1)  No non-citizen, other than arguably a child brought here without the ability to consent, has any reasonable expectation of NOT getting picked up by the police and deported.  If you enter the country, you do so either with the qualified permission of the United States or in contempt of the permission of the United States.  For the most part, visas don't run out by surprise, it's not a shock.  Occasionally non-immigrant visa holders get their visas yanked early and arbitrarily but that's not the case with the bulk of the 500,000-odd unlawful entrants and lingerers in Arizona alone; most have either never had visas or have been out of status for a very, very long time.

Most Americans would consider it fair for Switzerland or Mexico or Russia or Ethiopia to jail and definitely to deport an unlawful American entrant or lingerer.  Accused unlawful entrants or lingerers deserve full due process of law but only in the same way that a motorist does in traffic court; we should not whine for those who get caught in a speed trap either.

2) Citizenship, LPR status and work visa should be a LOT easier to get than they are, but if I drive without a driver's license I will not get whiny and righteous about getting ticketed or jailed and neither should unlawful entrants and lingerers.  Paying taxes sucks but who can really generate much feeling for illegal economic migrants who expect to live free of direct taxation, federal and state?  When I cheat on my taxes or fail willfully to file, you would probably want me prosecuted or at least held accountable; when the bulk of 500,000 unlawful Arizonans do that, some would call me an asshole for mentioning the fact.  (There is an IRS "5th Amendment" form allowing taxpayers reporting illegal income while not disclosing its source; this form is almost never used by non-citizen undocumented income earners.)

3)  Ordinarily, we produce documentation to confirm our rights in a variety of areas of life, both to the government and to private entities.  If you own a car, you have a title.  If you rent an apartment, you have a key and a lease.  Insurance policy, high school diploma - ditto. Grown adults expect to document what matters most in their lives.  Citizenship or non-citizen authorization to enter or remain in this country are arguably no different.  I can understand citizens getting indignant at getting asked for their papers, but that's because it is not our custom; many of our NATO allies expect their citizens to bust out ID on request and we do not regard say France and Germany as tyrannical hellholes, rather as nice places to visit.

4)  Arizona's population is approximately 10% unlawful entrants or lingerers post-visa, the majority from Mexico of course but from many other countries as well.  They have one entire congressional district's worth of people who almost never pay income taxes, and in a relatively small, middle-income state.  Arizona has the misfortune of a porous international border and a statutory mandate to bear the social costs of these hundreds of thousands of undocumented, largely tax-evading residents, including medical care and social costs of crimes committed so often AGAINST them due to their unwillingness to report crimes. 

5)  The U.S. does have laws protecting people who have a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, gender, politics, religion or other status in their home countries.  We should expand these laws, but require due process for entry and remaining, not getting your cousin in Yuma or Brighton Beach to whisk you in without papers.

Notwithstanding the foregoing I do think the law is stupid but not because I give a damn about any unlawful entrant into the United States.  I don't want us to Europeanize our citizens' relationship with the police.  But adult non-citizens whose entry and presence gives a finger to the laws of the United States? Spare me the violins.

and it is indeed broken, many times.

The issue with bus rapid transit is that often, it's not that rapid.  But that's a matter of policy, not fundamental engineering.  It's hard to convince car-centric suburbanites to build asphalt and not let every damn SUV drive on it.

In Baltimore, we have a rather weak light rail line.  Through downtown Baltimore, it is slower than many north-south bus routes that run parallel to it, and it doesn't go very fast in the suburbs either.  The problem is the low speed limits on the at-grade vehicles, coupled with miserable traffic light management.  I'd love to see a bicycle race against the light rail down Howard Street.

But properly implemented, you can get an entire bus rapid transit system of 80-100 miles of corridor for the price of a 1 or 2-spoke light rail line.  And if you make the investment in traffic signal controls, curb cuts, dedictated rights of way and getting rid of overly cautious speed limits on the exclusive right-of-way, middle class people will board it.  If you make the buses comfortable with low floors - hardly space-age technology - people will take it.

If you invest in real stations like in this video, not just unprotected sticks in concrete, and put in some realistic measure of security, middle class people will use it rather than pay for parking and sit in traffic.  But if you half-ass it, make a low-rent experience, people who have choices will tell light rail or BRT to go kill itself.  Wish there were a more politically correct way of saying it.

Conservatives hate whining except when whining is their entire M.O.  Really, Sarah, we have had enough.  This woman actually makes former senator Liddy Dole look like Cicero by comparison.

Actually my response is well within traditional interpretations of Jesus' death within Western Christianity.  It's not a matter of "threat"; when I see something truly bizarre that strains my intelligence and credulity, my temptation is to call it bizarre.

Even Tertullian claimed that he believed because it was absurd, impossible - "credo quia absurdum/impossibile" - i.e. bizarre.

As for your claim that those who have no faith have no real understanding of the Bible because they have never spent time to learn or study it, or study with the learned, that's a demonstrably false and breathtakingly uninformed comment.  Indeed, your entire comment is an ad hominem against those who find your bizarre religion bizarre and have the bluntness to say so, which means you have given up debating and instead have chosen to throw shitbombs.  It's tantamount to resigning at the chessboard, Buckeye.

Well, isn't it a fair comment?  We generally would regard someone who commanded the sacrifice of a child, then seemingly on a whim reversed himself, as indulging bizarre behavior.  It's not particularly polite, but "bizarre" seems like a fair comment.

This identified creator of the Universe seems to have a strong emotional investment in small things - the timing of a day of rest, eating some fish and quadripeds but not others, etc.  We have to believe that the creator and designer of the ENTIRE Universe - of every star, planet, meteor, subterranean fish, amoeba, scorpion, igneous rock, cosmic ray, ape, worm, penguin, platypus, supernova, waterfall, moon dust particle, partridge and penis - cares so much about small things.  It seems a bit bizarre.

It seems a bit bizarre that Christians would worship a God who, in essence, committed suicide as a man - with the help of the Roman soldiers on duty that day in Jerusalem under Imperial occupation - because He demanded a blood sacrifice for humanity's sins.  He was angry with us, so he angered the local authorities into killing him, so that he would not - have to? - send human beings to Hell.  If he wanted to forgive humanity, he could have done so without arranging a killing spectacle under color of Roman law; after all, God's omnipotent, right?  Seems a little bizarre.

It only seems less bizarre because the stories are so familiar.  Millions of Hindus polluting the Ganges and then bathing in it - sounds bizarre, but only for the first 100 times you read about it.  Then it's, "oh of course."

Why is religion the best way?  It may be the most common in many societies, but to some extent it's tautological; much of what is of interest to specific religions gets inculcated as "morality", whether it meets any objective test of merit outside the faithful.

Take for example Sabbath observance.  A Christian will tell you that not working on Sunday is moral.  An observant Jew will tell you that not working on Saturday is moral.  An atheist like me will tell you that working until your responsibilities are met is moral.  Who's moral?  

Similarly, take alcohol.  For many liturgical Christians, the consumption of alcohol is considered mandatory as part of the holiest rite of the Church: the Eucharist.  For Jews, wine is an essential component of the Sabbath table, the Passover table, Purim observance and other rites.  For Muslims and Latter-Day Saints, alcohol is strictly prohibited as a beverage at all times.  For an atheist like me, alcohol is neither good nor evil, neither prohibited nor mandatory, unless it interferes with your fundamental responsibilities.  Who's moral?

Would we not do better to read Aesop's fables in our youth and remember their good counsel, than to waste time and money on religion, given religion's hideous "recessive genes" in terms of sectarian strife, mass murder, superstition, frequent oppression of women (talk about morality....) and theocratic oppressive impulses to the detriment of those outside the "flock" or the "tribe"?

Religiously-inspired hatred of Jews was a large component of the Holocaust; a secular Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Belarus, Russia, etc., would not have been so eager to kill the Christ-killers.  It was Martin Luther, not some atheist in some physics department, who screeched for the killing of Jews, the looting and burning of their synagogues in his infamous "On The Jews and Their Lies."  Yet the name of Luther adorns tens of thousands of churches in America in broad daylight.  Some fucking morality.

Why am I not religious, even though I like religious music and art?  It's because I am already enough of an asshole and fear religion might make me worse.  Staying out of the temptation to indulge sanctimonious self-satisfaction and religious bigotry worse than I already do - that's MY contribution to "morality."

What's wrong with Maryland that a deeply Democratic and liberal state is getting out-manuevered by more purple states like New York?  Seriously!

In the past I have blamed Equality Maryland, though perhaps I was unfair.  But we are not some purple state like Iowa; we are sapphire blue and we should not be acting like we are Harold Ford's Tennessee.

I guessed this over at Big Orange's prediction contest.  There are about 10,000 entries, so if they are all about as clueless as I, I have about a 99.99% chance of NOT winning the iBook :-(.

58 Democratic Senate seats
40 Republican Senate seats
(not counting independents)
260 Democratic House seats
175 Republican House seats
353 Obama Electoral Votes
185 McCain Electoral Votes
51.9 Obama Popular Vote Percentage
45.4 McCain Popular Vote Percentage

I am not persuaded that this would constitute an "ex post facto" law, if passed.  The State of California has the ability to void its own acts as a matter of public policy, or to deny them future legal effect.  This is different from criminalizing ex post facto an act not illegal when done; the first is administrative and civil, the latter criminal.

It's more akin to the state granting a business license to a casino, then revoking that license or passing a law banning casino gambling; they don't have to grandfather the old casinos in for future business, but they cannot prosecute them for violating a ban that had not yet existed.  If you are a scholar on this point, please correct me; it's been 14 years since I had to examine this question.

The LDS Church has made a very specific point of jamming this through as a church project, even to the point of interrogating church members during Temple Recommend interviews about whether the member has not only put up a Prop 8 yard sign but also donated substantial sums to the effort.  The church's activities in this regard are extremely fair game; they are misusing their tax-exempt status as a church not to minister to their faithful or to teach their dogma, but to make their dogma the law of California, non-Mormons be damned.  But reasonable minds can absolutely differ on the prudence of this choice of tone.

Devastatingly good.  Am pushing this like wildfire.  I didn't see it up over at Big Orange.  

Funny - my gay ex-mormon pal from college just walked out the door before I saw this ad.  Hope he reads my email when he gets off the DC Metro....

The person holding that camera should also be working the polls, presumably.  It's that close.

To a Catholic (devout or lapsed/fallen like me), an Orthodox Christian or a moderate Protestant, the extreme "Bible-believing" Christians just look like oddities.  "The Bible" was the product of the Church, not the other way around; "the Church" (i.e. the collective of various Christian churches) existed for centuries before the earliest preliminary canons were formed by Christian scholars like Origen and Irenaeus.  

To this day, disputes exist within Christendom about the holiness or canonicity of various books.  But try to find a fundamentalist Christian who can provide you the foregoing basic paragraph of Biblical and Church history.  They and their preachers are so often militantly ignorant of history available at almost any county or town public library.  Then again, since I had the fortunate of a Jesuit education in high school before I fell/lapsed, maybe I am just a bigoted old fool.

Well, they should absolutely protect Pennsylvania, no doubt.  And leaking a fake poll (or a known, poorly done poll cherry picked to keep it from being a "fake leak") is a good idea, both for the candidate and to help out other Democrats who may be riding on an Obama wave.

But ask yourself this: which is more likely - that the well-respected right-leaning RCP and professional handicappers at left-leaning 538.com are all dead wrong, or that John McCain is a self-deluded erratic denier of reality in stage one of grief (on his own or fed/spun by operatives who are frightened of giving him bad news)?

I know, dog bites man....