View from the Loft

8 incidents in 4 1/2 months

Please read Sara Robinson's post on the domestic terrorist acts that have occurred since Obama's inauguration: eight episodes in four and a half months:

For the record: This is not business as usual. True, there have always been occasional events, usually dismissed by the corporate media as "isolated incidents," the work of "lone wolf shooters" acting for reasons all their own. But you have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks. And the chattering classes are finally beginning to realize what those of us who've been faithfully watching the right wing for years have been telling them for a long while now: there's nothing isolated about any of this.

In fact, this is exactly how full-scale terrorism begins.

What she's most worried about is "where this kind of thing historically leads," and she lists five areas of special concern.

Just. Go. Read.

ADDENDUM: Also see her "The Far Right's First 100 Days: Shifting Into Overdrive."

"America's Family Prison"

Have you heard of this facility?

In May 2006, the Department of Homeland Security opened its first prison for immigrant families 30 miles north of Austin. It is the first family detention center in the country to be based on the penal model, though plans were quickly made to build more.

The T Don Hutto facility holds men, women (some pregnant), children, and infants, none of whom have a criminal past. Administered by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's largest for-profit corrections company, Hutto lacks proper licensing and medical facilities, and has been proven to traumatize families.

Until a settlement resulting from the action of the ACLU, all of the "residents" (actually inmates) wore uniforms, even the infants. But let me quote from the ACLU itself on the improvements that occurred only after a lawsuit was brought against CCA:

Conditions at Hutto have gradually and significantly improved as a result of the groundbreaking litigation. Children are no longer required to wear prison uniforms and are allowed much more time outdoors. Educational programming has expanded and guards have been instructed not to discipline children by threatening to separate them from their parents.

In addition to making those improvements permanent, the settlement also requires ICE to provide, among other things:

• allow children over the age of 12 to move freely about the facility
• provide a full-time, on-site pediatrician
• eliminate the count system which forces families to stay in their cells 12 hours a day
• install privacy curtains around toilets
• offer field trip opportunities to children
• supply more toys and age- and language-appropriate books
• improve the nutritional value of food

ICE must also allow regular legal orientation presentations by local immigrants’ rights organizations; allow family and friends to visit Hutto detainees seven days a week; and allow children to keep paper and pens in their rooms. ICE’s compliance with each of these reforms, as well as other conditions reforms, will be subject to external oversight to ensure their permanence. [my emphasis]

Remember, all of these improvements happened only because of litigation. CCA couldn't have cared less about providing such necessities had they not been threatened. I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that when a prison-operating corporation runs a facility, it tends to be, well, a prison.

The ACLU's suit was settled in August. But way back in February, there had been enough disgust and protest that the prison conducted a tour for news media to show that

Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”

Look at this and tell me what you think about this statement. Worse, let me quote from a report by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women & Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, "Locking Up Family Val­ues: The Detention of Immigrant Families":

In the medical wing, for example, pregnant detainees were X-rayed with no lead screen; detainees received dental work without anesthesia; pregnant women were not allowed milk and were shackled when taken outside the facility for checkups. Additionally, the report reveals that overheated water scalded children at times. To punish children deemed unruly, guards "would turn up the air conditioning so that the room became very cold" and would turn off hot water for bathing, the report states. But the worst offense was that so-called errant parents and their children lived under the threat of being separated.

There has been at least one documented case of a sexual assault of a detainee by a guard, and in an irony not really that surprising, undocumented workers have been proven to work for the CCA at Hutto. Apparently, Williamson County's only concerns revolve around possible liability issues stemming from these outrages.

Don't kid yourselves: with the rabid anti-immigrant sentiment today (anti- brown immigrants, of course), we'll see more of these "residential facilities," and they'll all be sold to us as ways to keep families together. In reality, they are just one more way to intimidate the brown hordes and play to the nativist, xenophobic elements of the far right. I am frightened and chilled to think that the United States of America has sunk so low.

You can help. Sign the petition. Visit the Texans United for Families action page. E-mail your elected officials and ask them to agitate for a more humane way to deal with families whose immigrant status is in limbo. And please tell everyone you know about this horrific reality in today's America.

The US: one big gated community

Or it would be if the GOP had its way. As it is, the bill Bush signed today authorizes only 700 miles of our borders to be fenced. Frankly, I'm surprised that they're planning to fence off the desert and not something, you know, a little more exclusive and upscale. Why leave all that expensive coastline property unprotected?

Moreover, there's no money in the to finance the damned thing anyway. This is typical of Bush: sign a bill, make a promise (AIDS relief for Africa, anyone? No Child Left Behind?), and don't deliver. In this case, of course, it would be a blessing.

Actually, I'm a little confused about the budgeting:

The measure Bush put into law Thursday before heading for campaign stops in Iowa and Michigan offers no money for the fence project covering one-third of the 2,100-mile border.

Its cost is not known, although a homeland security spending measure the president signed earlier this month makes a $1.2 billion down payment on the project. The money also can be used for access roads, vehicle barriers, lighting, high-tech equipment and other tools to secure the border.

So is there money, or not? There's a "$1.2 billon down payment" in the homeland security measure, but not in the bill authorizing the fence, so perhaps there IS some money there. This damned administration. If it and the GOP-ruled Congress could ever pass something without confusing the hell out of everybody or earmarking the bill to death it would be a frickin' miracle. In any case, the signature "its cost is not known" makes its all too reliable appearance in the news story.

In his usual eloquent and statesmanlike fashion, Bush had this to say at the signing ceremony:

“We have a responsibility to enforce our laws,” he said. “We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility serious.”

Yes, we take it "serious." A generation of writing teachers writhes in horror every time we have to hear this vile man speak and realize he's representing our nation to the world. It can't be said often enough: what a moron.

Hmm ... seems like I recently read about another country trying to keep the great unwashed from crossing its borders ... where was that?

Oh, yeah. Another country fearful of hordes of brown-skinned terrorists arriving. In their case, however, that's thanks to the US and its insistence on exporting mayhem to all corners of the globe. In our case, well, brown people are scary.

About that star-spangled banner

Okay, this ridiculous shit of rightwingers foaming at the mouth over a Spanish version of the "Star-Spangled Banner" has got to stop.

It isn't as if we haven't had lots of versions of the national anthem sung over the years. As a spokesperson from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History said,

Americans have long enjoyed different interpretations of the Star Spangled Banner, including country or gospel arrangements.       

"There are a number of renditions that people aren't happy with, but that's part of it — that it means enough for people to try to sing," he said.

Jimi Hendrix, anyone? That remains my favorite version--actually, the only version I can stand, because it really makes plain the warlike, aggressive nature of the anthem, something I've never felt comfortable with as reflecting our national identity (insofar as I can envision a "national identity," but that's a topic for another day, another screed). His version is simply brilliant, and I know it enraged any number of "patriots."

And then, too, we all survived Roseanne Barr's rendition, somehow ...

But now some idiot--I mean, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)--has introduced a resolution requiring the Star-Spangled banner to be sung only in English, claiming that the Star-Spangled Banner has “never before…been rendered in another language.”

Thanks to Think Progress, we discover--not, admittedly, to our surprise, given the fossilized matter that passes for gray cells in the heads of these throwbacks--that

in 1919, the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned a Spanish-language version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The State Department’s website also features four-separate versions of the anthem in Spanish.

Got that? Commissioned. By the U.S. Bureau of Education. In 1919.

And if that's not good enough for the Cult of Dear Leader, how about this, from Atrios:

Bush a couple of days ago:

After saying he did not consider the anthem sung in Spanish to have the same value as the anthem sung in English, Mr. Bush said: "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English. And they ought to learn to sing the anthem in English."

From Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty:

When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, he would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parites, sometimes joining in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, sometimes partying with a "Viva Bush" mariachi band flown in from Texas.

We don't have an official language in the United States, comprende? Oh, I know there are those great minds who feel we should push for it. I guess they have a point, if you consider the lawmaker--alas, I forget his name and locale--who once said,

"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me."

Sigh.