... Raised in a strict Labor trade unionist family to whom not voting Labor was a crime akin to child abuse, I now find myself repulsed by the antics of New Labor. Oh, it's not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that most Labor turncoats cite; to me, anyone who's against them is actually saying that they would prefer Saddam and the Taliban still tucked up tidy in power and torturing their wretched citizens with complete freedom.
No, it's the shocking lack of adequate funding for the armies fighting there which turns my stomach up to 55 percent of soldiers in Iraq are believed to buy their own boots and other equipment because the standard issue is so inferior; less than half in the same poll expressed any confidence in it.
...ADD TO this Labor's ceaseless pandering to the growing Muslim vote which has led it to give thousands of pounds of government money to organizations which may support extremism. This at a time when British synagogues are regularly graffitied by Islamists. There's no way I'm going to be putting my cross in the Labor box.
What about the Tories then? Margaret Thatcher loved the Jews and promoted so many that one chilly Tory grandee remarked that her cabinet contained more Estonians than Etonians.'
Sadly, under the leadership of old Etonian David Cameron, there has been a complete reversal of this good fortune, and the shadow cabinet now contains more in-bred upper-class twits than you could shake a cane at.
Personally I believe that masochism should be catered to within the confines of the bedroom and selected fast-food outlets it has no place in the voting booth. And anyone not of the ruling class who knowingly votes for the ruling class to tell him what to do is displaying all the pride and backbone of a twice-used teabag.
What about the Liberal Democrats, the plucky little David to the other parties' Goliaths? Well, there's no point in being an outsider if you echo all the worst points of the establishment that is, being anti-trade union, anti-minimum wage, anti-Israel. ... The Lib Dems are basically bed-wetting Tories in Birkenstocks, with a few anti-Israel nutters chucked into the mix for variation.
AND THEN there are the Greens, the most high-profile of whom is Zac Goldsmith one of those blond-haired, granite-jawed Jews who are produced by parents of Hebrew origin once they move into the top tax bracket. (His father was the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith.) I have to say that I find the idea of Green Jews Goldsmith, George Monbiot, David de Rothschild and the rest so funny; modern Jews are by nature urban, super-bright and self-made, the opposite of Green. So what happened to them?
When one's family makes their pile, does their rich (dim) side take over from their Jewish (smart) side and simply render them as any other beneficiaries of inherited wealth?
GM CEO Ed Whitacre announced in a Wall Street Journal column Wednesday that his company has paid back its government bailout loan "in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule." He is even running TV ads on all major networks to that effect--a needless expense given that a credulous media is only too happy to parrot his claims for free. Detroit Free Press' Mike Thompson, for example, advises bailout proponents to start "warming up their vocal chords" to jeer their opponents with chants of "I told you so."
But before belting out their victory aria, GM-boosters ought to hear the whole story--not just the fairytale version about Government Motors' grand comeback that Mr. Whitacre is feeding them.
As I write, I have my papers on me -- and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law-enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?
Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt.
But don't let the fine print of the New Deal prevent you from going into full-scale meltdown. "Boycott Arizona-stan!" urges MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, surely a trifle Islamophobically. What has some blameless Central Asian basket case done to deserve being compared to a hellhole like Phoenix?
Boycott Arizona Iced Tea, jests Travis Nichols of Chicago. It is "the drink of fascists." Just as regular tea is the drink of racists, according to Newsweek's in-depth and apparently non-satirical poll analysis of anti-Obama protests. At San Francisco's City Hall, where bottled water is banned as the drink of climate denialists, Mayor Gavin Newsom is boycotting for real: All official visits to Arizona have been canceled indefinitely. You couldn't get sanctions like these imposed at the U.N. Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah.
Will a full-scale economic embargo devastate the Copper State? Who knows? It's not clear to me what San Francisco imports from Arizona. Chaps? But, at any rate, like the bottled-water ban, it sends a strong signal that this kind of hate will not be tolerated.
The same day that Mayor Newsom took his bold stand, I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop -- black body armor, helmets, and visors -- as they marched down the street. Goosestepping? No, it's actually quite hard to goosestep in those steel-reinforced kneepads. So just regular marching. Naturally, I assumed they were Arizona state troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill., facing down a group of genial tea-party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts. They were acting at the behest of President Obama's Secret Service, who rightly recognized a polite knot of citizens singing "God Bless America" as a clear and present danger to the republic.
If I were a member of the Quincy PD, I'd wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror. It's a tough job making yourself a paramilitary laughingstock.
And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp stormtroopers from either a dinner-theater space-opera or uniforms night at Mayor Newsom's reelection campaign.
Meanwhile, in Britain, a flailing Prime Minister Gordon Brown was on the stump in northern England and met an actual voter, one Gillian Duffy. Alas, she made the mistake of expressing very mild misgivings about immigration. And not the black, brown, and yellow kind, but only the faintly swarthy Balkan blokes from Eastern Europe. And actually, all she said about immigrants was that "you can't say anything about the immigrants." The prime minister brushed it aside blandly, made some chit-chat about her grandkids, and got back in his limo, forgetting that he was still miked. "That was a disaster," he sighed. "Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that . . . ? She's just this sort of bigoted woman."
After the broadcast of his "gaffe," and the sight of Brown slumped with his head in his hands as a radio interviewer replayed the remarks to him, the prime minister found himself going round to Gillian Duffy's home to abase himself before her. Most of the initial commentary focused on what the incident revealed about Gordon Brown's character. But the larger point is what it says about the governing elites and their own voters. Mrs. Duffy is a lifelong supporter of Mr. Brown's Labour party, but she represents the old working class the party no longer has much time for. Travis Nichols may be joking about "the drink of fascists," but, in the same way as Gavin Newsom and Keith Olbermann, Gordon Brown genuinely believes Gillian Duffy has drunk deeply from the drink of bigots for so much as raising the subject of immigration. How dare she! Ungrateful bigot!
Gillian Duffy lives in the world Gordon Brown has created. He, on the other hand, gets into his chauffeured limo and is whisked far away from it.
That's Arizona. To the coastal commentariat, "undocumented immigrants" are the people who mow your lawn while you're at work and clean your office while you're at home. (That, for the benefit of Linda Greenhouse, is the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent "undocumented" servant class by far too many "documented" Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states, illegal immigration is life and death. I spoke this week to a lady who has a camp of illegals on the edge of her land: She lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the new law as an offense against "fairness." Where's the fairness for this woman's family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she's just supposed to get used to living under siege? Like Gillian Duffy in northern England, this lady has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away.
Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. Europeans were told that they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: In reality, Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.
But wait: What about the broader economic benefits? The World Bank calculated that if rich countries increased their workforce by a mere 3 percent through admitting an extra 14 million people from developing countries, it would benefit the populations of those rich countries by $139 billion. Wow!
As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, "The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion." So an extra $139 billion works out to a spectacular 0.35 percent. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Austin Powers's nemesis, Dr. Evil, holding the world hostage for one million dollars! "Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back." A dependence on mass immigration is not a gold-mine or an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness, and should be addressed as such.
The majority of Arizona's schoolchildren are already Hispanic. So, even if you sealed the border today, the state's future is as a Hispanic society; that's a given. Maybe it'll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys in the limos bemoaning the bigots knew what was best for them.
#1
sometimes it takes a legal immigrant to point out what illegals do: they jump the line, use identity theft (necessary for SSN's DL's, etc.), they abuse overly expensive emergency health services and avoid preventive care, and forget about paying for their healthcare or having insurance - of any kind, including car insurance. In Escondido, here in SD County, the pro-illegals were bitching and moaning about police DL/Insurance checkpoints, not because that was a hardship or smacked of "your papers, please", but because it was overwhelmingly ILLEGALS losing their cars because they lacked DL's or insurance. God forbid you get hit by one - they'll hit-and-run in a nanosecond
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/01/2010 15:44 Comments ||
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#2
"Boycott Arizona-stan!" urges MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, surely a trifle Islamophobically.
Steyn must have been about the only one who heard him. Just about everyone else has boycotted the foaming-at-the-mouth Olbersturmführer.
#3
Some years ago I was the Commander of a military Counterdrug Task Force supporting law enforcement on the border in San Diego. We were going to meet with the Border patrol at Sector HQs. I had some staff with me and we were eating breakfast at a Denny's in Chula Vista, and came out into the parking lot to drive down to Hqs.
There was a van with perhaps 10 people in it in the lot, and three more came up from crossing the freeway and jumped in, clearly illegals, being shuttled to L.A. We started to write down the license, and they roared out of the parking lot, turned the corner, and a huge two-part bang followed. We looked around the corner and two cars were smashed up at the intersection as they had been clipped by the van, which continued on up the highway on-ramp.
We rushed into the street to check for injuries and tell the vehicle operators that we had called the Border Patrol.
This next part is the point... every single person, the occupants of the crashed cars, the bystanders, every single person except me and my two staffers, split, every single one was illegal .....
the BP showed up in about 4 minutes and we were standing in the middle of the street with two empty cars...
#4
yep, E St? prolly still had Cabrillo Lanes bowling alley at I-5 exit.
/Chula Vista kid
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/01/2010 16:46 Comments ||
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#5
Frank, I spent 4.5 years in that command, and had follks building the fence, working the road widening and doing the cut and fill in Smugglers Gap and the Soccer Field, and doing OP missions for the BP and Customs. People have not idea what the border is like if they haven't worked it and been on it for a protracted time.
#6
born and raised there in CV - I KNOW what it was like when they "jailbreaked" across the border crossing or when our little league field had duffel bags of dope hidden in the dugouts for pickup when we got to the fields unexpectedly early
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/01/2010 16:53 Comments ||
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#7
In Ciudad Juarez, they all walk away from the cars in accidents because nobody has insurance, the cars are not worth repairing and new ones can be stolen easily enough. Or so I was told by the mayor.
#8
One thing I will give ethnic Mexicans credit for is that they are absolutely not monolithic. Not politically, not socially, and not culturally. All told, if you look at 50 years of Mexican immigration to the US, several things stand out.
1) There are good ones, and there are bad ones. The good ones make good Americans, and a lot join the military. The bad ones are even a pain in the ass in prison.
2) How fast they integrate depends a lot on where they land. The more separated they are from each other the faster they integrate.
3) An oddity of Hispanics of all kinds is that they do not intermarry with Hispanics from other countries. This means that soon after integration, in a generation or two, Mexican Americans will stop marrying Mexicans.
4) When Mexicans go right wing, they go all the way, Jesse Helms, kind of right wing. The money quote from one of them: "Machine guns are a gift from heaven to kill communists."
5) Cezar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers, is held up as a left wing icon, but he was adamantly anti-illegal alien. His UFW workers even got into a riot with illegals who were scabbing, with lots of casualties all around.
6) Much of the current problem with illegals is "too many, too fast", and are a direct result of Vincente Fox's Plan Puebla Panama, that dislocated countless thousands of Mexicans in southern Mexico and sent them North to the border.
7) The bottom line is that time is on the side of the anti-illegals, because the birthrate in Mexico has dropped to just sustainability. This takes a lot of pressure off, because it will force wages to rise in Mexico.
#1
Common argument is that it's a federal responsibility and the states have no authority. If true, how many other federal laws should the states not be enforcing?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
As I write, I have my papers on me -- and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law-enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
