As Mets102 wrote this morning, the state of Arizona officially kicked off its "Build the Border Fence" website yesterday, allowing citizens the opportunity to own a piece of the wall if they ante up a few bucks. Think of it like buying an engraved brick paver for the new library, only instead of promoting reading you can endorse hate. We can't hold a state telethon to save organ transplant patients who were booted from Arizona's healthcare rolls, but we can invoke the ghost of Ron Popeil to hawk a 2,000-mile gadget constructed of fear and racism.
It's pretty clear the legislative pitchmen are using all of the donations for fence building, and not website construction, because every booger-picking 13-year-old kid I know could design a better site than buildtheborderfence.com. I know it's official 'cause it says "Official" and it's got the commonwealth seal and everything; but my goodness, placeholder websites do more, and look better. For those who don't want to venture there, and I understand why, the state's new internet endorsement of stupidity has a large picture of the desert on its homepage, dotted with a half-ass fence, and a few links to scare-mongering drivel, but mostly it's populated by large "DONATE" buttons.
As of this morning, says the Arizona Republic, nearly 900 goobers have clicked on one of those buttons, earning the state more than $39,000 to build its own anti-brown Erector Set across the Sonoran Desert. Now stop a second and do the math: On its first day, the site received nearly $40,000, and you can bet a shitload of these donations were from crackers just waiting for the site to go live, just waiting to put some real cash behind their bigotry. "This is better than the Lotto, Marge!" Senator Steve Smith, winner of the "Least Likely To Be Confused With a Mensa Member" legislative award, and the scrambled brains behind this cockamamy scheme, says he wants to raise $50 million initially.
His "initially" is more like "infinity," because even if the anti-immigrant bozos keep donating at today's pace, which is highly unlikely, after one year Senator Smith would have at best an $11 million downpayment on his desert stunt, meaning it would take nearly five years to reach the $50 million mark. And that's assuming the piss-poor website continues to attract nearly 40 large ones a day ... for five years! Here's betting that by this time next week the site is pulling in a couple grand, by this time next month it'll be drawing less than I got for weekly allowance, and by this time next year people will be asking, "What border fence website? Oh, you mean those couple hundred thousand bucks they used to build that 20-foot-long wall near Naco?"
Yeah, they had a big ceremony for Arizona's 2012 Centennial, full of flags and balloons and hot rhetoric about protecting grandma in Sun City. Then they unfurled the flag covering the 20-foot masterpiece that kept us from discussing genuine immigration reform. Ugly, beady-eyed men spoke, people cheered their spittle, then everyone walked around the fence and drove home.
Tread carefully through the swampland of idiocy you'll encounter in buildtheborderfence.com, because it's full of the pungent wingnuttery that can drag you under, suffocating a lesser man's brain cells. (There's a handy comment section, though, so be sure to leave a kind note.) Nowhere on the site does it mention that immigration is down, as is crime along the border. No, right now things are terrible, and you might die! Send cash, we take credit cards too. Rather than acknowledge what the administration has accomplished, the new state-sponsored mouthpiece continues to push the meme that the Federal government isn't protecting the border, so Arizona's pinhead legislature, who've shown themselves to be so competent at solving our problems, simply must take matters into their own states-right's hands.
Even though Obama has sent more resources to the region than Bush ever did. Even though most county sheriffs along the border don't favor the heavy-handed approach to immigration pushed by the Russell Pearce-dominated GOP. Even though a hard dividing line through the fragile desert could lead to ecological catastrophes. Even though a fence works temporarily, at best. Even though just a few years ago McCain and other Republicans favored a comprehensive reform package, but today their party won't go anywhere near that discussion with a Democrat in the White House, because now "reform" sounds like "amnesty."
No, the new site does not mention any of that. But if you feel like mind-treading in a bucket of bunk, over the croissant ...
There's really only one button to push on Arizona's fence-building website, because there's a total of three buttons to begin with on the homepage, and two of them are asking for your cash. I passed on that and dove into the third button's "more information" section, authored no doubt by a very drunk Lewis Carroll. This button takes you to the only other four sections of information on the entire website, and three of the four are lame-ass piles of vowels and consonants that don't say shit.
For instance, click the button that asks, "Is My Donation Tax Deductible?" and the answer you get is, We think so because Arizona is a nonprofit organization. But the site also urges donors to check with a tax attorney. In other words, the state is too friggin' dumb or lazy to find out and tell citizens what they deserve to know before asking for their cash.
And maybe I want to know where the fence is going to be built, because there are sensitive places down there, like sacred tribal gravesites, wilderness areas, and many natural and cultural wonders that existed long before that line was drawn. But the website doesn't tell you where the fence will go, because the jackasses pushing this initiative admit they don't know. They don't know a lot of details about where, how, and when the fence will go up, but they're pushing one big why: Al Qeada.
That's right, you'll find a healthy dose of terrorism at "Why Consider Supporting This Initiative?" ... the only button containing any information, and I use that word reservedly. This is where Smith and his pals like Senate President Russell Pearce, author of SB 1070, get to make their case. From the very first sentence of the one-page screed you wanna retch:
One of the gravest threats facing America today is the lack of security and enforcement along the U.S. and Mexican border.
No, sorry, it's not. If I were walking down the street today and saw four young Hispanic kids coming toward me on my side of the street, and a group of Wall Street bankers in suits on the other side of the street, I'd stay right where I was. I know which one constitutes "one of the gravest threats facing America today," and it ain't people sneaking over the border to hopefully make a better life. Sure, there are problems but our elected officials should focus their laser-like turd brains on programs that actually make a difference; instead these mean-spirited shitheads bark at the moon and pass a lot of do-nothing legislation. (Today, Arizona's "Official Gun" law went into effect, I rest my case.) Rather than discuss realistic solutions, they stir up more hate and breed more stupidity with stunts like this build-a-fence scam of old frightened people. They do it with crap like this:
... members of the terrorist group Hezbollah have already infiltrated the U.S. by crossing at the southern border.
Yeah, and I'll bet some member of Hezbollah has crossed over nearly every friggin' border in the world at some time. Look out, Antarctica. You'll find other transparently racist and fear-mongering references on Arizona's new internet jewel:
"... individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic."
Yup, let's make granny afraid of every Hispanic person she runs into at Safeway. So send us your check or credit card number, because no doubt our self-funded fence, that we don't know when, how, or where it will be built, will keep out a squad of well-trained terrorists. To date this focus on walls, penalties, and incarceration, instead of comprehensive reform, which includes drugs, has done a great job of stopping teenagers, hasn't it? Al Qaeda soldiers should be no problem.
Naturally, the crazies will overlook $50 million in fines that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has cost taxpayers, with tens of millions in lawsuits pending, but they'll get all huffy about brown people using services and costing us bucks -- and lie through their teeth about how much:
Estimates show that the United States spent over $100 billion on services for illegal aliens in 2010.
Bullcrap. In a long story about the economic costs and benefits of immigration, Terry Greene Sterling points out that Pearce's anti-immigration crowd spews a lot of misleading statistics dreamed up by the hate group FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform):
In July, as politicians eyeballed SB 1070's popularity and drafted similar election-year legislation in other states, FAIR issued yet another report, "The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers."
This detailed report says illegal aliens cost American taxpayers $113 billion annually. It says each American household pays $1,117 yearly for illegal immigration. It says most illegal aliens don't pay taxes.
Such numbers can only outrage millions of penny-pinched Americans already anxious about their own futures in uncertain economic times. But once again, the numbers defy logic.
That's because the misleading techniques in the Arizona report were duplicated in the national report.
Start with the population estimate.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 10.8 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States in 2009, but the FAIR report estimates a much larger population: 13 million.
And, again, as in the Arizona report, the largest single "fiscal burden" of illegal immigration is tied to American children. FAIR says it costs taxpayers $52 billion to educate the children of illegal immigrants, and that includes more than 3 million American citizens born to one or more undocumented parents.
As with the Arizona report, the positive economic counterbalance to education costs (the adult lifetime of productivity, consumption, and taxpaying) is excluded from FAIR's calculations.
But contrary to FAIR's assertion, the consensus among many economists is that the U.S. government nets a profit from educating its children, because educated adults pay more taxes and contribute to the nation's productivity. New Times
The entire story is worth a read, which I can't say for the final sentences in the state's fence-erecting website:
John F. Kennedy spoke the famous words, "...ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
It is at this time in our country's history that you can do your part to help make America safe for future generations. We as a nation can once again show the world the resolve and the can-do spirit of the American people.
Your donation is greatly needed and appreciated. Thank you and may God continue to bless the United States of America!
High rhetoric indeed, almost Ciceronian. First, invoke a president who would spit on your shoes if given half a chance. Kennedy was talking about programs like the Peace Corps, which brought nations together, not your fund-raising for a monument to separateness. And that friggin' "can-do spirit" you jabber about? The scaffolding for that spirit was largely built by immigrants. Sure, we witnessed nasty periods of anti-Irish, anti-Chinese, anti-everything hate, but for the most part we figured out how to accommodate the new faces, and the nation's "can-do-ness" is grounded in that accommodation. Senator Smith's spirit is more "can't-do" or "don't want to do."
Finally, it's unlikely that God gives a flying fuck about your fence, even though Senator Pearce thinks he's doing the Lord's work by keeping brown people at bay, since they don't play a role in the training Pearce received at the feet of John Bircher, Cleon Skousen:
[Skousen's "5000-Year] Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. Little Green Footballs
And in Skousen's world, to save the republic he needs white Mormon men, and only white Mormon men, to defeat the secularism that's tearing the Constitution apart. Explains a lot about laws and fences.