Gosh, Greg, I love it.  You fling vile invectives at our governor
after she vetoes a few half brained idiot bills aimed at "solving" the
immigration issue by utterly useless measures.  When the Bush
administration pulls a no show no call at the first major Congressional
hearings on the issue, you don't say one word about it.  Even a lame
Republican newspaper like the Republic called them on it.  You say
nothing.  You continue to confirm all my worst suspicions about
conservative Christians.
On the immigration issue, my biggest suspicion is this:  conservatives
don't really care about the issue at all, except to use it as a
convenient stick to bash any nearby liberal Democrat with.  You'll
smack Janet Napolitano with the immigration stick.  You won't touch the
Bush administration on the issue.  Not one word.  This isn't
conservatism, Greg, it's blind loyalty to one lousy politician and one
political party.
It's ridiculous to blame the problem of ten to twenty million
undocumented workers living and working in our country on the governor
of Arizona.  Immigration policy and enforcement is the job of the
federal government.  Always has been.  The policy now in place--ignore
the responsibility of employers hiring millions of illegal workers at
slave labor wages, clamp the border shut in most places and force
immigrants die crossing the desert in 110 degree heat--is the policy of
the Bush administration.  Bush has been president for four and half
years, with his party in control of the Congress.  He hasn't lifted a
finger to change the policy.  This is his policy.  If it's not his
policy, why doesn't he try to change it?  As a Democrat, I'll gladly
acknowledge that Bush inherited most of this policy from Clinton (who
inherited it from Bush the first) and that Clinton and the Democratic
party bear part of the responsibility for the problem.  Ex-presidents
who've been out of office for nearly five years can't be expected to
reform our immigration policy.  That would be the job of our current
president.  Don't try to pull the standard conservative Republican
"blame it all on Clinton" on this issue.  Won't work.
We finally have two major bills in Congress that attempt to reform
this absurd policy.  The McCain-Kennedy bill has its flaws but it's at
least a decent starting place.  Kyl's bill is so fundamentally
impractical that it will never get off the ground.  (Sure, Senator Kyl,
Mexican immigrants will go back to Mexico and re-enter the United
States, right after all white Americans of European ancestry leave the
country and return only after requesting and receiving permission to
return from at least ten Native American tribes.)  The Bush
administration can't even bother to show up for the hearings.  I guess
they're too busy searching for Osama bin-Who and dismantling all the
weapons of mass destruction that they knew Iraq didn't have. And you
have not one word of criticism for them?
If you're only interest in the immigration issue is to use it as a
weapon to bash Democrats with, you're doing a fine job.  If you want to
address the issue in a realistic manner and seek a solution, you need
to acknowledge that both political parties are guilty of allowing the
current situation to exist, and both parties will need to work together
to find a solution.  If you're actually interested in finding a
solution, you should be outraged and appalled by the Bush
administration's display of gross indifference.  If you just want to
play partisan politics, keep it up, and people will keep dying in the
desert.
I'm an emergency room nurse at the Maricopa Medical Center.  Last
month I spent thirty minutes doing chest compressions and pumping
epinephrine into the veins of a twenty-one year old kid who was found
barely still alive in 112 degree heat in the desert and flown into our
hospital.  He died.  Have you ever had to look at the lifeless body of
a twenty year old kid who died for an eight dollar on hour job?  Have
you ever had to zip the body bag shut over his face?  I suppose the
conservative Christian attitude is that it was all his fault since he
broke the law.  Rather devoid of compassion, isn't it?  What was it
that Jesus said?  Be compassionate, as God is compassionate?  (Did Luke
6:36 get left out of every Bible in Mesa?)
Our federal government bears the responsibility for a horribly failed
immigration policy.  It bears the responsibility for hundreds of deaths
that have resulted from this policy.  The policy needs to be fixed. 
Partisan political games and blind loyalty aren't going to help fix it.
  They only hinder the process.  I, for one, think it would be nice if
our "Christian" president and his administration cared enough to even
show up at the table and start talking about how to fix it.  And I
think anyone who claims to be a Christian should be outraged when they
fail to do so.

John Mayhew, with another Kerry sticker on my VW bus and another joint
to smoke.