posted on June 8, 2005 02:11:42 PM new
House Judiciary Panel Chair Berates Dean over 'Anti-Immigrant' Comments
By Melanie Hunter
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
June 08, 2005
(CNSNews.com) -
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean Wednesday regarding comments the former Vermont governor made on NBC's "Today Show."
During an interview with Matt Lauer, Dean said, "(T)hey (Republicans) are attacking immigrants: Two Republican congressmen, Jim Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo, have incredible anti-immigration legislation."
In the letter, Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) told Dean that he was "extremely disappointed to hear of your latest outrageous political assault."
"You accused me by name of 'attacking immigrants' and having 'incredible anti-immigrant legislation,' an apparent reference to REAL ID legislation that enjoyed strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate as well as by the Bush Administration," Sensenbrenner wrote.
"By implication, the 42 House Democrats who voted for the REAL ID Act and Senate Democrats like Senator Byrd who proved invaluable in moving this antiterrorism legislation through the Senate are also guilty of 'attacking immigrants,'" he added.
Sensenbrenner noted that the REAL ID measure was introduced in response to the 9/11 Commission's recommendations regarding border security and "improving identity document standards."
"Are 9/11 Commission members also guilty of attacking immigrants?" he wrote. "Are the overwhelming majority of law-abiding Americans who want us to get some control of our porous borders also guilty of attacking immigrants?
"In recent days, your delusional outbursts have forced senior members of your own party to distance themselves from your comments.
While I agree with your acknowledgment that you're 'not very dignified,' I sincerely hope you refrain from further personal attacks," the Republican senator added. "These attacks are contrary to the passionate - but respectful - political debate the public deserves," Sensenbrenner concluded.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
And why the American Voters chose to RE-elect President Bush to four more years. YES!!!
posted on June 8, 2005 03:05:05 PM new
Tancredo - now there is one strange individual...
Sponsored that would have withheld homeland security funds from communities that do not force police, teachers and medical personnel to turn in illegal immigrants.
Said that god told him it was ok to break a three term limit pledge (actually, it was the main plank in his platform) that he had made when running for election because he was fighting a noble cause - immigration. (Apparently God cannot abide by illegals)
This is a guy that is even too conservative for Bush.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
No, I'm saying -- I'm merely -- I'm saying what I'm saying. I don't know why I'm always having people say, are you trying to say -- you know what you can do if you want to know what I'm saying is listen to what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what I said ...
- Ann Coulter
[ edited by fenix03 on Jun 8, 2005 03:07 PM ]
posted on June 8, 2005 03:43:04 PM new
Tom DeLay,
----- DEFENDER OF SWEATSHOPS
THE GOP WHIP THINKS THAT AMERICAN COMPANIES USING UNDERPAID GARMENT WORKERS IN DISTANT SAIPAN IS JUST FINE.
BY JEFF STEIN | In the swirling spotlight that surrounds the presidential impeachment trial, it's finally Tom DeLay's turn to move into the hot seat. The slick-haired Texan with a fondness for calling President Clinton a liar is starting to face questions about his own contradictions.
A former business partner in DeLay's exterminating business in suburban Houston popped up in the pages of the New Republic this week with charges that the Republican whip had lied about his ties to the company in a 1994 lawsuit, and may have illegally siphoned off company funds to pay off campaign debts.
DeLay has excoriated the president for "trying to use legalese and lawyerese to do two-steps around the questions," author Ann Louise Bardach observed in her New Republic piece. But the three experts Bardach asked to examine DeLay's depositions -- under oath-- in the lawsuit concluded that he had done exactly the same thing.
DeLay's spokesman Michael Scanlon blew off the allegations as old news: "Our political enemies have been digging into Mr. DeLay's past for years," he said in a prepared statement.
Indeed they have, but they've been getting nowhere. Lacking a lurid enough angle in sex-obsessed Washington, they've had no success in knocking DeLay off his pedestal. Now, however, comes the faint cry of virtual slave laborers far out in the Pacific Ocean, as unlikely a threat as the nasty-tongued Republican could have ever imagined. But the faceless, nameless sweatshop garment workers of Saipan suddenly have some legal muscle.
In 1986, the 27,000 islanders were granted American citizenship.
It was around this time, however, that mandarins from Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China began setting up textile factories on Saipan and importing labor from the mainland, as well as from Bangladesh and the Philippines, to cut and stitch cloth for garment makers including JC Penney, the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Liz Clairborne, Jones New York, Abercrombie & Fitch, Levi Strauss, Nautica and many others -- a virtual Who's Who of designer labels. The idea was to slip under the radar of U.S. quotas and duties, which would cost the manufacturers millions more if the garments were made outside U.S. territory. Garments from Saipan are made from foreign cloth, assembled by foreign workers on U.S. soil and labeled "Made in the USA."
And they are made cheaply. Wages in the factories average about $3 per hour -- more than $2 less than the U.S. minimum wage of $5.15. No overtime is paid for a 70-hour work week. But that's hardly the worst of it. Far away from the swank beachside hotels, luxurious golf courses and the thousands of Japanese tourists snorkling around sunken U.S. Navy landing craft in the clear waters, some 31,000 textile workers live penned up like cattle by armed soldiers and barbed wire, and squeezed head to toe into filthy sleeping barracks, all of which was documented on film by U.S. investigators last year.
The unhappy workers cannot just walk away, either: Like Appalachian coal miners a generation ago, they owe their souls to the company store, starting with factory recruiters, who charge Chinese peasants as much as $4,000 to get them out of China and into a "good job" in "America." Their low salaries make it nearly impossible to buy back their freedom. And so they stay. The small print in their contracts forbids sex, drinking -- and dissent.
"I am very tired," wrote Li Zhen Hua, a 29-year-old Chinese woman in a letter to a friend obtained by the weekly Dallas Observer. "I want to go back to my country but I can't because we must keep [sic] two years ... Very busy. So hard. Every day work up to 1:30. I've to work on Sunday. Too much to respond to your letters."
Enter Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican sidekick, Dick Armey. When the Clinton administration sought to yank Saipan's factories into the 20th century in 1994, requiring the workers be paid a minimum wage, overtime and their living conditions improved, the island government hired a platoon of well-connected Washington lobbyists, headed by former DeLay aide Jack Abramoff, to block the plan. Abramoff, in turn, personally or through his family, contributed $18,000 to DeLay's campaign coffers. So far, the island government has paid the firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds $4 million for their efforts, records show. They also treated DeLay and Armey to trips to the island, where they played golf, snorkled and made whirlwind visits to factories especially spiffed up for the occasion, according to several accounts.
"Even though I have only been here for 24 hours, I have witnessed the economic success of the Marianas," DeLay told a banquet crowd. As for the critics of the plantation system, DeLay told the dinner crowd darkly, "You are up against the forces of big labor and the radical left."
The whip was apparently referring to the Clinton administration, whose official in charge of the Marianas, Insular Affairs Chief Al Stayman, wanted to change the sweatshop system. In a private e-mail from Abramoff to island officials, which was made available to Salon, the lobbyist vowed he would "impeach Stayman and his campaign."
Stayman is still on the job, but the Republicans, led by DeLay, have blocked every effort by the Democrats to hold hearings on the issue.
Help may be on the way, though, via a California law firm that this month filed a multimillion dollar suit against the factories in the name of "John Does 1-23." The suit, filed last week in Saipan and state and federal courts, accuses the firms of exploiting thousands of indentured foreign workers in sweatshop conditions on U.S. soil.
"A free market success," DeLay calls Saipan's indentured worker system. If the Republicans take a drubbing at the polls in 2000, however, DeLay shouldn't be surprised if vengeance is in the air, even from his fellow Texas fat cats. Scores of textile plants in cities like El Paso and Dallas have had to shutter their doors in the face of cutthroat competition from companies like those in Saipan.
All of which is ironic, considering how DeLay recently stood up for Chinese dissidents in a different context. On the eve of the president's visit to China last June, DeLay and 150 other Republicans signed a letter urging Clinton to call off his trip because of Beijing's treatment of religious and political dissenters.
Beijing had been cracking down on dissidents since the Tiananmen Square massacre a decade earlier, of course, but that didn't stop DeLay from making his own trip, paid for by a private foundation backed by private corporations with business in China.
"Some might say that gives hypocrisy a bad name," cracked Rep. Maurce Hinchey, a New York Democrat. But as the records unearthed from DeLay's extermination company this week showed, he's become an expert in that.
SALON | Feb. 4, 1999
Washington writer Jeff Stein is a frequent contributor to Salon.
posted on June 8, 2005 03:44:10 PM new
Is it anything like Tom DeLIE calling Native Americans "troglodytes and monkeys" ????
as he cheerfully screwed them out of millions of dollars!
posted on June 8, 2005 04:28:22 PM new
Crow - are you suffering from short term memory loss of were you just assuming everyone else is? Yes - we have seen them. It's a six year old article.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
No, I'm saying -- I'm merely -- I'm saying what I'm saying. I don't know why I'm always having people say, are you trying to say -- you know what you can do if you want to know what I'm saying is listen to what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what I said ...
posted on June 8, 2005 07:38:22 PM new
Gov Dean, in the position he is now, Gov.Dean needs to tone down for now. I think he is just showing the Democrats are not going to let only the republicans get away with rhetoric like that this time around.
posted on June 8, 2005 11:53:44 PM new
So fenix, because it's 6 years old it doesn't matter any more ??????
I think it does and IS relevant to what's happening NOW.
Conditions for workers in Saipan have NOT improved.
The righties are against abortion but these women are told, if they become pregnant , either get out or get an abortion......and DeLIE didn't care.............
posted on June 9, 2005 05:40:08 AM new
Shouldn't the workers in Saipan be concerned with their working conditions? Not the US governements problem. Saipan's.
posted on June 9, 2005 06:01:38 AM new
Ron, the point is Tom DeLay supports sweatshop conditions but takes money to play Golf and Swim. No one should say this is the right thing for DeLay to do. Is it all about cheap labor for you, have you no compassion for other Humans?
posted on June 9, 2005 07:17:00 AM new
How did we get from Dean to Sweatshops, but here is an interesting URL on sweatshops. Way to long to C& P. If you think sweatshops are only foreign you need to read this.
posted on June 9, 2005 09:53:13 AM new
And now that ol' hillary is beginning to sound just like dean....it appears both the liberal wing, of the democratic party and one who wishes we see her as a 'moderate' are both losing it.
Peggy Noonan's article:
Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean RAGE against Republicans - It's NOT a Winning Approach.
posted on June 9, 2005 10:01:16 AM new
President Bush is introduced at a great gathering in Topeka, Kan. It is the evening of June 9, 2005. Ruffles and flourishes, "Hail to the Chief," hearty applause from a packed ballroom. Mr. Bush walks to the podium and delivers the following address.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to speak this evening about how I see the political landscape. Let me jump right in. The struggle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is a struggle between good and evil--and we're the good. I hate Democrats. Let's face it, they have never made an honest living in their lives. Who are they, really, but people who are intent on abusing power, destroying the United States Senate and undermining our Constitution? They have no shame.
But why would they? They have never been acquainted with the truth. You ever been to a Democratic fundraiser? They all look the same. They all behave the same. They have a dictatorship, and suffer from zeal so extreme they think they have a direct line to heaven. But what would you expect when you have a far left extremist base? We cannot afford more of their leadership. I call on you to help me defeat them!"
Imagine Mr. Bush saying those things, and the crowd roaring with lusty delight. Imagine John McCain saying them for that matter, or any other likely Republican candidate for president, or Ken Mehlman, the head of the Republican National Committee.
Can you imagine them talking this way? Me neither. Because they wouldn't.
Messrs. Bush, McCain, et al., would find talk like that to be extreme, damaging, desperate. They would understand it would tend to add a new level of hysteria to political discourse, andthat's not good for the country. I think they would know such talk is unworthy in a leader, or potential leader, of a great democracy. I think they would understand that talk like that is destructive to the ties that bind--and to the speaker's political prospects.
posted on June 9, 2005 10:13:26 AM newDr. Dean, the shrink is in
Larry Elder (back to web version) | Send
June 9, 2005
"I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for," said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Dean also blamed Republicans for the unhappy occasion when California voters recalled their Democratic governor: "The right wing of the Republican Party is deliberately undermining the Democratic underpinnings of this country," said Dean on Sept. 6, 2003. "I believe they do not care what Americans think and they do not accept the legitimacy of our elections and have now, for the fourth time in the fourth state, attempted to do what they can to remove democracy from America."
Dean considers Republicans a morally inferior species. In a speech in Kansas on Feb. 25, 2005, Dean said the contest between Democrats and Republicans was "a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." A couple of months later, Dean also called Republicans "corrupt," and said, "You can't trust them with your money, and you can't trust them with your votes."
Dean says Republicans have minimal mental capability, as when Dean called them "brain dead." The chairman says the "brain-dead" Republicans only won the 2004 election because they kept their message simple, while Democrats need "to explain every issue in half an hour of detail."
Dean calls Republicans racist: "The Republicans are all about suppressing votes. Two voting machines if you live in a black district, 10 voting machines if you live in a white district." Dean considers Republicans either lazy or parasitic trust-fund babies: "[T]he idea that you have to wait on line for eight hours to cast your ballot. . . . You think people can work all day, and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever, and get home and . . . still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well, Republicans, I guess," said Dean, "can do that, because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives." A Democratic Party spokeswoman -- and later, Dean himself -- said he was talking about Republican politicians and leadership, not hardworking American people. (Right.)
Tell us, Dr. Dean, why the anger?
Armchair psychologist and former President Bill Clinton might have a perspective--maybe Dean is a self-loather. Back in December, conservative Republican fundraiser Arthur J. Finkelstein "married" his longtime male partner in a Massachusetts civil ceremony. When Finkelstein announced his intention to form a campaign chest to defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for re-election in '06, Bill Clinton said, "Either this guy believes his party is not serious and he's totally Machiavellian in its position, or . . . there's some sort of self-loathing." So, according to Clinton, when a gay man renounces the customary liberalism of the gay and lesbian community, he becomes "self loathing." Hm-mm.
Howard Dean's father was known as "Big Howard." Big Howard was a conservative Republican who supported Barry Goldwater in 1964. Does Dean consider his late father "brain dead"? Did he "hate" his Republican father? Indeed, according to Steven Thomma and James Kuhnhenn of the Detroit Free Press, Dean himself called his relationship with his father "complicated." "His father, Dean said, . . . was 'an enormous personality' who 'could suck the oxygen' out of a room," wrote Thomma and Kuhnhenn. "'He and I had as complicated a relationship as he had had with his own father, another magnetic and well-regarded individual who was a hard act to follow.'"
Dean opposes President George W. Bush's plan to allow optional private savings accounts. Bush's plan would allow younger workers to invest part of their Social Security contribution in a diversified account that could include stocks. But guess what "Big Howard" did for a living? Dad was a successful -- and apparently honest -- stockbroker. Dean's dad did quite well -- successful enough to live in the exclusive oceanside community of East Hampton on Long Island and on Park Avenue, and to send young Howard to pricey private schools like St. George's, a small Episcopal boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island, plus a postgraduate year at an English boarding school.
There's more. Dean's brother, Charlie, who was traveling in Laos in 1974, was captured and killed by communists. The family had predicted Charlie, not Howard, would be the future family politician. Charlie demonstrated both the interest and the necessary debating skills. About his brother, Dean said, had Charlie lived, "he'd be the one running for president and not me." Did Republican Big Howard prefer Charlie?
So Howard Dean says he "hates Republicans," although his dad was one. He believes the option of allowing workers to invest their money in stocks is irresponsible, even though his dad made a successful living as a stockbroker. And it turns out the family saw a political future for Dean's brother Charlie, but not for him.
Where's Dr. Phil when you need him?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
And why the American Voters chose to RE-elect President Bush to four more years. YES!!!
posted on June 9, 2005 02:34:12 PM new
Below is a list Democrats who can't get away from Dean's comments fast enough.
Good for them.
List courtesy of the Hotline (subscription):
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR): "I would encourage my chairman and the Republican chairman to tone it down a little bit, if possible" (Barton, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 6/9).
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) noted Dean "doesn't speak for me" (Lakely, Washington Times, 6/9).
House Min Leader Nancy Pelosi: "I don't think that the statement [Dean] made was a helpful statement" (AP/USA Today, 6/9).
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL): "I think there have been a couple of times when the way he phrases things seem to be pushing people away" (Lakely, Washington Times, 6/9).
Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-TN): "I won't have him down for me in Tennessee spending time on the campaign trail with me" ("Imus," MSNBC, 6/9).
Ex-SC Dem chair Dick Harpootlian: "That's not the way you distinguish someone's politics. It forces us to distance ourselves from him" (AP/Rutland Herald, 6/9).
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT): "He's doing a good job as chairman. Did he make a mistake with these comments? Absolutely" ("IP," CNN, 6/8).
Ex-Media Fund head Harold Ickes: "Some of his comments will reinforce the view that he sometimes talks before he really thinks through his implications" (Easton/Klein, Boston Globe, 6/9).
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) top adviser Howard Wolfson: "I do think these comments are over the line and not appropriate" (Dicker, New York Post, 6/9).
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA): "There's some areas where you may have used other kinds of words" (Easton/Klein, Boston Globe, 6/9).
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) called the "white, Christian party" remark "way over the top" (Murray, Washington Post, 6/9).
Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) said Dean's style "gets away from how the Democrats should frame issues" (Lakely, Washington Times, 6/9).
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) said Dems "don't need gratuitous hits" (Murray, Washington Post, 6/9).
-------------------
posted on June 10, 2005 05:42:00 AM new
# Commonwealth
1. Used to refer to some U.S. states, namely, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
2. Used to refer to a self-governing, autonomous political unit voluntarily associated with the United States, namely, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.
So, No I don't care about those people. Nice try though. If their own government allows them to be exploited then that is their concern.
My concern is whether Delay is guilty of something here in the US.
Ron
[ edited by WashingtoneBayer on Jun 10, 2005 05:43 AM ]
....Saipan is in a UNITED STATES COMMONWEALTH.
