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Believe me, I'd have loved to have these people vote for Busby instead, but many out here, including myself tried to at least point many disaffected Republicans to go to Griffith instead of Bilbray if they couldn't find themselves voting for Busby. That's at least a half vote lost. I'm not really surprised that Griffith got what he got. In fact I kind of expected around 4-5% for him and a lot of that from Republicans, who not only don't trust Bilbray on many issues, but many Republicans feel Bilbray's not conservative enough for them too. Griffith was an avenue for them to express themselves in this election.
I too have a problem with the Dems support of the McCain bill. They really need to state a third alternative and be more public about it that sides more with the way Thom Hartmann's position on immigration is, and that favors neither xenophobic "attack" of immigrants through big fences and criminalization, yet tries to find ways to send these people home to their countries instead of having a "guest worker" program that McCain and a lot of Dems are putting together, that sounds more in favor of corporatist agenda to some than it does being "fair" and not draconion to illegals here.
I told a lot of those independent and conservative voters here that if you really care about the immigration issue, and find you can't trust Bilbray to do right by you (I had an easier time doing that for some of these folks), then vote for Griffith instead, and hopefully Busby, in winning, would notice that substantial lot of people ih that category and move more towards a position of trying harden the terms of a guest worker program or move more towards the idea of penalizing heavily those who hire illegal immigrants instead. I think that approach would sell better to those reasonable elements of the anti-immigrant movement down here. There are some that are just plain racist and you'll never appeal to, but there are others that are genuinely concerned of the numbers of illegals here taking people's jobs.
If it were me advising Busby on this, though I know she's got a difficult time trying to get into congress and not trying to make big waves before she gets there that are counter to what both parties are doing, I think she should have been more saying something to the effect that we need to find ways of keeping people out before we start offering them "guest worker" status, and that the "burden of proof" is on employers to show that they can't hire people here in the U.S. for a decent wage before offering them to guest workers.
I'm still very concerned about the way this election was run by a totally Republican Board of Supervisors and Voter Registrar's office that seems open to fraud, but it's hard yet to get to any meat yet that shows fraud just yet. That Republican control was kept in place in a fraudulent way in and of itself, when they tried to masquerade Ron Roberts as a Democratic Party selection in one of the "fake" endorsement's mails that were sent around here, instead of the one real viable shot at unseating a supervisor in Richard Barrera. I hope we can make a case to make sure that we can recount the ballots to ascertain where the votes went with more eyes looking at them to ensure no funky business is going on. They aren't going to make this easy though!
Also, for you all saying she should "fight the fight", be careful how you want her to "fight" this. She's got to weigh what sort of strategy will help and not hurt her chances for the November election too. Though getting this election would have been really important for setting a positive tone for Dems in November, ultimately, winning in November is the bigger prize, and helping us with impeachment which will likely occur in 2007, etc. Let's not advocate a strategy that ruins any chances in November. But I'm all for trying to have us make SURE what happened in this election as much as we can.
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