The only place in America where we have to even be confronted with another difficult concept for us (homelessness) is in the cities, and we can pretty much ignore them, right? But I think that the anti-abortion crowd might pick its fights on protecting children a little more carefully if they had to drive or walk down the street and see children starving at the streetside. One child. Every five seconds. So to whomever spent the hundreds or thousands of dollars to put those pointless billboards up, don't you think that God would be better pleased with you if you ever do have to face him in judgment if you had spent that money trying to figure out a way to reduce or eliminate the number of children dying from sheer poverty in this world?

Now. Here is where I have to take a breath when I start getting all het up about these types of things. Here is where, as a Christian, I have to put my money where my mouth is, and help me Lord, for it is difficult.

I keep a phrase forefront in my mind. It has caused many a Christian friend to stomp off in a huff when I pose this question to them. It is a question that any thinking Christian struggles with every day, every conscious moment.

Do all things NOT serve the glory of God?

The answer, to any Christian is, of course all things serve the glory of God. We may not know why or how, but they do. Abortion serves the glory of God, as do your (in my opinion) misguided attempts to stop it. The holocaust served the glory of God, although I have no idea how. Flowers and child pornography and Bart Ehrman and prison rape and joyful singing and Americans putting their money ahead of their fellow Americans... ALL of these things, good and bad, serve the glory of God.

That is why I have to take a breath, my conservative Christian brothers and sisters. Because what you do serves the glory of God just as Roe vs. Wade does.

Just be damned if I know how.

Peace.

Rev. Randal

Don't Hate Him Because He's Beautiful

If you're going to attack president Obama, fine. Just attack him on what he is and is not doing, please. Don't just make shit up and blame it on him. I heard from someone again today blaming the current deficit mess on the President. HE DIDN'T MAKE THE MESS, HE SIMPLY INHERITED IT, OKAY?

After the eight years of the Bush administration, I'm the last one to tell people that they have no right to criticize the president. I am not as happy with President Obama as I had hoped to be. And I am freely criticizing the president for those things that I don't like. But if you find yourself resorting to death panels, or the deficit, or his being born in Kenya or calling him a socialist, then recognize that your argument is weak, and it won't stand.

Let me give you a for instance.

I spent the years from 2000 until... well, it'll probably never stop frankly, criticizing the “presidency” of George W. Bush. When someone resorted to an ad hominem attack on him (he's stupid, he's a puppet, whatever) I would defend him against that, because those are not only in my opinion wrong, but they are also weak arguments. So what DO I criticize him on?

1)Irregularities in the 2000 presidential election. I'm not going to go over them again here (I hear you sigh with relief) but they are there and they are numerous. And instead of doing the honorable thing and insisting that all of these irregularities be ironed out before took office, he sued to stop people from examining the irregularities.
2)Wasting our time, our money and the lives of our young men and women in a war that did nothing to protect America. For my money, this is his biggest crime.
3)Using imagery from the 9/11 attacks in his re-election campaign in 2004. Despite his promise to capture and punish the people who committed the crime, he discovered that these men were more important to him as boogeymen. 9/11 wasn't a victory for George W. Bush, and his using the images from the attack to play on people's emotions for re-election was reprehensible to me.
4)Suspending the rights of people arrested during this time. And this is something that Obama administration is not overturning fast enough to suit me. When people would “defend” him by reminding us that Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the civil war, I remind THEM that the Constitution actually ALLOWS the president to suspend this right in two instances: insurrection and invasion. Mr. Bush faced neither of these. President Lincoln faced insurrection.

See how that works?

Yes, it takes time and brainpower to figure these things out. Yes, it would just be easier to say that GWB was an idiotic puppet who was elected because of his name instead of any of his qualities, but it wouldn't be intellectually honest.

Even, honest to God, if the reason that you oppose president Obama is his race... just own that. Have the sheer, unadulterated balls to say that you don't like him because he's black. Personally, I think that's shallow and fatuous, but at least it's intellectually honest.

Let's start by explaining the problems with these arguments when it comes to logical argument. There are several logical flaws that render an argument invalid, and the republicans seem determined to use every one of them.

STRAW MAN: This is where, when you can't argue based on the facts, you build another argument that has nothing to DO with the facts and demolish it. So, for instance, “Obama shouldn't even be president because he was born in Kenya.” As long as we can pay attention that that scarecrow, to that straw man, then the real facts of what he's doing in office can just go to the side.

ARGUMENT FROM AUTHORITY: Someone who should know told me, so it must be true. For instance, “I don't know what's in the Obama health care bill, but John Boehner says it's a bad bill, and he should know, so I'm against it.”

I can't remember the other logical flaws right now. I'll add them later with examples if I remember.

One last note. For the record. I know that modern republicans won't let what they “know” be swayed by little things like facts or information. But... for the record. According to the US Department of the treasury, in 2000 when Mr. Bush wasn't elected president, the deficit was about 5 and a half trillion dollars. In 2001, the year that he assumed office, it had gone up to about 5.8 trillion. In 2008, the year the President Obama was elected, the deficit was around 10 trillion. In other words, it almost doubled. In President Obama's first year in office, 2009, it increased by another trillion and a half. But honest to God, did anyone expect that somehow in his first year in office the President would manage to to stop and reverse that particular train?

Peace.

Rev Randal

The End of Health Care Nonsense?

I heard it again today. "NOBODY in America wants universal health care."

Well, I know that's bullshit, because I'M somebody in America and I want universal health care. As a matter of fact, most people that I've spoken to, whether they self-identify as liberal or conservative, would like to see all Americans receive adequate health care, even if it takes a government mandate to do it.

So what's the problem?

To begin with, the two main political parties in America are corrupted by corporate money. BOTH of them are beholden to the insurance industry for at least part of their election. Bought and paid for. And who REALLY doesn't want a public health care option? Big insurance. The CEO of Aetna makes in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars per year, give or take a million. The CEO of Blue Cross made a much more… um… "reasonable"… 4 million, which included a bonus of more than 3 million dollars. Bear in mind as you read those figures that these earnings come from denying YOU medical care, and making sure that YOUR illnesses are not cured, merely treated so that they can go on vacuuming money out of you forever. I ask again… as I asked in an earlier post… am I the ONLY one in this country who's pissed off about this? REALLY? We pay our teachers somewhere between 40 and 50 THOUSAND dollars per year (in other words, I, working at my day job riding a cash register, make MORE on average than a TEACHER) and we're okay with that, while these guys make MILLIONS denying us the care that our doctors want us to have.

Another problem is fear. Especially among older Americans (who, I will remind you, comprise a much larger voter block than younger Americans). Even into my generation, we had a fear of "socialism" pounded into us. It still astounds me when I talk to people who think that socialism is the opposite of democracy, when it is, in fact, the opposite of capitalism. And I have no problem with making money. Heck, if my books get publishd and sell millions of copies each you BET that I'll enjoy that money. But I also don't have a problem with the fact that a lot of it, through charities and taxes to support government programs, will go to help those less fortunate than me. But as long as our corporate-funded elected officials can keep you afraid of death panels, and socialism, and whatever else, that you will continue funneling money to their rich buddies. My mom, a wonderful and intelligent woman who struggles to pay for her prescriptions, is afraid that her medical benefits will be slashed and her taxes will go up… neither of which would happen under "Obamacare". And by the way… Obamacare includes NO DEATH PANELS. I say again that there is NO SUCH THING AS DEATH PANELS. Would they make decisions over coverage, including when it should stop? Sure they will. THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. The difference is, right now it's insurance companies who make these decisions.

I applaud president Obama and the democrats for finally taking a tough stance on this. It seems like the president spent his first year in office genuinely trying to work with republicans, but has finally realized that no matter what he does, the republicans are going to try to block it.

Below is a video that I found that shows the republicans in congress at work.



Peace.

Rev. Randal

Another E-mail Forward

I received this e-mail forward recently, and wanted to address it.

One thing to bear in mind as you're reading this is that the person who forwarded it to me once referred to middle easterners as “sand niggers” in conversation with me, so I think that I see the general drift here... white people okay, non-white people not okay.

So i'll start with the text of the e-mail:

A Real Eye Opener

WHY is the USA BANKRUPT?

Informative, and mind boggling!

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Boy, was I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us.

I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts...

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.

Verify at: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.HTML

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.

Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.CNN.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.

Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSC%20RI%20PTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt..01.HTML

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries.. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the Southern border.

Verify at: Homeland Security Report: (actual link is http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt..01.HTML%3E)

12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.'

Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/PDF/deportation.PDF

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14.. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States .'

Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND IF YOU'RE LIKE ME HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00 WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.

Are we THAT stupid? YES, FOR LETTING THOSE IN THE U.S.CONGRESS GET AWAY WITH LETTING THIS HAPPEN YEAR AFTER YEAR!!!!!

If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the United States AND PLEASE REMEMBER IT AT THE NEXT ELECTIONS!!!

End of e-mail.

Okay, let me start with the verification links. Most of them do not work. I have discovered several formatting errors with them (extra spaces, too many dots, etc.,) and have tried to fix them as much as possible. But I STILL cannot get most of them to work, and I received the e-mail a week ago.

So let's look at the links that DO work. The first one is from an outfit called FAIR (The Federation for American Immigration Reform), which states in its "about us" section " FAIR advocates a temporary moratorium on all immigration except spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and a limited number of refugees." Yeah. I wish that my mom's native ancestors had put a "temporary moratorium" on immigrants - we wouldn't be having this conversation now. Not really, but you get my point. Anyone living here who doesn’t have some Mexican or native blood in them is here, one way or the other, through the result of illegal possession of land because the all land in America was taken BY FORCE from the Mexicans or the native people. At any rate, this is clearly a website biased against immigrants.

The next two links are to the Center for Immigration studies, whose website maintains " The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker." Right. What else can we blame on immigrants? I'm sure that American corporations have had no hand in the destruction of our environment and low wages. So, again, clearly a biased website.

The next nine links do not work. And the ninth one, to the National Policy Institute, has to be kind of a joke anyway. The NPI's line seems to be "We're not anti anyone else, we're just pro-white". The Klan uses the same line. Any "data" coming from this place would be highly questionable.

The idea of the next link being used as actual informative data would be funny if it weren't so scary. It comes from www.rense.com, the website of general nutball Jeff Rense. This is a guy who celebrates the release of holocaust-deniers from prison and says things like the Chilean and Japanese earthquakes recently were caused by a US "earthquake weapon". The specific blog entry cited here contains lines like these: "Those who follow the Koran expect to kill Jewish and Christian nations. The Koran states it emphatically." and " If all 535 candidates for Congress were Muslims, and became U.S. senators and House members-- they would dismantle our Constitution in a heartbeat and install Sharia Law." It also refers to a "movie" written by Rod Serling called "To Serve Man" with Lloyd Bochner. This "movie" is actually a classic Twilight Zone episode.

The last link not only WORKS, but I would recommend a review of the articles on that page. They are thought-provoking and interesting, and include articles about sex crimes committed AGAINST illegal immigrants and many articles on the dangers of radical Islamic beliefs. Personally, I think that ANY radical religious beliefs, including radical Christianity are bad. Any time someone takes a religious text and says "Oh, that means it's okay to kill", it's a problem.

Is illegal immigration a problem in the US? Of course it is. But you must bear in mind that most of these "statistics" are citing ABUSES of programs that were set up to benefit Americans. No one intends for illegal immigrants to take advantage of our welfare systems. And as far as the sex crimes stats go, I wonder how many sex crimes are committed each year by American citizens and legal immigrants? Or by America's co-owner (with China), Saudi Arabia, which sends rape VICTIMS to jail and allows girls to burn to death in a school because they couldn't get their coverings on quickly enough?

But let's pretend, just for a second, that we fix these problems tomorrow. Fine. Done. Does that make the money that we're pissing away in Iraq okay? As near as I can tell, the Iraq war was instigated the benefit the rich, and for no other reason. And this, unlike the billions being wasted for illegal immigration CAN be controlled.

As far as the question of our elected officials wasting money goes, that IS something that every American should consider on EVERY election day. I spend some time every day pondering the question of how we can keep our elected officials from wasting money, and can't see an easy answer.

Just like with all e-mail forwards, all that I ask is that you consider the source and consider the larger problems that the "information" in this e-mail addresses.

Peace.

Rev. Randal