Greetings. Yahoo 360 will be shutting down in July. I've taken up a new home in the blogosphere and the first entry is now posted. It's about an interesting fellow who has made a life of working for justice and the significance of whom I am only now really just beginning to understand. I hope you'll bookmark the new location here:

http://jimrosenberg.wordpress.com/

It's been a great two and half years and I appreciate the more than 80,000 unique visits to this site, so I hope the new venue will be equally successful.

JR

With a three-day weekend to play with, cheap airline tickets available on short notice, double elite qualification miles, a promo to pick up Hilton Gold and a little bit of wanderlust, we decided to bum around San Francisco over Memorial Day. We weren't looking to stay near Fisherman's Wharf, but it's just as well because a number of the hotels were booked solid and some of the others were pricey. The sprawling Hilton San Francisco on O'Farrell Street had rooms for $129 and when we arrived, they even asked if we would rather have a junior suite for no extra charge. The Hilton Financial District, where we stayed for the second night, let us reserve for $109 on Monday. It would have been $60 more by Friday, but both of these places regularly go for well north of $200 a night.

It was a bit more chilly in the Bay area than back home in Wisconsin, which is true to Mark Twain's famous saying that "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." But it's still San Francisco and it's a place that we don't have to spend any time figuring out anymore. So we went out to eat, did a bunch of walking, picked up a couple of Chinese bowls and generally got away from it all for a couple of days. It's a funny thing that sometimes you have to fly for hours to force yourself to do simple things like going for a walk or not answer phone calls and things like that, but sometimes and for some of us, you just do.

An interesting thing at the plaza that is part of the Chinese Cultural Center over the weekend were the groups of Chinese men who intently watched pairs of men engaged in a game that looks a lot like checkers, but it seems like it has a bit more to it than that. These games would be surrounded by a dozen or more observers who would discuss strategy, compliment moves and just generally make it into a far more intense form of competition than it would be if it was just two guys playing by themselves. (Of course, all of this was happening in Chinese, so I'm just offering what I think was happening. For all I know, they might have been discussing the guy with the camera who was trying to take it all in.) Meanwhile, women played cards on another level of the plaza, sans spectators.

The thing about Chinatown is that while a trip to San Francisco would hardly be complete without a visit, it's not some faux attraction that's just there for the tourists (which is what a good share of Fisherman's Wharf has become.) I've been to Asia a half dozen times and in my view, Chinatown is an authentic Asian culture that thrives in a self-contained North American environment. It's the genuine article and while you are there, you might as well be on the other side of the Pacific. It all started around the middle of the 19th Century with the first Chinese immigrants and its origins were very much a product of excluding Chinese people from mainstream U.S. society for decades. That might seem strange with Chinese food around these parts today being about as ubiquitous as pizza and hamburger joints, but that's the way it is. As bad as that might sound -- and it certainly was -- the result today is something that is really pretty special.

JR

Memorial Day is the official start of the summer vacation season in these parts and I could already see traffic building at I returned from a meeting in Rhinelander yesterday. The trilliums are in bloom and it reminded me of many summers when our family would head up north to the cottage for a weekend of fishing, canoe rides and -- on extremely rare occasions when the water was warm enough this early -- swimming.

It's not as if there is nothing to talk about. The economy still has challenges. Dick Cheney is still trying to position the GOP to exploit anything that goes wrong on the terror front, while risking absolutely nothing as the ex-VP that he is. The Neumann trial continues. Things haven't magically bounced back yet on the employment side and the deficit is still through the roof. There are still wrenching, unsolved problems from Main Street to Darfur. But big deal. It's nothing that a fired-up grill and a few beverages wouldn't go a long way toward helping us forget momentarily and we probably should. I know I will.

So go ahead and work a full day today, if you must. But don't expect to get a lot of answers to your phone calls after lunch today and as for me, I'm getting out of here. Whatever it is, we can deal with it Tuesday.

JR

While there is no lack of things to talk about, I've been content to sit just back and just listen to discussion lately. Call it fatigue from a few weeks of shingles or just plain laziness, but if there is not enough good to outweigh the potentially negative outcomes from participating in a discussion, it is sometimes better just to leave it alone. Some of the most important things you learn from serving in public office for a few terms consist of patience and timing. You also learn what you can leave to others or blow off entirely. (Of course, you always have the opportunity to be wrong about these things, too.)

Last Monday, I had our somewhat annual meeting in District 1. One of the questions that came up concerned the brutal murder of an 18-year-old woman earlier this month on the west side. I said I didn't feel that it was a random act and that I felt the police would be making an arrest soon. The police obliged within a day or so. When the weekend arrived, I had a couple of beers with a relative of a teacher who was killed in the western part of the county some months ago by an individual who was operating his vehicle while intoxicated.

Since these incidents, we have had a wide-ranging discussion in our community about undocumented immigrants because that is what the people taken into custody for these incidents happen to be. The debate is raging along in comments attached to each story of the Wausau Daily Herald relating to the cases and probably elsewhere, too. While there are many things I wouldn't mind adding to such a conversation, I think the tone and tenor is such that it's better to just let people who are passionate about recent events exchange their commentary between themselves.

But I will say this much: immigration is going to continue; undocumented and otherwise. It won't matter what the Congress says, who is President, what party holds the majority or what we build along the borders in terms of policies, armies, laws or walls. It won't matter who likes it or not. I say that not because I have any particular opinion about it, but because I think it is a fact.

To see some problems in the immigration situation is not inherently racist, but there is an element of the discussion that is inextricably tied to race. Bigotry is undermining the argument of those who may legitimately want to see a better level of control over the throngs of new neighbors who are pouring in across our borders.

There are some things that need to be conceded about who is contributing what to our system. Detractors like to talk about things like social programs, school costs and crime. They tend to dismiss things like their own grocery bills being lower, the role of immigrants in the hospitality industry (for one), tax contributions for which benefits will never be collected and a myriad of other things in the economy that rest with varying degrees of weight upon the labor of millions of immigrants. The ride isn't any more free for immigrants than it is for anyone else and in many ways, it is likely to be far less so.

Those who are given to racism will necessarily join the ranks on one side of this argument and at times, they can assume a large role in the discussion. It's a huge problem and the reason is this: To many of us, including me, there are much worse problems than illegal immigration. One of them is racism. Beyond that, there is a complex set of tradeoffs going on in this situation and I am not inclined to pretend that I understand all of the intricacies that are involved. If it was an easy problem, it would have been solved. It's not.

JR