Archive for the ‘Illegal Immigration’ Category

“Come to the U.S.A.”

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Hat tip to Boortz.

Not a Laughing Matter

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

Oh, but He missed the point so gracefully, sonorously, articulately. There’s Just Something About Him!!1!

Hat tip to Smitty.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… XXII

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

I must paraphrase the fellow who called in to the radio guys a few minutes ago. It’s a replay from a show that was broadcast earlier in the week, and in theory I should be able to launch a search for a transcript. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel of money on this and I’m not going to bet a single minute of time.

The point has already been made that America is a unique player on the world stage, in that the loud, always-present, seldom-correct never-in-doubt politically correct glitterati will not grant her license to show pride in herself. Those who define what is offensive, find no offense when any other country shows this pride. Canada can do it, Mexico can do it, Scotland can do it, France can do it and Chile can do it. When you go to those places, those places can insist you behave in certain ways or else face the consequences, social, civil or criminal.

America is the one place that cannot do that.

This guy laid down a logical, durable argument that America is the one place in the world that should be granted this license, presuming only one country may have it. It is the one spot on the globe at present, and the only nation in all of recorded human history. It did not spring forth from a patch of ground, a tribe, or the bloodline of a royal family. America is unique in that it was founded on a set of ideas. He mentioned that no other nation has this origin, and I believe that is the case.

Our country should be the first one to be able to say: If you come here, you must accept our ideas, or turn around & head back the way you came.

I would go even further, and say: So long as such a nation-of-ideas adheres to its true legacy, of fidelity to those ideas, it should be the last to be called upon to prove something about non-prejudice, non-discrimination, non-bias, et al. Color-blindness is a natural development of caring about an idea. You meet a stranger who shares your values with regard to that idea, you aren’t going to care if he’s black, white, yellow, red, green with purple stripes.

Hey come to think of it, how come those other country’s aren’t called-upon to prove such a thing? How many black leaders has Europe elected?

EnglishI’d go even further still: You want to come live here for good, and do it by scaling a fence or overstaying a visa, that’s like immigrating to Israel wearing a Hitler uniform. There, I went ahead and Godwin‘d.

Immigrating legally but speaking your mother tongue, that’s bad too. Yes, a lot of the ways you can learn a new language cost money and a lot of immigrants don’t have it. These methods also take time, and that can be scarce too. When you’re older than five or ten, it takes awhile to pick it up. There’s stuff to to be done, you have to talk to your immediate family…I get all that. Do what you can, and the kids learn English. You want them to have a future, right? It’s politically correct to point out the enhanced career opportunities in store for people who are bilingual, well guess what: English still beats everything. The official language of air navigation, worldwide, is English. This is not so P.C. so maybe you haven’t been told.

The USA is entitled to an official culture and an official language. It is entitled to these things even if only one nation can be. It possesses, and would be right to claim, special, unique privilege. Yes, I’m dead flat-ass serious.

Spare me the e-mails and comments about racism. This stuff is all color-neutral, and it all makes perfect sense.

Obama/Media vs. Arizona/America

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Lloyd Marcus writes in American Thinker:

As a black patriot of the Tea Party Movement, the liberal mainstream media practically strapped me down and waterboarded me, attempting to force me to confess seeing racist signs, which I never saw, at tea party rallies. Meanwhile, they are completely blind and silent about the outrageous, hate-filled, racist, traitorous, and violent signs on display at the anti-Arizona immigration law rallies.

ProtesterRecently, the word of the month from Obama flacks in the liberal mainstream media was “sedition,” which Webster defines as “the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion against the government in power.” Obama’s homeys in the media were aggressively attempting to make the “S”-word stick to tea party patriots, conservative commentators, and anyone who opposed Obama’s agenda.

I am also struck by the breathtaking arrogance and entitlement mindset of the anti-Arizona immigration law protesters. The liberal mainstream media portrays illegal immigrants as humble peasants who are seeking a better life while hiding in the shadows, while in reality, those attending the rallies were angry, demanding, and some were even violent. Their attitude is “in your face, America! Yes, we are here illegally, and you had better give us what we want!”

Who do they think they are? What has inspired them to boldly ignore our laws? I submit that these illegals and their liberal supporters are emboldened by the usual suspects: the liberal mainstream media, the Democrats, and, outrageously, the President of the United States.

Illegal is the new legal. Legal is the new illegal.

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XXX

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

At the beginning of this month I identified what is very likely to be the all-time champion SCIHOWL (Sickest Commercial I’ve Heard Or Watched Lately). Actually, I split it two ways because it was a tie. And the second of the two was that sickening pinko-commie Census commercial:

Little girl asks her mommy what the census is about, and momma gives her this big ol’ speech about how this is the only way they can make it known to Washington that they’re out here, needing their goods and supplies, that they have needs — and get what’s theirs. Get their fair share.

Pure communism. That used to be an evil thing, remember that?
:
The idea that we’re all just out here in the wild frontier…suckling away at a Washington momma-piggy’s teats, fighting over each other for the sustenance. Have to tell our Washington overlords that our tummies are empty, so they can use their infinite wisdom to figure out whether it’s time to raise taxes on the evil rich people again. What the hell is this? Castro’s Cuba?

Now, I do not know if the radio guys read my blog. I’ve always assumed hardly anybody ever does. But how, then, do you explain this glorious tirade of theirs that is being replayed for the weekend as I type these very words.

They’re not covering too much that I didn’t cover, except for one thing. And it’s probably because they’re reading this story over here — about the census officials trying to build trust with the illegal aliens.

What a quandry! The illegal aliens think the census officials are representing some government agency that will get them deported. If I was an illegal alien, I’d probably be suffering from this misconception as well. We have this government full of all these agencies…which is going to pretend to police our border, but actually try like the dickens to avoid doing it. So if this agency finds out you’re here illegally, you can only get away with it if there’s nothing on the record. Garfield the cat plays card games with the mice, so long as owner Jon Arbuckle isn’t watching.

If that other agency finds out you’re here illegally then you don’t have anything to worry about at all, no matter what.

I don’t really know how you explain that to a newcomer to our country.

And I don’t know how you explain this effort to build trust with the illegal alien community, to anyone at all. Let me paraphrase one of the radio guys: We are out of money. We are just flat-out beyond broke. So we are going to…spend money. To send people with clipboards out into the field. So they can find the illegal aliens that are hiding from them. So they can build trust with them…so they can get the illegal aliens their “fair share.”

By C-O-U-N-T-I-N-G them. We’re really burning the midnight oil, to make sure our government is aware of the illegal aliens in the right way, but not in the wrong way. So it knows just barely enough to get the illegal aliens their “fair share” but not enough to give them what they really deserve. Which is a one-way ride out of here.

They’re here to work hard and send money home to their families, and not to hide from authorities because they’re sex criminals? Really? You’ll promise me that, twenty million times? Not knowing a single blessed thing about who or what you’re talking about…which is what words like “undocumented and “illegal” really mean. They mean you don’t know. They mean you’re playing Russian Roulette. So no, you won’t promise me that millions of times, you won’t promise me even once. You’ll just call anyone a racist who might have a suspicious or negative word to say about anyone who isn’t white. That’s as intellectual and as studious as the shouting match ever gets.

I don’t manage my household this way. Never. No sane individual does. You go through some lean times, you don’t say “hey I think the cable company undercharged us, let’s make sure they’re counted so they receive their fair share.” Aw sure, that might make the bottom line even bleaker still, but that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. Got to get everyone their fair share!

This is a practice that would end the very minute it began to be widely discussed, and I think it would be widely discussed if only it had a name. This thing about going out looking for people who might be “eligible”…when the government’s already broke…because it would be just so awful for someone, anywhere, to fail to file a claim when there might be some reading of the rules that would make them eligible. That kind of detective work. “Out of place” doesn’t even begin to describe it. We should come up with a name for it, and then give a fair hearing to the merits and liabilities of it. Maybe it’s appealing to some, but to me it’s just a big black poisonous arachnid, the kind that thrives and survives only in the most concealed and dark places, where large rocks have not been overturned for a very, very long time.

Update: If you need some perspective on exactly how much loot we’re spending, to, uh, get money spent — Cassy’s post is a must-read.

You Knew When You Saw the Word “Racism” in the Headline…

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

…that the meaning of that word was going to be expanded. Explosively, beyond all linguistic usefulness. Par for the course, for the Huffington Post.

Its responsible liberal editors need to speak out IMMEDIATELY against their liberal contributors in their own ranks using this awful “ism” word as an excuse to provide cover to lawbreaking illegal aliens.

Responsible members of the Republican party need to speak out IMMEDIATELY against the conservative commentators in their own ranks using swine flu as an excuse to spew out racist hatred.

Radio, TV and newspaper personalities have jumped on the illness as a platform to attack “illegal aliens” for being responsible for carrying the disease across the Mexican border and infecting innocent Americans.

Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support such claims, talk radio hosts Michael Savage and Neal Boortz, radio and Fox TV personality Glenn Beck, and columnist Michelle Malkin are spreading them faster than the contagion.

“Illegal aliens are bringing in a deadly new flue strain. Make no mistake about it,” blares Michael Savage.

“I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the US as a result of uncontrolled immigration,” writes Michelle Malkin.

“What happens if there’s a rash of deaths in Mexico… and if you’re a family in Mexico and people are dying and Americans are not, why wouldn’t you flood this border?” announces Glenn Beck.

What color, exactly, is “America deserves to have a border”?

More to the point — if America can’t have a meaningful border right now…then when can she?

And do you really think, Ms. Fuller, that this country’s citizens are so dull-witted and stupid that they can be lulled into holding their own nation’s laws as meaningless — just because they’re afraid someone will think they’re racists? Only if they already have reason to cling to this kind of fear; some kind of skeleton to keep shackled up in their closets.

And what kind of guilt trip keeps you imprisoned in its invisible gilded cage, for that matter, that you feel compelled to demonize others this way. Simply for insisting our immigration laws ought to matter? That our border should mean something? The more I see of your ugly words, the more it looks like a guilt trip, laid down for those who are already guilty, by those who are similarly guilty. What are you hiding? Does it have something to do with your perception that all those who illegally cross a border must be of one special race, and all those who would rise up in support of that border must be some other race?

The rest of her essay is far less offensive…but no less ignorant. It all rests on this flimsy foundation: Ms. Fuller thinks of germ warfare as a brand-new, untested, and fanciful technology. It’s the usual left-wing claptrap: She’s formed her own opinion about how likely or unlikely something is, although she can’t really substantiate it — and you’re required to share your opinion or you’re a stupid racist hick moron. And she has nothing to say to such morons. For surely she must realize, if you do not buy into her mistaken beliefs about germ warfare…completely…if you show the least little bit of skepticism, or pause just a little bit before accepting it uncritically…her entire argument is, shall we say, rent asunder. And that includes her ugly slur toward Savage, Beck and — hah! — Malkin.

These liberals calling Michelle Malkin a racist bitch crack me up. Haven’t they seen a picture of her? Seriously. I know they put pictures of Malkin in the sidebar. But those are editors doing that. For all I know, the people who actually write this drivel must picture her, in their minds’ eyes, as Ann Coulter’s twin sister or something. And they probably do. Not a single one of them has ever impressed me as being particularly knowledgeable or well read, about their chosen subject matter or about anything else.

It’s worth an eyeball-roll and nothing more. Until, that is, you recall that people just like her, are the ones who won the elections and run our entire government, including our immigration and defense services, now.

It’s not just stupid. It is that, plus exceedingly dangerous.

Update: You see the little game being played here?

Thing I Know #272. When people accuse you of doing something or being something and it isn’t true; when it comes as a surprise to you that anyone would think such a thing about you; I’ve found it is a mistake to put any effort into proving them wrong. If they’re sincere, something is coloring their perception, and whatever it is, it’s outside of your control. If they’re not, then they’re trying to get you to do something that’s probably contrary to your interests. Either way — you aren’t going to change their minds. Don’t try.

Thing I Know #273. This is the flip-side to TIK #272. When you want someone to do something, and you don’t have the authority to force them to, it’s contrary to their interests, and they’ve figured out it’s contrary to their interests or they’re plenty bright enough to figure out it’s contrary to their interests — accuse them of something. It’s your only option. Make sure they aren’t guilty of it. If they’re guilty, they’ll resign themselves to the fact that you’ve figured them out; if they’re not guilty, they’ll do anything you want to prove it. Then you just tie that in to what you want them to do.

Accuse people of something. Make sure they aren’t really guilty of it. Get this one message across to them: I haven’t made up my mind you’re absolutely guilty, but I haven’t made up my mind you’re absolutely innocent either — I am in a state of doubt about you. Act like you care about this, just a little bit less than they do…and don’t forget to fasten the things you want them to do, however laughably and however nonsensically, to the things you think they will want to prove to you. This is how every single unscrupulous-but-effective salesman does his mental gymnastics. I think you are, or have done, something bad…but I’m just not sure…so here is your chance to prove your worthiness to me.

This is not how we became as great a nation as we are. We need to stop falling for this garbage.

Update 5/1/09: Thing I Know #248 is even more apropos:

Guilt is the final refuge of really bad ideas. When somebody accuses you of something and you have no idea why they’d think this of you, look at what they’re trying to get you to do. And you’ll realize, not only is it a bad idea, but there’d be no way to get a man to do it, if he felt good about himself.

The thing-to-get-people-to-do, in this case, is to offer up the United States of America as the one single, solitary sacrificial lamb on the face of the globe — the one country that cannot have a meaningful border. Russia can have one. Everyone in Scandinavia can have one. Each country in Europe could have one, if it wanted one. African countries can certainly have one. Only America shall be denied this basic attribute of sovereignty.

Like the TIK says — no man would sign on to this if he felt good about himself. Without guilt, the product cannot be sold.

With Peeling Removed, How Long Does an Orange Last?

Friday, January 30th, 2009

I agree with Fat in Indiana. It’s like the folks writing this nonsense, don’t want the country to succeed — difficult to see how anyone could deny or question it, and remain intellectually diligent and honest about the matter.

You wanted change. Looks like you’re getting it. Suckers.

Here’s some more change you said you wanted…

Well … at least the Republicans stood fast yesterday in the House. They were joined by several Democrats in opposing this $825 billion government growth bill. Now it’s off to the Senate…I love what House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said yesterday in response to criticism of the government growth plan. “Americans voted for change.” There you go. The Democrat’s answer for every objection to a Democrat atrocity? Does Obama’s focus group created slogan give Democrats a clear field to destroy our free market economy and burden your children and grandchildren with a bill they may never be able to repay? Oh yeah…we did all of this because Americans voted for change. What a jerk. What an asinine and arrogant response to the valid concerns of many Americans.

Just think about this stuff for a minute or two. We imagine this as a discourse between the weak and the strong, who in turn are positioned oppositionally…what benefits one side automatically injures the other side. We imagine it that way not because reality counsels us to, but because the democrat party counsels us to.

Even those who say they are championing the cause of the weak…the voiceless (hah!) weak…acknowledge the weak are dependent on the strong. Hell, they’re the ones making it that way.

Now, how would you destroy a civilized country? I really can’t think of a better way. Make the degenerates dependent on the functional, pump up the ranks of the degenerates to the point where they outnumber the functional, then use those votes to see to it the functional can no longer function.

You couldn’t do this kind of damage to a country in an entire century — overthrowing Saddam Hussein over and over again, every five years.

Can’t Keep Them Out Of Her House

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

It’s a consequence, in my view, of that famous John Kerry gray-world nuanced thinking:

Lorraine Henderson, the Boston area port director for the Customs and Border Protection Division of the US Department of Homeland Security, was arrested at her home shortly before 8 a.m. after an eight-month undercover investigation during which a cleaner wore a wire.

Federal prosecutors said Henderson – who directs 190 armed officers who oversee ports of entry in Rhode Island and Connecticut as well as Massachusetts – became a target after she ignored a warning from a fellow employee that her regular cleaner was an illegal immigrant from Brazil.

“She’s supposed to be deporting aliens, not hiring them,” said Assistant US Attorney Brian T. Kelly, chief of the public corruption unit.

I’m relieved to see there are still consequences somewhere. For the real tragedy of America’s immigration policy is intellectual damage. It has become an issue in which, if you merely balk at the idea that a law is supposed to be enforced selectively, suddenly you are a hateful person. Because according to what has become the prevailing viewpoint, Lorraine Henderson did everything exactly right. I’m off the clock. Need to hire a cleaning lady. You’re an illegal immigrant…which must mean you’re just doing what’s necessary to “make a better life for your kids.” In you come. Who cares that my job is to enforce the law and now I’m breaking it. Who cares that I have no way of knowing who you really are. Who cares…no way will this ever get me in trouble.

This has become an issue in which lots of otherwise intelligent people can no longer distinguish between moderation and extremes. I say — our tolerance for this has approached dangerous levels, and the response comes back — what’re you gonna do Freeberg, load twelve million immigrants into a boxcar and ship ’em out overnight? I didn’t say that. Nobody I know ever said anything like that. We oppose laws that break other laws. No, I don’t think you spend a night in jail just because you jaywalk, and no, it’s not because I’ve jaywalked a time or two. I would oppose a law about jaywalking. “Don’t jaywalk, but if you’re gonna, our policy about how to properly jaywalk is…” Just like the needle-exchange program. Shooting up drugs is against the law, but since we’re compassionate and want to prevent the spread of AIDS, we have a program…etc. Laws should not contradict other laws. If they do, then the whole system becomes a joke.

Western civilization’s notion of law can certainly withstand a violator here and there. It can withstand a violator who doesn’t get caught. It cannot survive glaring contradictions written into the laws. That’s when it becomes a mockery of itself. That’s what Lorraine Henderson did. That’s her real crime.

The woman’s in charge of security at an airport, and she doesn’t think the law she’s charged with enforcing, is truly worth enforcing. Which means the people who work under her, could enforce it just as selectively. The nation does have deadly enemies. When they win, they become emboldened, and when they lose, they become desperate. It’s simply not appropriate for us to have a porous border.

It’s not a frantic, desperate, adrenaline-charged, shrieking viewpoint. It’s simple common sense. It’s called security, and it was supposed to have been this woman’s profession. Obviously she isn’t right for it. Fine. She can make her living brewing coffee at Starbucks McDonalds, or maybe as a cashier at Home Depot. I wonder how many others are made of the same sort of stuff, and simply haven’t been caught yet.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Illegal Aliens with Illegal Mortgages

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Newsbusters

A single report by KFYI radio of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.

There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.

KFYI reports that these fraudulent straw purchases of mortgages by illegal aliens has affected every state in the union.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

Lax immigration laws have also helped make this crime easy to perpetrate.

In 1965 a Democrat Controlled Congress under President Lyndon Johnson passed the concept of “chain” immigration into law. A later commission named the Hesburgh Commission convened during Ronald Reagan’s first term, found that this concept statistically allowed each single immigrant to bring into this country 84 of his family members. Of course, all these people have to live somewhere making such fraudulent mortgages quite attractive.

But go on. Vote for the fellow with the most charismatic personality for your hopey changey goodness, and blame any hitches in the giddy-up on “eight years of Bush Cheney.”

Real life just isn’t that simple, m’friends.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Follow-Up on Horn

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Joe Horn is a free man.

The legal justification is supposedly the “Castle Doctrine,” a subset of Texas’s self-defense law that lets you defend yourself and your property by firing on an unlawful intruder without having to “retreat” first. Having spent the past hour poring over the statutes and giving myself a migraine, it seems to me there are two gray areas: One, whether Horn is to be thought of as defending his home, his neighbor’s home, or himself when the shootings occurred, and two, whether having the right to “stand your ground” (i.e. not retreat) entitles you to precipitate a confrontation that could have been avoided by simply not doing anything. The sections that authorize defense of property (9.42 and 9.43) do allow for deadly force — but only at nighttime in the case of burglary, presumably because it’s harder to tell what a burglar’s packing in dim light and also because a burglar who’s coming through the window at an hour when he knows people are likely to be home is likely to be a bolder, more dangerous burglar. The Horn shootings happened in broad daylight. Which means if he’s off the hook, it has to be on grounds that he was protecting himself, not his property, during the confrontation with the burglars.

Dunno if I agree with this analysis. It presumes the Grand Jury followed the letter of the law, and furthermore that there must have been some tip-off of imminent danger to Mr. Horn. The latter of those has not been substantiated by the 911 call I heard (follow link at the top), and the former of those of course has not been substantiated by anything.

I think the grand jurors simply decided they’d had it up-to-here with the law standing up for bad guys. They didn’t think they should have been meeting for the purpose at hand; they moved to dismiss.

Not sure I can agree with that if that’s the way things went down, but I’m certainly not shedding any tears over it.

H/T: Ace.

Clown Car

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Money quote:

A routine traffic stop turned into a search that included K9 units and a helicopter after nine suspected illegal immigrants fled from a passenger car police pulled over near Riggs Road and Arizona Avenue Monday night.

Det. David Ramer, a Chandler police spokesman, said police were able to catch eight of the nine men. Ramer said police did not know if the men were part of a human smuggling operation.

You know an invasion when you see one?

Bird Feeder

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

It’s currently making the rounds on the innernets

I bought a bird feeder. I hung it on my back porch and filled it lovingly with seed. It was indeed a beautiful bird feeder.

Within a week we had hundreds of birds taking advantage of the continuous flow of free and easily accessible food. But then the birds started building nests in the boards of the patio, above the table, and next to the barbecue.

Then came the bird shit. It was everywhere; on the patio tile, the chairs, the table … everywhere! Then some of the birds turned mean. They would dive bomb me and try to peck me even though I had fed them out of my own pocket. And others birds were boisterous and loud. They sat on the feeder and squawked and screamed at all hours of the day and night and demanded that I fill it when it got low on food. After a while, I couldn’t even sit on my own back porch anymore.

So I took down the bird feeder and in three days the birds were gone. I cleaned up their mess and took down the many nests they had built all over the patio. Soon, the back yard was like it used to be … quiet, serene and no one demanding their rights to a free meal.

Now let’s see ….

Our government gives out free food, subsidized housing, free medical care, and free education and allows anyone born here to be an automatic citizen. Then the illegal’s came by the millions.

Suddenly our taxes went up to pay for free services; small apartments are housing 5 or more families; you have to wait 6 hours to be seen by a doctor in an emergency room because it is filled with illegals; your child’s class is behind other schools because over half the class doesn’t speak English.

Breakfast cereal now comes in a bilingual box; I have to ‘press one’ to hear my bank talk to me in English, and people waving flags other than ‘The Union Jack’ are squawking and screaming in the streets, demanding more rights and free liberties. Its just my opinion but: maybe, just maybe, it’s time for the government to take down the damn bird feeder.

I have not yet heard it suggested…not even once…that any other nation besides the United States of America would be doing anything “racist” by establishing, or continuing to establish, an official language. To the best of my knowledge, this is a rule that doesn’t make sufficient sense to be articulated outright anywhere — that the United States is engaged in an act of RAY-SCIZM by making English the official language of the country. But other countries can go ahead and have theirs. That’s all good.

This is an abuse of logic and common sense of monstrous proportions. That’s probably what it’s not articulated outright.

It doesn’t even begin to be rational.

What color is English anyway?

Best Sentence XXVI

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

There is a round-about way we stumbled across the winner of the latest BSIHORL (Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately) award. Follow along…

Michelle Malkin linked to a curious item in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which was crying crocodile tears for the illegal aliens who couldn’t find any work leaving any parallel dilemma faced by the people who actually belong here, mostly uncommented-upon.

And the story contained this curious undertone. Like trout in a plentiful pond, it would break the surface when you least expected it, and elude capture by vanishing almost instantly. And then do it again. And again.

The bad times are trickling down to the lowest rung of the work force: the illegal labor pool, which has long been tapped by both contractors and homeowners for convenience and low cost.
:
“Everybody is going to suffer in a recession — from the top on down,” says Patti Decker, a branch manager with Labor Ready in Soquel, whose number of Spanish-speaking customers, she added, has been on the rise in the last few months, in part due to the poor economy.

This recurring reference to verticality. I think it’s relevant, because if you accept that the illegal aliens are the lowest among us — rather than the children who are brutalized by some of them, more often than we’d be led to believe — this would mean every time a politician makes reference to our goodness being defined by how we treat the least among us, that politician is saying our goodness is defined by how we treat our illegal aliens.

Which would be groundbreaking, because I’m hearing it from them every goddamned day. Society is to be regarded according to how it treats the weakest…the least…the lowest…the poorest. Many saying this is so. Few saying why.

Not sure if this comes from The Gospels or any other part of the Bible. This seems to be a misattribution based on Luke 9:48, “…the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great.”

But thankfully, I don’t see this attributed to the Bible too much. Most of the time people are claiming to come up with it themselves, which is funny because there are so many original authors of this one bromide.

Including one Helen, cited by Don Quixote while guest-blogging at fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm Room.

A nation is only as powerful as its weakest citizen, as prosperous as its poorest, and as decent and moral as its empty jails.

Whereupon commenter Lissa wins the BSIHORL award with this apropos rejoinder:

Why should we judge a society by its poorest and weakest? Why not judge it by its best, and the opportunity for the poorest and weakest to become neither poor nor weak?

A question for the era, Lissa. WELL done.

Update: In another example of wonderful/wretched irony, I see the overall liberal mantra is a short dialog of sorts, in which an interested outsider applies for assimilation into the liberal collective union, inseparable from adoration and adulation from those already therein — and is granted it.

It can be distilled into the following brief exchange:

APPLICANT: I believe we are all equally worthwhile in every conceivable way, without regard to gender, race, creed, credo, sexual preference, income, net worth, or place of birth.

COLLECTIVE: That clearly makes you far superior to those who don’t believe the same. Enter when ready, New Member.

The theoretical egalitarianism is an indispensible component. So is the practical non-equal stratification of “We’re Better Than You.” Neither one of these are tangential or optional. They are BOTH core, even though they are opposites.

Self-mockery, thy name is liberalism.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Anti-Immigrant?

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

What’s Mexico President Felipe Calderon talking about here?

“The worst thing that happened in this country is this anti-Mexican or anti-immigrant perception of people. We need to contain this,” Calderon said after a speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“I need to change in Mexico the perception that the Americans are the enemy, and it is important to change the perception that the Mexicans are the enemy,” he said. “We are neighbors, we are friends and we must be allies.” [emphasis mine]

“Immigrant” implies, but does not state outright, legal immigration. That would be a drive to increase or restrict the quota, and with all due respect to President Calderon, I know of no such drive. In either direction. Frankly, I wish the quota meant enough that people could arouse some kind of passion about it.

If you’re talking about that other kind of immigration, then you are an obfuscating, vicious, lying sonofabitch and I hope your nose gets flattened under the knuckles of a great American somewhere before your flight home. Over this stupid statement of yours. And that you know that’s the reason why.

How DARE you.

Write In Fred Thompson

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

I’ve been wrestling with a decision, and now I have decided. In fact, for those who have wrestled similarly and decided similarly, I am donating the artwork below to the public domain in the hopes that the message spreads far and wide.

In that spirit, I am pleased to announce the latest blogosphere campaign starting here, at The Blog That Nobody Reads…

Anyway. That’s my solution to this thorny problem. All you other sunzabishes do what you want…

Update: Before you other sunzabishes decide to decline this friendly advice and pull the lever for McCain so that you don’t “waste your vote”…watch this…

Would you buy a used car from this Guy Smiley, slicked-haired, oily-skinned, gift-o-gab professional jibber-jabberer? He is John McCain’s Hispanic Outreach Director.

And this really isn’t a very complicated situation at all. The man’s a liar. By which I mean, he tells big fat disgusting whoppers. He wants you to think that people who break the law, don’t. Millions of ’em. He’s telling us these people are really good at following the law, when he has no way to know such a thing, and in fact the matter doesn’t require any scrutiny because by their very definition, they break it.

C’mon…do we really want to say America is a place where we all pretend you didn’t break the law, when, at the time you broke it, your standard of living was a little on the rustic side? Do we really want to go down that road?

Thing I Know #196. Real freedom is actually pretty boring. It has very little to do with noteworthy events, save for the one event marking its arrival. When classes of people take turns, over time, enjoying special privileges, not one man among them enjoys genuine freedom.

Killing the Agents Americans Won’t Kill

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Via our parent site and host Webloggin, a story from fellow Webloggin contributer Big Dog about those honest and hard-working illegal immigrants that do such a good job of following the laws once they break the law to get here…

Now we have word that a border patrol agent in California was run over by a vehicle that he tried to stop after it entered this country ILLEGALLY. The area where this took place is popular among off road enthusiasts as well as drug runners entering the US ILLEGALLY. Our government is responsible for the death of this agent. The failure of the President and the Congress to secure our borders has allowed a vehicle to enter ILLEGALLY and run over an agent.

I can certainly understand why some people really hate Fox News and immediately think of the words like “slanted” and “biased” whenever it is mentioned. If you’re used to cherry-picking the facts to make ILLEGAL immigrants look good, I would suppose the truth would might look strange and tainted when it finally walked up and slapped you across your ILLEGAL-alien-apologist face.

The apologist viewpoints that I find most disturbing about this, are the ones that leave the wrong idea and then hang around for awhile by being laced with kernels of truth. Namely…that the illegal aliens hop the turnstyle and break the laws by being in America, because they suffer from a lack of options and want to do right by their families. This is true, several times a day…of that, I have no doubt.

But the argument is diminished somewhat, the first time someone gets hurt. It’s diminished further when someone is killed…more so, when it happens a few more times.

What I think people lose track of here, is that “Illegal” means immeasurable. You don’t know who these people are. So it’s impossible to say what they’re really wanting to do once they’re in America. And you certainly can’t state in any certain terms how dangerous it’s going to be to let ’em run around. You DON’T KNOW. Even the illegal aliens that have names, and supposedly, work histories…you don’t even know if that applies to the guy in front of you, or not.

The word “illegal” means it is a crapshoot. To support it, you have to say it is worthwhile to play this absurd lottery game with the lives of others. With real citizens, that belong here. To which, you can reply (and many do) that it’s only by an accident of birth that anybody supposedly “belongs” here…that lie has a kernel of truth to it as well.

But look where that leads. This argument, necessarily, insists that your “accident of birth” made you a citizen of the United States, and it shouldn’t have — you have been overly privileged, and therefore it is just desserts that you be made into target practice for millions of illegal aliens. Some of whom are here to “work hard,” some of whom are here to run people over with their cars after getting drunk. Some of them, both. Maybe it’ll happen to you, and maybe it won’t. But you deserved to be subjected to this sick game of chance, because you as a natural-born citizen were born overly-privileged.

Yes, that isn’t what these apologists mean. But that’s the argument they’d have to embrace, for their statements to make sense. That the lives of natural-born citizens…simply aren’t worth very much, and have been overvalued.

How to Handle Illegal Aliens

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

One of our very best blogger friends objected, predictably, when I said

And then we’ve developed this unfortunate mode of thinking in which we say the issue is “complicated” when it isn’t. And we know the issue isn’t complicated at all. We just use the c-word to try to shake things up a little, to produce a different outcome for selected individuals and groups of people. Almost always, to help those individuals and groups of people.

The subject under discussion, specifically, was illegal immigration. I think the subject that was generally under discussion, is far more important though: our national confusion between simple things and complicated things. We call complicated things simple, and simple things complicated.

We’re laboring under this national delusion that Osama bin Laden caused 9/11, therefore we should kick Osama’s ass and nobody else’s. See? Simple. Simple, simple, simple. Well, it isn’t so simple. Anybody who ponders it for a little while will realize it isn’t so simple…but the democrat party thinks it’ll win some elections if it can be made to be simple, so they do exactly that, and everybody else clambers on board the stupid-wagon.

Illegal immigration, on the other hand, is against the law. And you know what? That is simple. But noooooo…we continue to hear about what a complicated issue this is. How so? Nobody will say. Because there are twelve to fourteen million of them here already?

That is a crock. I jaywalk all day every day, and aver a year and a half finally get busted for it — the judge isn’t going to care one bit how long I’ve been doing it. He won’t care that everybody does it. He won’t care that jaywalking is a “victimless” crime and he really won’t give a rip that I was doing it to feed my family. You break “stupid” laws and you get away with it if you don’t get caught. When you get caught, you stop getting away with it.

And that, my friends, is simple. It is no more complicated than that. What makes it faux-complicated, is that there are unscrupulous businesses that have a vested financial interest in keeping up the status quo. Those businesses buy politicians. Those politicians then do a lot of talking that confuses people.

But I get to break laws until I get caught. And then I don’t. Because I don’t have a license to break laws. That means I don’t want anybody else to have one either. The situation is really no more complicated than that.

Buck, love ya to death and everything, but Phil’s right. A one-stage “Night of the Long Knives” type of round-up is decidedly off topic. We aren’t discussing a one-night sweep or a one-week sweep, the subject under discussion is whether a designated class of people should be given a license for breaking a law. And to address your frightening hypotheticals, to the extent this designated class has been granted such a license, when it is revoked it turns out beautiful things happen.

Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, immigration crackdowns, Arizona’s new employer-sanctions law and a sluggish economy have combined to create a climate families…no longer find hospitable.

The number returning to Mexico is difficult to calculate, but there is no question that many families are leaving, according to Mexican government officials, local community leaders and immigrants themselves. “The situation in Arizona has become very tough,” [an illegal alien] said minutes after driving into a Mexican immigration and customs checkpoint south of the border on Mexico 15.

Dozens of immigrants are leaving the U.S. daily, and even more are expected to leave once the sanctions law takes effect in January, provided the law survives a last-minute legal challenge, said Rosendo Hernandez, president of the advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders. “If people can’t find work, they won’t be able to pay their bills, so they will leave,” Hernandez said.

H/T: Malkin.

Does this cause pain? I’m sure it does. I’m sure the families feel pain going back to their place of origin, which the law says they must…and I’m sure an infrastructure of shady, nefarious private enterprises has grown around them like ugly despicable dark spots of mold on wet warm bread.

But long term, this has to be a good thing. America is a place where we are all, regardless of group-identity, equally accountable to the law. That doesn’t necessarily mean all classes of people get equally harassed by the law, or equally incarcerated, or equally fined, or are hired on to jobs in equal proportion. It doesn’t mean all classes of people get busted for committing crimes, or can commit crimes in equal numbers and get away with it in equal proportion.

It just means all classes are equally accountable. Just that…and nothing more. The minute you can’t say that anymore, we’re no longer living in America.

And why is that? Well the people who defend illegal immigration, and illegal other-types-of-things on the basis that the laws are “stupid” should take especially careful note. This is from where the stupid laws come. Laws that are enforced selectively…tend to be stupid. You see, when you have that going on, it’s all okay. The law can afford to be stupid. It’s only enforced when the agent in charge of enforcement, decides that is what is going to happen.

This illegal-immigration thing has brought America perilously close to that cliff of lunacy. If this is really a retreat from that brink of disaster, it is cause for celebration.

If not, it is cause for a revolt.

When you get busted for something in this country, even for breaking a law EVERYBODY thinks is stupid…we do not check to see what groups you are part of, before making the decision to bust you or let you off with a warning. We make that decision blindly. Or, at the very least…for God’s sake, we pretend to do that. If we lose that, that is the final indignity. We might as well just tear down every flag, every statue, every emblem in our nation’s capitol if we’re at that point.

Illegal aliens. They don’t belong here, there are legitimate ways for them to get in if they think they should be in. And they can be sent home. If you want to argue with that, fine, I would ask you simply withdraw your name from the race for United States President. POTUS is the highest office in the Executive Branch, and the Executive Branch exists to enforce laws. Show a willingness to do the job, American-style, or don’t run.

King Endorses Thompson

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Iowa Congressman Steve King, known as a leader among anti-amnesty hawks, has announced his endorsement of Fred Thompson for President.

I’ve been as consistent in my support of Fred Thompson as the Ron Paul bloggers have been in their support of “Congressman No.” If you couldn’t vote unless you had a blog, it seems to me the race would boil down to some kind of Thompson/Paul match-up…with Thompson eventually coming in second, possibly a distant second. And it further seems to me, that if you’re undecided or if you’re pushing someone besides Thompson and Paul, it would be an interesting exercise to scour the Thompson blogs and the Paul blogs and take note not so much how many bloggers are going with each candidate, but how they go about arguing their points.

Simply put, the average Paul blogger, much noise as he may make about the Constitution, barely knows what it is. And he certainly hasn’t read it.

The Thompson blogger, on the other hand, ends up supporting the Constitution in a kind of round-about curve-ball way, using a longer arc that demands not only knowledge about the Constitution and original intent, but a somewhat cynical, albeit cheerful, bullshit-detector. And right now, we’re pretty pleased because the Republican party is going through a badly needed shake-up. Right now the front-runners are Giuliani and Huckabee. Two weeks ago it was Giuliani and Romney. Fred’s holding at about third or fourth, maybe even fifth, but a lot can happen.

Except for Paul actually getting the nomination. Those other candidates are like ping pong balls in one of those lottery machines, and Congressman Paul is sort of like a lead weight tossed in there. Well, good. Congressman Paul is a just-plain-bad candidate. He’s a twenty-first century Jimmy Carter. With spam.

I’m hoping for slow-and-steady. I gather the impression Giuliani fans are a little tired of Giuliani and Huckabee fans are tired of Huckabee. Fred-fatigue is something that, if it exists at all, works pretty slow. He’s a charming guy. He’s the last guest you’d kick out of your house as the party winds down to a close, and he’s highly unlikely to be hanging around that long.

I think this works well with the Average American Voter, and his armpit-high fatigue factor with everyday politics bullshit, particularly with the immigration flap. We have, among Malkin’s linkage, a story in American Spectator about an Average American Presidential Candidate and his — unfortunately — extremely average nonsensical ravings about immigration policies, which I feel reflect poorly on most of the other people running, from both parties.

On immigration, [Mitt] Romney was utterly Clintonian. He said that when in November 2005 he described the Bush/McCain approach to immigration as “reasonable” and “quite different” from amnesty, he wasn’t endorsing the proposal, but just describing it. He hadn’t formulated his own position on immigration at the time. That’s right up there with Hillary Clinton saying in the debate that she didn’t say she supported driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, but she just said that a proposal to do so “makes sense.” Even if we were to get into the Christmas spirit and be extraordinarily generous by granting Romney that an elected official saying pending legislation is “reasonable” doesn’t constitute support for the legislation, it still doesn’t get him off the hook. His description of the proposal was that it was “quite different” from amnesty, and yet during this year he has ceaselessly leveled attacks on McCain by accusing him of supporting “amnesty.” So even being generous to Romney, this constitutes a major change in position, not just from some long ago Senate race in 1994, but from late 2005.

I’m not with the majority much. But I think I’m with the majority when I express my disdain for complicated answers to things that are, in fact, actually simple.

Tragically, we’re having a debate in this country about whether illegal immigration even is simple. This is like a poison in America, and it contaminates many more things than just illegal immigration. We have certain rules — some of which I admit are unprincipled and silly, and uphold no high ideals until it is time to practice equal enforcement. And then when it is time to practice equal enforcement, then even the unprincipled and silly rules become sacred.

A lot of times, we find out if & when the rules are equally-enforced against certain classes of people, it causes pain.

And then we’ve developed this unfortunate mode of thinking in which we say the issue is “complicated” when it isn’t. And we know the issue isn’t complicated at all. We just use the c-word to try to shake things up a little, to produce a different outcome for selected individuals and groups of people. Almost always, to help those individuals and groups of people.

But America doesn’t pass out licenses to break the law. We like to run around saying things like “nation of laws, not of men” and “no man is above the law.” If the illegal immigration issue is indeed “complicated,” it is only complicated to the extent that it involves genuine compassion for some people who really do need it; that, and a whole crap load of money flowing to unethical businesses that exploit cheap, illegal labor.

But I’m like Al Pacino with that c-word. Don’t tell me it’s “complicated,” because that insults my intelligence.

I think this will work out well for Fred. I get e-mails all the time, in the comments section here as well as off-line, from some people I consider very dear friends who want me to give Giuliani a third, fourth, fifth look. Or…Romney or Huckabee. That triumvirate of inconsistent, waffling Republican candidates have all been embarrassingly inconsistent on this issue, which in my eyes (and nobody’s been able to make a rational, well-thought-out, left-brain argument to the contrary) is as simple as anything else is. They’ve all equivocated. They’ve all talked out of both sides of their mouths.

But not Fred. And you know what’s really cool about Fred? As he went about enforcing this law, he’d do it somewhat compassionately. Not ass-hole-ish-ly. Not in a way that would involve tar & feathers & catapults and television cameras. At least, he’d be a lot less likely to do something like that, than…maybe, a President Freeberg.

Because I’ll be honest here. I see stuff like the clip you see below, and I kinda go a little nuts. Reasons why, we’ll leave undiscussed here. But people like me, we have stories to tell too, and we have reasons to take this very seriously.

You can’t extend compassion to the innocent and the guilty, both. You must choose.

Rudy Out

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I’ve defended Rudy Giuliani from slander here and here, but I’ve set him aside as a non-viable candidate, one rendered unacceptable until such time as something enormously huge changes. JohnJ, writing in an offline, wanted to know why. Without quoting from the actual exchange, I thought my reply was worth a broadcast. It includes some points about illegal immigration that are not, to the extent I can see, discussed very much anywhere — and really should be.

Well, I’m plum-pleased to see you’re sticking around and are going to be visible. You’re a sharp guy and have some well-thought out positions on things, although of course you and I don’t agree on everything. Hey, life would be boring if everybody did.

I do agree with the Giuliani platform on many things, and I’ve defended him against some of the slurs against him. And it’s taken me awhile to put him in my purgatory, but I think my reasons are pretty sound.

On immigration, although I do understand his plans have to do with moving the immigrants out of the illegal status, I make an important distinction between sending a violator to the front of the line, and toward the back of the line. I really do think that is only fair to the people who are trying to [follow] the rules as they try to get in. I start with the assumption that we have a certain immigration quota, and when you add up the immigrants have have followed the rules to get here to the violators, you’re left with a total that far exceeds the quota. The result is that when someone jumps the turnstyle and then, once here, embarks on a “pathway to citizenship” — this ends up being amnesty in all the ways that matter. Yes, they’re legal when all’s said & done. But by going this round-about method, they’ve effectively been allowed to bypass the quota.

And here’s something else. When someone is here on a temporary visa and they overstay it, they become an illegal immigrant. Even though they aren’t part of the turnstyle-jumpers. But they, too, are allowed to amble down this pathway-to-citizenship. They, too, can skirt the quota. And by being sent to the front of the line instead of to the back of it, they can take priority over other people who are sending lots of money and waiting a long time, just to follow the rules.

Why do they do this? Well, when you follow the rules, your background gets checked out. When you jump the turnstyle, it doesn’t. Once you go down the pathway to citizenship, your background MAY be checked out…maybe…we’re still arguing about how it works. Nobody really knows yet. Such a background check almost certainly will not be effective.

Do we need to check them out? Maybe not. I continue to be told these illegal aliens “work hard.” I’m sure a lot of them do. But you know, you can be a child molester and still work hard; the two are not mutually exclusive. What if 99 percent of the illegal aliens are not child molesting perverts? Well, this leaves us with 120,000 of them that are.

Giuliani would send them to the front of the line, not to the back of it.

Could it be true that 99% of the illegal immigrants are clean? Perhaps it’s true of the students and other temps that overstay their visas. I have strong doubts such a thing can be true of the turnstyle-hoppers. Why hop a turnstyle if you’re clean? Let’s face if — if I’m a poor Mexican farmer and I have two strong, hard-working sons, one’s a documented kiddy-diddler and one has no crime record…the clean son is staying with me. I’m sending the pervert to the United States. I’m going to get a new record for the hard-working son who can use one.

I’d be foolish to do it any other way.

We need to take the health and welfare of our kids seriously, and take national security seriously. I do believe Giuliani would kill lots and lots of terrorists, as I’ve said. But I think Fred would kill a lot more. And he’d send the turnstyle-hoppers to the BACK of the line…the only way to be fair to law-abiding immigrants, keep our borders under control, and give our kids the safety, protection and opportunities they deserve.

The reason I thought it worth posting for the general audience? It’s the facts, you see. It’s not that I embellished them to make Rudy look bad, or left out some of the ones that might have exonerated him. What I did, if anything, was quite the opposite.

In 1997, Giuliani signed a statement of principles which read, “The new laws recently passed by Congress and signed into law by the President unfairly target immigrants in the United States by severely limiting their access to many federal benefits which citizens are entitled to receive.” and “Since legal immigrants work and pay taxes like American citizens, they should be entitled to temporary assistance when they fall into personal difficulty. Furthermore, the denial of federal assistance to legal immigrants in need is patently unfair and arguably unconstitutional and inhumane.” In 1998, Giuliani argued for expanding Medicare, SSI and foodstamp benefits to legal immigrants and also, “Providing full Medicaid coverage to Prucol aliens with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses”

In April 2006, Giuliani went on the record as favoring the US Senate’s comprehensive immigration plan which includes a path to citizenship and a guest worker plan. He rejected the US House approach because he does not think House Resolution 4437 could be enforced.

In February 2007, in a meeting with California Republicans, Giuliani was quoted as saying “We need a [border] fence, and a highly technological one.” Giuliani also reiterated his support for some sort of path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants after a process to be determined, but added that at the end of the process the immigrants should “display the ability to read and write English” and must assimilate into American society. In 2000, Giuliani said, “I wish that we would actually make America more open to immigrants.” He does not believe in deportation of illegal immigrants and advocates a “tamper-proof” national ID card and database for illegal immigrants.

On September 7, 2007, during a CNN interview, he said that illegal immigrants are not criminals.

Send…the violators…to the back…of the line. There is no reason not to. To propose anything else, is to grease the skids for more turnstyles to be hopped.

I do not think that everybody who wants to grease those skids, is bent on smuggling terrorists into the country. I think what they’re doing, is helping to smuggle terrorists into the country without consciously realizing it. I think they’re trying to make it more economically practical for labor-intensive businesses to operate outside of the law…and by accident, they’re leaving the door open for sleeper cells — and child rapists — to come marching in.

Oh yeah, they’ll protest that. They’ll call me a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe. But that’s just a campaign slogan, a cheap, poorly designed rhetorical tactic used to shout down the opposition. The motive is to make it easier for immoral businesses to operate…and they have no idea what kinds of bedfellows they have, in that effort.

And Rudy is their leader. He’s made it very plain he’s dedicated to the bumper-sticker slogans, and the legislation, of the “Make The Border Meaningless” crowd. Fence, schmence. The folks on his side, want to build…an escalator that works only half the time. And they say “Ooh, look, we’re not open-borders advocates, it’s really HARD to get in this country. See? The escalator only runs half the time.”

This country is under attack. From people who want to impose methodical, deliberate harm on American citizens to make political statements…and from people who want to impose non-methodical, haphazard, sexually-motivated harm on our women and children. Can we please act like this is what is going on, and make a priority out of confronting these threats?

I have no reason to look at Giuliani as someone who will do this. Just a lot of Rudy fans who want me to think that. Some of whom I respect very highly, but still, just because they want me to think it is no reason to think it. He’s a “pumice border” advocate, and a rather brazen one at that.

The Third Most Important Issue

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I have mentioned more than once that this country has two critically important issues for next year’s elections, that are running neck-and-neck in terms of how much attention we should be paying them. Which one of them claims the booby-prize, is a question that ends up being just a real squeaker. But ultimately they have to be listed in this order:

1. Who is going to bring me the biggest pile of dead crispy terrorist carcasses each year?
2. Is the democrat party represented by people who are ignorant or careless with reality, or full-blown crazy?

The third-most-important issue, I have commented as I reiterate this short list, is not even close. Whatever that third-most-important issue may be. I’ve said that on a few occasions too.

Well you know what. After listening to some rebroadcasting of Sen. Barack Obama’s comments on illegal immigration last night, I am ready to amend that. There is a third most important issue, and it is almost as important as the first two. And like those first two, I can state it with something that ends with a question mark. It is a question. It’s a question we should be asking a LOT. And I’ve not yet heard of anyone asking it…not even once…not anywhere…not yet.

The question is this. It is the third-most-important issue of next year’s election.

How does a candidate for President of the United States, or any other high office for that matter, even begin to form an enlightened opinion about what illegal immigrants might or might not be here to do?

I mean, the last occupant of any office of that stature who was something even hinting at a paycheck-to-paycheck individual, was Newt Gingrich just before he was Speaker of the House. The last one before that, would have been Governor (not President) Bill Clinton. These folks aren’t exactly the first to be exposed to the dark seamy underbelly of society. They have got to be talking out their asses — there is no other explanation — since they aren’t enjoying any kind of access to the information that would be needed to decide such a thing.

Unless they somehow are…which must mean someone’s about to confess to a Linda-Chavez type of nanny situation. You know, when you’re running for President, I think that’s supposed to be bad news. Last I checked, President was above Labor Secretary.

But seriously. Since we don’t have any logical reason to suppose a bazillion and a half illegal aliens are here to “follow the law and work hard” and “do the jobs Americans won’t do,” and we’ve got this enormous wad of politicians telling us exactly that and few-to-none of them are asserting any way they could possibly know such a thing…this is something that needs some inspection. More than it’s been getting. A whole lot more.

The most incriminating thing about the word “illegal,” when you think about it, is that it is indeed synonymous with the euphemism “undocumented.” That’s the worst thing about it. “Illegal” means YOU DON’T KNOW. You could be hiring Pablo to work at the waffle restaurant, or the daycare center, or at the landscaping business…you might have gotten hold of Pablo’s records to make sure he’s got a clean history…and you have no way of knowing if you’re looking at the real Pablo.

We’re talking about twelve million people here. To say they’re “all” out to do anything, or “none” of them are trying to do something else, is as silly as things get.

Thing I Know #35. The individual attribute ascribed to the aggregate entity, manifests a weak argument ripe for re-thinking.

Burning Cities Americans Won’t Burn

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

How’s this for an inconvenient truth:

Police have arrested a man in Los Angeles after witnesses say they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside.

Authorities say 41-year-old Catalino Pineda was seen starting a fire in the San Fernando Valley Wednesday and then walking away.

Witnesses alerted authorities and followed the man to a nearby restaurant where police arrested him.

Pineda was booked for investigation of arson. Authorities say the Guatemala native is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement.

Police and fire officials could not immediately say whether he might be connected to any of the wildfires in Southern California.

From the L.A. Daily News story that came out roughly the same time…

Prosecutors have charged a 41-year-old Sun Valley man with arson after witnesses spotted him lighting up a hillside in Woodland Hills on Wednesday, officials said this morning.

Catalino Pineda is scheduled to be arraigned some time this morning in Van Nuys Superior Court, said Deputy District Attorney Steven Frankland. He is charged with one count of arson of a structure or forest.

Witnesses allegedly spotted Pineda lighting a fire on a hillside near Del Valle Street and Ponce Avenue about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and walk away, police said. The fire was quickly extinguished.

Witnesses followed Pineda to a nearby restaurant and notified police, who arrested him. He is being held on $75,000 bail. If convicted, he faces up to six years in state prison.

Pineda is a day laborer and native of Guatemala. He is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call West Valley Area detectives at (818) 374-7730. On weekends and after hours call the 24-hour Detective Information Desk at 1-877-LAW-FULL (529-3855).

Now, you’ve heard that these “undocumented” immigrants actually commit crimes at a rate far lower than people who actually belong in the country. For example…here. But this example, typical of many others, is loaded with half-truths and red herrings. You fall into the trap when you’re lulled into thinking the faux-statistic addresses illegal immigrants…

In 2007, the American Immigration Law Foundation found that, based on U.S. Census data, “immigration is actually associated with lower crime rates” and that “incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are least educated.”

Additionally, the report states that foreign-born (including undocumented) men aged 18 to 39 have incarceration rates five times lower than U.S.-born counterparts. Contrary to media portrayals, undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often than U.S.-born citizens.

Two differentiations that I personally think are probably important, are being conflated here rather casually. We have “immigrants”; we have “undocumented.” Those groups are overlapping but are far from statistically identical. Earlier in the article, it is stated as fact that 75 percent of immigrants are “with documents.” The statistical comparisons in the two paragraphs above, have to do with the superset, not the subset. The final sentence of the second paragraph summarizes the situation, but incorrectly or in a manner inconsistent with what the cited research supports: “Undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes significantly less often.” Uh, beg your pardon. We don’t know that. We don’t know that from what’s been offered here.

The other distinction to be made, when we’re talking about comparing crime rates among illegal aliens, or at least pretending to be talking about that, is between “incarceration” and “committing crime.” One would presume if you happen to have broken the law by coming into this country and want to continue breaking the law once you’re here, you would have a few tips and tricks for avoiding getting caught right? I mean if you didn’t…you’d be far less likely to have made it in.

It’s very rare that I hear of studies about illegal aliens committing crimes. Whenever a statistical comparison is done, almost always it has to do with incarceration rates. Smells like skullduggery to me, because the question I hear people asking has to do with who’s committing the crime, not who’s getting locked up for it.

Anyway, we seem to be split straight down the middle on this one. Citizens want the border locked down, and our slimy politicians and lazy egghead white coat propeller-beanie-wearing scientists with their phony studies want it busted wide open. What to do, oh, what to do…

Well, that’s a lot of homes. Maybe now we have our answer.

Hop the Turnstyle, Punch a Ballot

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

What better way is there for us to apologize for our very existence as a nation, than to hunt down those who would kill themselves in order to take a few of us down with ’em…and give them the right to vote for or against our public officials.

Here’s the thing. An immigration investigation by the federal government found 4,000 probable illegal voters in that race. It was decided by less than 1,000 votes. Eight of the 9-11 hijackers, eight of the 19 hijackers, were registered to vote — because they’d gotten driver’s licenses.

This is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one. The Newsbusters pice excerpted above is a little on the long side, jam-packed with interesting tidbits you’re not going to hear on the alphabet-soup networks on the boob tube. Ever write a letter to your senator or congressman and wonder why they aren’t exactly slobbering with anticipation for your latest clear guidance about how they should be voting? Well, it almost seems sensible…they’re so busy, and you’re just one voter.

Well, in all likelihood you’re not even that. America, The Beautiful — where the voters elect leaders, and then the leaders get together and decide who’s going to vote. And then the voters wonder why it is they don’t have a say anymore, when the answer is right in front of our faces the whole time.

The donk party just barely managed to squeak out a congressional victory for the first time this century last year. They’ve managed to win 3 out of 10 presidential elections since 1968.

Overall, in spite of the enormous amounts of money they spend bullying us around and telling us what to think, we just don’t want them running anything. And so, we see through Hillary’s embarrassing performance in that debate earlier this week, and through that asinine Motor Voter law enacted in the first year of her husband’s presidency, they want to give the right to vote to people who enter the country illegally.

If the donks were forced to spend one twentieth as much time proving the above musings false, as Republicans are forced to prove they aren’t sexists and racists, we might have a chance as a country. Me, I’m braced for a full year of listening to Hillary and Co. endure hard-nosed, scrutinizing questions such as “how does campaigning make you feel?”

Speaking of which, I wanted to be sure and capture this (H/T: Duffy), which I expect to come in handy in the long months ahead…

Drivers Licenses for Illegal Aliens

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Wow, this was a little tough to find. It was kind of easy running into the water cooler hubbub hear-and-there about Hillary Clinton flubbing up an answer, but getting a link to the actual cilp was no mean feat.

“This is where everyone plays gotcha.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

We need to reform that word “reform.” Ban it from politics altogether. This is a pet peeve of mine and it’s not a Republican/donk thing either; I’m sick to death of some waffling politician using that word, giving not one scintilla of evidence as to his real position on the issue under discussion one way or t’other, and then giving this steely-eyed stare into the camera or just off it, as if s/he’s just gone out on a limb and taken some courageous position on something.

It goes well beyond drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens, and it pre-dates Hillary by a good stretch. “We need blahblahblah reform!!” …it’s become the rallying cry of politicans who try to please everybody. Or have hidden agendas they’re afraid to really talk about.

Hillary thinks guys like me are afraid of her because she’s a strong-willed woman. Damn straight. I’m terrified. This flubbed-up answer was a real occasion for surprise and I have no reason to think it’ll ever happen again. She’s using her female-ness to avoid tough questions, with admirable effect — she could be caught red-handed covering little tiny puppies with gasoline and setting them on fire, and when questioned about it she’ll just say she’s forced to do it because of the incompetence of the Bush administration. And in that circumstance, I would fully expect her to get away with it.

I mean, I don’t know for a fact that a President Hillary Clinton would certainly end the United States as we know it. But let’s face facts: She’d certainly be able to. She could erode “civil liberties” a hundred times more than President Bush has ever dreamed of doing, and afterward, face one-hundredth as much scrutiny and inspection from the media or from anyone else.

A woman of real courage would just leave that “don’t pick on the girl” card unplayed. You’d get answers out of her, which would have real meaning, that you’d be able to understand.

Update: Once again, an unidentifiable, omnipotent cosmic kismet says to itself “Hey that Morgan Freeberg guy is babbling nonsense again, let’s make some stuff happen to prove what he’s saying is true.” Some weepy apologetic male surrounded by feminists, spins like a Turkish dervish to support the canard that Senator Clinton’s position is cohesive as all get-out, just communicated badly. Poor fellow just doesn’t get it. He seeks to measure the achievement of the feminist movement by how many of us have the pardon-my-French BALLS to call women “girls.” Get that number to zero, the movement is success; otherwise, it still has a way to go.

It’s not compatible with a free society. Such a brand of feminism, can only achieve when the spirit of the individual is utterly defeated. Until then, everybody gets to call everything by whatever name they’re compelled to use by the wrinkles in their brains. And that’s just the way things are.

Oh, and Senator Clinton is a duplicitous weasel. It’s no less reprehensible when the girls do it. Sorry if that comes as a shock.

Not Buying It

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

I’ve got a mild buzzing migraine that I can tell is going to get worse throughout the day, and I’m in the mood to be pithy. Let’s see if I can veer off my more usual schtick of the zillion-word essay.

John McCain, President Bush, and I are in agreement. This is rare. The Senator went on record to say he agrees with the President’s veto decision against expanding the children’s healthcare program.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, told CNN Wednesday he agrees with President Bush’s veto of legislation expanding a children’s health insurance program, saying the bill provided a “phony smoke and mirrors way of paying for it.”

“Right call by the president,” the Republican White House hopeful told CNN’s John King. “We’ve laid a debt on these same children … that we’re saying we’re going to give health insurance to.”

The bill, which would cost $35 billion over five years, is meant to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to provide coverage to an additional 10 million children.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a different view. Because, once again, it’s all about the chiiiiiiiiilllddddddrrrreeeeeeeennnnn….

Today the President had an opportunity to sign a bipartisan bill that will bring health care to 10 million children in families struggling to make ends meet. Instead, President Bush used his cruel veto pen to say ‘I forbid 10 million children from getting the health benefits they deserve.’

And my beef, here, is about the radio airwaves. The boob tube bluster. The water cooler chit-chat. Surely, the “average” American sees things Speaker Nan’s way, right? Not a single thought about the expansion of the welfare state, it’s all about the poor precious babums vs. the “cruel veto pen.” Hells bells, if democracy worked we’d have fully-funded door-to-door baby formula delivery and diaper-washing service, with not a single thought as to who’s paying for it.

I am NOT buying it.

I have been scolded, as a “blogger,” for jousting with liberal straw men that don’t really exist. And this time, I’m inclined to believe the scolders are right. I think, if you can find me some people who see this Speaker Nan’s way, you will be sampling from a truly elite whacko-fringe group. I think at this point, most people understand that the Government doesn’t “bring” a damned thing — it confiscates. What it does bring, it confiscated from somewhere else. At this point, if you still have need for it to be pointed out to you, you’re never going to get it and I don’t think there are too many people in that club.

That goes for those who are in favor of the bill President Bush vetoed, by the way. I’m calling ’em out. I don’t think they give a damn about the chiiiiiiiiilllddddddrrrreeeeeeeennnnn. That’s just an excuse. Oh, here and there you’ll find some weepy chuckleheads who are going to honestly wonder how the poor whelps are going to make it now, but by-and-large this is something different. It is a debate about what is to become of America, and her ideals, and people on both sides of the fence see it that way.

Next subject: Why did this vet cut down the Mexican flag? Was he really upholding the law, and his country, or is he bigoted against Mexicans?

I predict some folks are going to swarm out of the woodwork and advance the notion that Jim (insert last name here after verifying correct spelling) is just a racist bigot, or at least that is what they honestly think about him. Not buying it. Flying the Mexican flag over the U.S. flag is against the law in Reno, and furthermore, Veteran Jim’s comments on Mike Gallagher’s program are a hundred percent correct. We have become culturally spineless on the matter of standing up for our nation — it’s customs, legacy, principles, language, and border. We aren’t cowards, and we’re not trying to save our hind ends; rather, we’re afraid of being accused of racism. The thing is, though, I’m not buying that any of the folks who stand ready to accuse others of racial hatred, really mean it. Sure they do the accusing. But it’s nothing more than an activist tactic.

Why in the world should they not resort to such a tactic — it works like a charm. What would have happened if Veteran Jimbo had not popped on to the scene with his Iraqi Freedom Knife.

A fun mental exercise in which I’ve invited people to partake, those who are worried about the “racist” angle, involves albinos. Suppose our nation bordered another, that was populated by albinos. Leave all other aspects in the illegal-immigration debate…every single minute, insignificant, arcane detail…unchanged. Just pretend it is albinos climbing the fence — people with lighter skin, instead of darker skin. In fact, while we’re at it, apply this exercise to the “Is Islam a violent religion or not?” issue and to the “Should we profile by race at the airport?” issue.

Leave everything else unchanged, just think about the skin color. Make it lighter instead of darker.

You’ve changed everything. What we “can’t” think and “can’t” say, suddenly, now, in our thought exercise with the albinos, we can. And what we can say now, in this otherworldly thought-exercise, suddenly, we can’t. People who are in reality opposed passionately to racial profiling, suddenly, are going to be in favor of it. People who are opposed to Veteran Jim taking down the flags with his big knife in our universe, in that thought exercise, suddenly would have no problem with it at all.

And all you’ve really changed, is that instead of these issues involving people with darker skin, you’ve tweaked the issues so they involve people with copy-paper-white skin and pink eyes.

We’re supposed to be all a-twitter about racism. What is racism, but an unreasonable weight placed on the factor of skin color in the making of decisions?

So I’m not buying the racism angle, not even a tiny little bit. I do not think we’re doing any worrying about racism at all; not even as much as we should be. What I think we have been doing, is practicing it. People take patently absurd positions on these issues, allowing foreign flags to be flown above their own country’s flag when it’s clearly against the law to do so, demanding that Scottish grandmothers with red hair be frisked at the airport in the name of “randomness” — because of dark skin. It’s the hue that results in these decisions that, otherwise, logically make no sense whatsoever.

What really amazes me is that while both Mexicans who cross the border illegally, and Muslims who support terrorist organizations in some way, can lay claim (with some tiny kernel of truth) to the “I’m doing it because I’m so poor and put-upon” defense — there is very little in history to connect the two societies with each other. In fact, you could make the argument that the most meaningful and tangible connection between the two, by far, is the fact that we in America happen to be arguing with each other about both those demographies at the same time. They haven’t got anything to do with each other. Or very little.

But they both have darker skin. Darker than — that hated Archie Bunker guy.

And so the issues that affect them, we treat exactly the same way. The situation has deteriorated to the point where the United States has a border less meaningful than the border of…just about any other country on the face of the earth. It makes no sense. It’s supposed to make sense to the people who disagree with me about it, people with a different point of view, perhaps buying into the “doing what is necessary to feed their families” angle. I don’t think that’s it. I’m not buying it. I think the open-borders types don’t give a damn about the anchor-babies. They just want cheap labor, they’re acting out of white guilt, or both.

It’s racism pure and simple. They’re insisting on utterly irrational decisions about people with darker skin, just because of that darker skin, and for no other reason. Take the skin color out of it through the “albino exercise” and their position becomes indefensible, even to them.

We’re supposed to be a color-blind society. We’re supposed to stand up to, and confront, racism wherever we find it. We haven’t been worthy of conferring that kind of compliment onto ourselves; the big “We” seems to like racism just fine, so long as it’s the right flavor.

Well…thus ends my attempt to say something pithy. Gonna go take some Aspirin and get my day started.

Our Downslide

Friday, July 27th, 2007

The day I heard about the federal judge striking down Hazleton’s anti-illegal immigration law, a law which we saluted way back here, this wonderful, underrated movie showed up in the mail.

Last SupperI find this to be ironic. This movie should be considered a warning to all bloggers, conservative and liberal — and overzealous activist judges who run around striking down any law they personally dislike, under some rancid and overly-delicate “interpretation” of the “Constitution,” jotting down any ol’ text to justify the decision they’ve already made before they cooked up a single word of the opinion. The movie applies to this pretty well. It, like all great ones, is about two stories: The cosmetic one that skims along the surface, and the deeper one that labors on in parallel far beneath. The visible and shallow story has to do with five grad students living in a cottage, growing vegetables, going to school, wallowing in their liberal-ness and feeling really smug about it. They pontificate a whole lot and they actually ponder very little. Their only point of disagreement, at first, is about whether it should be allowable to turn on the boob-tube when a certain bloated conservative media icon, obviously modeled after Rush Limbaugh, spews his hated right-wing venom on television.

They have no visible means of support and no visible need for any. Of course, in the first act there is no need to think anything out. Things are crystal clear. Liberals good, conservatives bad. But there this sense of frustration that a civil war is taking place, and people like the conservative demagogue are winning and the liberals are losing. They aren’t doing anything to advance their cause. Clearly, something must be done.

Like a Hitchcock masterpiece, the film forces the main characters downward through a bunch of layers of moral decay to the point where they’re killing people, without once making the audience go “oh, come on now.” The main characters make bad decisions, and you identify with the character even though you know the decision is bad. You have to keep watching because you want to see what consequences develop. And this is the deeper sequence of events grinding away far beneath the surface. The protagonists “know” what is right and they “know” what is wrong, they have moral certitude, but they are bored with isolationism. They become righteous warriors and end up perpetuating what nobody can deny is darkly evil. And the magnitude of evil is stepped up gradually, expertly, as the situations that motivate the evil are gradually muted, until our heroes are tempted to do anything while being provoked by nothing.

Not much point to spoiling this movie or doing anything that would approach that. The ending is deliberately left open to multiple interpretations. You should purchase or rent it, see it all the way through to the last frame, and see what you think. Debating it is interesting (link requires registration).

But anyhow. I said this applied to the Hazleton situation, and I should explain. This seems a convenient metaphor with what’s happening with illegal immigration. Not the real debate about illegal immigration, which I see is this: We understand the law becomes a tool of oppression as opposed to liberty when it is enforced selectively, and we have some greedy businesses who want it enforced selectively so they can use illegal labor and pump up their profits by breaking the law. Not that — the other one. Our bigot liberals want us to respect people with “good” skin colors, which means “non-white.” So there is the law, and then there is this big old moldy notebook binder filled with sniveling excuses they can add to on the spot. Oh, our “undocumented migrant workers” work so hard. We need them. They’re just trying to feed their families. You don’t want to pay six dollars for a head of lettuce, do you. Snotty, whining excuses like those. Our liberals have learned they can add to the snivel-book by pulling brand new excuses out of their asses to fit whatever situation arises, whereas the law has to be legislated, negotiated, reviewed, appealed.

They like the snivel-book better than the law. The law just gets in the way. It is unclean. It incorporates the viewpoint of people who aren’t all glorious and wallowing in their own liberalness, like the liberals.

Granted, poisoning some conservative person and burying him in a tomato patch is a terrible thing to do, compared to sneaking across the border of an overly-permissive country to feed your starving family. But the two situations are exactly the same, and I would further argue it isn’t just liberals who are susceptible to such a moral down-slide. But the situations are identical. We have our illegal immigrants who’ve chosen to make a lifestyle out of breaking the law. We have our crooked businesses that employ them, and then we have our political agitators who give them cover and manufacture all these fairy tales about how our illegal immigrants follow the law every single day after breaking it by coming here. All these people have decided the law simply gets in the way of what they’re trying to do. Their mission is so incredibly glorious, that in working toward it they can commit crimes that are serious enough that if someone committed the same crime in opposing them, they’d all scream, cry, wail, bitch and moan…

…in other words, the remarkable thing isn’t that they break the law to achieve their glorious missions. You might say the incredible thing is that the mission is glorious enough to righteously float on a bed of hypocrisy. The law, then, becomes a tool used to entangle and subdue their opponents, while they escape the same tentacles by means of a convenient, self-granted license. Their mission is glorious and noble, after all. And so, corrupt, illegal businesses can keep on employing contraband labor, and the trespassers can continue to slip across the border. And our everyday liberals can insist that “hate crime laws” be rigidly enforced while border laws…aw, well, here’s today’s excuse why they don’t and shouldn’t matter.

The liberals in the movie want to propagate their values by killing off anyone who doesn’t share them. The liberals we have in real life, want to propagate their “respect” for non-white people, by declaring America’s borders null and void. Both fall prey to rather elementary failings in logic. You can only invite so many people to supper and your tomato patch is only big enough to hold so many bodies; there is no correlation, statistical leanings notwithstanding, between being an illegal alien and having a certain skin color; if you’re so “right,” you should be able to use the dinner table to talk the issue out instead of to murder someone with arsenic; if someone’s willing to break a law by hopping a border, they may be willing to break a law by doing other things.

It’s an expensive proposition to get a civilized society humming along under a set of laws that are open to re-inspection, negotiation, appeal, and that apply to all classes. It’s far easier to undo such a society, by declaring some among us to be exempt from the laws because they’re toiling away on a mission that is so noble, laws ought not apply. I think that’s what we’re starting to learn now. If the illegal aliens should be granted a license to skip across our border, then you have to grant them a license to do as they please while they’re here. Can’t grant one without the other. The mission of the illegal immigrant is far too noble, as is the mission of the everyday liberal, who wants to let the illegal immigrant in. And so of course, our system of justice has to be undone one layer at a time, while we slowly slip toward insanity. We become confused, muddled, babbling and incoherent just like the liberal heroes in the movie’s final scenes. Everything that would have made us sensible, along the way, has to be undone. Sense of right and wrong, restraint, ability to reason, language itself. They all have to be unfastened so the noble goal can be achieved, and the tomatoes can be fertilized.

Decision here. Arguing that the regulation of immigration is an “intimate affair,” it concludes that Hazleton is messing around in areas where the municipal authority does not belong. Better to let the feds retain autonomous authority over that intimate affair, even if little is being effectively done, than to let a more energized body step in. Add another page to the snivel-book. Now it’s the duty of every layer of authority, beneath the federal government, to let drug deals go on, to let cars get vandalized, to let women get raped — as long as it’s the right class of people doing the dealing, vandalizing and raping. That’s for the feds to handle, and if they’re not handling it, you just mind your own business. That’s what Judge Munley says. The affair is intimate.

You know, we can certainly survive someone tearing the tag off a mattress here and there. What we can’t survive is a law that means something when it’s applied to one class of people, and nothing at all when applied to another — and a retinue of black-robed stewards adding pages to the snivel-book any time our country’s borders are about to actually mean something. To accommodate that, we have to become enemies of logic and common sense. And we’ll end up fertilizing the tomatoes ourselves.

Olbermann’s Best Person

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Keith Olbermann has a “shocking announcement” to make. Why don’t you watch it.

Regarding the O’Reilly/Rivera dust-up: Those two have kissed & made-up. Which is to say, they & their bosses figured out the publicity value involved in the little drama had exceeded the point of diminishing returns, and they’re telling us what they think they need to tell us in order to keep the ratings high.

What to make of this? Well I agree with this editorial over here:

Fox broadcaster Bill O’Reilly has certainly stirred up the city of Virginia Beach. Two Virginia Beach teenagers Alison Kunhardt, 17, and Tessa Tranchant, 16, were killed recently when their car was slammed into by a vehicle driven by Alfredo Ramos, 22. Ramos is an illegal alien with a record of three-alcohol-related convictions.

Mr. O’Reilly has criticized the lenient sentences Ramos received in his prior DUI convictions and attacked Virginia Beach for basically providing “sanctuary” for illegal aliens.

In defending his city, Virginia Beach police chief Jake Jacocks made a stunning statement. He said he found it “ironic that had the intoxicated driver been born and raised in Virginia Beach, little notice would have been given to this senseless tragedy by the media or the community at large.

If that’s true, it’s appalling. A great deal of notice should have been given when a man has been convicted of DUI three times is still on the road. The driver should have been in jail.

In jail, and/or out of the country.

However, the rest of the Chief’s comments do carry a certain logic. Immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the feds. I’ve not yet seen any facts to confound the notion that O’Reilly is, effectively, making scapegoats out of the Virginia Beach city officials for a problem that primarily rests with the federal government.

That’s O’Reilly’s first mistake. Losing his temper was his second.

But if he must blow his stack sometime, what a great occasion for it. What exactly was wrong with O’Reilly’s indignation, Geraldo didn’t say; I don’t think he can do so. I’m absolutely confident that the salivating fans of Olbermann and Rivera can’t tell me, or if they do, their answer will be anything but unified from person-to-person. What did Rivera say word for word…something about illegal immigrants committing fewer crimes than citizens? That’s a load of crap. Illegal immigrants are lawbreakers by definition. If there are statistics that say they commit fewer crimes, that’s a sign that the method of gathering the statistics is busted.

And how could you expect the method not to be busted? You’d be comparing more-or-less complete records, with incomplete ones. That’s what illlegal means — you don’t know the record. Geraldo understands this.

So since he’s proven himself utterly untrustworthy and completely unconcerned with the truth, I’ll state his argument for him. Geraldo is from the anarchy crowd. Anti-law-and-order. Some of us are weary of seeing people hurt by malicious or negligent people, and we want something done about it — other folks are mad at us for becoming weary, and have drummed up a plethora of reasons why we shouldn’t be weary yet. But they aren’t defending any principle. They’re just suspicious of human machineries dedicated to law-and-order. They don’t trust them, and for this reason, prefer chaos. They’re prejudiced against the idea of Matt Dillon riding in to town and locking up the guy in the black hat. They have a childish desire to see Matt Dillon gunned down instead, and as for the guy in the black hat, well, let the chips fall where they may.

Keith Olbermann, according to his own remarks, has also engaged in a “first.” He’s handed out a “Best Person” award. For what? Well, I’ve given a summary of the reason in the preceding paragraph. It is the only coherent one you’re going to see; you’ll certainly see nothing clearer or plainer coming from the folks who agree with Olbermann and Rivera. The point about discriminating against illegal aliens, is a complete crock. We’re supposed to discriminate against them. They’re criminals. The point about illegal aliens not breaking the law, is an even bigger crock.

In my book, this shows Olbermann is in favor of people getting drunk and killing other people, as long as the drunk driver is an illegal alien. I’m sure that notion gets under the skin of a lot of readers, and I’m sure a lot of them think I’m curtailing someone’s rights…even though, all I’m doing is making up my own mind as a private citizen, and writing it down. But unlike Rivera, Olby made his comments without anyone talking over him. He had plenty of time to say what he wanted to say. And what I saw was 1) O’Reilly pointed out the deaths were utterly preventable and that city officials should be held accountable; 2) Rivera gave a bunch of bullshit reasons why this is not the case; 3) O’Reilly lost his cool; 4) Olbermann — for reasons he’s afraid to state, or thinks unnecessary to state, or both — gave Rivera the first-ever “Best Person” award. An award he could have handed out at any other time over the last two years. For anything. He thought this was the right occasion. Making a stand for………illegal immigrants who break into the country, and get drunk, and use their cars as weapons and kill girls. He wanted now to be the time, so he could be crystal-clear about what he supports and what he opposes.

Am I to conclude something else?

The Jobs Nobody Wants

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Via Bullwinkle Blog, we learn of the latest hole to be blown in the patently absurd assertion that illegal aliens are needed to do the jobs Americans will not do.

That’s going to go down in history as our current President’s version of “read my lips,” by the way. Who told him it would be a swell idea to say that? If it was a speechwriter, I hope that speechwriter is in a different line of work by now. If it was him, I’d say the last elections handed him just about the level of embarrassment he deserves.

English is Official Language in This County

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Every year, municipalities and counties of every state will declare thousands of things to be illegal, some of which were perfectly legal beforehand. Cherokee County, Georgia, just got done declaring something illegal that is already against the law.

We have been instructed by our betters who went to journalism or law school to regard this as a controversial move. What the officials of Cherokee County did, was recognize the throughly half-assed and slack-jawed job the Federal Government is doing to protect the nation’s borders, and start going after landlords who rent to illegal immigrants. They also approved a program that would allow some probing into the status of anyone applying for public benefits, and made English the county’s official language.

Cherokee commissioners have maintained that illegal immigrants drain local resources. And because the federal government hasn’t tackled the issue, commissioners said it was up to them to send a message to those living in the county illegally.

A public hearing last month on the ordinance drew a large crowd, and for Tuesday night’s meeting there were as many people crowded into the county courthouse atrium as there were inside the meeting room, which holds more than 100.

Some bunched up against the double doors, pleading with sheriff’s deputies who at times threatened to remove people who didn’t stop shouting or back away from the doors.

The vast majority of those waiting outside were interested in rezoning matters, but a handful of people on both sides of the immigration debate were left standing outside, too.

They included Billy Inman of Woodstock, whose only son was killed 6 1/2 years ago by a drunken driver who was in the country illegally.

Inman cheered news of the vote.

“I lost my son to an illegal immigrant,” Inman said. “I ain’t no lawyer, but legal is legal and illegal is illegal. Somebody’s got to do something. It’s a problem in every city across this country.”

But Estebaan Zuniga, a drywall worker from Woodstock who said he has a green card, said he didn’t think illegal immigrants were going to leave in droves as proponents hoped.

While illegal immigrants are concerned about the new laws, he said, many probably realize that the ordinances are being challenged in court.

And if they do leave, he said, it’s Cherokee County that will suffer.

“This will hurt the economy,” he said. “Why don’t they do something to help the economy?”

Because it’s against the law, dipshit.

This shouldn’t even be challenged. Shouldn’t be controversial in any way. It’s made that way, because the “proles” are letting the elites run things too much. Where things like this are controversial, they are controversial among political activists who think they can win something by making it controversial. Real people, almost without exception, would let this go forward without complaint. It might not be their favorite cup o’ tea, but they’d let it proceed without silly court challenges.

I know some liberals, just like I know some conservatives. I think everyone who makes their daily bread from actually working, rather than from stirring up the crock in some way, would admit this much: If you’re in a position of power, and you think action is demanded on some greater level when someone dies from “global warming” compared to when someone dies from the illegal alien invasion — this would be incorrect. There would be something wrong with you and you shouldn’t be in a position of power. You can’t pick and choose which deaths matter and which deaths don’t, based on what pet issue you want pushed and what issue you want repressed.

A bunch of courtrooms are going to start dedicating resources to figuring out whether or not the United States Constitution allows this country to have borders. Borders that actually matter, that mean something. Well, whaddya want to bet that some of those courts, will have already allowed a gun control measure or two to go forward, in some way, with nary a peep of protest.

Constitutional? “Shall not be infringed” is right in there. Look it up. “Borders shall be meaningless and people should be able to walk right on in anytime they want to make a buck”…last I checked, I was having a little trouble homing in on that. We aren’t watching our courts, and as a result it’s becoming a subjective opinion what the Constitution does and does not say. Well, it’s not a matter of opinion. It’s factual.