Liberals are the cause of ALL problems!

My friend Richard sent me yet another email bashing liberals, some of it from Lou Dobbs. Here's my reply:

Oh please. "Congress makes the laws and the president just has to work with it?" That's a gross oversimplification and hardly worth the time to counter. What is this juvenile need on the part of conservatives to blame every problem on liberals? Grow up! The truth is so much more complicated than that. Any useful conversation requires a bit of sophistication. This isn't a schoolyard brawl, this is our nation we're talking about. This is serious stuff and requires that adults address issues in an adult way!

Here's just ONE refutation of Lou Dobbs' statistics, I can't be bothered to go through this whole silly list:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/30leonside.html

Here's the particular statistic in the email that I checked (the email claims to provide verification for all the "facts" but of course the verifications are all highly suspect. . .)

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

Here's the refutation:

Here are the facts, according to the Department of Justice:

¶In 2000, 27 percent of the inmates in federal prisons were noncitizens. Some of these noncitizens were illegal immigrants, and some were in this country legally. In 2001, this percentage dropped to 24 percent, and it continued dropping over the next four years, falling to 20 percent in 2005.

Bottom line: illegal immigrants make up significantly less than a third of the federal prison population, and the share has been falling in recent years.