Today on the border

Obviously we are not hearing much about immigration in this super-heated presidential race. There seems to be no room for talking about the senseless tragedy that has been taking place along our southern border for more than a dozen years.

Today is the last day of the federal fiscal year. So far we can document 149 migrant deaths just along the Arizona part of the 2000 mile border. Once we have the final coroner reports, that number will surely jump. It won't be as high as 2004-05 (282 deaths), 2005-06 (205 deaths) or 2006-07 (237 deaths), but it will be one more sign of governmental lunacy that refuses to open the way to a just and practical border policy.

Today I returned with three coworkers to the Centro de Apoyo al Migrante Deportado pictured here. (The words mean Support Center for the Deported Migrant.)


The center sits just a couple of blocks south of the Mariposa Gate where the buses of the mercenary Wackenhut Corporation deport a steady flow of Mexican migrants. Here three marvelous nuns and their volunteer friends feed and tend to 100-150 deported migrants morning and afternoon of each day.

The first thing that strikes you is the youth of most of the deportees -- hard working fellows (today we saw more women than last time) who have been sending money home to help their parents and families survive. They show up with almost nothing -- even their shoelaces have been taken away. Some are from as far away as the state of Chiapas, a 60-hour ride. Many of the older ones cannot return home because they sold whatever they had to come north. They are very likely to settle right in Nogales, already packed with over 200,000 residents in space never meant to contain a large city.

The situation is not just a tragedy. it is a truly mortal sin. I spoke with one woman who was deported three days ago. She has lived in the US for 23 years and is now cut off from her husband and four children. It is the kind of thing that happens all along the border day in and day out. But you can bet you're not going to hear about it on the political news hour. Not on your life. Not on any migrant's life.

Stupid in America

On Sunday Nicholas Kristof reported in his New York Times column that almost a third of voters either "know" that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be a Muslim. (If he were a Muslim, so what? Nevertheless, at this time in this country, a Muslim would not be elected president.)

Kristof continues: The Pew Research Center has just concluded that only half of Americans know Obama is a Christian. In March, 10 percent said he was a Muslim. In June, 12 percent. Today, 13 percent.

On some "Christian" radio stations, they talk about Obama being the Antichrist. (About ten percent of Americans think we may be in the apocalyptic "end times" with the Antichrist just around the corner.) A commercial web site sells T-shirts and bumper stickers with a large "O" with horns above the words "The Anti-Christ."

And Kristof adds: "Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border."

But what is most interesting in this article is Kristof's opinion that "religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to 'otherize' Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him."

These are very rotten times indeed.

An Alaskan Revolt

It seems that Alaska does not see many protests or picket lines. But on Saturday it was different in Anchorage.

A Don't-Elect-Sarah-Palin demonstration drew at least 1,483 protesters, most of them women. (Somebody with a clicker counted heads. Oh, and 93 McCain/Palin supporters showed up.) Dedicated Palinites tried to stop the rally beforehand by resorting to silly dirty tricks, such as spreading a false rumor that the Secret Service had forestalled the event. A local hate-radio propagandist, Eddie Burke, said that people planning to attend the rally were "a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots." Well, the "maggots" outdid the turkey, who showed up but was surrounded and drowned out by chants of "ObamA, ObamA!"

Obviously a lot of Alaskans agree that this narrowly-experienced, untraveled, global-warming denying, rigidly fundamentalist, repeatedly mendacious candidate would as vice-president and very possibly president be an absolute disaster for the nation and the world.

I watched a video of the rally. There were some very catchy signs, like these:

PALIN = BUSH IN A SKIRT

MCCAIN/PALIN - A BLIZZARD OF LIES

HOCKEY MOM FOR OBAMA

PITBULLS MAKE POOR DIPLOMATS

BLINK BEFORE GOING TO WAR

Sarah Palin & Religion

Anyone with sincere religious beliefs--especially if those beliefs are lifelong- is going to be influenced by them in a thousand ways. They are like lenses through which you see the world around you. They influence the way you come to understand what is good and what is bad, what is life-giving and what is death-dealing. That's surely true of my life, and I think it's true of millions of lives. Including the life of Sarah Palin.

So I'm intensely worried. What is simply personal can be kept under wraps. What might affects the lives of millions or even billions of people cannot be kept under wraps. Especially when we are talking about someone who could be a heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful person in the world.

Ms. Palin apparently belonged to a Pentecostal church from the age of 12 until the age of 38. Then, in 2002, she switched to the non-denominational Wasilla Bible Church, where some very strange things go on. For example, last August 17, a guest speaker at the church, David Brickner, who founded "Jews for Jesus," said that terrorist attacks on Israel are due to God's "judgment" of Jews who don't convert to Christianity. Brickner did come from outside as a guest, but this is surely a case where Palin has to come out of her campaign-imposed isolation and answer questions about how she views stuff like this coming out of her own church.

And what did she mean when she called the Iraq war "a task from God?" Does she consider it a Holy War? How would her belief in creationism affect her approach to the nation's public schools? What was she thinking when she stood at the side of her pastor Ed Kalnins while he talked about Alaska's destiny to be a shelter for Christians at the end of the world. (Here's how Kalnins put it: "I believe that Alaska is one of the 'refuge states'... in the Last Days. And hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to this state to seek refuge. And the church has to be ready to minister to them." Does Palin actually buy into this wild stuff?

When I hear "Pentecostal," I think of "speaking in tongues" and being "slain in the spirit" (falling to the floor during services.) But Palin's churches take part in something way beyond traditional Pentecostalism. It is called The Third Wave, or The New Apostolic Reformation. For an article on this astounding movement, paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/97939?page=entire
Then brace yourself and read away.

Rudy & Sarah on stage

I was driving on I-10 while I listened to Giuliani's convention speech. It was hard not to grind my teeth into smithereens as the master blowhard railed against Barack Obama with a truckload of sarcasm, mockery and insults.

Sarah Palin followed. She is obviously a very confident contender, and her family ruminations ("hockey mom") will probably get her a lot of votes. But tonight she picked up on the Giuliani sarcasm. Both of them had a jolly time making fun of Barack as a "community organizer." They made it sound like two dirty words.

But the health care crisis, the economic plight of tens of millions of Americans, complex foreign policy questions? Gone with the wind.... Instead, Palin unloaded the usual Republican blather about Barack the Evil Taxer. Et cetera et cetera.

Time's Joe Klein has just written in his blog that "it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is 'a task from God.' The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme."

Eight long eight weeks to go, folks. Actually eight weeks and four days.

If McCain and Palin win, I think I am going to volunteer for a four year stint as janitor on the International Space Station.