Newsweek's look at Scare Tactics gets a write up at the Post Bulletin's Political Party blog today in the post
Fear-mongering in the 1st District. The judgement?:
"If you've seen the ads, you might agree with Walz's press secretary that they're fear-mongering cheap shots, trivializing an issue on which patriotic people on both sides of the issue can reasonably disagree."
The Mankato Free Press editorial board decides Immigration not the issue in bus crash, rejecting attempts to use emotional appeals to sway the debate on immigration:
It was an unfortunate contribution to an already awful tragedy when it was revealed that the driver of a vehicle that slammed into a school bus, resulting in the deaths of four children, is an apparent illegal alien.
Added to the grief was anger, fanning an already divisive immigration debate. . .. . .As for the woman in the center of the storm, she is now a reference point for those who argue she represents a more compelling argument for the state to seek a more aggressive solution to the illegal immigration problem. The bus incident does serve to remind us that undocumented aliens pose a variety of risks. How many drive without licenses? How do we measure the impact on communities as illegals resort, essentially, to living underground — avoiding contact with authorities, mistrusting them and many of their neighbors to hide their illegal status?
Most do their best to fit in and become valued members of the towns they live in. But as some among them avoid the responsibilities of citizenship (continually aware that they are not, after all, citizens), how do they increase the chance that an incident of the type that occurred near Cottonwood last week, can occur?
These are hard issues to quantify.
Perhaps we should refrain from even attempting to tie the bus-van accident to immigration issues at all. There are enough bad drivers in this state for us to know that they come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, legal status and levels of sobriety. Bad driving is no respecter of persons, on either the giving or receiving end — as we were reminded again last week.
Read the entire editorial at the Free Press.
Sadly, there are people living in the district who began to tie the bus crash firmly to the debate over immigration policy rather rapidly. Take Ruthie Hendrycks, the leader of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform, an incorporated association that's a subchapter of the Minnesota Coalition for Immigration Reduction.
Before the children were mourned and laid to rest, Hendrycks, a candidate for the GOP endorsement in Minnesota House District 21B, was already working to organize a rally exploiting the tragedy. From a posting on Saturday, February 23:
NEVER FORGET THE COTTONWOOD FOUR
Members - MINNSIR will be taking a leading role in educating the public to the "Human Costs" of illegal immigration and this tragedy. We are also working with other organizations on this horrific, PREVENTABLE and senseless crime.
In rememberance.............
Hunter Javens, Jessie Javens, Emilee Olson, Reed Stevens
A rally in the wake of this tragedy is being planned.
MINNSIR will be working in coordination with another group on this rally and information will be provided when all details are arranged. - Please plan to attend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We can only hope that Republican activists in HD 21B have the good hearts and good sense to reject this style of "leadership."
UPDATE: At the Minnesota Monitor, Steve Perry listens to The sound of two jaws flapping: Bachmann and O'Reilly on the scourge of criminal aliens. The article concludes with the notice of an interesting study:
Bachmann and O'Reilly's fevered vision of marauding illegals committing crimes and endangering public safety all across the country stands in stark contrast to the findings of a study released this week by the Public Policy Institute of California. In culling through arrest and incarceration statistics from the state, the authors found that immigrants were far less likely to commit crimes than native-born residents.
"For example," they write in the study abstract, "among men ages 18-40 - the age group most likely to commit crime - the U.S.-born are 10 times more likely than the foreign-born to be in jail or prison. Even among noncitizen men from Mexico ages 18-40 - a group disproportionately likely to have entered the United States illegally - the authors find very low rates of institutionalization. Such findings suggest that longstanding fears of immigration as a threat to public safety are unjustified."
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