Airing dirty laundry at the U.N.

UNHRC

The Obama administration, in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, has included the Arizona immigration law controversy.

What possible justification is there for including an ongoing internal U.S. controversy in a report to an international agency? The Arizona law, its constitutionality, states’ rights — all are being examined at this time. If and when the matter becomes settled law, then and only then it might be appropriate to include the law in some kind of report to the U.N., although why any of our internal matters are reportable to the U.N. is a mystery.

Reportedly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the decision to include the dispute in her report to the U.N. to demonstrate to the world how the U.S. deals with such issues. At the very least, she acted prematurely, considering the entire matter is still very much unsettled. (And honestly, would you hold up our immigration mess to the world as an example of how we do things??)

Nor is the controversy an issue of human rights. Nobody has an inherent human right to cross illegally into the U.S. or any other country. It’s not a basic human right to stay in a country in violation of that country’s laws. The issue is, and always has been, legal rights, not human rights.

The U.S. government itself could have challenged the law on whatever basis it wanted, but it chose to challenge Arizona’s right as a state to enact and enforce immigration law, contending that only the federal government can do so. It couldn’t, after all, effectively challenge the provisions of the law since they mirror existing U.S. immigration law.

The U.S. government itself relegated the issue to a jurisdictional dispute. Clinton and the Obama administration are wrong to include it in a report to an international human rights agency.

Geocities lives on as Oocities

Some of you may recall that last summer Yahoo shut down Geocities, its free web hosting service. And with it went an untold amount of information posted by uncounted little people like yours truly. For those of you who care about such things, today I stumbled across oocities.com, the site that archived much of the Geocities content before it was flushed down the Internet’s virtual drain.

Oddly enough, the folks there felt as I did — that you shouldn’t just up and destroy a huge chunk of Internet content. At the very least it creates a nightmare of broken links in a system dependent on interconnectedness. And just because Geocities was free and mostly a virtual Amateur Hour doesn’t mean there wasn’t some very worthwhile and interesting material posted there.

The plan is to eventually make all former Geocities pages accessible again by simply changing “geocities” in the old URLs to “oocities.” I was pleased to note that my little contribution to Internet history has been restored, although some of the internal graphics links are broken, probably the result of my horrendous coding.

Anyway, a tip of the hat to Oocities and the dedicated folks working over there, and a heads up to you who might be looking for an old Geocities site.

It’s the little things

My day began badly. The lawnmower brigade woke me up at 7:40 a.m. Not so early, maybe, for those who are normally up anyway getting ready for work or school. But for a retiree in the habit of staying up till 1 a.m., it came too damned early. Especially when I hadn’t slept well last night anyway. Angry is just not a good way to start the day.

It’s frustrating that part of my homeowner’s dues go to pay that crew. Believe me, I’ve phoned the management more than once expressing my unhappiness, even as I realize I may be the only one in the neighborhood who’s still in the neighborhood at that hour. Most of the neighbors seem to be young couples where both work and both are likely on their way to work at that hour.

It’s more the principle that really bugs me. Even when I lived in Oklahoma, where people did yard work either early or late to avoid the summertime heat, it was considered unneighborly to fire up one’s lawnmower before 9 a.m. Here in the Denver area, even on a hot day, the mornings are mild, so there’s no excuse for mowing as early as 7:40!

Okay, I realize that the more yards they can mow in a day, the more money they’ll make. But dammit, there’s got to be someplace else they can mow first. Like Farmer Brown’s north 40, or the soccer field 3 blocks over.

Okay, just had to get that out. It’s been bugging me all summer. The old crone’s rant is over. For now.