Okay you’re coming home and the beer is in your trunk, and let’s say it’s a dry county. Does that change anything?
Does someone driving on an expired license plate deserve all harm that might befall them?
That’s not the question here. The question is, is it the government’s job to help them out if something does happen?
But it’s very relevant. It’s the same logic. If you’re saying they deserve whatever happens to them while here illegally. Then unless, you’re logically inconsistent, you’re saying driving on an expired plate means you deserve whatever happens to you on the road. One group by law shouldn’t be here, and the other by law shouldn’t be on the road. Same thing.
So unless those conservatives were all about completely rewriting liability and protection laws then they were just out to further punish folks, who helped America deal with a devastating attack, for an unrelated crime. In short malice.
I suppose if one believed in the sincerity of the rightarded party, that they had behaved in an appropriate fashion lo, these many months…offered some sort of deference to the people who actually won the last election, and presumably have some legitimate claim to represent the people…
I suppose if we had seen any of that lately, we might be inclined to see this in a different light.
I didn’t say they deserved any such thing. However, you appear to have missed the point entirely, which is that this legislation is not about letting them sue, but about whether they are entitled to government benefits.
ETA: that was addressed to The Tao’s Revenge.
I think you’re getting hung up on distinctions that don’t matter. If an illegal immigrants house catches on fire because the neighbors burned leaves carelessly would it not be pure malice to deny them the government benefit of the fire department to rescue them? Likewise if someone who cleaned ground zero develops breathing problems as a result, why is their status any more relevant than someone’s license plate status in a T-bone?
There are people who seriously think illegal immigrants who helped out on 9/11 shouldn’t be granted full citizenship? I mean, if that doesn’t prove that they are a worthy addition to our society, what the fuck does?
Betty Jo Cheeto-eater gets to sit on the couch watching Jerry Springer and shitting out future criminals every 11 months, and enjoy the full benefits of Unites States citizenship because her ancestors kicked the right savages off the right piece of land, but a guy who worked his ass off to get here and sacrificed his own health to lend a hand in our nation’s greatest hour of need is freeloading scum who doesn’t deserve our help in return.
I’m not sure if I want to vomit or punch somebody. I think both.
I refer generally to the public antipathy to providing public benefits to illegal aliens, and tangentially to the other point under condition under dispute: recipients don’t necessarily have to have a condition directly related to the 9/11 disaster.
But not from you. You were perfectlyhappy to post an OP (which yo still characterize as “factual” and “neutral,”) and the summary from your OP is just what Ají de Gallina points out.
And in the same breath, you criticized Republicans for their actions… actions that you shaded to place in the worst possible light.
So we learn that it’s really not the behavior, it’s which party it’s in service of, that makes anything at all bad.
Same as always.
I know this is a difficult concept for people like you to get your head around, but the guy you’re talking about - good deed acknowledged and appreciated - is here illegally! Yeah, he worked hard to get here (:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:)…fording rivers and dashing over hills and through ravines and riding in sweltering trucks with fifty of his compatriots…but he’s still here illegally. (And besides, he didn’t work hard to get here in order to benefit us; he worked hard to get here to benefit himself!) You don’t get automatic citizenship in any country I’m aware of by breaking its immigration laws and then simply doing good deeds once you get there. (And may I point out that nobody except you has referred to them as “freeloading scum”.)
Cripes, the fact that these people broke the law by coming here, and are breaking other laws in order to stay here, means absolutely nothing to people like you, does it? Good grief! I’m not sure if I want to vomit or punch somebody myself…but I can tell you I really hate to vomit. 
But of course the only reason I could feel this way is because I’m a racist and I hate brown people. (Oh, wait, I thought “brown people” were Arabs, or Muslims, or, uh, whatever. It gets so confusing trying to keep track of who all I’m supposed to hate because of the color of their skin. Am I supposed to hate Italians too; they’re pretty brown? And what about Middle East Indians…or hell, American Indians for that matter? And what about Eskimos; they’re pretty brown too.)
But I digress. The point of the matter is that my next door neighbor, a woman I’ve referred to several times before on this board, is a first generation Mexican who genuinely did “work hard” to get here - paying whatever fees were required by the Mexican authorities and waiting years for her papers to come through - feels exactly the same way I do and said so voluntarily with absolutely no prodding from me. She is adamantly opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants and for the exact same reasons I am. Could there be any possible reason for her to feel this way other than that she is racist too? If so, then spare me the accusation, mmkay?
And as far as the 9/11 rescuers bill goes, Representative King hit the nail on the head when he said, prior to Weiner’s showboating little snit:
“The reason HR-847 is not being brought up under regular order is that the majority party is petrified of having its members face a potential vote on illegal immigration, but the reality is, you could pass this bill. This bill should be more important than a campaign talking point. You could have passed it any time during the past three and a half years but you want political cover. Thank God for our country that the first responders of 9/11 didn’t look for cover before they did what they had to do and lived up to their oath.”
[bolding mine]
This place makes my ass twitch sometimes.
Wow, I thought this post was going to be tongue-in-cheek for the first couple sentences but you really are just that fucking selfish and hateful, huh? I’ll be damned.
Yeah, I’m selfish and hateful. Just like the governments of Canada and the U.K. and France and Australia and Japan and…well, you get the idea. You don’t get to broach borders and enter other countries simply because you want to, and you don’t get a Get Out Of Jail Free card and get made a citizen simply because you did a good deed afterward. If I were to steal a leather coat from Macy’s would you lobby for me to get off scot free because I pushed an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus sometime afterward? I thought not. So what’s the difference?
Selfishness and hate are merely buzzwords liberals use to denigrate anyone who disagrees with them. Being brown doesn’t give you the right to flaunt the law, and it’s disingenuous in the extreme if not outright dishonest to claim that objections to illegal immigration can only be explained by selfishness and racism.
Most people away from this board know this without even having to think about it.
And since I know all this, your phony accusations fall on deaf ears.
I notice you didn’t even consider the fact that these (completely hypothetical, as far as I know; does anybody know any differently?) illegal aliens might not have crossed the border illegally. They might have overstayed a visa, which, crimewise, is about on par with jaywalking (but always theft, rape, murder, etc to hear a jingo tell it.)
Take your head out of your ideological asshole for half a second and fill in the blank for me: An undocumented immigrant who risked his life and gave his health to answer the call of citizenship and help his fellow man on our nation’s darkest day - 9/11/2001 - should NOT be given medical care by the people of the nation he helped, in return for his heroic deeds, because _____________ .
And as a Hispanic, I seem to either inspire people to call me self-hating (or, in one memorable instance on this board, an “Uncle Tom” whose Republican friends “laugh at him behind his back.”)
But not to worry. When that happened, the crowd of tolerant liberals on this board rose up as one to denouce that language and sentiment.
Ha! Ha! I slay myself! With, you know, the comedy and all.
I wasn’t even going to pick the low-hanging fruit of Starving Artist having an argument in his own head about racism. (Seriously, I didn’t even hint at the skin color of these immigrants and he practically goes off on a tangent in his own defense against the non-existent accusations of racism. He doth protest too much.) Interesting that another conservative bit-- but I thought it was liberals who were always going on about race? Thought you guys were really committed to that whole “an illegal immigrant can be Irish or English or Swedish for all I care” thing, but Starving Artist clearly has “brown” on the mind when he hears the term. Duly noted.
They did allow a straight up or down vote. They chose a procedure that required 2/3 majority and the GOP voted it down.
Here’s a link from the other thread It’s more complicated than is being presented here. They’ve had years to get something done and hammer out some details to help those who deserve it and they couldn’t get it done. Shame on both parties. I like Weiner’s fire but it is political theater with some self serving motives.
I just don’t get the GOP whining about procedure. In principle I agree with what Weiner ranted about. If it’s a bad bill, and wasting money then have the freaking nads to say so.
The illegal alien thing is just more political bullshit. You can bet your ass there will be plenty of American citizens lining up to get get a piece they don’t deserve.
Right. So there is actually no evidence of public disapproval for providing 9/11-related benefits. I don’t think you can adduce the “general public antipathy” here. Granted, I believe that everyone deserves care and we’re all better off when it is provided, but even if someone did hold such a “general antipathy” it would still be likely that they would make a distinction between ordinary events and crises (especially when said recipient may even have aided in the response to the crisis).
As to the specificity of recipient diseases, I’ve already pointed out that it is impossible and would be fruitless to attempt to delineate the causes of a chronic illness.
As I responded to AdG, while I generally prefer to be as complete as possible and would have included these reasons, now that they have been brought up I (and others) have found them pathetic and trivial to the point of irrelevance. Thus, my characterization of conservatives in this situation stands. Their excuses do not at all justify their position.
To the contrary, I deliberately worded the OP as “conservatives” rather than “Republicans” because I think the 4 opposing Dems deserve equal blame.
You know, this might be true inasmuch as American citizens are just as likely to do this as illegal immigrants, but I would also point out that people are not completely driven by self-interest. I remind people than in the days following 9/11, crime in NYC dropped and fraud with regard to WTC-related operations was almost nonexistent.
And you’re so right about this that not only is the contrary opinion wrong, but utterly evil?