Today’s news roundup is on the flip. Teasers: voting registration screw-up, projected housing slowdown and economic effect, immigration, immigration, immigration, immigration… [It’s not just bloggers who are like 5-year olds chasing a soccer ball, it’s journalists and politicians too.] …immigration, immigration…
- California’s Elections Division under Bruce McPherson is not really Helping America Vote. A new database has erroneously rejected a substantial percentage of newly registered (or re-registered) voters. I know voting is not a right under the Constitution, but couldn’t we at least pretend to take it seriously?
- A slowing housing market bodes ill for workers, state revenue and our economy generally. More from the Union-Tribune. Prepare for the Governor to tell us that more sprawl and fewer environmental regulations are what we need to head this problem off.
- Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Republican Party has introduced no fewer than 25 anti-immigrant bills into the legislature this session. Tasty wedgey nativist politics for the election year!
- The Chron gives us a thumbnail of recent immigration statements by Angelides, Westly, and Schwarzenegger.
- Navarette on nativism. Ditto, Robert Scheer. Oh, for the halcyon days of yore, when the immigrant threat was the Eastern Europeans, the Italians, the Germans, the Irish, with their funny languages, quaint folkways and threats to American cultural purity.
- A poll by New American Media suggest that most legal immigrants don’t resent those who came here illegally, and simply want the system reformed to make more sense.
- The SacBee has the story of Dianne Feinstein’s journey to her current immigration position.
- This LA Times article about Antonio Villaraigosa is interesting primarily for the teaser: “As protests energize his Latino base, Villaraigosa strives to show he is not captive to ethnic politics.” Sounds like that editor has absorbed the nativist subtext to the anti-immigrant position.