What Debate?

Where do the Democrats stand on immigration? In their Friday debate the subject came up only once:

MODERATOR: Thank you, sir.

Senator Clinton, if you were currently the president, would you defy the majority of American citizens and offer a form of amnesty for illegal aliens?

CLINTON: Well, I'm in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, which includes tightening our border security, sanctioning employers to employ undocumented immigrants, helping our communities deal with the costs that come from illegal immigration, getting the 12 million or so immigrants out of the shadows. That's very important to me.

After 9/11, we've got to know who's in this country. And then giving them a chance to pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English and stand in line to be eligible for a legal status in this country.

MODERATOR: Time's up. Thank you, ma'am.

And that question was from Chris in Myrtle Point, Oregon.

Why wasn't every candidate asked this question? Is immigration not as important to Democrats as it is to the rest of us? Even if it isn't, is it too much to expect our fearless self-appointed government watchdogs in the media to put the question to them anyway?

Hillary's answer by the way, is yes. She is for defying the majority of American citizens and offering a form of amnesty for illegal aliens. Or as the euphemism goes, she is for "getting them out of the shadows".

Where I live nobody is hiding in the shadows. They've stepped out and waved their Mexican flags, spelled out their reconquista dreams, and dared anyone to do anything about it.

Nothing happened.

Since then, across the nation, the true scope of the invasion has become clear to anyone with eyes. The official numbers are shocking. The truth is far worse.

In southern California the ordinary Americans are outnumbered by immigrants. A routine visit to the supermarket or department store has become surreal. The same old places I've visited for 20 years are suddenly full of short, stocky, oddly-dressed, brown people who don't speak a lick of English. They shuffle aimlessly up and down the aisles with bemused expressions on their faces, their minds clearly blown by the clean bright abundance around them.

The freshly arrived seem especially surprised and comforted at being surrounded by so many others like themselves. "Where are the gringos?" they say with their eyes. There feel no urgent need to learn English or adapt to American norms. Our government, banks, media, churches, and businesses pander to them shamelessly.

We the People are quickly becoming the aliens.

Walking to the checkout I wonder: How long before I have to speak Spanish to function here? When will I have to start carrying pesos? Should I move myself and my family somewhere else before the local government and police are controlled by gangs and our house is completely worthless? Or should we stick it out and pray the Razanistas will beat, rape, kidnap and kill all the other guero pigs first?

Friday's debate was virtually worthless. We now know that all the Democrat candidates oppose Bush and "his" war in Iraq. Is this news to anyone? Are any of the candidates aware that our own country is being invaded? Do any of them oppose that?

Maybe someone should ask them. Someday.

A Rorschach For Our Times

Inkblot #1

You wake up in a warm, comfortable bed. Have a cup of coffee. Peruse news from around the world. A hot shower. Dress as you like, choosing from a deep wardrobe selected from a vast market. Then out you go to meet your day - which very likely involves traveling somewhere at high speed in a car, bus, train, or plane.

You think:

A) Life is great. Millions live a lifestyle only a handful of aristocrats could a hundred years ago. The rule of law, technology, and free trade have produced unbelievable returns. It can and should be like this for everyone.

B) This oppulent delusion is disgusting. Mother Earth aches under my carbon footprint. Mankind is a cancer. We will consume all our resources, and die. Or war over those resources, and die. Or cook our atomosphere. And die.

C) How fortunate! A young mother and baby carriage. If I turn myself around like so the TATP in my backpack will be sure to kill them. Get ready virgins, here I come! *click*


Inkblot #2

You look up into an otherwise clear blue sky and note a long contrail. Your eyes track and settle on the jumbojet. It's likely carrying hundreds of people. Miles above the ground, hurtling toward its destination with amazing speed.

You think:

A) Look at that! The fruit of technology. From zero to thousands of flights a day in a hundred years. Isn't that something? We can wonder what travel will be like a hundred years from now, or we can roll up our sleeves and make it so!

B) Good Gore we're destroying the atmosphere. Ozone, CO2, deadly chemicals meant to poison the sheeple. Just look at all those fat greedy banksters and corporadoes flying off to some Disney fantasy. Killing the whales for their blood diamonds. If it weren't for their insatiable thirst for oil our baby killers wouldn't be fighting and dying in Iraq. Redeploy our baby killers now!

C) Hmmm. Too bad. Too high for a Strela.


Inkblot #3

You work at Wal-Mart. You man a checkout. A customer approaches with a package of bacon.

Your reaction:

A) Hiya! Did you find everything you were looking for? That'll be $3.55 please. Thank you, have a nice day.

B) I don't work for facists or their rapacious corporate bullyboy paymasters! I quit! I'm going across the steet to work for Starbucks. They care about the whales.

C) In deference to my all-powerful but easily-offended religion I refuse to handle this sinful meat, even if it is wrapped in plastic. I must also take extra breaks for prayer, and thus require special prayer rooms with foot-cleaning basins. And I can not work anywhere near the women's underwear section. Oh and I'll be out every Friday making plans for jihad.


Analysis

If you answered A to every question you are, sorry to say, one species or another of mindless, gutless, misinformed wingnut whose doom it is to forever see things through hopelessly rosy glasses while you are led to your doom by Machiavellian manipulators playing to your latent racist and xenophobic tendencies. You delight in destroying the environment by driving your SUV to church every day, where your evangelical leaders urge you to jail all leftists and Muslims with the ultimate goal of torturing and gassing them.

You're probably inured to such characterizations, but you know they must be true because they are repeated so often by your far more friendly and tolerant neighbors.

If instead you preferred B you are, quite obviously, a brave patriot-warrior. It is hard to believe you could find the time for this test in your busy schedule, your activism, the never-ending fight for what makes you personally feel good about yourself. You see the horrible crimes and violence around the world and can't help but recoil in disgust and sorrow at the realization that your country and countrymen are responsible. Fortunately, you are not. Though supremely intelligent, contemplative, peaceful, and wise you cannot help but lash out viciously, mercilessly at any ignoramus who questions your patriotism.

Oddly enough you are not very happy.

If your answers tended toward C you are advised to seek aid at a nearby US military base. You'll get 3 square halal meals a day, new flipflops, plenty of space for praying toward Mecca, and your own Koran.

Allahu Akbar, such a deal!

No Sacred Cow Left Behind

flippityflopitty sends this Washington Post article at truthout concerning an investigation of a key initiative of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, "a program besieged by allegations of financial conflicts of interest and cronyism".

For decades liberal Democrats have controlled public education. But it's only now under the sheer pretense of introducing competition and standards that the dastardly Bush-contributing corporations have moved in to rip off the public and create a real mess that threatens the future of our children.

What about the conflict of interest that motivates teachers and their unions to favor immigration because it means more students and thus more money and power, despite the harm it does citizen children? I never read about that in truthout or WaPo.

How about the conflict of interest between the one-size-fits-all, multiculti, politically correct, gay-lifestyle-glorifying, feminized, anti-corporate, anti-military indoctrination my children are getting from their predominantly liberal-leftist teachers who see them as little Eichmann-vessels to be filled with scepticism and indifference, if not rage and hatred, toward all things Western under the guise of shoring up their self-esteem; versus the unvarnished and objective exposition of science and rationalism and history I'd like them to get? Never seen this mentioned in truthout or WaPo.

Despite the constant flowery words to the contrary the interests of the teachers and their unions always trump those of the students and their families. When the budget gets tight (and it always does, regardless of constant spending increases) there goes the computer lab, there goes band. Anything to save a teacher's job. California spends $8K per year per kid. Who pays for that and where the heck does it all go? More truths not deemed worthy of exploring by truthout or WaPo.

We can be rid of all the conflicts of interest in public education. Abolish it. Stop taking my money to force poisoned alien world-views down my children's throats. Voucher games (and teachers don't want even that minimal flexibility) only give back a fraction of the taxes paid toward education. Let me keep all my money and select where and how much I'm willing to pay to educate my children. A 12-student class with a teacher of my choice sounds good to me. I'll bet $96K/year sounds good to teachers.

Most people don't necessarily like the sound of that. They believe that somebody richer or with less children helps pick up their tab, it's ok to screw the rich and the childless, and as if by magic the enormous bureaucratic waste in our current system is actually cheaper in the end.

Probably because they went through the homogenizing dehumanizing meat grinder otherwise known as public school.

You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

The Nuclear Disorder

Another transmission from Das Heimchen:

As you know, I always look for positive signs of changing attitude in the European media. The attached is a translation of a commentary I read at Tagesspiegel online. It shows a sign of awakening to reality, though the entire article did not mention the War on Terror once, nor was there any reference to the threat of the Islamic menace, which is at the base of Iran's belligerence. But I liked the author's realization that it would take the US and our military might to stem the advancing threat.

His attachment:

4/11/07

The following is a translation of an article that appeared in today’s Tagesspiegel, a leading Berlin newspaper.

The Nuclear Disorder

Iran’s nuclear plans can only be stopped by the USA - By Sibylle Tönnies

As long as the British sailors remained in Iranian custody, everyone made as if there was no connection between this affair and the nuclear controversy, as if this episode happened at the hottest border of the world purely by coincidence. For diplomatic reasons, this obvious connection was viewed with a blind eye.

But the most recent events in Iran underscore the need to consider the world-political context in which this kidnapping happened. The triumphal celebration of the enrichment successes, the proclamation of the exit from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reminded the western world of the fact that Iran is their archenemy. Instead of discussing the question whether the young Brits may sell their stories to the press, the public needs to ponder a more important fact: With their imprisonment Iran has symbolically set the scene for claims to its territorial integrity, before it threw down the gauntlet to the West.

And successfully. In any case, Tony Blair was forced to attest to Iran - something, which otherwise might have been lost from memory - that the land has a great history and possesses its own dignity. And implicitly, that it is not a rogue state whose territorial integrity may not be ignored. With that, Blair confirms explicitly the principle of equality of the states, which Iran cites when it demands the same right to go nuclear as other nations.

That Iran is an archenemy I stated guardedly. It is a problematic old term, which should not imply that Iran is evil, more evil, for instance than the USA. Not at all! The question here is not about good and evil. The subject here is a necessary antagonism, which leads to a necessary world-political metamorphosis.

Each of the two antagonists represents a position that has its legitimacy. While Ahmandinejad insists on the old principle of equality of the member states, set by the UN Charta, which is based on territorial integrity, the Bush politics, is led by a new, though undeclared and undeveloped structure of world security: A unilateral, world police-based guard against the dangers of nuclear proliferation and that does not worry about sovereignty.

The current world order is undecided between the two positions. The current system of collective security, headed by the UN, though without military force - this system that prohibits attacks on the territorial integrity of others, without offering protection from those attacks - is no match against nuclear threat. The balance of terror of the Cold War had hidden this flaw for a long time.

Yet, there is no resolve amongst the community of nations to give up the sovereignty of nations in favor of a central world police. The thought alone causes fear - mostly because the US alone should not take charge of it. However that would be quite inevitable. Because like any national police, the world police would also need an over- whelming potency of thread, an effective military force. And faced with this requirement the UN is powerless. Only the US would be up to it. But for Heaven’s sake! No one wants that, not even the Americans themselves. But on the other hand, the thought of nuclear proliferation is horror inspiring. It is not because he is a rogue that no one wants to see Ahmandinejad nuclear armed, but because he is not allied with the US. One would much rather see the nuclear powers under one command.

The balance is held by two kinds of fear and a decision is difficult. This is why it is hard to find un-ambivalent opinions in favor of multi- or uni-polarity. Therefore, the question is avoided in that abstraction. The concrete “line in the sand” lies in the waters between Iraq and Iran.

The author is a professor of law and teaches at Potsdam University.

Yes, it's quite a conundrum for the anti-American worldview. They'd like to think a nuclear Iran really isn't any different than, say, a nuclear UK or US. But whenever the shit hits the fan anywhere in the world (including Europe) they don't call on Iran. Deep down some even know, for man-made disasters at least, Iran may have planned, funded, or carried it out.

When help is needed even anti-Americans expect the US to lead the cause, pay the bills, and if necessary send it's boys to kill and die. That is at least as long as doing so won't interfere with any non-American "territorial integrity", the economic interests of the anti-American's own territory, or the interests of "presidents" and "freedom fighters" who act an awful lot like lawless gangsters.

But then an anti-American doesn't really want to go there. Because resolving the conundrum might require sorting out the difference between good and evil, which is of course more distasteful for them than accepting a nuclear Iran.

The Citizens Are Pissed

Cricket-reader Pablo emailed the following to several media pundits and cc'ed me.

I respectfully request that you do a story on the subject of why some American politicians, Democrats and Republicans, support amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. And as a follow-up ask them how they justify supporting bringing more non-citizen guest workers into America.

The telling line in this North County Times article
is Congressman Brian Bilbray calling the president's support for amnesty "felony stupid." The question is, Is President Bush acting as the lapdog of unscrupulous employers, illegal immigrants and non-resident, non-citizen future slave wage guest workers and not representing American citizens and legal immigrants? Is he simply following the wishes of employers of cheap laborers? Or, is this Karl Rove’s master manipulation? Is President Bush selfishly attempting to stack the deck, setting the stage for his 30 year old, half Mexican, nephew George P. Bush (Google him) to be elected the third Bush POTUS. As a Republican or if need be a Democrat it wouldn’t matter. Screw America, screw the Republican Party. History is what matters. Is the lure of being the first three president family in American history so irresistible as to make Bush felony stupid? Viva Bush.

My question posed to Democrats would be, "How do Hillary, Obama, Edwards and the other Democrat presidential candidates justify to blacks and other lower to middle class American citizens, (mostly Democrats) that they have their interests at heart while at the same time they are supporting amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who are doing the jobs that used to be available to Americans? How do they justify supporting bringing more non-citizen guest workers in to make sure the supply of hard working poor is always plentiful and cheap for unscrupulous employers? It is so anti American worker, anti legal immigrant worker, so anti Democrat. Why aren’t the Democrats representing their constituents?" Are these so-called Democrat leaders so dumb, so blinded by their own egos and ambitions, that they don’t realize that they are being trapped to go against their own constituents, being suckered by Karl Rove. Don’t they realize that the one and only initiative that Bush can possibly get passed and then only with their complicity will stack the deck, set the stage for Bush’s nephew George P. Bush to be elected the third Bush POTUS. Either as a Republican or if need be a Democrat it wouldn’t matter to Rove or W. How gullible are they?

My question posed to those Republican presidential candidates, McCain, Guilani, Brownback, etc., who support the amnesty and guest worker proposals would be "Why?"

Don’t you agree those questions and the answers would make national news and a great story?

Svengali Rove has mesmerized GW and hoodwinked Democrats? There is no reason to invoke paranoid conspiracy theories. Rove and GW are drinking the same koolaid the rest of their Wall Street buddies. "They only come for jobs, jobs Americans won't do."

On this issue Ds and Rs have the same problem: a disconnect between leadership and constituency. The elected officials of both parties misunderstand who they represent and disregard the oaths they have sworn.

It is a great story. But it isn't being told and never will be because our media elite - like the business, political, and religious elite - overwhelmingly favor open borders.

Pablo's NC Times article for example, like virtually every other immigration story told by the for-profit media, subtly slants some issues and ignores others. There is far more truth to be found in the reader comments. There you find the righteous indignation of betrayed citizens and the brazen taunts of La Raza.

Bilbray's "felony stupid" line makes him sound like a hard-liner. He isn't. Only a fool or a knave would pretend that a "guest worker program" will in any way fix the very real problems caused by the immigration invasion status quo. Half the illegal aliens in the US are visa overstays - people who came legally on temporary visas and never left. US judges and politicians have already very thoroughly demonstrated their inability to prosecute visa violations. Another problem is the traditional liberal interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to the children of people here illegally. Guest workers will expect equal or better treatment - and they'll sue and get it by appealing to the 14th Amendment - no matter what the guest worker plan says.

Any lawyer should realize these things, including the ones who become politicians and concoct guest worker lies. This should not come as a surprise. None of the excuses for the immigration status quo make any logical sense, much less the arguments in favor of legitimizing or expanding the mess.

They do not come here only for jobs.

They take jobs Americans would do.

They do not help the US economy, they hurt it. By sending billions home. By bringing disease. By bringing a culture of violence and crime.

The facist, racist, and xenophobic slurs open borders advocates throw at anyone who opposes the chaos and insanity of the status quo are intended to shut down debate. They do so because they have no rational position from which to debate. They did not achieve the status quo by reason or votes, and most are happy to "compromise" by simply stalling and allowing the chaos to continue.

Our legitimate outrage will continue to be minimized by the media and the leadership of both political parties. It is plain to see for anyone with access to the internet.