So, you're reading the New York Times? Or could it be Dana Milbank's new laugher, "Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America"? Or perhaps the new Olbermann delusion, "Pitchforks and Torches: The Worst of the Worst, from Beck, Bill, and Bush to Palin and Other Posturing Republicans"?

Do tell...

I cut thru the bullshit rather quickly. When anyone mentions "anti-immigrant" or "illegal alien bashing" or "immigration reform", I just front them off and say "Cut the crap, you want open borders, at least have the guts to say it without burying it in bullshit".

That usually ends the conversation. Except for the "Ah....er...uh....a....er....uh....."

For work we had to take online CPE classes. The management class pointed out how Gorbachev had ended the cold war through the goodness of his commie heart. Difficult to read through the laughter but at least I was getting paid.

Two of the most used/abused "debate" techniques by politicians are the redefinition of terms, and the segue into answering a different Q than the one asked.

The one you cited is an example of the first.

Another variation mixes the two: the "strawman." In that approach, the debater/politician deplores/attacks something that s/he wishes an opponent had said or supported (but never did).

When facing those techniques, the first step is usually to identify them for what they are and correct the speaker quite prominently.

Well, you see how Charlie Crist's attempts to label Marco Rubio as anti-immigrant, first by implying he was more Hispanic friendly than Rubio and then outright criticising him for his stance on illegal immigration as more proof of his anti-Hispanicness, has backfired on him. People ain't falling for that crap any more.

So what ever "report" you're reading I'm sure it's right up there with the Dept of Homeland Security's report about "dangerous conservatives" on the bullshit meter.

I eagerly await your deft dissection/evisceration of said report.

What I oppose is illegal immigration.

Stop using their words!!! Stop it! Call them what they are: illegal aliens, or foreign nationals residing illegally. Don't allow them to own the words of the debate.

We lost the debate on "healthcare reform," ie, health insurance bureaucratization. We'll lose it on "comprehensive immigration reform," ie amnesty or line-cutting. We accept their words and ignore their implications.

Jay, although you say you welcome immigrants, much of the rhetoric on the right makes all immigrants (both legal & illegal) feel not welcomed.

Thank you, Mister Tea, for your kind, American, words about immigrants. I'm one of the kind your welcoming -- and, yes, loving (gulp!) -- words embrace.

Born a week to the day before Pearl harbor, my first impressions of Men were of the tens of thousands of United States Marines (Earth People) and lots of Kittyhawk Pilots (my Favorites!) who were camped all around my home and the local district and for hundreds of whom, during the first few years of my life, my (PhD historian/rancher/farmer's wife) Mum offered many a home-like Sunday and cooked hundreds of apple pies.

Young Americans left from my home district for Guadalcanal and other awful battles and many of them came back again and were hospitalized in my family's private Glenwood Hospital and in other hospitals in my home district. As is demonstrated in the fact of the millions of folks in decades-long immigration waiting lines around the world, being an American is a state of mind -- and my state of mind was that I was an American almost before I could walk and talk.

My life's ambition became to become American and -- after I'd in the meanwhile spent a couple or so interesting decades fulfilling all kinds of adventurous contractual obligations, flying interesting American aircraft in some of the world's more exotic locales -- that happened one day in Denver.

During the Citizenship Examination (100%) it dawned on me that I was getting it all right and my excitement bubbled through and I became "mildly" exuberant. Later that day it turned out that the same man (himself an immigrant American) who'd given me the video-taped exam was also to conduct the Naturalization ceremony for the couple of hundred or so of us who were there. During the little speech he delivered as a build up to the ceremony the Immigration bloke talked about his own experience, about having become an American and about having been with INS (as it was, then) for around thirty years. He'd become a little jaded, he said, by having done the same job week after week, year after year. And then he began to talk about having, that day, had an experience, that had simply "made" his career. Had made it all make sense and had rewarded his thirty years in the job?

The experience? He just talked about the hour he'd spent with me -- and about my irrepressible exuberance as the realization grew that I was becoming an American. He said that sometimes something happened in a day or a week that "made" that day and/or that week. His experience that day, he said, with an (anonymous) member of the couple of hundred new Americans, had "made" his INS career.

So, thanks for reminding me of all of that. Of Absolutely the very best day of an in any case far from boring life.One lived on a steady Adrenalin Diet.

And, finally and for the record -- and because we immigrant-Americans get to chose what kind of Hyphenated-Americans we want to be -- Let there be no doubt that I'm an AMERICAN-American.