Maurine H has it so right! We should have our eye on the corporations and not be blaming the workers.

My heart hurts for you, Frankie.

Sorry, I did not edit and catch my typos!

There IS a way to verify new employees. You make them show you their Social Security card. You copy this and attach it to their application for employment. There is a free phone number with which you call Social Security and they will let you know RIGHT AWAY whether or not the number you have given them matches up with the name. If they are illegal, either the number itself is no good in the Social Security records or the name does not match up. You simply do not hire that person. The system already exists, and has for simply years now. There is no excuse for any employer in this country NOT verifying with the Social Security Administration prior to hiring any worker. The fact is, it is the law that we must. There is also a form that must be sent in quarterly for the green card workers. That way, they catch those with proper Social Security numbers but counterfit green cards. The systerm exists; employers are just being too lax and lazy because they WANT these workers!

Did someone say Bush plans to put a fence around Hawaii? Oh my! Oh my! Our politicians of every stripe are so obsessed with coddling the employers of this nation they will spend billions of our tax dollars that should be spent on Head Start and school lunches on fences and border patrols. People who are hungry for paychecks will always climb fences, fly over fences, tunnel under fences, do whatever it takes to get to those paychecks. Go after the source of the paychecks. Do what Arizona is now threatening to do: shut down the business that has hired an illegal worker. If the paychecks dry up, they will not come. Once it is so illegal to HIRE them, the businessmen will start talking realities over whether they need them or not and, if they do need them, how to obtain these workers Legally. Stop being fooled by the fingers of blame being pointed at, along with the name-calling and yelling and screaming, the honest hungry folks wanting to come here and work for the paychecks. ALL of the blame falls upon the shoulders of those who are hiring them! Think about it; please do!

My biggest fear amounts to 2 equal fears: (1) the number of Arabs who hate our guts has risen as a result of our own deeds from a few thousand fanatics to tens of MILLIONS, and (2) the majority of our citizens are oblivious to true facts versus propaganda they are being fed. Find myself agreeing with a lot of you, especially Jenny Oops and L. Shaw. Like L. Shaw, my husband and I predicted the war in Iraq years ago. Back in the summer of 2000, we told one another that we had to do all we could to defeat Bush, as he was sure to want to invade Iraq and finish the job he felt his daddy had failed at. History shows no outside culture can go into a soverign country and conquer it and impose a totally different culture upon it. All reform to the culture itself MUST come from within; usually violently, but always from within. My hope is that we will withdraw and APOLOGIZE for our errors and explain our well-meaning, and that the Middle East will heal its wounds and put its zeal to improving the lives of its peoples.

ADORED Ann Richards, but if she were bustling through the door in her stiletto heels and sitting down at the round table to yak it up with us, you know, surely you do, who would be right with her? My favorite, the Texas Lady Writer who wrote things I most often wished I had written, our own irrepressible MOLLY IVINS!

Nothing. Nothing happens to us after death. We have only this one life in which to learn and love and do everything possible to protect our planet and improve the chances of our species surviving by learning to get off this planet and out of this solar system. Death obliterates all action in those little grey cells and the brain rots. All stories to the contrary are the result of mythmakers conning the masses with promises carefully honned to control and reward, at the same time they give themselves careers. One of the most obvious flaws in these myths is their universal insistence the female of our species is of less value and importance in the scheme of things. Big time propaganda, all; the result being a huge waste in the ways in which we direct our attention and energies during these short lives.