U.S./Mexican Border Volleyball

Based on the campaign commercials I’ve paid attention to the past few weeks, illegal immigration is apparently the top issue Tennessee voters face in November.
If I were a campaign consultant (candidates: get your offers ready), I imagine a negative TV ad as follows:

Candidate X thinks border security should be treated like this [show footage of volleyball match]. A vote for X is a vote for open borders. Vote for Y.

That ought to stir a few of our culture warriors up.
On a thinly related matter, but this reminds me of the multicultural volleyball experience I had a few weeks back. Usually I play recreational volleyball one night a week at my church. One week a bunch of players from an affiliated Hispanic group unexpectedly showed up. Somehow I found myself on a team consisting of a Hispanic/American guy (who speaks English and is a regular), and four other people who, as far as I could tell, didn’t speak any English. Fortunately, a basic game doesn’t require much communication, so I managed not to make a fool of myself. But needless to say, we didn’t attempt to implement much strategy.
The funniest part may have been the appearance of the team. Not trying to get into ethnic stereotypes here, but there was a distinct pattern. I’m 5’10”, if I stand on my toes. There was one other guy about my height, and the rest of the players were at least 4 inches shorter than me. It was odd being the “tall” guy on the team, as if the universe had tipped off its axis.
But what those guys lacked in stature, they made up for with hustle. Quite a feisty bunch, who didn’t want to give up on points. It was refreshing to watch.

Are These People For Real? Rep. Marilyn Musgrave Edition

What’s the greatest issue Congress faces today?
If you guessed “World War III,” terrorists killing every American, Social Security, Medicare, skyrocketing health care costs, education, illegal immigration, crime, energy, threats to the environment, or the outsourcing of American jobs, you guessed wrong.
According to Ms. Musgrave, it’s gay marriage.
Alert to one-man-and-one-woman married couples: the gays are out to get you! Vote Republican to quell this threat.

FNC Market Watch

As Atrios notes, it’s lame that Fox News is trying to make a political (tax cut) issue of the stock market rally when the all time high was reached months before Bush took office.
But that wasn’t the lamest Cavuto I saw yesterday. The show had a segment featuring a caption which attempted to make a tie-in to 9/11. I had the volume down and didn’t catch most of it, but the an oft-repeated theme on Your World is that if we are good Americans who support Republican tax cuts and pay lots of money for stocks, then the terrorists won’t win.

Keeping Our Lungs Safe

NY Post (of all newspapers):

Condoleezza Rice’s office gave final approval to the infamous Environmental Protection Agency press releases days after 9/11 claiming the air around Ground Zero was “safe to breathe,” internal documents show.
Now Secretary of State, Rice was then head of the National Security Council – “the final decision maker” on EPA statements about lower Manhattan air quality, the documents say.
. . .
Early tests known to the EPA at the time had already found high asbestos levels, the notes say. But those results were omitted from the press releases because of “competing priorities” such as national security and “opening Wall Street,” according to a report by the EPA’s inspector general.

Of course we now know that the air around Ground Zero was anything but safe after the towers collapsed. And hundreds of rescuers are now paying the price with long-term respiratory ailments.
The obvious question here is why the NSC director, with a background in Russian studies, had the “final” call on whether or not air was “safe”? At any rate, where there’s a conflict between business and environmental concerns, it’s no mystery which side is going to win in this White House. I hope the people we were rushing back to lower Manhattan didn’t have to breathe very often.