Debate season officially begins

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Resolved: In matters of U.S. immigration policy, restrictions on the rights of non-citizens are consistent with democratic ideals.

Thus reads the Sept-Oct resolution. Which, as it turns out, we did not vote for. We hardly ever vote for the winning resolutions. So far we've gotten two out of four, and one of them was the Nationals topic, which we didn't debate, and which everybody probably voted for, which is why it was the Nat's topic in the first place. I guess you can say that we Hen Hudders are blue state debaters in a red state debate world.

Not that it strikes me as a particularly bad resolution, at least insofar as the subject is new and interesting (immigration, that is, not democracy). The reason it's not a stunner is that it's so narrow (if argued well). Narrow topics can be good in some respects, as they force you to argue well because there's not much case variation from round to round after a topic gets established. But the rub is, there's not much variation from round to round. Oh, sure, the CT brigade will tell us that we're exluding aliens from our democracy or some other obvious point, let's say along colonialism lines, but that's obviously the point. So this boils down to relatively straightforward policy issues, but in aid of achieving those wonderful "democratic ideals." Of course, that parenthetical "argued well" means that I can envision without too much difficulty all sorts of bizarre interpretations of "the rights of non-citizens" that will ask judges to do everything but consider the real world issue that this topic is asking about.

That said, I suggest that the idea of "real world issue" inform anyone who wants to start researching. There's plenty of real and good stuff on this. It's a big issue today (and not just because of terrorism).

Little Elvis update: I've loaded Windows versions of Word and Excel. I own those fair and square, and now if I need 'em , I've got 'em. I also loaded my good old AOLPress program for HTML editing. Pretty bare-bones WYSIWYG, which I've been using for years. My websites aren't cute, but they do the job.