Friday Night at 8: Loose Threads

I’m smarter than President Obama!  Really.  It’s true.

I’ll bet he can’t write beat poetry worth shit.

He has not memorized every single story in Nathan Ausubel’s “Jewish Wit & Wisdom.”  And let me tell you, that’s a LOT of stories, like hundreds and hundreds of them!

Yeah, I’m smarter than President Obama.

I’ll bet he doesn’t have a clue as to how the internet has expanded the political consciousness of certain DFH’s and activists of all kinds who have leaped into the new paradigms like fearless parachute divers.

Come to think of it, THEY’RE smarter than President Obama, too!

Here’s an impossible fantasy of mine … and it’s poignantly tragic to me because it seems so easy .. yet it is impossible in our political reality.

I’ve written before about the folks who write about immigration, Duke, Manny, Kyle, Kai over at Zuky, so many more, who all started as individual bloggers, they’re all on our blogroll.  They got together and started the group group blog, the Sanctuary (also on our blogroll).

And I’ve written before about the group of New Orleans bloggers who sprung up like magic after the federal flood decimated their beloved city and they knew everyone else was just fucking getting the story WRONG.

So they all individually and spontaneously started blogging and then they found each other and now it’s a network of blogs about what’s going on in New Orleans.  They’re so beyond the labels “progressive,” “conservative,” “Republican,” “Democrat,” etc., that it’s funny to even try to look at them that way.

Oh, by the way, THEY’RE also smarter than President Obama.  They know more about what’s happening in New Orleans than any Villager or pundit or newspaper writer, even a great Pulitzer-prize winning one, all of ’em.

So let us recap.

I’m smarter than President Obama when it comes to knowing both the words and meaning of the stories in Nathan Ausubel’s Jewish Wit &Wisdom.

The Editors of Sanctuary are smarter than President Obama when it comes to the issue of immigration reform, the next great legislative battle.  They know the laws and the challenges, but more importantly they understand the moral dimension in political terms, they understand what used to be known as Democratic values and how to frame the national discourse on immigration reform legislation through that moral lense.

The NOLA bloggers understand what New Orleans needs and can translate the mad intricate political scene after the federal flood turned the entire city upside down.  They not only write about their city, they have changed it as well.

So back to my fantasy.  My fantasy is that the people in the bubble in D.C. would stop going to the wrong folks to get their information and come to these folks instead.

It’s a fantasy, I know that.  I do.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the federal flood.

I was hoping so badly that President Obama would go to New Orleans for the anniversary.  Well, I guess that is not to be.

I do know that folks from HUD have been in New Orleans, it was pretty cool how HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan brought his whole staff there (or as they called it, his “entire leadership team.”  

It will be Donovan’s third trip to the city since joining the Obama administration — “the single place I’ve traveled (to) the most since becoming secretary” — and, he said, “I will be bringing my entire senior team, all my assistant secretaries, to make sure that we complete the recovery phase as quickly as possible.”

Donovan said his team of 10 includes some undersecretaries recently confirmed by the Senate.

Like other top administration officials dealing with Gulf Coast recovery issues, Donovan has stressed an initial focus on trying to make the federal bureaucracy a more creative and flexible partner with state and local officials.

This is good news, so I’m glad to have some good news to share on the anniversary of the federal flood.  Just wished … oh well.

Immigration reform is going to be the next big thing.  I look who was “at the table” during the health care “national debate,” and it makes me sick to contemplate who got the biggest chairs, ones that crowded out just about everyone else.

How are these two issues connected?

Only one way … the folks I’m mentioning are smarter than President Obama.

He should speak to them.

He wouldn’t come to New Orleans and now he can’t because of the death of Teddy Kennedy.

His initial immigration moves owe more to corporate thinking than true Democratic values.  According to duke (arguing with a bunch of tech folks who are spouting anti-immigrant rhetoric in the cause of keeping their jobs — when they never were around for the working folks, not because they’re evil, but because they are not using real progressive values in framing their political solutions):

I will bet you dollars to donuts right now that when CIR (Ed. Comprehensive Immigration Reform) finally comes up, you and the rest of your crowd will be ALL OVER Dobbs, Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh, right next to the wingnuts and minutemen, trashing the hell out of the bill. Just like last time.

And given what we’ve seen so far on the newest CIR proposals, from every indication there will be MANY more h1b’s, more skilled worker greencards, automatic greencards for foriegn STEM students graduating from US universities, a shift of H1b to a full-blow immigration visa with the end of the declaration of non-intent to immigrate, and many other provissions intended to make immigration of high skilled and highly educated immigrants MUCH easier.

From Schumer’s 7 point plan that has a significant emphasis on actively recruiting more highly skilled workers while discouraging low-skilled, low-wage immigration…to The Council on Foriegn Relations recent recomendations on immigration reform (that appear to be the blueprint for Obama’s reform) that calls on a major shift in employement immigration to exclusively favor what it calls “the best and the brightest”, it looks like this round of CIR will be heavily influenced by an intentional shift away from family based, low-skill, hemispheric immigration, to a more skill-based global model.

or to put it more bluntly ….they’ve given in to the xenophobes and racists who have dominated the opposition to real reform, and will now attempt to close the southern border by making it nearly immpossible for low-skilled workers from this hemisphere to enter leagally…The flip-side being that more high skilled immigrants from places like India and China will be actively recruited.

So be careful what you wish for….you just might get it

When y’all teamed up with FAIR and the other restrictionist groups to fight CIR last time …or joined forces with them again this time in astroturf groups “supporting US workers”…. bet ya didn’t think they’d sell you down the river to accomplish their goal of stemming the “brown invation” from the south…we’ll they have…. Now Obama, Schumer, and Emanuel, have given in …they’ll stop “the brown menace” from coming in, and set up a system they claim “works to make America more competative amd prosperous” .

.. guess all those op-eds and appearences on Lou’s show last time around kinda backfired on you anti-H1B types after all … now they’ve just sidestepped you.

You picked the wrong dog in this fight. Y’all could have worked WITH reformers to make the system work for everyone…but you chose instead to side with Lou Dobbs and the wingnuts…now the chickens have come home to roost.

Oh, those folks Duke was talking to?  Definitely President Obama is smarter than THEM.

Heh.

It’s just a fantasy, but that’s what I’ve been dreaming about.  And I apologize for the loose threads in this essay … it’s an emotional time of year and that makes it hard to write in a sensible fashion.

It’s just that we need an injection of real progressive values into our political discourse, and there are folks who are smarter than most, who ought to get some attention.  Just sayin’.

Happy Friday to all.