McCain Blames Immigrants For Forest Fires In AZ and Other Stuff You Missed Over The Weekend

Arizona Senator John McCain is at it again, this week blaming undocumented immigrants for wildfires that are raging out of control in Arizona and New Mexico.

Salon has a great piece up already pushing back on the absurdity of the good Senators comments. Essentially his statements are unverifiable and purely conjuncture, as such his press person is already walking Senator McCain's statements.

Apparently it is a bad week for anti-immigrant firebrands, as it now seems that AZ State Senator Russell Pearce will face a recall election. To make matters worse for the beleageured state Senator a prominent Republican in Arizona wrote a full editorial in the Arizona Republic saying that conservatives in the state think that the demagoguery that Pearce practices is hurting the states economy.

As for actual legislative movement the news was dominated by two issues: E-Verify and Secure Communities.

For E-Verify there were a couple of really good editorials written in The Hill. The first by Eliseo Medina of SEIU does an excellent idea of highlighting the very real problems that making the E-Verify program mandatory would cause the economy.  The second written by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren zeros in on the fact that E-Verify also creates very real job creation problems. 

Finally the reviews are in on the Obama Administrations fixes to the highly controversial Secure Communities program, which allows the government to run citizenship status checks on incarcerated immigrants. Critics of the program charge that among other things that the government is using the program to deport immigrants who have not been charged with any crime.

The reviews of the adminsitrative changes are unsurprisingly mixed.... The New York Times editorial board says, Too Little Too Late, The Los Angeles Times notes that the Administration taking steps to ensure that the program is actually targeting only criminals, and finally the Washington Post zeroes in on the reforms and notes that the new guidelines issued by ICE give greater discretion over which immigrants should be targeted for removal which should in the future stop the deportation of certain groups of immigrants who have not committed felonies.