Russ McBee

The mighty Joe Powell is soliciting answers to a set of questions for his readers. Here are the questions (in bold) with my answers underneath each one:

1) Do you have a preference for any one candidate in the current race for President of the U.S.? Please give a reason for your choice (or lack of one).

I'm voting for John Edwards for several reasons. He's the only viable candidate with a health care reform proposal which would even come close to providing all Americans with decent medical coverage. The other proposals merely tinker around the edges of the problem without doing anything substantive about it. He's also in favor of pulling all US troops out of Iraq within 9 or 10 months of his inauguration. There are a host of other reasons, but those two are very near the top of my list.

2) The state of Tennessee is one of 24 states holding a primary this year on Feb. 5th. Will you be voting in this primary and do you think it wise to hold that many on the same day? Is it time to end the massive one day primary battles?

Yes, I'll be voting; early voting starts January 16th, so I'll probably go vote after work one day this week.

Bunching a lot of primaries onto the same day makes it difficult for any but the most well-heeled candidates to campaign across the country. Days like Super Tuesday favor the front-runners and those rich enough to fund their own campaigns, and it penalizes the candidates who haven't had an opportunity to be seen by a wide enough audience. This merely reinforces the media-created notion that the Democratic race only has two candidates in it.

I'm not sure what the best alternative is. Maybe we could adopt a randomly chosen schedule, rotating from one election cycle to another, or maybe the states should simply be required to spread their primaries across more months of the calendar. Maybe regional primaries would work. I don't know what the solution is, but the current front-loading of the calendar is not working to anyone's benefit except the front-runners.

I'm also tired of Iowa and New Hampshire being given a special status neither state deserves.

3) How would you describe your views on immigration policies in the U.S.?

Short version: The right wing noise machine has blown the issue way out of proportion and is using the issue as a proxy for racist pandering to the most vile factions of the GOP base.

Longer version: Ours has always been a nation of immigrants; our economic well-being and rich cultural diversity have been enabled due to the wide and persistent desire of immigrants to find a new and better life in our country. That has always been one of our strengths, and it should be encouraged. However, every successive wave of immigrants has invariably engendered attacks, hatred, and vitriol from provincial rubes and xenophobes. It is always thus.

I think there should be a consistently enforced, orderly, predictable, and stable mechanism for anyone, from any country, to apply for residency in the US. Anyone should be able to apply at any US consulate or embassy, or online. Although current immigration policy does include quotas for people entering under certain work visas, those quotas are way too low (I think the H1-B visa, for example, is limited to 50,000 per year). This makes illegal immigration much more attractive, thus adding to the problem of undocumented aliens. Quotas should be applied, but they should be more reflective of the labor demands in the US market. That is currently not the case.

Those undocumented immigrants currently here should be given an opportunity to obtain legal residency with no outlandish fines or "touch-back" requirements. The process should be simply, easy, and quick. If they choose not to pursue that opportunity, they should leave.

Employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants should be penalized harshly, since those employers are typically using illegal workers to circumvent laws regarding workplace safety, hours and overtime, organizing unions, and paying fair wages. Predatory employers are doing no one any good by hiring illegal labor. However, I don't think we should punish people who've risked their lives to come here; doing so would ignore the critical contributions immigrants have made to this country since its foundation.

4) Where do you seek news and information the most and do you talk about the news with those you work with, with friends and with family?

I'm a news junkie.

I get the vast majority of my news online. I don't subscribe to any newspapers or magazines, and I don't watch TV. In fact, I stopped watching television entirely about six years ago, and I don't miss it one bit; except to watch DVDs, my TV hasn't been turned on since 2002.

On a typical day, I listen to the BBC World Service (on XM) in the mornings and NPR in the evenings. I check all the headlines at Google News and Yahoo News at least a couple of times a day. I have about a hundred news sites in my RSS reader (plus about two hundred other feeds), and I peruse all of the news-related feeds daily.

Because of that, I'd be willing to say I'm a lot more informed now than I was when I watched TV news.

I often stumble across news stories on blogs, but they're not my primary source of information. I read the New York Times and Washington Post sites every day in as much depth as I have time for; secondary sources are the LA Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Huffington Post. For state and local news, the Knoxville News Sentinel and the Tennessean are my first stops.

I try not to inundate people around me with news-related topics, but if a particularly fascinating story comes along, there are certain people around me who I know would be willing to make a conversation out of it. I tend to share news stories with them.

5) How many hours a day (or week) would you say you spend online and what type of sites do you visit the most?

I spend probably 30 hours a week online, and the vast majority of that time is spent reading news (see above). I also love Pogo.

6) On a scale of one to ten, with one being lowest and ten the highest, what score would you give for the success of your local school system? What score for your local school board?

I'd give both about a 4. The Knox County dropout rate is way too high, and the county average on ACT scores is way too low. The school board doesn't seem to have much of a handle on either problem, and they screwed up royally in 2007 with a county-wide redistricting plan that served no purpose other than to make real estate developers happy.

7) What's the most recent movie/ TV show/ or book you enjoyed?

"Enjoyed" is the operative word here. I watched "The Queen" for the second time recently and enjoyed it just as much as the first time. Great film.

BONUS - Say you have a $25 gift coupon from the store Best Buy. What would you purchase with it?

I have a Best Buy addiction. I can't walk into that place without buying something, and it's usually way more than $25. I might see what DVDs are on sale, or I might buy some blank DVDs, or I might put it toward that 60" Sony HDTV that's been calling my name for a while now.