Seems like a straw man argument, no logic there.

Anyway, your original claim (as I recall) was that payments to illegals in California was not a factor in the tanking budget in that state.

California has roughly 2.7 million illegal residents, according to an April 2009 report from the authoritative Pew Hispanic Center, accounting for about 7% of the state’s population. State officials estimate that they add between $4 billion and $6 billion in costs, primarily for prisons and jails, schools and emergency rooms. Beyond those services, the illegal population adds to the overall cost of other parts of local government, from police and fire protection to highway maintenance and libraries.

Deficit may trigger anti-illegal immigration ballot measure

Do you not believe that? Aren’t ALL Men created equal? Do you really think that Jesus prefers Gringos?

Now this is just plain dumb, I refuse to spend time going there.

But I’ll tell ya, just for the hell of it, I prefer Mexican Americans to most gringos in my heavily demographic Mexican American county in my heavily demographic Mexican American state.

But I prefer them to be living here legally.

Adios for the nonce.

As you likely know, the way the system of confirmation has moved, a President will get his nominee barring said nominee being an out & out criminal.

During her confirmation hearings, Sotomayor attempted to undo her earlier public statements by repeating over and over and OVER that her driving force and pure inspiration is “fidelity to the law”.

This is a judge’s job, fidelity to US law*, rather boring, involving close analysis and tedious brainwork.

We’ll see whether or not fidelity to the law/US Constitution characterizes Sotomayor’s rulings and trumps an attitude towards the law reflected in some of her more off-the-cuff, earlier statements.

*Some justices on the SC, most notably Ruth Bader Ginsberg, seem to have a liking for European law.

“Taking the U.S. to them” is pretty much what we did back in 1846, and that is why San Antonio and L.A. and Albuquerque are better places to live than Juarez, and Mexico City.

The problem is, in the early 1900s we figured out that we could have an empire on the cheap. The British had gone around the world conquering places and then they got caught by what Colin Powel would later call “the Pottery Barn Rule”, (You break it, you buy it). They wound up having to actually RUN these places, and that got expensive.

What we did was a lot worse. We just put in the dicator dijiour and let him do whatever he wanted to the local people, economy, etc. as long as he kept our corporate interests safe. Thus the Latin Americans got all the bad side of American Imperialisim without any of the expensive hospitals, sewers, schools, or honest courts, or good government that California and Texas and Arizona got.

My 8th Grade history teacher said “It’s a pitty we had to set the border at the Rio Grande, Mexico starts to get really pretty just a few miles further south”. He was kidding of course (we had already annexed 1/3 of their country) but he had a point. The single reason Ciudad Juarez is a mess and El Paso isn’t is because we stopped our land grab at the Rio Grande.

Sadly, I don’t think the USA is going to be in the business of “exporting democracy” for the forseeable future though. It would be a lot easier (and cheaper) to “nation build” in Cuba or Mexico or Haiti than Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia.

Sure I can. Since the end of the Mexican Revolution (1920) until 2000 ONE Left wing political party, the PRI held power in Mexico. Think of what would happen to the US if for 80 uninterrupted years the Obama/Pelosi ran the country. That is pretty much what happened in Mexico. Actually though these guys were worse, it is the Mexican Oil Expropriation of 1938 that Ayn Rand used as a basis for the seizure of the San Sebastián Mines in Atlas Shrugged.

Decades of corrupt left wing government (look at Juarez’s anti-clericalism) followed by decades of corrupt and opressive right wing government, followed by a long and very very bloody civil war (which included the Pershing expidition that failed to catch Pancho Villa) followed by 80 years of corrupt single party left wing government. That’s pretty much why their economy is tanked and stays tankes.

Sorry but it’s not that Hispanics are “undermunchen” or anything. They simply had a really cr@ppy outcome to their last revolution, that’s all.

“Your claim that payouts to illegals in CA (education, medical etc.) hasn’t played a role in tanking the CA economy is patently false.”

No, I’m simply being logical and non-histerical. Take a look at what SNOPES says about just one example. http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/taxes.asp

Look, despite the ridiculious claims FAIR makes, there simply is not any good data on this. It’s all data and assumptions, and when you can make up your own assumptions, you can get any result you want. http://www.fortfreedom.org/b19.htm

What IS known is this. California is $40,000,000,000 in the red, and it has a WHOLE lot more to do with the fact that the State Legislature is run by idiots than it does people named Jose who pick strawberries. Why can I say that? Texas. Texas, (rumor has it) has hosted the occasional illegal alien from time to time, so if you were right and illegals are a big problem, Texas should be falling apart too, right? Well according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, between 1997 and 2006 Texas’ economy grew an average of 4.3% while California’s grew at a rate of 3.7%. But as of 2002 (to 2007), with tort reform in place, Texas’ annual economic growth jumped to 5%, while California’s remained essentially the same at 3.6%. In fact Texas created more jobs in 2008 than the rest of the states—combined.

California’s problem doesn’t have anything to do with Mexicans, it has everything to do with CALIFORNIANS.

“And you still can’t spell Tancredo.”

True, but then again I really don’t want to.

And could you please explain to me in a non-racist, non-xenophobic way what there is to disagree with in saying that “John McCain has declared illegals “children of God, too”"? Do you not believe that? Aren’t ALL Men created equal? Do you really think that Jesus prefers Gringos?

As for the immigration laws being stupid, have you ever READ them? Anyone who has will agree with me, they are stupid.

On issues of immigration Congress has carte blanche. They can do whatever they want, there are no Constitutional restrictions, there is no body of common law or legal precident they have to follow. This is why we got the Chinese Exclusion Act, amongst other things.

Because of that the immigration law is nothing more than what you can get 51 Senators to agree to. It changes with the political winds, and is often self-contradictory. There is no rhyme or reason to it, there are illogical exceptions carved out by special interests, conflicting policy goals that are included by different interest groups. There is no overall goal, nothing. It is all bureaucratic compromise stacked on political compromise. For a while there courts in one part of the USA were deporting aliens arrested for DWI because MADD was screaming at the local politicians that DWI was “a crime of violence”, but courts in other parts of the country did NOT consider DWI to be a “crime of violence”, so a DWI arrest would be treated under a different part of the immigration law, and you might not be deported for it. You could have two defendants commit the exact same crime in different states, and you wind up with one of them getting his Green Card yanked and he and his family are slammed on a plane back to Fubaristan, and the other one gets a fine and told not to do it again. Any way you slice it, that’s stupid.

I am stunned to say this, but I actually agree with EscapeVelocity about post 103 and 104. It would be a lot better for everyone concerned if Mexico had an honest and competent government. However (to quote Jayne Cobb) “If wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak”.