Grijalva targeted again

Our congressman Raul Grijalva has been targeted for the third time. In April he received death threats here in Tucson. In July a window of his Yuma office was shattered and a bullet was found inside.

Yesterday at his Tucson office, an envelope arrived in the mail containing two pieces of paper with swastikas and a plastic bag with white powder inside. The Tucson Fire Dept. said the powder was toxic. Today it was identified as hydroxyacetanilide. Some reports have said it is not toxic, but the FBI has not yet released its lab report. (I had no idea what hydroxyacetanilide was, so I googled it. It seems there are several kinds, at least four. I looked closely at the first kind; it had a long paragraph listing health hazards.)

How much more violence inspired by Teabaggers and Glenn Beck & Co. are we going to see around the country before election day?

Discarded Migrants

Readers who would like to read my just-published article DISCARDED MIGRANTS can paste the following link into their browser:

http://cmsmtemp.trueserver.com/forum/

Or, if you follow me on Twitter, there is a direct link there from early today.

The other two articles on this CMSM forum site are related to the one I wrote. Many migrants/immigrants of course are victims of wage theft, especially in these days. The other article is especially for Catholics as it asks us how we eat in view of Catholic social teaching.

About those border walls

I highly recommend a new website that opposes the border walls: www.no-border-wall.com

The home page has a striking slide show above the following commentary:

The border wall is one of the most ineffective projects that the United States has undertaken. It utterly fails to stop undocumented migrants or smugglers - an estimated 97% of people who try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border eventually succeed at entering the country. Yet, the border wall has been monumentally destructive:

* Instead of halting people at the border, walls have redirected desperate migrants toward perilous desert routes, leading to the tragic deaths of thousands of men, women, and children.

* Walls have caused environmental destruction, fragmenting crucial habitat for animals, including endangered species, funneling migrants and Border Patrol enforcement activities through fragile ecosystems, and triggering large-scale erosion.

* The border wall has already caused catastrophic flooding, and the lack of adequate studies of its safety means that it has the potential to do far greater damage to nearby communities.

* The wall has split sovereign Native American nations in two, and its construction has disturbed ancient graves and archaeological sites.

* The federal government has stripped private property out of the hands of hundreds of U.S. citizens to build the border wall and has refused to pay fair market value or guarantee access to adjacent property.

* Under the Real ID Act, 36 federal laws were waived for the border wall project, including laws that protect our air, drinking water, endangered species, parks and wilderness areas, farmland, religious freedom, and our historical and archaeological heritage.

* The financial burden to U.S. taxpayers may well exceed $49 billion for wall construction and maintenance.

NO BORDER WALL opposes the border wall because of the devastating consequences that border walls have on border communities and economies, human rights, and the environment, as well as the United States' relationship with Mexico and the rest of the world. We urge our elected representatives to reject the border wall and repeal the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act.

Crazy and running for Senate

The political atmosphere in this last month before the Nov. 2 election makes me shudder. Ranters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin continue to poison the airwaves, and their fans are not likely to be immune to the venom when they vote. A few quotes:

Limbaugh: “Let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.” And this: "Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream." And to an African American female caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

Beck: "I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words." And then: "If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop."

Michele Bachmann: "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas." To the people of Minnesota: "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us 'having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,' and the people -- we the people -- are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country."

Sarah Palin: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

In an angry political climate like this, our nation could actually end up with a Senator Sharron Angle and a Senator Christine O'Donnell. If you think it has been bad with Senators DeMint, McConnell, Inhofe, Coburn, Kyl and "lip-flop" McCain, just imagine a Senate with Angle and O'Donnell on board .

Sharron Angle wants to

* privatize Social Security
* privatize Medicare
* privatize the Veterans Administration.

And she doesn't even stop there. On July 12, she said this: "The Federal Department of Education should be eliminated. The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education, at any level."

Christine O’Donnell lies like mad. Gail Collins spilled the beans Tuesday in the NY Times: O'Donnell got her BA a month ago, not in 1993. She did not go to Claremont Graduate University; she went to Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. She was not an Oxford University student; she attended a course given by a group that rented a room there.

Here are some O'Donnell quotes, just a few selections from a veritable treasure trove:

* "We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools. Now we're having weekly shootings. We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS."

* "America is now a socialist economy. The definition of a socialist economy is when 50% or more your economy is dependent on the federal government."

* "I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven." / "One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar."

* "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."

* "You know what, evolution is a myth." / "Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?"

* "During the (2006) primary, I heard the audible voice of God. He said, 'Credibility.'"

Are you looking for similar quotes from crazies running for the House of Representatives and Governor? Sorry, but I don't think my keyboard batteries could last that long.

Good night.

Oops, I almost forgot about another whacko who is running for Senate. He is Alaska's Joe Miller, and he wants to kill unemployment benefits and the minimum wage.