What is a car?

Is a three-wheeled vehicle an automobile? That question is at the center of a vigorous lobbying effort in Washington. The vehicle in question is the Aptera 2e, a machine that looks like a cross between a Cessna plane and a tricycle. It's the brainchild of Aptera Motors Inc., a three-year-old, closely held car company in Vista, Calif.

Interesting visual simile: a single-engine plane and a tricycle.

Aptera wants to borrow $75 million from a Department of Energy program created by Congress in 2007 to speed development of fuel-efficient cars. Aptera's backers include some big-money donors to the Democratic Party, and its quest for help has received a boost from a group of mostly California lawmakers who want to help a home-state enterprise. Allies of Detroit's big auto makers are lined up against them.

Detroit versus California.

Aptera's quest for federal help raises a bigger question about Washington's effort to subsidize fuel-efficient vehicles: How much of the money should go to traditional companies with the most customers, versus start-ups with unorthodox ideas?

Got Milk … Workers?

Jesús Rodriguez, a Mexican who can't read or write, sometimes mixes up the numbers that identify the cows that he milks. But he can easily tell one brawny black-and-white Holstein from another, and discern when they are sick, in heat or just plain moody.

Farmer Ray Souza credits immigrants like Mr. Rodriguez, an employee for nearly 20 years, for saving the U.S. dairy industry. "I haven't had a non-Hispanic want to do this work in 10 years," says Mr. Souza, a descendent of Portuguese immigrants, a group that helped turn California into the nation's largest dairy state.

Not stealing jobs from US citizens, as is the usual anti-immigrant refrain, but filling jobs others don't want, as has been the case across generations.

Dairy farmers from Vermont and New York to Wisconsin and beyond have become increasingly dependent on immigrants, many of them Latin Americans who are in the U.S. illegally. Unlike other agricultural work where laborers are hired for short, seasonal stints, dairy-farm laborers often stick around for years, forging close ties with their employers.

But that has also left dairy farmers vulnerable, as rising unemployment in the U.S. heightens tensions over the hiring of illegal immigrants. Dairy farmers say that without immigrant workers, a labor shortage might force some to shutter their businesses, depriving rural communities in the U.S. of a key economic engine.

But groups that call for a crackdown on illegal immigration say that the farmers want an amnesty that would unfairly disadvantage American workers.

It is patent nonsense to say that; people who do are anti-immigrant.

View Interactive
See data on dairy farms' immigrant workers.





"You'd bring thousands of people who would work in dairy farming and then compete with Americans for jobs in manufacturing, construction and services," says Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a national organization that lobbies for immigration reduction. Given the recession, "this is a time when we know it's possible to find Americans to do this work. If you had the right recruiting, pay and working conditions, you could handle this with Americans."

Good point: recruit with promises of good pay and good working conditions, and more people would want to do the work. That would result in higher prices. And just how does this guy know that there are US workers who would do such work? What does he know about farms?

But, in the long term, he adds, "we are going to need a foreign-guest worker program geared toward agriculture."

Ah, a little realism. In the long-term many of his workers would not want to stay on a farm, what with all that bullshit.

The dairy industry in California's San Joaquin Valley used to be dominated by Portuguese and Dutch immigrants and their descendants. "Now Hispanic immigrants are the ones who do this work," says Mr. Souza, standing in front of the red barn that his grandfather built. "One day, another group will come."

The high turnover and low reliability of local workers posed major problems for dairy farms that wished to grow, according to TomMaloney, who studies agricultural labor at Cornell University.

What would Roy Beck say about that?

"In the mid-'90s, I saw dairy managers who were afraid to expand their businesses because they couldn't find dependable help. Then, some dairies began to hire Latino immigrants, and found they were reliable and had a tremendous work ethic," says Mr.Maloney , a senior extension associate in the Department of Applied Economics & Management. "Now they can't imagine operating without them."

Dairy farmers in Europe have begun to use robotic milkers to reduce dependence on manual labor. But due to the high capital investment required, adoption in the U.S. is likely to be slow, Mr.Maloney says.

Phil Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, believes if labor gets much more expensive in the dairy sector, those higher wages could spur investment in technology -- "although it's not clear at what wage," he says. Currently, the average hourly wage for dairy workers in California, for example, is $11.38. Even though minimum wage is lower, he says, "I would suspect a whole lot of 18-year-olds prefer to work at McDonald's for minimum wage than milk cows."

On Mr. Souza's 250-acre farm, people occasionally drop by looking for work. "Once Americans get the job description, they lose interest real quick," he says. So six out of the eight employees are Mexicans. They deliver calves, milk cows and scrape manure.

Police Chiefs: Overhaul Immigration Policy

Chief John Timoney of Miami


Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

Sensible.

The chiefs — updating recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration enforcement.
Have the federal government accept responsibility for a national policy?

Chief Timoney, Chief Art Acevedo of the Austin Police Department in Texas and former Chief Art Venegas of the Sacramento Police Department said local law enforcement had been undermined by the blurred line between crimes and violations of immigration law, which are civil.
Congress has avoided dealing with the issue, and by doing so they have shifted the burden to local law enforcement, including the costs.
Those who call illegal immigrants “criminals,” they said at a news conference here, are misreading the law and hurting their own communities by scaring neighbors who could identify criminals. “When you remove the emotion from the debate,” Chief Acevedo said, "no one can argue that it is in the best interest of public safety to keep these people living in the shadows.”

Emotion is what mucks everything up.

They said they favored tough border enforcement and efforts to prosecute employers who rely on illegal foreign-born workers. But they insisted that local law enforcement be kept apart from immigration enforcement because such agencies lacked the training and time, especially with recent budget cuts.

Another efect of the economic slowdown.

Jessica M. Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration enforcement, said the chiefs were misguided.

The motto of the organization? Pro-immigrant, low-immigration think-tank which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.

The costs for local police are often minimal, Ms. Vaughan said, because the federal government pays jailing costs, and verifying immigration status can be done in conjunction with standard checks of criminal databases. Immigrants are less likely to report crimes, she added, because of language barriers, a lack of understanding about American law, and a general distrust of authority stemming from corruption in their home countries.

So the police don't understand what is really happening, but a think-tank analyst does. O, sure.

“None of this is related to fear of deportation,” she said.

Huh? It is corruption of law enforcemet in their home countries that afflicts immigrants

An unlikely pair

Susan Kennedy held a meeting with advisers to discuss the state's budget crisis in the governor's smoking tent at California's capitol in mid-June.
Slide show


More from Gov. Schwarzenegger about Ms. Kennedy's work in the capital.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his effort to end the partisan bickering that is pushing California to the brink of insolvency, is deploying Susan Kennedy, his cigar-smoking, paintball-playing Democratic chief of staff, to get the job done.

The 48-year-old Ms. Kennedy has built a reputation as a pragmatic leader equally inclined to work with -- and lambaste -- lawmakers from both parties. Such a regard would have been unthinkable five years ago, when Republicans viewed her as a stereotypical Democrat -- a former director of the state party and top aide to Gov. Gray Davis who lives in famously liberal Marin County with her partner.

Unlikely allies, yet Arnold is a pragmatist, as she clearly is, too.

She didn't always have a cordial relationship with Republicans, the governor included. When Mr. Schwarzenegger won the 2003 recall election -- ousting Gov. Davis, her former boss -- Ms. Kennedy said, she "was as angry and as much of an anti-Arnold person as any Democrat was." Mr. Schwarzenegger said he regarded her as part of a gubernatorial administration in which "everything that they did was wrong."

Though often critical about California Democrats, Ms. Kennedy raised money for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and said she has no intention of dropping her party affiliation. "My wife would kill me," she said.

Great line.

La Hora Mixteca

The voice trembled with anguish.

“Please,” Esmeralda Santiago pleaded, calling into a radio show here aimed at the poorest of Mexico’s emigrants, indigenous people from the southern state of Oaxaca. “This is for Sylvia Santiago. Please, if you can hear us, call. Our mother is worried because we have not talked with you in a while.”

Filemón López, the host of the show, listened and nodded. He had heard such heartache before. The woman spoke first in Spanish and then repeated her plea — breaking down in sobs — in Triqui, one of Oaxaca’s indigenous languages.

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

BY THE BARREL OR BOTTLE David Tran's sriracha sauce in a market in San Gabriel, Calif.

Its own website? Of course.












David Tran, foreground above, with his son, William, at the Huy Fong Foods warehouse in Rosemead, Calif.

Headline news

Democrats in Senate Block Money to Close Guantánamo

by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million President Obama requested to close the detention center.

Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory

By CARL HULSE

President Obama appears likely to sign a provision, added to a measure on credit cards, that would allow loaded and concealed weapons in national parks.

Calif. Voters Reject Measures to Keep State Solvent

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER 56 minutes ago

The results dealt a severe setback to the state’s fragile fiscal structure and to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Echoes of a Distant Time

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

During the presidential campaign of 1928, a photograph began circulating in rural areas of the Southwest showing Alfred E. Smith shaking hands with a fellow politician on the roadway of a tunnel. The image depicted Smith as he was officially opening the Holland Tunnel, which had been built during his tenure as governor of New York. The people thousands of miles away who received copies of the picture were given a decidedly different explanation: Smith planned to extend the tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Vatican, so he could take secret orders from the pope. As just about any informed voter that year already knew, Smith was the first Roman Catholic ever to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

A tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean is not feasible even today, 80 years later.

At the remove of 80 years, it is tempting to laugh off such a crude attempt at fearmongering and character assassination. With Catholics unquestionably part of the American mainstream — one of the most coveted swing groups of voters in the current race for the White House — the misrepresentation of the photo might seem the artifact of a benighted past.

Except for two things.

It took another 40 years before a Catholic got a presidential nomination (a Democrat, at that). And the anti-Muslim smear of this year.

As for the second point, scholars of Smith’s career and of American Catholicism say nothing in presidential history since 1928 more closely resembles the smearing of Al Smith than the aura of anti-Muslim agitation that has swirled around Barack Obama these past two years.

In the Times today there is a picture of a 50ish white man wearing a t-shirt that says Vote McCain Not Hussein. The implication is clear: Obama is a Muslim. Which he isn't.

The biggest single difference may be the postmodern aspect of the attacks against Mr. Obama. He is vilified not for the religion he follows but for the one he doesn’t, and much of his campaign’s energy has gone into reiterating that he is a Christian. Either way, the underlying premise of the rumors remains that a Muslim is unfit to be president.

As Colin Powell said, what is wrong with being a Muslim? Well, many people simply associate Islam with terror, and refuse to believe a Muslim can be a loyal American.

“What is similar in Smith’s time is that there was a widespread belief there was something dangerous about electing a Catholic as president,” said Allan J. Lichtman, an American University historian who is the author of “Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928.” “You couldn’t be a good American and serve American interests if you were a Catholic, because you were beholden to a foreign potentate called the pope and Catholicism held autocratic tenets.

“Likewise today, there is a widespread belief that somehow you cannot be a good American and be a Muslim at the same time, that being a Muslim means you have loyalties outside the United States — and, like Catholics in the 1920s, they are dangerous loyalties to militant groups seeking to do harm. There’s no truth to the allegations, then or now, but they are tenaciously held.”

So who are those who believe this nonsense? Yahoos and assorted right wing nuts, surely. But anyone else? As the governor of Alaska would say, youbetcha.

In the blogosphere and through mass e-mail, however, and even on Fox News and in Insight magazine, the disinformation has proliferated that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim, educated in a madrassa, influenced by an Islamist stepfather and sworn into the Senate holding a Koran.

Ah, Fox News, fair and balanced. Insight magazine? Conservative current events online magazine published by the Unification Church states its website description. Right. Two peas in a pod, this pair.

Robert A. Slayton, author of the Smith biography “Empire Statesman,” suggested in a recent interview that the religious bias against Smith and Mr. Obama served in part as a proxy for nativist resistance to an increasingly diverse nation. The United States in both the 1920s and the 2000s has been bitterly divided over mass immigration — by Jews and Catholics then, Hispanics and Muslims now.

The prejudice is virulent, though couched in homilies.

The most remarkable parallel to 1928 has to do with the idea that Smith was one of ‘those people,’ that the people he represented weren’t real Americans,” said Mr. Slayton, a professor of American history at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “And when Sarah Palin talks about the ‘real America’ now, I hear an echo of that.”

Real Americans: heartland, small town folk, not Eastern elites, New York Times readers, and, by implication, Muslims, those of color.

Angel Island scorched

The island is in SF Bay. Read about it in a column entitled Rushing to see the apocalypse in Market Watch website.

As I traveled home Monday evening before sunset, and witnessed the charred remains of more than half of Angel Island, I wondered how many years or decades it might take for the island to be what it once was. Yet the next day's paper quoted experts saying that the grass will begin growing with the rains this winter and that by the spring it should be largely back to normal. One guy said it will look like a golf course before the end of the year.

And just as growth will return to Angel Island much sooner than its smoldering ruins suggest today, our economy and way of life will rebound long before we can possibly imagine right now as we stand before the flames.

Tough times for Arnold, too

Amazingly, even California needs to be bailed out. Wonder if the conservatives will reject this one as well.

Schwarzenegger Warns California May Need Federal Loan

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warned U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in a letter emailed Thursday that the state might need an emergency federal loan of up to $7 billion within weeks, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday, citing a copy of the letter that the newspaper obtained.

Nudists Want State to Look the Other Way

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Dano Dickerson, 41, who surfs naked, wants a judge to keep the nude beach open. “I’ll be really bummed if they close it.”

Like,bummer, dude.

'This Was a Warning'

An earthquake struck near Los Angeles yesterday. This video is funny, but only because no damage resulted.

[http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1620628564/bclid1699105550/bctid1699238481]

Oil and Gas

The L.A. Times has a story with this picture: gas below $4 returns to SoCal. I haven't seen a leading 3 in quite some time; I paid $3.999 (which is actually 4 bucks) on 20 May (and 3.92, 3.96 a few days before that).

Sad part is that 3.979 seems a relief.

The night sky in the World

This is an amazing picture.

About two-thirds of the world's population, including almost everyone in the continental U.S. and Europe, no longer see a starry sky where they live. For much of the world, it never even gets dark enough for human eyes to adjust to night vision, reported an international team that mapped the geography of night lighting.

I well know it: darkness is never dark in Flushing, and in Manhattan it is almost as if it isn't night when the sun goes down.

A natural nightscape has become as rare as an unspoiled wilderness. In Borrego Springs, Calif., a small town surrounded by 600,000 acres of desert in California's largest state park, the midnight sky is a tourist attraction. On a clear night, the curtain of stars almost seems to brush the ground.


View Larger Map

Imagine: night a tourist attraction.

In the brightly lit cities that half of humanity now calls home, a half dozen stars may be visible on a clear night. In the darkest rural areas, about 2,000 stars typically may be visible – half the number seen in centuries past.

Wow. In Chichester the night sky seems carpeted with stars.

Even in Death Valley, one of America's most unspoiled parks, the night sky glows with urban light. Only the moon outshines the neon halo of Las Vegas, 120 miles away, Chad Moore, U.S. National Park Service night-sky manager, reported last year in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. After taking night-sky readings at 45 national parks, he found that the glare of city lights 200 miles away could visibly alter a park's night lightscape.

Wow. Even Death Valley.

By reforming lighting practices, they hope to become the second Dark Sky Community designated by the International Dark Sky Association later this year (after Flagstaff, Ariz.).

True Love

Some people get quite very upset about gays and lesbians getting married: the sanctity of marriage beseiged by fags and lesbos. It is such an emotional, passionate gut-level issue that having any sort of rational discussion between disgreeing parties is nigh impossible. I don't see what is wrong: if people love one another, and want to get married, so what?

And then there is a perfect picture of what gay marriage is all about, really: two people in love. This is that picture.

Del Martin, 87, center left, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, center right, are married by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom , center, in a special ceremony at City Hall in San Francisco, Monday, June 16, 2008.

If this isn't love, what in the world is?

Interesting picture of Arnie and Felipe

What fascinates me about this picture is how alike they look: almost the same shade of light grey suit, white shirts, hands clasped almost the exact way.