Bush's Speech

Two more thoughts on Bush's immigration speech that I'd like to share.

First, I agree with Tran Sient when he asks, "When is my ATM going to stop asking me what language I speak?" This question has always been annoying to me and I know I'm not alone with this. Bush could have scored big points last night if during the "melting pot" part of his speech he called for banks to have ATM's in English only. Of course that wasn't going to happen but I do think Tran's question exposes a weakness in what Bush laid out last night.

Bush called for a high tech Immigrant ID card. Right now probably the most high-tech card people carry is an ATM or credit card. If our technology is not sufficient so that our ATM cards can tell ATM machines that we speak English first - how will these new Immigrant ID cards be sophisticated enough to tell the real immigrants from the illegal ones with fake ID's?

Secondly, last night I had the closed-captioning on my TV while watching the speech. I got a good chuckle out of the person typing in the speech as the President spoke. At the end of the speech Bush spoke about Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean. I could picture the closed captioning typer saying, "Who? How the f*ck do you spell the name? Well I'm just gonna skip that!" And they did. The text looked like "Laura and I met a wounded Marine named... Sergeant... came to the United States from Mexico." Or "During the liberation of Iraq, Master Gunnery Sergeant... was seriously injured." It was like looking at a CIA memo that had the names of people blacked out. I just found it amusing.