Barry Salad

My new favorite website is www.snopes.com.  This site is a tremendous resource for checking out all those urban myths that plague our email inboxes trying to outrage us with some latest injustice or simply to prove that our elected officials are corrupt, stupid or both.

I have been fooled by a few of these lately, but this one didn’t get by me.

Subject: Social Security Benefits - Do It Or Lose It.
This is so important and I am begging you to please read, sign and forward- By not responding we are simply helping give away what we, as citizens, have worked so hard to achieve .
As stated below, the Senate voted this week to allow illegal aliens to access to Social Security benefits.
Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition that requires
citizenship for eligibility to that social service.
You can Agree or Delete. Instru ctions are below.
PETITION FOR:
President Bush , Gov. Schwarzenegger, Senators Debbie Stabenow , Carl Levin and Congressman
Dana Rohrbacher, Joe Knollenberg
Gentlemen and Mr. President:
The petition below is a protest against what the senate voted on recently which was to allow illegals to access our social security!
We demand that you and all congressional representative require citizenship for anyone to be eligible for social services in the United States .
We further demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegals, and NO free services or funding, or payments to and for illegal
immigrants.
We are fed up with the lack of action about this matter and are
tired of paying" for services to illegals! Tell Senor Fox to pay for his own people!

I could spend a couple of pages talking about whether ‘illegal aliens’ deserve to receive Social Security or other "free services", but today’s piece is simply about getting to the truth.  Enter Snopes.

This email appears to be ‘based on a true story’ but goes awry in several places.  Snopes has 2 entries that address this story, the first addresses the facts of this and a similar email naming Senators who had "voted to give illegal aliens social security benefits."

What actually happened is that during debate of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, Sen. John Ensign (R) of Nevada proposed an ammendment that "would prevent Social Security benefits from being awarded for illegal labor in the United States."  In other words, if an illegal worker paid into Social Security using a false or stolen social security number, that person would not be given credit for those payments on their social security benefits.

The named Senators voted Yea on a Motion to Table (read kill) the ammendment.  A matter of semantics, I suppose, but 62 Senators eventually voted in favor of the bill without Senator Ensign’s amendment.  Perhaps we should add to the petition the names of the 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats who voted Nay on the Motion to Table the amendment but later voted to pass the bill, thereby enacting the law that "allows illegals to access our social security."  What then do we do with Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) who voted to table but later voted against the bill?

All of this is mute, really, as the second article from Snopes points out.  Email petitions are incredibly ineffective as the recipients, if they even receive copies of the email, have no way of verifying that the names were actually added to the list by the person named or even if the names are real people.

If you really want to have an impact, write (with pen and paper) and encourage your friends, family and neighbors to write to your elected officials.  Oh, and make sure you haven’t been duped by some email urban myth.