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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, March 24, 2005

THE OREGON CITIZENSHIP TEST

...never having been a group to let any idea pass without pushing that one extra step into nut-job land, Republicans in the Oregon House of Representatives have taken a seemingly simple bill that would deny illegal immigrants drivers' licenses and turned it into a bona fide hassle - if passed - for every driver residing in the state of Oregon. The bill in question, House Bill 2608 - which was originally suggested by an Oregon State Trooper, would require proof of citizenship or legal residency for any person seeking an Oregon driver's license. In itself, this might not be that big a deal, and it may just improve the sleep of all those fretful conservatives who are wrapped up in a tight bundle of nerves about the illegal immigrants that tend to our crops and plant our trees and work in all those poorly-paid service sector jobs in our state that are otherwise so hard to fill...

...the bill, however, can't leave well enough alone. It just has to go that one step farther by requiring that all renewals, replacements, or reinstatement of drivers licenses must be accompanied by proof of citizenship or legal alien residency. That's ALL renewals. Everybody. Everytime. It also doesn't say that at your first renewal after the effective date of the bill you need to provide such proof. It is simply stated in the language of the bill (Section 5) that proof of legal presence in this country is required upon renewal. As written, it would require that such proof be provided at every renewal, etc. Even if the language is cleaned up so that residents don't have to keep proving every four years that they haven't in the intervening period ran off to Canada, renounced their US citizenship, and wallpapered their Yukon cabins with upside-down American flags, these are obviously changes that may just make for some lively times around the ol' DMV office. Since most Oregonians don't pay enough attention to state politics to be able to name their state senator, even for a million dollars, it's pretty unlikely that this particular requirement will break through the haze. As a result, there are going to be a lot of very surprised residents when renewal time rolls around and they discover that it wasn't such a good idea to wait until the last minute to renew their driver's licenses because - in order to complete the transaction - they need to come up with a birth certificate TODAY that they not only don't have but may have well never even actually seen in their entire lives...

...yes, one can only imagine the excitement when some long-time eastern Oregon resident who proudly displays one of those little "Oregon Native Since..." license plate stickers on every car that he owns putters into the DMV office to renew his license (which in itself he may view as an unconstitutional intrusion into his personal life) for the tenth or twelfth time, only to discover that he is being asked to PROVE - after fifty or sixty years or seventy years - that he is in fact in the United States legally by a state government that he has never trusted to look after his interests in any case. Having lived in Eastern Oregon for the better part of the last two decades, I know that there are folks out here who aren't going to take this at all well...and I have to confess a certain sympathy. I am, after all, a 50-year-old white male who has never held residence outside of the Pacific Northwest and can't even speak a foreign language, much less reasonably fake a single foreign-accented form of English speech (the one great failing that forced me to turn away from my grand youthful dreams of fame and fortune in the theater), so I can imagine turning a bit grumpy at the prospect of having to dig up a birth certificate just to get my stupid driver's license renewed...

...it will be interesting to see what happens to House Bill 2608 as it winds its way through the legislative process, especially in the State Senate. The legislative process sometimes, especially when dealing with the almost duplicitous duality of issues involving illegal immigrants, begins to look less like making sausage and more like baby seal hunts. The question in this case is going to be to what degree the rest of us get swept up the red-hot solution of the day...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:53 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

MARCH - IN LIKE A LAMB, OUT LIKE A RABID BADGER

...two weeks ago here on the Eastern hip of the Central Oregon Cascades, the daytime temperatures were in the seventies. Last week, southwest of my redoubt at an otherwise unnoticed wide spot on Highway 58 called Crescent Lake Junction, just a few short miles from the crest of the Cascades at Willamette Pass, there was a wind-driven 15-acre wildfire that by all rights should have grown much larger but didn't because of the ready proximity of ample fire-fighting resources; you shouldn't even be able to see the ground in a normal snow year at the location of this fire. The snow is almost gone except in sheltered areas and at the highest elevations; you can't drive just anywhere in the woods but it is possible to get to a lot of places you shouldn't be able to get to. The warm, relatively dry winter apparently presented driving conditions outside of the design parameters of my high-tech studless technology traction tires that I bought for the family car in order to be a nice guy and help the state out with their wear and tear problems (of course I have two other vehicles with studded tires, so it was more of a gesture than some sort of firm principled commitment). At any rate, while coming back from a Portland meeting I started noticing strange vibrations, which the local tire shop confirmed were the manifestations of the early stages of the potentially catastrophic delamination of the steel belts in the tires; given the conditions, I elected to put the much less winter-driving capable summer tires on the family sled...

...that is all sooo yesterday, though, and became decidedly so approximately 30 minutes ago when the radio announced, as I looked out at the two new unforecast inches of snow that snuck in under cover of darkness, that a winter storm warning had been issued for this part of the state. Not a snow warning, mind you, but a Winter Storm Warning with a storm total of up to 12 inches of snow. Past experience suggests that this little bit of panic could amount to nothing or we could have two feet of snow in Central Oregon by morning. My two contributions to America's future are at this moment going wild in a wrong way out in the living room; it's Spring Break this week, and a 10-inch snowfall would be a bitterly tragic waste of a good school snow day, in their currently distraught opinion. That's not even to mention the vicious body-breaking task of snow shoveling - on SPRING FRIGGIN' BREAK - that they would be facing under Dad's brutal oversight. The good news is that, if this storm comes to pass, they will be too worn out to complain much tomorrow if the current level of hysterical bereavement continues for any length of time...

...on the other hand the sun is shining right now...

...and yesterday was the first full day of spring.......whoopie...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:02 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 20, 2005

THE UNSURPRISING SURPRISE

...ok, listen up. Everybody just needs to settle down now. Sure, the Bush Administration told all, and I mean all, of our Asian allies that North Korea shipped uranium hexafloride directly to Libya. And, sure, they knew at the time that this was a complete and utter lie. They knew that our strong and faithful ally Pakistan, that Asian good buddy of ours that has faithfully has been a stalwart actor in the war on Terra - staying just two vexing steps behind Osama all the time, who actually received the material and - in all likelihood without the knowledge of the North Koreans, shipped the nucular material to Libya all on their own through the auspices of their own nuclear bad boy Abdel Qadeer Khan, who has done more all on his own to introduce nuclear instability than North Korea could even dream of.. And, yes, even though we knew this, we told our Asian allies, China, and the rest of the world a bald-faced lie that had some sort of clever neocon world domination point that doesn’t matter anymore because it didn’t work anyway. Our erstwhile allies have learned not to trust anything we say and North Korea is polishing up its current supply of nuclear-tipped missiles and muttering angrily to themselves while they slip the abacus beads around trying to figure out where the hell Oregon is...

...but what’s the surprise? I mean, sure, our allies probably feel just a bit used by this whole dirty affair, not being American residents and therefore being unused to the visceral, bone-deep duplicity of this cheap, dirty gang of waterheads who somehow have arrived at the conclusion that a 3% margin of victory is a landslide of Nixon/McGovern proportions that gives them license to spur up and play cowboy all over the world. Our now-suspicious allies just simply don’t have the history to properly process information from our country. They haven’t been lied to about Gee Dub’s abortion connections, drug use, military service, reasons for wanting to be President, tax cuts, reasons for invading Iraq, actual sense of compassion, passion for PRIVATIZING Social Security, or whether he actually does or doesn’t care about the deficit, so they operate from a disadvantageous position, unschooled by a constant litany of lies, fraud, and misrepresentations...

...those of us who live in the United States, however, can’t claim this disadvantage. We know that these characters comprise the most useless band of cheap little hucksters and charlatans ever to be drawn all together under the once honorable roof of the White House. We’ve seen this gang of raw political mechanics in action turning every possible issue in the entire world into a simple calculation of how to maintain their personal sense of empire, to the point that we don’t even muster much more that a sad resigned sigh when these odd little creatures - so crooked that they actually have to employ a brace of man- and maid-servants every day to physically twist their power suits of the day on to their bodies - cook up the idea of employing the likes of Karen Hughes to make us better liked on the Arab street, a prospect that one would only expect to see in something like the Redneck Comedy Tour and not in the actual real-live government of the alleged world’s only Superpower. This is apparently what a whopping 3% majority of the nation wanted, so this is what we get: a group of patented liars who can’t even tell the truth to allies when we would be better served to do so and who - in some weird effort to play their sad little ‘big set of (well, you know)’ game - have managed once again to make the world a more dangerous place, despite all their self-congratulatory talk about the flowering of democracy in the Middle East. At least we’ve seen it all before and don’t have to weather all the building issues of shock, dismay, and betrayal that our Asian friends and co-interest affiliates are now wrestling with. A fella almost feels sorry for ‘em....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:12 PM 0 comments

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