The Court steps up? Oregon shenanigens! And the meaning of July 4.

For starters: Peter Denning interviews me about “resilience” of our critical infrastructure, from the power grid and cell-phones to transportation, food supplies and solar roofs, in the new issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM). I offer a dozen measures - some of them incredibly easy/cheap - that could improve robustness against shocks, by orders of magnitude, preventing us from ever facing a “Postman” situation. 

For those of you who aren’t ACM member-nerds, I’ll post a version some time. And yes, I’m qualified as a physicist, electrical engineer and longtime consultant on these matters with corporations and agencies. But frankly, it’s the science fiction. Of course it is.

== Three Court decisions that will change America and the World ==

Cardinal Richelieu - recalled as the "Three Musketeers" villain - is quoted as saying, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” 

Now the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Richelieu’s favor. Well, in favor of police who arrest you over any minor thing, even if it is clearly in retaliation for something you said. This eats away at what was the leap in citizen rights we experienced — (without press notice) - in 2013 when the courts and Obama administration ruled that citizens may record the police in public. We must add this to our list of reasons to be active!

Still, there is a court that is higher than the Supremes! Jury nullification. Talk your neighbors into saying “no way is that right.” Then talk all of them into voting.

== A birthday gift to the nation? ==

Of course the most-important American, right now is Chief Justice John Roberts. He has already used a technicality to reverse Republican cheat-gerrymandering in Virginia, allowing that state's rising majority of smart people to finally get a fair vote. But it's the looming Court decisions re Wisconsin and Maryland that could truly end that blatant travesty, returning democracy to America.

These matters combine with a third constitutional crisis before us... whether Congress truly is an equal (indeed Constitutionally foremost) branch of government, able to compel testimony under its inherent powers of investigation and oversight. Powers the GOP used for 25 years to harry Obama and the Clintons, uncovering zilch. Now that light is pouring the other way, and money-laundering revelations are about to burst the dam, Trumpist-Foxites hypocritically aim to castrate that power, forever. 

There is ample precedent that Congress has this power: Under the 1934 Jurney vs. McCracken decision, the Supreme Court says Congress can detain people who refuse to provide information. Adam Schiff is talking about fines. This article lays it out. 

These separate issues revolve around one principle: legislature sovereignty. John Roberts earlier admitted that blatant political gerrymandering was wrong, but refused to intervene in the “proper domain” of state legislatures, a stance so clearly bogus.... But indeed, my 'Minimal Overlap' solution to gerrymandering would nullify the 'legislative sovereignty' excuse perfectly! Plaintiffs in gerrymandering cases should refer to it.

Okay, let's suppose Roberts favors acceptance of 'legislature prerogative' as an excuse not to rule on gerrymandering, then how can he rule against the U.S. Congressional prerogative of oversight? Someone needs to make that explicit.

Note: In fact, I know a way Congress might bypass the Supreme Court, by appealing to the fourth branch of government. I spoke to a few Congressional aides about the idea. It would work... once... and then likely always. If only Democratic politicians had as much brains as heart. (There is also a way to make every House member (including Republicans) fiercely protective of subpoena power - by granting every member - majority or minority - one-per-year. I explain elsewhere.)

Amid one of the most crucial Supreme Court seasons ever, look up Roger Taney, who goes down as one of the most despised names in American history - a posterity Taney wouldn't have imagined, when named Chief Justice. But before he died – knowing Lincoln would be re-elected by a landslide - he saw ignominy and infamy would be his fate. You should spread word so modern Americans know about that horrid man, who ensured there would be no way out except violent convulsion. Will what happened in phase 4 of the U.S. civil war occur again, if our current phase 8 goes hot? It will, if blatant cheats empowering the New Confederate Treason are left in place.  America’s destiny is largely in the hands of the man currently sitting in the same chair.

== Oregonian goings-on ==

You've seen reports out of Oregon, how Democrats have super-majorities and the governor and plan to enact climate change legislation for the sake of their grandchildren... but need two Republicans to show up to make a quorum. And so, GOP state senators are fleeing to Idaho, chased by state police ordered (legally) to collar them back to their jobs.

What theater! The NPR and other reports are interesting... yet I've heard none that pull back to recall a similar case back when Tom DeLay's GOP took over Texas, vowing to rip redistricting out of the hands of bipartisan commissions and gerrymander like hell. In 2002, Democratic state legislators fled to Oklahoma, rather than give DeLay a quorum. Rick Perry used a series of tricks to bypass them and the era of GOP super-cheating -- emulated everywhere the party got power -- began.

Does that sound like a tit-for-tat similarity. Both sides do it?  Well except that:

1) The dems in 2002 Texas were protesting spectacular cheating aimed at a raw power rape, ending fair elections. The 2019 Republicans pulling this quorum trick in Oregon are trying to prevent a cap-and-trade system that's proved to work well in California, helping save the world... because some oligarch-owned coal plants in Idaho and Utah might have to close. Both times, the stink of evil-brimstone points in the same direction.

2) In both cases, right wing armed militias threatened violence against Democratic legislators.

Well. Except for that... and everything else... similar cases. It's history that deserves to be remembered.

And finally... worth the wait. You'll gasp!

== July 4 musings... take inspiration form the Declaration ==

In light of the looming American anniversary... and efforts by a pompous pretend-king to hijack it... I was just re-reading the U.S. Declaration of Independence (USDI) - a worthy step in humanity’s climb out of darkness, though with many painful steps left to go.

Elsewhere I discuss how the USDI is about the colonies’ “patient sufferance” and fruitless efforts at negotiation with British oligarchs - which the 1860s secessionist oath-breakers never did. This time, I want to point at just one of the indictments against King George III. It leaped out at me!

"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.'

Whaaa? Re-read that. Especially in today's context. Oh sure, many aspects of the USDI read as brutishly imperfect from our later perspective… as we will seem brutes to our better descendants, I hope!

Still, as we approach July 4 -- and insipid attempts by confederates to hijack it -- let’s recall that it is the direction of progress that matters - keeping the arc of history bent toward justice. 

Moreover when confederates and their foreign allies and would-be kings are driven out of Washington, and our temples cleansed of treason, we will lift our eyes to a shared future of amiable-adult argument -- actual fair politics -- over how to keep improving, with charity for all and malice towards none.

Politics: Break away from the usual "axis"!

Many of you know that I've long railed against the hoary-lobotomizing so-called "Left-Right Political Axis." Oh, sure, it's one thing to use it as a very rough marker. But anyone who assigns it actual, intellectual meaning is pretty much discredited from the git-go. Want an example?
This "study" of the political divide in America - supposedly thorough and insightful - only proves you can perpetuate a calamity, by asking the wrong questions. Focusing on race, identity politics, immigration and vague economic populism, the perpetrators of this mess never getting to any of the real reasons for today's inchoate rage.  

Just one question would have blown out every other factor, demarcating our cultural divide:

"Which 'elites' in American life do you blame and despise?"

Almost all Americans share a reflex called Suspicion of Authority (SoA), taught by every brave Hollywood underdog tale. Republicans fret about faceless-conniving bureaucracies and Democrats about faceless-conspiring corporations. In normal times, each side can grudgingly admit the other may have a point. But today's enemy elite fixations are more stark. 

Liberals know the U.S. is being taken over by a plutocrat oligarchy. Fox-watching conservatives save their true rage for -- not other races or immigrants -- but scientists, journalists, teachers, doctors, civil servants and every other type of expert-smartypants. Those smarmy-lecturing-patronizing elites are the enemy, and aristocrats can do no wrong.

This is the old underpinning of the US civil war, going back to 1778 when southern tories supported the King and when 1860s confederate soldiers marched for their plantation lords. Today's oligarchy knows their greatest obstacle is the millions of expert fact-users... and hence fact-users are now Enemy #1.

Racism is real and deadly! But it does not map as perfectly onto American conservatism as hatred of fact. (And note: facts tend to kill racism!) 

Alas, while Robert Heinlein predicted all this, more than half a century ago, democrats seem compelled to ignore the one factor that correlates perfectly. And bright-but-stupid 'studies' like this one fall into the same, tiresome trap.

See more on how desperately the right is fighting against facts.

== Danger! Danger! ==
The most important civil liberties advance of the 21st Century, so far, was when the Obama Administration joined multiple courts in declaring a citizen's right to record the police. I wrote about this 20 years ago in The Transparent Society (1997; see p.160) discussing how vital it is that we can exercise sousveillance at the level of the street, where power can most-directly affect us. I'm generally a moderate fellow, but we must be militant about our right and power to look back at authority, or else our revolution and renaissance and brief era of hope will end.

Only now:  "In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public."

News reports on this are scanty and some claim that this is only about making recordings inside a police station. Even if that's so, I'd claim a steep burden of proof falls on those who would restrict a citizen's right to record.

Sure enough, in a deep-red state, this principle is under attack. 

Only... I blame the good side's lawyers! They base their arguments for sousveillance on the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment and sometimes the Fifth... when it is in fact the under-appreciated SIXTH Amendment that most clearly protects the citizen against abuse by authority. That's the rule granting us the power to compel revelation of facts in our own defense, allowing our ultimate recourse...

...the Truth.

== Inspect your own assumptions ==

If you plan to have credibility - both with your opponents and in your own mind - you should grade and scale your political and social reactions. Yes, your opponent may be bad and wrong.  Indeed, today “he” (and I refer to the whole movement that engendered you-know-who) is very bad.  

Nevertheless, may I offer some impudent, off-axis and contrary suggestions?

First off, be able to question your own assumptions.  Here's a method I’ve provided, called the Questionnaire on Ideology. Take the test! You’ll learn plenty, especially about your own reflexes and underpinning values.

But coming back to our current civil war…

1) Keep in mind ways that things could be a lot worse than they are. (And hence why impeachment is a very bad idea.)  

2)  Don’t just oppose reflexively.  There are times when it’s appropriate to push back directly, as in Sumo wrestling. But many more when it’s best to look for a judo move. Let me repeat (ad nauseam?) one that I wish half a dozen democrat leaders would do, even if they have to hold their noses -- the Short Straw Gambit.
The current storm falling on Senator Diane Feinstein, because she counseled "patience" is a worrisome example of the "left" imitating the right's intemperate tantrums.

3) Win over your opponent’s wavering allies by proving that his caricatures about you are lies. For example, every single metric of U.S. national health - including those that conservatives should care about, like military readiness, entrepreneurship, employment, business startups and trends in deficit spending - all have had better outcomes across democratic administrations. Oh, and Berkeley protestors are not “typical of liberals” whatever Sean Hannity says. Deny them the comfort of their favorite stereotypes.  

4)  Look for concessions that make you look like the moderate reasonable one — before you wage total war on your crazy opponent’s unreasonableness.  For example (and you are not gonna like some of these):

- Build the damn wall.  There is nothing intrinsically evil about maintaining control over our national border. Clinton and Obama each doubled the border patrol and prioritized legal immigration over illegal. (Ponder why Republican factory and farm owners actually preferred the latter.)  As for the “wall”? Sure, Trump’s macho project is an exercise in phallic overcompensation! So? Then use it as a bargaining chip. Make an offer that he’ll leap at.

“Okay. We’ll pass a few billions to upgrade fences and maybe do a stretch of absurd “wall”… if you’ll amnesty the Dreamer Kids and do some bipartisan Obamacare fixes.”  

You don't think he'd leap at that? Prioritize!

- Voter ID. Sure, in principle, over time, we can envision everyone identifying themselves in order to vote. Don't make your opposition about that! Instead make it -- 

“You $%%#! GOP cheaters blatantly are using this "I.D." thing as an excuse as voter suppression.  But that would change if you red-staters finally allocate major funds for compliance assistance, to help the poor, divorced women, the elderly etc. actually get their ID straightened out. That would help them in dozens of ways, far beyond regularizing voter registration (which should be automatic, by the way.) Ideally, both sides would win-win.

"Of course that’s the last thing you cheaters want, as you deliberately close DMV offices in order to make getting ID harder. But if you do offer massive compliance assistance, we'll go along with gradually phasing in voter ID."

- Voter fraud. Donald Trump’s new 'electoral commission' is the most blatant gathering of thieving, lying cheaters seen in our lifetimes. But it can be turned against them: 

“We’ll cooperate in a full scale investigation to find your mythological “dead people voting”… if we get equal representation on this commission and it also goes after right wing cheats like rigged voting machines, purged voter rolls, gerrymandering and Tuesday-only voting.” 

Of course they'd refuse.  But the offer paints them in a corner and makes clear they are the electoral fraudsters.

== A suggested compromise sure to rouse your anger ==

- And now, a judo offer that will rile nearly all of you up and make you snarl at me!  It starts with this headline: “Trump pushes to sharply cut the number of legal immigrants and move U.S. to a 'merit-based' immigration system.” 

Let’s be clear, illegal immigration was always an absurd issue. Red Americans seem upset that our nation's demographics are changing, but undocumenteds aren’t doing that.  It is legal immigration that's been altering the face of America, and Democrats truly are responsible for that! Dems have always favored legal immigrants, who can join unions and eventually vote, over undocumenteds, who undercut union wages and cannot either vote or complain about bad work conditions.

To be clear, I am not objecting to America’s changing demographics, per se.  If the kids adopt our open-tolerant-diverse-rambunctious-hopeful-individualistic-scientific-pragmatic-ambitious-generous and fun-loving culture… did I mention culturally diverse?... then we (this civilization and humanity) win. It's the revolutionary, anti-feudal and pro-future meme that makes us different/memorable and worthy of forging tomorrow.

 We are a nation of immigrants.

But all liberal policies aren’t automatically correct in all ways, boys and girls. And you gain credibility when you’ll admit that maybe 5% or 10% were errors. In particular, many aspects of the legal immigration structure that Democrats put in place have been stupid and self-defeating. 

Like basing most of it on an endless web or ‘chain’ of family reunions. Re-uniting separated family members is right and proper for parents and children, and maybe in a few other cases. But I don’t agree when it comes to cousins, aunts, uncles and yes, most siblings. And before you lash out, will you please try to pause and consider just how evil and unfair this system has been?

Take Somalia. A country filled with people who want to come to America. Why should Joe be luckier than Fred, just because Joe has relatives in the U.S.? Joe is already luckier than Fred, because his U.S. relatives send him money and hire lawyers to help him with red tape. But Fred and his daughter Malia are just as deserving of luck!  What if Fred and Malia work harder? What if they strove more diligently for education or to build skills that have a ready market in America?

Is it awful to give some preference to immigrants who worked harder for it? Who will more likely be creative, productive and pay more taxes here? Taxes that will then let us increase our generosity in the world? That is what already happened! The rich nation of immigrants that was America after WWII was the engine that propelled the whole world upward. And yes, that means our criteria should be generous and non-racist and all that... but we can still have criteria.  And 'family reunions' are among the least generous and least morally supportable criteria imaginable. All that policy has ever done is declare: "if you are already luckier than everyone else in the homeland, then you get to stay luckier, as a matter of law."

The new Trump proposal "ends chain migration," Trump said, referring to the preference for uniting family members in the current immigration system. It would implement a points-based system for awarding lawful permanent residency, or green cards.

Dig it, pals. I despise that whole crew and you know how hard I have fought them! How hard I continue to fight them.

But we are better off rank ordering our priorities!  Let's make clear some things are non-negotiable and others… well… we’d talk about, if they ever send us adults to talk to?  That gives us credibility with the wavering adults who are right now pondering jumping off the GOP’s sinking ship.

And it is in those five or ten million residually-sapient American conservatives that our hope for victory will be found.

==  What are YOUR biases? (yes, you) ==

Time to draw attention back to my Questionnaire on Ideology.

Seriously, you are in no position to rant about our political landscape unless you know your place on it. And the stupid-lobotomizing so-called “left-right political axis” is not helpful. In fact, it does vastly more harm than good.

So go ahead. Take the quiz!  The Questionnaire on Ideology will cause you to ask yourself things you had taken for granted. Have the guts.

Shifting views on immigration

In 1939, the infamous ship St. Louis limped around the Atlantic and Caribbean with over 900 German Jews on board. Arm-twisted by the Nazis, but also shamefully, the United States and Cuba both refused sanctuary to the refugees. Eventually the ship returned to Germany and most of the passengers on board were eventually killed during the Holocaust.

Bard College professor an director of the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz talks about a luckier refugee, Hanna Arendt: In 1943, Arendt wrote a poignant essay 'We Refugees': "The stateless person, without the right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law."

Berkowitz expands on Arendt's experience: 
"The word, refugee, flattens a person and a people marked by loss and vulnerability. Having lost their home, their language, their friends, and their families, refugees live in camps, in public; they experience the rupture of their private lives and their public visibility as only a mass.
   "The refugee is transformed from a person with a history and world into a pitiable figure. We can have compassion for an individual, look into their eyes, touch their shoulder, and feel the humanness in their pain. But faced with masses of refugees hands open, seeking refuge, compassion is too often replaced by pity (if not by fear).”

I’ve long accused all sides of hypocrisy regarding immigration!

History shows that Democrats protect the borders and reduce illegal immigration --demonstrably better and more vigorously than Republicans (till Trump) -- for the same reasons that they boosted legal immigration — because legal immigrants can join unions and eventually vote. Yes, this sounds counter to popular impressions because liberals try to be kind to illegals, once they are here. But democratic presidents always boosted the Border Patrol (Obama deported all the illegals who misbehaved, who he could get his hands on).

Think about why, until 9/11, GOP presidents always slashed the BP. It's true!  Why? Because their owner caste loves cheap labor that must live in fear and that undercuts unions.

If cranky, white, male boomers want to blame anyone for the changing look of America, blame the Democrats all right! But for legal immigration.  The landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eased the path across the nation's borders for people from Asia and Africa by removing old regional quotas. That was moral and right.

And now the GOP Congress is moving against legal immigration.  

That 1965 Democratic Congress also did something that seems also to be right-sounding… easing the way for families to re-unite, if one member is already legally a U.S. resident. And there, well, I disagree. 

Sure, unite parents and children and spouses. But the sibling and cousin advantage is just immoral and wrong. 

Think.  Anyone in another country who has a U.S. relative is already much luckier than his neighbors in say, Bangladesh. Think, I mean it, actually think about this. Those relatives back home already get remittances and packages and favors, and help with legal paperwork trying to emigrate. They are already lucky! Why should they automatically be luckier than their neighbors, in Dacca?  Don’t those neighbors deserve a chance, too? See my earlier posting: Hidden factors in the rush to immigration reform. Must luck be kept limited to arbitrary family chains?

Does this mean I approve of a Republican bill?  Really? These monsters who have betrayed Adam Smith and Lincoln and who have sent Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave? 

Well, in fact, while it seems old-fashioned, I am capable of fine parsing. And there are portions of this bill that are as loathsome as anything else spewing from Paul Ryan’s Confederate Treason Cabal. But to be honest, there are parts that I can shrug over.

Look, we need to prioritize. Obama himself had no problems with simultaneously creating a citizenship path for "dreamers" - kids who came here as babies, while vigorously deporting slimes who betrayed their adopted land by wreaking crime and harm.  He called for kindness and help for hard-workers who were already here... while spending quite a few millions beefing up the Border Patrol and laying hundreds of miles of new fences, so immigration can channel through the legal processes.

Just in order to shock you all, let me say: "Build your stupid wall." It's about time Republicans were willing to employ lots of semi-skilled workers in infrastructure, creating high velocity money in the economy instead of sucking us dry with tax gifts to the rich.

If this were a negotiation, I'd let em have the wall, in exchange for... for... for not being jerks at war with facts and brains and heart in every way they can possibly find.

== Immigration and Violence ==

From the Los Angeles Times: Californians are 30% less likely to die a violent death today than other Americans. Since 1980, California’s rate of reported crime overall has fallen by 62%. The state’s criminal arrest rates, too, have fallen considerably, by 55% overall, and by 80% among people younger than 18 — a population, it is worth noting, that is now 72% nonwhite. 

Violent crime in California has fallen by an impressive 50% in the same period. This includes drops in robberies (65%), homicide (68%), and rapes and assaults (more than 40%). That last figure is even more remarkable when you consider that the legal definitions of both assault and rape were expanded during these years.

Trump often points at violence in Chicago. An outlier that is less blue and less immigrant rich, and far smaller than California. 

Oh, and California generates inventions and jobs faster than anyone. Texas keeps sending governors here to try to raid and poach our companies. Um, why? Can't generate your own?

Efficient government, top schools and universities... and sure, filled with problems... that are being handled better than any red state. Why? How? We haven't abandoned the formula of the Greatest Generation. We have unions, universities, infrastructure, tolerance and the rich pay taxes. And business flourishes. 

Oh, one more thing. We like being a little bit funky-crazy. It's cool. It is one of many reasons why we're the sane ones.

The Immigration Fury: one of many cliches you believe - that are “opposite to true”

Not far from where I live, demonstrators in Murrieta California have been blocking a facility designated to hold families and children who were recently intercepted attempting to cross illegally into the United States.  The demonstrators' chief effect -- (other than keeping kids on stifling busses for a few hours, till other centers came online) -- was to make a noisy statement about the recent flood of young border crossers. 

Fair enough. That border youth-surge apparently arose when commercial "coyote" crossing-traffickers discovered and publicized a glitch in the Bush era immigration law, treating children with more legal niceties than adults. The Obama Administration is scurrying to adjust and staunch the flood. But such details are not my reason for raising the topic, today. 

In fact --

-- the sound and fury over illegal immigration to the United States has put me in a rebellious and contrary frame of mind! I intend to upset everyone... from left to right... by pointing out that everything you believe about this issue is probably wrong. 

Indeed, what you believe -- about who is better at defending the U.S. border, and maybe a dozen other major issues -- may be diametrically opposite to true!

== Our previous example of an "opposite" ==

This contradiction re immigration (which I'll get to, in a moment) isn't the only one.  Amid an era in which "discourse" consists primarily of argument-by-facebook-jpegs, I got a lot of positive vibe for an elegantly clear graphic, a while back, showing that the U.S. budget deficit suffers a positive 2nd-Derivative (2D) — that accelerates toward skyrocketing debt — during almost every year of every Republican administration since Eisenhower. 

In sharp contrast — and contrary to every “truthy” slogan we’ve been taught — the 2D of federal deficit spending improves or decelerates during almost every year of every Democratic presidential term.

Why are our basic assumptions so perfectly opposite to actual fact? Both parties have "rhetoric constituencies" -- armies of reflexive voters who have no influence over actual legislation, but who must be told what they want to hear! Even if it is completely different than the effective agenda of the party's true rulers.

In the case of fiscal responsibility, this clash is obvious. Progressives, clutching a long laundry list of causes that need addressing right now, don't want to be told that borrowing must be handled judiciously and responsibly. So their party's record of actual fiscal prudery is something that Democratic leaders scarcely mention. And it is pretty obvious why GOP leaders want to talk loudly about balancing budgets, to distract Republican ground troops from their actual record, pouring deficit spending into the open mouths of the party's owners.

Or take another glaring example in today's news. The right's sudden attack upon the U.S. Export-Import Bank.  Mind you, as a Smithian libertarian, I actually dislike the institution, whose primary justification is that "every other country is doing it and we'll cripple ourselves, if we stop."  

Hm, well, I would make it a high priority to treaty-negotiate away the practice.  Still, how ironic that the tea-partiers are targeting an institution that (in fact) is completely self-financing! There is no "tax-waste" going on, at all. The underlying motive, then? That many of the exporting companies - like Boeing - tend to be technological and therefore Democratic-friendly.

== Back to immigration ==

But let's return to today's core topic. Our absurdly wrong cliches about immigration. Let me put it plain. 

Democratic presidents always beef up the U.S. Border Patrol and reduce illegal immigration, while GOP presidents almost always cripple the Border Patrol and open the floodgates of illegals. It is right there in the budgets and manpower figures, with one exception --

-- that G.W. Bush started down the usual GOP path, slashing Border Patrol funding during his first 6 months in office… but then had to increase it, prodigiously, after the traumas known as 9/11.

If you actually thought about it, you would understand why both parties’ actions regarding immigration run diametrically opposite to their reputations and rhetoric. Dems actually benefit from LEGAL immigration, which increases the potential numbers of loyal union members and eventual voters. Hence, in fact, democrats have always been softies about increasing the flow of fully sanctioned and documented immigrants. Again, it is legal immigration that democrats have always favored.

Unions do not want illegals undermining wages… which is something the top GOP masters do want. Again, just so your mind cannot evade the cognitive dissonance, dig it well: democratic presidents beef up the Border Patrol and are actually pretty fierce with deportations. This was true of Carter, Clinton and Obama. 

If you hate the ethnic changes taking place in America, fine, but go after the dems for legal immigration, which they did open wider, and stop obsessing on the much smaller illegal influx, which democrats actively combat and which your own party has relentlessly aided and abetted. 

(But if you are that kind of person, logic is wasted on you, anyway.)

Do you start to see the picture? How often what the parties do will run diametrically opposite to the malarkey they feed their rhetoric constituencies? And more the fool you are, for falling for it. 

Go listen to Weird Al sing "Everything you know is wrong." Acceptance is the beginning of the road to openminded recovery.

== Another "opposite" ==

More examples? The same cognitive dissonance between cliched expectation and reality can be found in “de-regulation of excessive government bureaucracy.”

Which party talks and talks and talks about that? About eliminating overly burdensome and competition-reducing rules and agencies? Which one wants to ease the burdens of over-regulation? You think you have that sussed?

 Ah, Republicans do talk about de-regulation, incessantly. But does the GOP ever do anything about it? Even during the many years (e.g. 2001 through 2009) when they held every lever of power -- executive, legislative and judicial?  Go on, name those great de-regulatory feats that came about during those years. Take your time and be thorough. We can wait right here till you get back....

(Be sure - while you're at-it - and ponder the half a trillion dollars in no-bid "emergency" contracts that the Bush-Cheney Administration signed with family-crony companies. Ah, the party that favors free-market competition.)

In fact: ironically, it was the democrats who disbanded the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) that Ayn Rand deemed the worst example of “captured” government, helping railroad moguls to collude and destroying market vigor. It was democrats who disbanded the horrid old Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and restored airline competition. 

Democrats performed the single greatest act of de-regulatory unshackling in human history, when they unleashed the wild-open Internet upon the world, with almost no supervision or regulation at all! (It was Sen. Al Gore's bill that did that.)  Not to mention lesser events, like Obama opening U.S. space-launch services to competitive bidding. Or the largely-liberal-led efforts, in many blue states, to rein in - at long last - the horrifically insane regulatory madness called the War on Drugs.

In fact, Democrats did nearly all of the major U.S. deregulations of the last century... except in one industry.

Finance. Wall Street and banking. I will grant that Republicans have actually put their de-regulatory rhetoric into practice in that one sector. Not once but many times.  

Now, some critics have claimed that regulation of finance is desperately necessary to prevent collusion, cheating and massive raids on our economy. Adam Smith as much as said so. Indeed, rampage raids on our wallets -- with accompanying market collapse -- did happen right after every GOP-led slashing of supervision in securities and finance, especially in the 1920s, the 1980s and the mid-2000s. A cynic might conclude that's the goal! But let us at least admit that this is a counter-example to my assertion - that Republicans never actually de-regulate. Securities and finance: there is an industry where the GOP did follow up their rhetoric with action.

And let me further avow that democrats are also the fellows who eagerly rush to apply new regulations! For every time they slashed an agency or rule, they surely compensated by legislating two, somewhere else.  Liberals are like that. And sure that's one cliche truism that does have some validity. I do have a libertarian side and it squirms when I see progressives declaring a need for solutions! Then following that with a demand that each fix be... well... meddlesome.

Elsewhere I have attributed this frenzy of erecting - and demolishing - tweaks upon society to a matter of personality.  Democrats and liberals are not so much statists as they are manic, constantly having to do something about problems!  Yes there are problems. Still, the manic trait is at-best... grating.

Moreover, personality explains why Republicans grumble so much, but never actually do anything, leading the laziest and most useless Congresses in U.S. history.  They are the depressive side of our national bipolar disorder.

== Why does no one ever notice? ==

And so the question is raised… why do all the pundits and journalists and pols and online yammerers never even glance at any of these horridly opposite-to-true cliches?  

Again, the answer is simple. Rhetoric and symbolism always trump fact-based appraisal. 

Left wingers do not want to face the fact that democratic presidents are strong at the border and fiscally cautious, and sometimes retire obsolete programs. Tea Partiers would rather rail against illegal immigration -- a problem that their party leaders have always fostered, because it seems less racist and nasty to go after undocumented law-breakers than the much larger legal flood, which the democrats did set in motion!

We are slaves to cliches. And the news media is complicit.