We still have a lot of foreign tourists visiting our country, too — and that’s not just because our dollar is currently laughable.

Yes it is…, why else, because they love their fingerprints taken? Because they have to see the country they see whenever they put on a tv with their own eyes? You’re not that interesting, believe you me. We all live in America and it sucks monkeyballs.

Comment by O. Bigfoot — January 16, 2008 @ 2:01 am

More in the line of lack of morals when money enters the game. “Full capitalism” = Republicanism, you know.

The rest of the public, as well as the automobile industry as a whole, looks at Kias and laughs.

Because many Mexicans cross our border in search of higher wages, Newt doesn’t care that your average European or Asian thinks Dubya and his “Brownie, doin’ a heck of a job” cohorts are an embarrassing joke? Or is he oblivious to all this?

The punch line in the article was that America is a nice place to earn money but they don’t want to live here.

I live in Mexico, do you too?

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I believe you. The guy that picks up the garbage every morning in the building is as hard-working as any other POOR person I have known. They work in extremely bad conditions (subhuman) and have to endure horrible unjustices.

For example: Mayans and Guatemalans illegal workers work for Cancun’s Spanish Hotels. 3 of 4 hotels in Cancun and the whole Mayan Riviera belong to Spanish corporations. These guys live caged (really, caged and locked) earning hunger wages and the owners force them to work 12 hours a day because they might not hire them the next day. So, you might wanna consider your staying options next time, btw.

I was speaking of the middle class. Mexican middle class is lazy, ignorant and tries to get the best by doing the worst, professionally speaking.

Comment by CaptainMantastic

A fallacy of relevance, red herring, straw man….

Considering that there are, relative to the world’s population, an extremely small number of people coming to America. (The media has been inflating immigration number for years now, but that is a different issue.)

The fact that some people are coming to America is irrelevant and does not refute or disprove the diminution of America’s repuation throughout the world.

Who said that our “image problem” meant that every person on the planet now has the view that America is a terrible place to live?

There are also, perhaps, right-wing nuts in other countries, who now like America’s neo-aggressive ways.

Besides, the folks who people like Gingrich are propagandizing — Mexican immigrants — are of no real consequence in that they are mostly working class. What matters regarding America’s “Image” are other governments, businesses, etc., those people and organizations whose actions may have negative impacts on OUR economy — arms sales and tourism for example.

Gingrich is a dirty liar, simply spreading yet more fear among the bewildered herd that makes up most of the American public.

I disagree with you that our over reaction was justified by 9/11. It was not. I have been in the military. I have been a prosecutor at the state and federal level. I am sorry that Bush was a stupid, brutish idiot who has not only jepoardized the image of the United States but also provided terrorists with vastly increased recruits, financing and training. I am sorry that Bush fell for Bin Ladens primary gambit: Put the US in a position where it would over react and destroy itself economically.

DO NOT DARE ACCUSE ME OF BEING COMPLACENT. THE TERRORISTS HAVE DONE EXACTLY WHAT THEY SET OUT TO DO. THEY HAVE DIMINSHED OUR IMAGE. THEY HAVE TIED US DOWN FOR MORE THAN SIX YEARS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ. THEY HAVE BLED US ECONOMICALLY AND MILITARILY.

REDRESSING OURSELVES AGAINST BIN LADEN WAS JUSTIFIED. WHAT WAS DONE IN IRAQ WAS JUST STUPID. DO NOT DARE ACCUSE ME OF HINDSIGHT. I WAS TRAINED IN THE MILITARY PROFESSIONAL COURSES, I DID STUDY ASSYMETRICAL WARFARE DOCTRINE. IT DID NOT TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN. IT DID NOT TAKE PRESCIENCE TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT CAREFUL AND COMPLETE PLANNING FOR THE REBUILDING OF AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ. INDEED, WE COULD SEE THE INCOMPETENT BUSH ADMINSTRATION MISHANDLE AFGHANISTAN’S REBUILDING LONG BEFORE WE INVADED IRAQ. WE DID NOT NEED TO BE A FORTUNETELLLER TO SEE WHAT THE AFTERMATH OF THE INVASION OF IRAQ WOULD BE. IT HAD BEEN STUDIED TO DEATH BY DOD AND STATE ON NUMEROUS OCCASSIONS SINCE GULF WAR ONE.

I take cold comfort in the fact that those living in desparate conditions from third world countries to be citizens of the United States.

This was true even during the romantic era of gazing at the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a ship. Even then, the notion of seeking America “for Freedom” was somewhat overblown and it’s been perpetuated by our self-important belief that all the world envies our way off life. Then, and now, those who choose to stay are usually kept here by dire problems in their homelands. Most with stable homelands maintain close ties and tend to return as finances allow.

NEWS FLASH: Most of the world’s population is quite happy living where they are and how they choose.

Juan

I have to disagree as well. You don’t risk life and limb to cross a few hundred miles of desert, in order to be lazy. I used to work with a lot of guys from Mexico, San Salvador, and Guatemala. They usually worked 2 or 3 jobs, and lived in crowded homes with lots of others from Latin America. Most of the money they made was sent to families back in their home countries. And yes the ones I worked with were legal. Some of the stories they told of oppression, and poverty in their home countries was enough to curl your toes.

Bush is the one with the image problem.

Juan

I’d have to differ in this opinion. I work with Mexicans who must cross the border, and then return home at night, and I can attest they have a good work ethic; they show up at 6:00 am every morning- – and that’s after spending 2-3 hours coming up from Tijuana. The machiadoras (sp) on the other side of the border also employ hard-workers, who often sleep in the cardboard boxes of the products they make, in make-shift barrios around the plants.

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam’s menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

“They surveyed data and picked out what they liked,” said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department’s intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. “The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defense had this huge defense intelligence agency, and he went around it.”

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

“None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel’s Likud party.

The people at the Office of Special Plans are so successful at bypassing conventional procedures, in part, because their neoconservative colleagues hold key positions in several other agencies and offices.

Their contacts in other agencies include: John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International; Bolton’s advisor, David Wurmser, a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, who was just recently working in a secret Pentagon planning unit at Douglas Feith’s office (see Shortly after September 11, 2001); Elizabeth Cheney, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser; Elliott Abrams, The National Security Council’s top Middle East aide; and Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Policy Board. The office provides very little information about its work to other US intelligence offices.

[Salon, 7/16/03; Inter Press Service, 8/7/03; Guardian, 7/17/03

Sources: Karen Kwiatkowski, Unnamed An unnamed senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war, Greg Thielmann, David Obey]