We Must Make Them Responsive to Us

Ann Coulter is always fun to read, and it is easy to agree with her most of the time. It is interesting to see how she has given up on Righteous George Bush, and for the correct reasons.

She has just come out with piece about the Senate's "immigration reform" bill, which Bush loves.

Well, let her tell some of it here (follow the link to get the whole article):

Se puede get 2 years tax-free!

By Ann Coulter

If Congress adopts the Bush plan and gives amnesty to illegal aliens, Senate Republicans will be asking President Cheney for a pardon.

Bush wants to grant illegal aliens amnesty while sounding like he's really cracking down on them...

The "path to citizenship" that Bush and the Senate are trying to pawn off on Americans requires that illegals pay huge fines and back taxes...defined as a $2,000 fine and taxes for three of the last five years.

[T]hey also will have a panoply of government benefits available to them if they become citizens – in fact, even if they get green cards...

Inasmuch as most of these low-skilled immigrant workers are in the 0 percent tax bracket, this should be a real boon for the U.S. Treasury...

The Senate bill also forgives illegal aliens who have committed identity theft by stealing American Social Security numbers to get jobs...

[I]n addition to the Two Years Tax-Free plan for illegals, they get one free felony.

Also, illegal immigrants from Mexico qualify for affirmative action, allowing them to get into U.S. colleges with lower grades and scores than Americans.

Given this listing of Senate benefits to ILLEGALS (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), paid for BY YOU, there are benefits for a whole lot of others. Continues Ann:

However hardworking illegal immigrants are when they come here, the moment they become citizens, they will be immediately demagogued by Democrats into viewing welfare as a universal human right, just as they now view living in America...

The list goes on. Benefits to some, but not us citizens--we simply get stuck with the bill.

Her single best comment is this:

Instead of creating a separate class of citizens who are immune from oppressive government rules, how about relieving all of us – even us shiftless Americans – from the cost of government?

(There is much more in the full article. )

We have a president and a senate that have become refractory to us. They have forgotten that they work for us. In their forgetfulness, they are working agendas instead of working to preserve and protect the rights of LEGAL CITIZENS (pardon the redundancy). Bush is carrying the senators' water for them, so they need not rein him in. All of them are giving us the middle finger.

One third of the Senate and all of the House come up for election this November. We all need to be aware of how and why our so-called representatives have been behaving. Most need to be fired from the ballot box in November. To judge this, examine what they do

Note that that will get rid of all but about 4 Democrats and 50% of the Republicans in the Senate--and give us a vast sea of new faces in the House. That will start getting their attention.

Ummah News Links

Worth keeping tabs on this one.

Via: The American Thinker

A Novel Approach to the Border Problem: Keeping Mexicans at Home Would Be Good for Mexico.

Is the tide finally turning in Mexico?

Some Mexicans publicly are admitting that emigration, for Mexico, has been a disaster. Mexican elites have not lived up to the responsibilities for their country and countrymen that come with power and position. Rather they have taken the easy way out by sending their problems across the border. A fence would stop all that.

Some interesting facts about Fox and Mexico

1) President Fox makes $236,693 a year, more than the leaders of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada; Mexican congressional deputies, who serve only a few months year, take home at least $148,000 a year, plus $28,000 "leaving office bonus" at the end of term.

2) Taxes collected are equivalent to 9.7% of GDP, a figure on par with Haiti; there is painfully little to spend on education and health care, which means there is no social mobility and little job opportunity.

Mexico is a country rich in resources and hard-working people. Obviously the leadership-class is holdingt hem back:

In short, Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures...

When I was in Mexico last fall, after dozens of visits over the years, people on every political and social level confirmed these accusations, complaining to me of Fox's failures. Forty families still own 60 percent of Mexico. There are no voluntary organizations, no civic involvement, no family foundations – and thus, no accountability, allowing corruption to flourish. Mexico gains $28 billion from oil revenue and $20 billion from immigrant remittances. There is virtually no industrialization, no small business, no real chance at individual entrepreneurship. Under Fox, it has created only one-tenth of the 1 million jobs needed.

Using Orwellian newspeak, Mexican politicians publicly pronounced the migration to the North a boon for Mexico. The emigrants were "national heroes", the jobs and remittance money, "Mexico's due for territorial loss at the Treaty of Hidalgo," American displays of sovereignty and border control are nothing more than "adding insult to injury, preventing re-unification of families", and so on.

Now, other "prominent Mexicans are quoted as saying that the wall would be the

“best thing that could happen for Mexico”; the “porous border” allowed “elected officials to avoid creating jobs.” And former Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castañeda, who always took a tough line toward the United States, writes in the Mexican newspaper Reforma that Mexico needed “a series of incentives” to keep Mexicans from migrating, including welfare benefits to mothers whose husbands remained in Mexico, scholarships, and the loss of land rights for people who were absent too long from their property.

Finally, a revolution in thinking! Too long has everything been blamed on the gringo, and too long have gringos been expected to pay up for Mexico's failures.

Two important points here. The fact that the free enterprise candidate for July's presidential election, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), is suddenly and unexpectedly surging ahead on his slogan of “My job will be to make sure you have a job” may show that the Mexican people are fed up. In addition, the fact that only 50,000 of the 400,000 Mexicans in the United States who were available to vote in the July Mexican elections have bothered to register can only indicate a generalized disgust with Mexican corruption and hopelessness, and perhaps even a turn toward American ways.

Don't count your chickens just yet: Mexican politics are notoriously deceptive, and elements in the elite will fight to hold on to their advantages and low-rate of taxation.

Mainstream-America has now awakened to the "insult of its 'neighbor' cynically exporting its problems, while doing nada at home." (After all they didn't have to while they could count on the American tax payer and the American government to take care of their problems and do the work for them.)

The immigration debate, the posting of the guard, the raising of standards, threats to seal the border and deportation of the undocumented, and all the rest has jarred Mexicans into the realization of how foolish, corrupt, and incompetent they appear to the rest of the world, as their exports are oil, human beings, crime, and drugs:

"Ironically, the debate and the anger in the U.S. about this mammoth illegal immigration ha already helped Mexico to begin to shed its dependency on America -- and to turn its energies toward its own real predators, all home-grown."

Not so fast. True, Mexico has a mammoth task ahead, for reform, cleaning up and cleaning out the corruption and criminal elements, a daunting task for anyone, but the role of corrupt politicians and employers can't be overlooked. Mexico only took advantage of the United States because they were allowed to do so. The United States must do its own soul search, its own cleaning and cleaning, and a suitable job of immigration reform is in order. The predators and villains are "home-grown" on both sides of the border,

Great News! Get on the list for Ali Sina's new book

From Robert Spencer on Jihad Watch, May 29, 2006

Ali Sina's book, Understanding Islam and the Muslim Mind

The courageous and insightful Ali Sina has written a book, and he needs people to show interest in buying it in order to encourage his publisher. Please take a look here and support Ali by signing up.

And here are some of the endorsements the book has received (there are more here):

The book is prefaced by the celebrated scholar [and Jihad Watch Board member] Ibn Warraq.
[...]

1- A blisteringly honest, thoroughly documented, and piercingly insightful investigation of the root causes within Islam of the fanaticism and violence that today threatens the entire world. Should be required reading at the State Department and the White House. -- Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades (Regnery)

2- A powerful, no holds barred look at an ideology of hate and what must be done to eradicate it. This book pulls no punches. A must read for anyone seeking to understand Islamist terrorism" Professor Kim Ezra Shienbaum, Ph.D Dept. of Political Science, Rutgers University Camden, NJ. Chief Editor of Beyond Jihad.

3- With great courage, perspicacity, and trenchant wit, Ali Sina demolishes a host of politically correct myths about Islam, and its founder. One wishes policymaking elites would avail themselves of his insights which shatter the dangerous delusions of their own invented Islam. Andrew G. Bostom, MD, author of The Legacy of Jihad

[...]
9- The war against jihad can and must be won, in spite of the Western elite class that is instinctively prone to appeasement and betrayal. The first task is to analyze frankly the identity and character of the enemy and the nature of the threat. It is essential to discard the taboos and to discuss Islam without fear or guilt, or the shackles of mandated thinking. Ali Sina's new book makes an important contribution to that objective.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” says Sun Tzu. Thanks to this book we know the jihadist enemy a little better -- his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious and good society.

The main problem remains with ourselves, however, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn Ali Sina's diagnosis. Our own elite class treats the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed multiculturalist “cures” that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia. Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor CHRONICLES

He's At It Again, Ma!

Happily, more and more commentary about the president of Iran compares him to Adolf Hitler, and extends that comparison to Iran as a Nazi state reincarnate. Both are completely accurate, usually far more accurate than most people appreciate. Der Spiegel has just released their interview of Adolfinejad, and here are a few tidbits.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - May 30, 2006, 12:01 AM
SPIEGEL Interview with Iran's President Ahmadinejad: "We Are Determined"

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust, the future of the state of Israel, mistakes made by the United States in Iraq and Tehran's nuclear dispute with the West.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "By siding with Iran, the Europeans would serve their own and our interests."

SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany -- this causes an uproar. So you were surprised after all?
Ahmadinejad: No, not at all, because the network of Zionism is very active around the world, in Europe too. So I wasn't surprised. We were addressing the German people. We have nothing to do with Zionists... We are posing two very clear questions. The first is: Did the Holocaust actually take place? You answer this question in the affirmative. So, the second question is: Whose fault was it? The answer to that has to be found in Europe and not in Palestine. It is perfectly clear: If the Holocaust took place in Europe, one also has to find the answer to it in Europe. On the other hand, if the Holocaust didn't take place, why then did this regime of occupation...We don't want to confirm or deny the Holocaust. We oppose every type of crime against any people. But we want to know whether this crime actually took place or not. If it did, then those who bear the responsibility for it have to be punished, and not the Palestinians. Why isn't research into a deed that occurred 60 years ago permitted? After all, other historical occurrences, some of which lie several thousand years in the past, are open to research, and even the governments support this.

SPIEGEL: The key question is: Do you want nuclear weapons for your country?
Ahmadinejad: Allow me to encourage a discussion on the following question: How long do you think the world can be governed by the rhetoric of a handful of Western powers? Whenever they hold something against someone, they start spreading propaganda and lies, defamation and blackmail. How much longer can that go on?

SPIEGEL: We're here to find out the truth. The head of state of a neighboring country, for example, told SPIEGEL: "They are very keen on building the bomb." Is that true?
Ahmadinejad: You see, we conduct our discussions with you and the European governments on an entirely different, higher level...

Interview conducted by Stefan Aust, Gerhard Spörl and Dieter Bednarz in Tehran.

This is a sampling of how this man thinks, and understanding how he thinks is essential to our survival. He carefully clothes emotion in the language of logic, to suck in the unsuspecting. Read the entire interview to get the full impact-- as well as a companion article An Apocalyptic Religious Zealot Takes on the World.

MEMORIAL DAY: What We Owe Our Soldiers

To follow is an op-ed piece by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Mr. Epstein puts the meaning of our fighting men and women into context and perspective. Anyone understanding this piece will get an eye-opening about the contradictory and lousy ideas that motivate the men and women of government to send our troops to slaughter. George W. Bush is a classic in that regard, and the maiming and killing of our military personnel as well as the treasure being spilled along with their blood reflect the prevalence of this foul thinking.

George W. Bush is hardly alone. Since Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, American leaders have been sending the flower of our youth and our treasure off to be sacrificed, including to police a world that has come to rely on American sacrifices to save their unhygienic behinds. The blame falls equally on the Right, the Left, and those marshmallows who call themselves "moderates."


If these fine young people of our military did not believe they were going in harm's way in service to the home of the rights of man, they would not go. But, they are being sent by their lessers to be sacrificial fodder, even cannon fodder, for what Lyndon Johnson called "championing lost causes." If America is to get well, we must stop the sacrifice and stop championing causes not worth our time and effort.

What We Owe Our Soldiers

By Alex Epstein

Every Memorial Day, we pay tribute to the American men and women who have died in combat. With speeches and solemn ceremonies, we recognize their courage and valor. But one fact goes unacknowledged in our Memorial Day tributes: all too many of our soldiers have died unnecessarily--because they were sent to fight for a purpose other than America's freedom.

The proper purpose of a government is to protect its citizens' lives and freedom against the initiation of force by criminals at home and aggressors abroad. The American government has a sacred responsibility to recognize the individual value of every one of its citizens' lives, and thus to do everything possible to protect the rights of each to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This absolutely includes our soldiers.

Soldiers are not sacrificial objects; they are full-fledged Americans with the same moral right as the rest of us to the pursuit of their own goals, their own dreams, their own happiness. Rational soldiers enjoy much of the work of military service, take pride in their ability to do it superlatively, and gain profound satisfaction in protecting the freedom of every American, including their own freedom.

Soldiers know that in entering the military, they are risking their lives in the event of war. But this risk is not, as it is often described, a "sacrifice" for a "higher cause." When there is a true threat to America, it is a threat to all of our lives and loved ones, soldiers included. Many become soldiers for precisely this reason; it was, for instance, the realization of the threat of Islamic terrorism after September 11--when 3,000 innocent Americans were slaughtered in cold blood on a random Tuesday morning--that prompted so many to join the military.

For an American soldier, to fight for freedom is not to fight for a "higher cause," separate from or superior to his own life--it is to fight for his own life and happiness. He is willing to risk his life in time of war because he is unwilling to live as anything other than a free man. He does not want or expect to die, but he would rather die than live in slavery or perpetual fear. His attitude is epitomized by the words of John Stark, New Hampshire’s most famous soldier in the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die."

What we owe these men who fight so bravely for their and our freedom is to send them to war only when that freedom is truly threatened, and to make every effort to protect their lives during war--by providing them with the most advantageous weapons, training, strategy, and tactics possible.

Shamefully, America has repeatedly failed to meet this obligation. It has repeatedly placed soldiers in harm's way when no threat to America existed--e.g., to quell tribal conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. America entered World War I, in which 115,000 soldiers died, with no clear self-defense purpose but rather on the vague, self-sacrificial grounds that "The world must be made safe for democracy." America's involvement in Vietnam, in which 56,000 Americans died in a fiasco that American officials openly declared a "no-win" war, was justified primarily in the name of service to the South Vietnamese. And the current war in Iraq--which could have had a valid purpose as a first step in ousting the terrorist-sponsoring, anti-American regimes of the Middle East--is responsible for thousands of unnecessary American deaths in pursuit of the sacrificial goal of "civilizing" Iraq by enabling Iraqis to select any government they wish, no matter how anti-American.

In addition to being sent on ill-conceived, "humanitarian" missions, our soldiers have been compromised with crippling rules of engagement that place the lives of civilians in enemy territory above their own. In Afghanistan we refused to bomb many top leaders out of their hideouts for fear of civilian casualties; these men continue to kill American soldiers. In Iraq, our hamstrung soldiers are not allowed to smash a militarily puny insurgency--and instead must suffer an endless series of deaths by an undefeated enemy.

To send soldiers into war without a clear self-defense purpose, and without providing them every possible protection, is a betrayal of their valor and a violation of their rights.

This Memorial Day, we must call for a stop to the sacrifice of our soldiers and condemn all those who demand it. It is only by doing so that we can truly honor not only our dead, but also our living: American soldiers who have the courage to defend their freedom and ours.

Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."


The Ayn Rand Institute, 2121 Alton Pkwy, Ste 250, Irvine, CA 92606

Flag Etiquette

Today, we display with great pride an American flag we have displayed on every appropriate holiday since 9/11. It is beginning to show its age, but it is in good condition, and we pamper it between holidays.

We have many occasions during the year when it is appropriate to display our flag. Since this, Memorial Day, is one of them, and since others such as the 4th of July are not far off, I thought this might be a good time to refer people to a couple of good sites where they can refresh their knowledge of "flag etiquette."

Quite a few of the points of etiquette are governed by federal law in the "Flag Code."

When I was a kid, every school had a flag-raising ceremony at the beginning of the school day. We all stood at attention while the flag was raised, and then we went inside and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with our right hands over our hearts, while facing a flag displayed on the classroom wall. That was in the pre-Eisenhower days, before the controversial introduction of the phrase "under God," so there was no question whatsoever about whether it was appropriate to recite it on government property, and we were all proud to participate.

We also had lessons in "flag etiquette," both in school and for those of us who were members of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, at our weekly meetings with them.

Today, many school children know little about flag etiquette unless someone has taken the time to teach them. Here are a couple of good sites (there are many) about "flag etiquette" that are helpful: USA Flag Site, and Betsy Ross. The "Betsy Ross" site has good illustrations, as well has historic photographs of violations of etiquette. Even President Bush is shown committing a violation!

The Roots of Evil - Book Review

Does evil exist? How is it defined and how can we recognize evil when we see it?

...The word “evil” seems out of fashion these days (except perhaps to describe George W. Bush). Even Islamic terrorists busily blowing up innocent children and mothers tend to get a verbal pass.

The moral and political philosopher John Kekes rejects this thought-killing nonjudgmentalism. Evil exists, he says, and philosophy has the job of explaining it. And that is what his serious and humane new book, The Roots of Evil, sets out to do.

From the outset, Kekes sets himself against most Enlightenment and religious accounts of evil. Enlightenment thinkers tended to view human nature as intrinsically good, while evil was a product of a flawed social order: Fix society and evil will vanish. Kekes, by contrast, sees evil as ineradicable, though he believes we can ameliorate its worst effects. Similarly, Kekes (a nonbeliever) claims, religious theories that posit the goodness of creation run aground: The “very existence of evil . . . constitutes a reason against believing in a morally good order.”

ACTIONS ARE EVIL, he asserts, if they combine three basic features: the “malevolent motivation” of actors, the “serious excessive harm caused by their actions,” and the lack of a “morally acceptable excuse for their actions.” On these terms, Allen’s actions were unambiguously evil: He self-consciously chose to hurt people for his own enjoyment. One must be realistic about human nature: Human beings are capable of magnanimity and mercy; they can also be stone-cold killers.
In Kekes’ view, Allen’s thuggery exemplifies the evil that can result from “disenchantment with ordinary life.” Boredom is an underappreciated source of wickedness. But there are many others, Kekes says, and he explores five more. A particularly lethal one—on a much larger scale—is utopian politics. Kekes devotes a fascinating chapter, “Perilous Dreams,” to Robespierre and the Jacobins, whose fanaticism anticipated twentieth-century totalitarianism. Kekes unsparingly details the atrocities of Robespierre’s two-year reign—women raped, children killed or mutilated, prisoners disemboweled before howling mobs.

What licensed the brutality was the Jacobins’ ideological approach to politics. Robespierre and his followers, like left-wing revolutionaries since, divided the political world in absolute terms. “All political choices of the time were interpreted as choices between morality and immorality, good and evil, virtue and vice,” writes Kekes.

“The choices Robespierre favored were of course on the side of the angels, so his opponents could be demonized.” Illustrating this chilling logic, Kekes offers the words of St-Just, Robespierre’s close ally: “The republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it.”

But is it right to call Robespierre evil, his apologists ask? Wasn’t he seeking a better, fairer society? Kekes will have none of it. “Robespierre had people lynched, buried alive, hacked to pieces, slowly drowned, publicly humiliated, and parts of their still-warm bodies devoured by the mob,” he observes. Whatever justification one might offer “cannot even begin to account for the savage, inhuman cruelty and ferocious malevolence” of his actions. Even if it were necessary to kill his victims—not that it was, of course—the wild excess of the harm he and the Jacobins inflicted reveals the moral truth. The same kind of excesses characterized the actions of Kekes’ other evildoers.

Consider the “dirty warriors” of Argentina’s military junta during the late 1970s. Committed to national and military “honor”—a concept that when perverted becomes a third source of potential evil, Kekes believes—they used kidnapping, gruesome torture, and murder to eradicate subversives (dropping bound victims out of airplanes to drown in the ocean was a preferred method of killing). The junta defined subversion so loosely that anyone who disagreed with the dirty warriors’ vision of politics became a potential victim.

Here, too, politics became a battleground between good and evil, making “toleration, compromise, and moderation impossible.” And religious faith can encourage evil, too, as we are reminded daily in our struggle with Islamist terror. Kekes’ example of religiously inspired atrocities is the thirteenth-century Catholic Church’s crusade against the Cathars, which wiped them out—along with many who had little or nothing to do with them.

Read it all.

Thomas Jefferson On The Problem of Rapid and Excessive Immigration

Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the Declaration of Independence, a Framer of the Constitution, and our third president, was very generous on the issue of immigration, but he also cautioned us about the problems that resulted from too much, too fast:

"[Is] rapid population [growth] by as great importations of foreigners as possible... founded in good policy?... They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass... If they come of themselves, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship: but I doubt the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements."

Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.VIII, 1782. ME 2:118

"Immigration debate impacts Mexican race"

If you could vote in Mexico, whom you choose? The question is fair as Mexico's dual-citizenship franchise law allows expatriates that have attained citizenship in another country to vote in Mexican elections as well, thus assuring that they will maintain interest and ties to "the mother country".

Candidates

1) Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, "a fiery lefist, has accused Fox of being weak when dealing with Washington, calling Fox a U.S. 'puppet' and 'lackey' for not vigorously opposing the move of the U.S. National Guard to the border.

"Lopez Obrador is using Fox as a patsy for Calderon. He has found it easier to run against Fox than Calderon because Calderon is slippery and difficult to get to," political analyst Federico Estevez said."

Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who has headed demonstrations against state and federal governments, would likely work more closely with migrant protesters, [George] Grayson, an expert on Mexico said.

"I could see Lopez Obrador flying into the United States and joining demonstrations to put the pressure on," he said. "He believes in direct action. Look at his past. He has always mobilized people to achieve his political aims."

"Lopez Obrador has been stumping in these [poor] villages and is gaining substantial support there, pollsters say. He kicked off his campaign in the impoverished hamlet of Metlatonoc on the day it held a funeral for a former resident hit by a car in Alabama.

2) Felipe Calderon, a member of the ruling National Action Party.

Harvard educated, "Calderon, a career politician and son of a National Action Party founder, staked out his own nationalist credentials on the immigration issue, attacking the U.S. Senate for approving 370 miles of triple-layer border fencing."

"These measures increase the social and human costs for migrants and only benefit criminal groups," he said.
Calderon "would probably continue Fox's strategy of lobbying U.S. senators and holding get-togethers with the U.S. President, said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary."

3) Roberto Madrazo "of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until Fox's historic victory in 2000, is also hitting the immigration issue hard with peasant farmers, a key base for the party.

Madrazo began his campaign with a rally in the central Mexico farming town of Izucar de Matamoros, flanked by a migrant activist from New York and a young Indian woman whose brothers work in the United States.

Madrazo claims migration has increased under Fox because the president has abandoned the countryside."

"Whoever wins, the migration policy of Mexico's next administration will probably vary more in style than substance.
With migrants sending home nearly $20 billion a year and reducing the pressure for job-creation in Mexico, it is likely that any president will go on pushing for Mexicans to work legally in the United States....

But their tactics may differ."

For whom would I vote IF I had the Mexican franchise? It's hard to tell as all three candidates tie everything to migration which was in full swing long before Fox was elected. But rather than expecting to bailed out by the United States or using the United States as a "safety valve," Roberto Madrazo was the only one that offered hope in Mexico:

"The solution to the migration problem is in Mexico, not the United States," he told the Associated Press in a recent interview. "We are the ones who have to create more jobs in the countryside."

Based on this report, I would choose Madrazo. However, his political party, the one that had been in power for 71 years is known to be very corrupt and elitist, and can his party be trusted to uphold that sentiment? The choice would be very difficult, the least of the three evils: a manipulator of U.S. policy, a Marxist, and an elitist . Whom would you choose?

"Memories of 1918 flu pandemic haunt 21st century"

In earlier times, flu and other infectious diseases routinely killed whole families. Toni Reinhold's story of grandmother struck a note as my own grandmother, a product of her widowed mother's second marriage, born at the end of the 19th century, told me of an epidemic of "Scarlet Fever" that eliminated her mother's first family and husband during the last quarter of the 19th century. No one can know for sure what killed my grandmother's family as infections were categorized by symptoms and identification of viruses and most bacteria was still not possible. A personal tragedy that paled when compared to effect of the 1918 'Spanish Flu' pandemic.

(Photo: Antonia Starece, author's grandmother and her children)

Toni tells of her grandmother's tale of fear and pain of loss that was multiplied millions of times over worldwide:

My grandmother lived through the Great War, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War Two, the cultural revolution of the '60s and three decades beyond.

There was little that could threaten her nerve but until the day she died, Marie Starace was afraid of two things. One was lightning. The other was "The Grip" -- the deadly flu that wreaked havoc on the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood where she was born and raised.

So vivid were her memories of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that whenever she saw us with open coats and throats exposed to the cold, she would gravely warn: "Button up or you'll get the grip." When I was a teenager -- about 50 years after the horrible episode -- I had the sense to ask what this dreaded "grip" was.

"It was a terrible thing. So many people died from the grip when I was a little girl that it seemed like every family lost someone," my grandmother told me.

"It was heartbreaking to see mothers crying for their children. Some of them lost two and three children. I'll never forget one woman crying in my mother's arms because she lost her children and her husband."

"People didn't want to say when someone in their house was sick because the place would be quarantined and no one could get out to work," Granna recalled.

"Some people went out in the middle of the night to get the undertaker because they didn't want it to get around that someone in their house had died from the flu. They were afraid of being reported to the Health Department and quarantined."

'SPANISH FLU'

The flu that killed an estimated 20 million to 100 million people worldwide was known in the United States as the Spanish flu or "La Grippe" because it ravaged Spain early on.

Studies show that it was caused by an avian flu virus -- the H1N1 strain -- that could be passed from human to human. The fear today is that the current H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate and do the same.

In 1918, word of the illness in Europe was carried to Brooklyn's shores by troops returning from the battlefields of World War One and seamen who helped breathe life into New York City's ports. It was suspected that some of them carried the flu as well.

Read the rest.



The author's grandmother advised her to "Button up or you'll get The Grip". My grandmother's homespun wisdom was: "Eat or you'll get sick". They did the best they could, treating the symptoms with potions, plasters, quarantine, and chicken soup. They didn't understand why sickness came, but they did what the had to do, and it's amazing that any survived.

Although modern medicine can never totally eliminate the flu, we are fortunate to live in era where containment is possible with measures of prevention and a lot of luck.

Get ready, the flu is coming. Apparently it has mutated to a more efficient strain

Bird Flu News Coverage

"In Reality, It Will Give the Illegals More Rights Than the Average American Citizens."

The "problem with immigration" has little to do with foreign trade or even the line drawn in the sand called the border. The problem has to do imposition, the foisting on Americans of laws and regulations...and people. Laws and regulations that we have not approved and too many people, people that apparently are to be given more rights and benefits than are we.

How Much Would You Pay?

If this doesn't make you blood boil, nothing will.

"Nurses Under Attack"

"Rising Wages for Nurses? Nanny State to the Rescue.

The article reports on a provision in the Senate immigration bill that removes the cap on the number of nurses who can enter the country each year. The problem, as described in the article, is that the country faces a large and growing shortage of nurses. In a market economy, a shortage means that wages should rise. This will cause more students to enter nursing schools (presumably creating more incentive to establish nursing schools), and will induce many part-time or retired nurses to work more hours as nurses. It may also curtail the demand somewhat, as some tasks that are performed by nurses can presumably be performed by less-skilled workers.

But, that is not the way things work in the world of the conservative nanny state. The people who set economic policy in this country don’t want to pay nurses higher wages. They have a different solution - bring more nurses from developing countries into the United States. These nurses will be very happy to work for the current wages received by nurses in the United States, which are far higher than what nurses in places like the Philippines or India earn. (Never mind the impact that this drain of nurses has on developing countries.)

Before anyone claims that free immigration is part of a free market, it is important to remember that the United States does not have free immigration in general, it only allows free immigration in occupations where it is trying to depress wages.

"Here's a Job Americans Would Do

Outsourcing is killing plenty of American jobs. But nursing is a good job that can’t be outsourced, because the patients are here. Hey, no problem. We’ll just in-source foreign workers.
Kuttner ideas on how to increase wages and improve distribution of wealth via taxation are a bit dated in my opinion-but at least he’s trying.

The US of Guest Worker Visas to attack Software Engineers went smoothly for the plutocrats because software engineers were not an organized profession-and had nothing in the way of things like licensing boards as a tool to use in their defense. Nurses are largely unionized. Many nurses have seen first hand what Guest Worker Visas have done to family members in the software profession. If the union leadership of Nurses can’t stand up to this kind of assault, I suspect we’ll see a rapid reaction in this area.

Why is this happening?

The key to the story is that our political leaders think that free trade and competition are good only for manufacturing workers, nurses, and other workers lower down the social ladder. They want the nanny state to protect the highest-paid workers from international competition. The huge gap in wages between those at the top and those at the bottom is not because of the market, it ís because those at the top got Congress to rig the game.

Disillusionment has set in: I'm getting this feeling more and more often.

"Imposition of Shariah on non-Muslims Proposed in Aceh"

The Indonesian province that took the brunt of the Indian Ocean Tsunami is about to suffer cultural devastation as Muslims are riding roughshod over non-Muslims:

A bill proposed by lawmakers in the Indonesian province of Aceh would impose Shariah law on all non-Muslims, the armed forces and law enforcement officers, a local police official has announced.


The news comes two months after the Deutsche Presse-Agentur warned of “Taliban-style Islamic police terrorizing Indonesia's Aceh”.


Shariah took effect in 2005 in Aceh, a predominantly Muslim region on the northernmost tip of Sumatra. But it only applied to Muslims.


In the months following the tsunami in December 2004, the Aceh government had begun vigorously enforcing a three-year-old provincial statute on Shariah. Human rights groups have expressed concern.


Alyasa Abubakar, head of the relevant local government office, declared recently: "Based on equality in law, Acehnese people have formally proposed ... to apply the Islamic Shariah Law to all those residing in Aceh, including military, police and non-Muslims."


The provincial Islamic law department has called a further crackdown on 'immorality' - alcohol, gambling, women appearing in public without headscarves or venturing out at night without a male escort.


Recently a young Acehnese woman was allegedly publicly flogged for kissing her boyfriend in public, while another 23-year-old has been locked up in Acehnese jail for more than two weeks without access to an attorney after being caught drinking beer.


Shariah police are said to have barged into the lobby of a leading Banda Aceh hotel to arrest three women attending an international conference because they were not wearing headscarves.

The terrifying nightmare of Shariah, the Muslim system of law based on Koranic principles is not confined to questions of morality, but includes every aspect of life, from conception to grave. Intolerant and repressive, Shariah is responsible for the inequalities that are prevalent in the Muslim world. For non-Muslims, the condition of inequality is yet more terrible, with restrictions and humiliations that are incompatible with our notion of freedom in the West.

Naturally with the spread of Islam, Shariah is on the rise around the world, baggage that observant Muslims carry with them. (To be observant means to follow the law.) However, imposition of Shariah on non-Muslims is unacceptable, but inexplicably non-Muslims allow themselves to be harassed and exploited under this odious system.

Unfortunately the lesson of history is that Shariah eventually becomes the norm wherever Muslims settle. Thus, allowing Muslims among non-Muslims is cultural suicide and.... is INSANE!!!

Farmers' Markets - "The Idea that shook the world"

Today, farmers markets seem to be everywhere — there were almost 500 in the state last year, more than 80 of them in Los Angeles County. And although the farmers market movement is closely identified with California, it has exploded into a national phenomenon. There were more than 3,700 farmers markets in the United States in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than double only a decade before.

Who would have dreamed such a thing could come from what started out as four farmers in a church parking lot?

"This whole thing started with a small idea, but it put into motion something that turned out to be much bigger when others heard about it," says Ida Edwards. She and her husband, Leroy, were customers that first weekend; now they manage this market and another one at Adams Boulevard and Vermont Avenue — and they even do some farming themselves, raising aloe vera that they turn into soaps and lotions to sell at the markets.

To appreciate what the movement has accomplished, you have to look below the surface of what's going on at the Gardena market now. That stand with the bags of cute little citrus? That's Friend's Ranches from Ojai, and those Pixie tangerines are similar to the ones served at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. That stand over there with the great-looking strawberries and mixed vegetables? That's Tamai Farms from Oxnard and right across is Ha's Apple Farm from Tehachapi — their produce is served in some of California's finest restaurants.

Even more to the point: that funny-looking money that so many customers are using to pay? That's scrip for federal and state anti-hunger programs and accounts for as much as half of the market's sales.

From at one time not having access to fresh produce, low-income customers at the Gardena market — and many other small markets — now can get the same ingredients as are used by some of the best chefs in the country.

That is surely well beyond the dreams of even the most optimistic of the markets' founders. The first five farmers markets in Southern California were sponsored by the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, a project of the Southern California Ecumenical Council, with the simple idea of bringing fresh food to the poor.

"We were really addressing questions of food access, because at that time some of the supermarkets had fled the inner city," says Vance Corum, who organized the first half a dozen successful markets in Southern California. "At the same time, we were also very aware of the plight of farmers. That was the start of the tough times in the farm economy around the country. Things were tight."

Read it all.

This article features a market located in Southern California, but there are thousands all over the United States:

More resources and an interactive map.

"The Celluloid Time Capsule"

The hippie-burnout drama "Cisco Pike" is a movie in which the optimism of the 1960s slips into the disappointing loneliness that Los Angeles can cultivate like no other city.

It is a cruel irony, then, that the 1972 film sank without a trace upon its release, so concerned is its hero's need for recognition and reward. Although both a Marvel Comics character and a Chicago indie-rock band have taken the name Cisco Pike, the film— despite unforgettable performances by Kris Kristofferson in the title role, Gene Hackman, Karen Black and Harry Dean Stanton—has never had enough exposure to become known even as a cult classic.

It struggled for its audience from the beginning: Bill L. Norton, a 27-year-old filmmaker, first pitched the story (original title: "Dealer") in 1969 to Columbia exec Gerald Ayres, who then left the studio to produce it. After countless rewrites and last-minute cast changes, the film was shot on location (for less than $800,000, with the smallest Hollywood crew Columbia had ever used) in late 1970 and early 1971. And then . . . nothing.

While Columbia sat on the picture, Gene Hackman's star-making turn in "The French Connection" was filmed and released to theaters, and magazines such as Seventeen went ahead and published what were supposed to be tie-in profiles of Kristofferson. It was released to one theater in Los Angeles, where it played for several weeks before closing. Norton couldn't get work as a director until "More American Graffiti" in 1979. In the '80s, the late Z Channel head Jerry Harvey, who had resuscitated interest in other mishandled releases such as "Heaven's Gate" and "Once Upon a Time in America," was unable to persuade Columbia to license the rights for broadcast. Never officially available on VHS, "Cisco Pike" has nonetheless circulated on bootleg videotapes, and has occasionally surfaced in various "great lost films" series at revival theaters.


It was finally released on DVD this year to little fanfare—so little that Norton didn't know of the release until I contacted him. In a final indignity, the packaging was adorned with this supremely backhanded compliment from critic Leonard Maltin: "Surprisingly Good."

But "Cisco Pike" is much more than that: It belongs in a pantheon of films—along with "Sunset Boulevard," "Mi Vida Loca" and "Valley Girl"—that have managed to capture in-the-moment pieces of the L.A. landscape that are no more.

Read the rest.

Food for Thought - "Borders Aren't About Maps"

by Moisés Naîm

A country's borders should not be confused with those familiar dotted lines drawn on some musty old map of nation-states. In an era of mass migration, globalization and instant communication, a map reflecting the world's true boundaries would be a crosscutting, high-tech and multidimensional affair.

Where is the real U.S. border, for example, when U.S. customs agents check containers in the port of Amsterdam? Where should national borders be marked when drug traffickers launder money through illegal financial transactions that crisscross the globe electronically, violating multiple jurisdictions? How would border checkpoints help record companies that discover pirated copies of their latest offering for sale in cyberspace -- long before the legitimate product even reaches stores? And when U.S. health officials fan out across Asia seeking to contain a disease outbreak, where do national lines truly lie?

Governments and citizens are used to thinking of a border as a real, physical place: a fence, a shoreline, a desert or a mountain pass. But while geography still matters, today's borders are being redefined and redrawn in unexpected ways. They are fluid, constantly remade by technology, new laws and institutions, and the realities of international commerce -- illicit as well as legitimate. They are also increasingly intangible, living in a virtual and electronic space.

In this world, the United States is adjacent not just to Mexico and Canada but also to China and Bolivia. Italy now borders on Nigeria, and France on Mali.

These borders cannot be protected with motion sensors or National Guard troops.

Political unions, economic reforms and breakthroughs in technology and business came together to revolutionize the world's borders during the 1990s.

It was a decade during which a global passion for free markets erupted. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, politicians and their electorates felt that prosperity was possible by enticing foreigners to invest, tourists to visit, traders to import and export, banks to move funds freely in and out of countries, and businesses to operate free of heavy regulations.

It was also a decade when nations with long histories of conflict or animosity surprised the world by dismantling or rearranging their borders through political unions and trade agreements. The European Union kicked into high gear; Argentina, Brazil and rival South American nations formed a regional customs union; and Mexico joined Canada and the United States in their own trade agreement. These efforts sought to maximize economic growth and political harmony (or so the leaders hoped).

Meanwhile, new technologies were vastly reducing the economic and business importance of distance and geography. The only prices that dropped faster than shipping a cargo container from Shanghai to Los Angeles were those for sending e-mail, making phone calls, or rapid-firing text and images across borders.

With borders much more fluid, opportunities for profit multiplied and cross-border activity boomed. Suddenly it seemed normal to invest in Thailand, visit China, trade in exotic currencies, take seasonal jobs in different countries or download stolen software from Bulgarian Web sites.

Even something as simple as buying a counterfeit Prada handbag on the streets of Manhattan or Washington represented the final step in a long journey of border crossings. The bag's original design -- probably acquired or stolen in Europe -- was transported electronically or physically to China. There, the leather, zippers, belts and buckles were procured and assembled into tens of thousands of counterfeit handbags. The finished products were then smuggled onto containers officially carrying, say, industrial valves, to ports such as Naples or New York.

Once the handbags reached these final markets, street merchants took over -- often African immigrants who themselves were smuggled across borders by human-trafficking networks. Yes, the poorly paid street vendors are usually as illegal as the goods they're peddling. Meanwhile, the overall counterfeit enterprise reaped enormous cash profits that were converted into bank deposits and laundered across the globe electronically, again trespassing across multiple borders.

These changes reflected a severe and acute new asymmetry: Borders became harder for governments to control, and easier and more lucrative for violators to bypass. Anyone seeking to cross them found it easier to do so, while government agencies floundered in their efforts to regulate the new world they had helped create.

Today's borders are violated, enforced and remade not only on the ground but also in cyberspace, multilateral agencies and the virtual world of international finance.

Consider the most mundane of examples: the ATM machine. When an immigrant living in the United States sends her ATM card to her children in the Philippines and they draw money from her U.S. checking account, where has the transaction taken place? Did the kids cross a border to tap the funds from an American bank? In a sense, they did -- the ubiquitous ATM has become a powerful, easy-to-use, border-crossing tool. Often, such crossings are perfectly legal. But not always.

National boundaries are also being transformed by new -- or newly empowered -- international institutions. For example, when the World Trade Organization's 149 member states agree on the reduction of tariff rates around the globe, our time-honored beliefs about controlling sovereign borders are upended. On trade, the borders that matter may be drawn at the WTO headquarters in Geneva as much as anywhere else.

The fluid, unpredictable nature of modern borders is evident even among the most geographically isolated and remote nations on earth. Try landlocked Bolivia and Afghanistan. Their rugged geography and poor roads make internal travel exceedingly difficult and time-consuming. Yet narco-traffickers regularly and swiftly connect Bolivia's remote Chapare region, where coca is cultivated, with Miami or New York, where cocaine is consumed (with a processing stopover in the jungles of Colombia and a transshipment detour to a deserted beach in Haiti). And in Afghanistan, opium traffickers seamlessly link the Deshu district in the lawless Helmand province with elegant consumers in London or Milan.

Even for experienced travelers, reaching Chapare or Deshu is a tough proposition. But location and geography now matter less and less for traffickers or for anyone seeking to violate national borders. In major cities across the globe, the availability of banned merchandise stands as a monument of sorts to nations' eroding sovereignty -- no matter the billions of dollars that governments spend seeking to keep such goods from reaching their shores and penetrating their borders.

In 2004, the Guardian published a dispatch from the banks of the Yalu River, on the border between China and North Korea. "Here and there shadowy figures can be seen on both sides of the misty river quietly carrying out an illegal -- but thriving -- trade in women, endangered species, food and consumer appliances," wrote Jonathan Watts.

If a paranoid police state such as North Korea is incapable of controlling its borders and deterring illicit trade, there seems to be little hope for open, democratic and technologically advanced nations seeking to uphold their sovereign borders. This issue gained urgency in the United States in particular after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when security concerns became paramount.

Yet the paradox of policing borders in a high-tech, globally integrated era is that today, less sovereignty may equal more protection. In order to reinforce national boundaries and combat terrorism, one of the most effective tools a government can deploy is collaboration with other nations -- in effect, ceding or "pooling" certain aspects of their sovereignty.

That is no easy task. It requires partnering with less efficient, less democratic and less trustworthy nations and sharing information, technology, intelligence and decision-making power. In many quarters -- Washington and beyond -- the notion of diluting national sovereignty verges on treason.

But if sovereignty is indeed a hallowed concept, it has become a somewhat hollow one, too. Traditional borders are violated daily by countless means, and virtual borders seem even more permeable and misunderstood. "Closing the border" may appeal to nationalist sentiments and to the human instinct of building moats and walls for protection. But when threats travel via fiber optics or inside migrating birds, and when finding ways to move illegal goods across borders promises unimaginable wealth or the only chance of a decent life, unilateral security measures have the unfortunate whiff of a Maginot line.

The immigration "problem" in the United States isn't about borders or free trade or sending cash to love ones around the world. The problem concerns sovereignty, mass migration, cultural imperatives, and too rapid changes without consultation: People want to make their own choices without having governments foisting progams, regulations...and people upon them.

Look at the Fence!

Thanks to the Minuteman Project, we see here the first pictures of the fence being built by the private sector, on private land, with the cooperation of private landowners, with privately donated funds, on the US-Mexican border in Palominas, Arizona.

The little dog you see at the lower right may be the last living entity to cross without first asking permission of the rightful property owner.

One caller to the Rollye James show stated that his attempt to put up a fence failed, as it was torn down by the government. The property owner erected a fence on his own property, at his own expense, and government workers came and tore it down, stating that they did so because it interfered with migratory pathways.

Fortunately, the matter was taken to court, and the government's action was overruled.

The first version of the fence will stretch for 10 miles. The landowner has made some modifications to the original design, as he has cattle and can not deal with trenches, etc. So we (the Minuteman Project) will be building 10 miles of fortified fencing with rails, barbed wire, concertina wire and railroad ties for vehicle barriers. We do not have a graphic of this design requested by the landowner, but we will soon have pictures!

The first full security fencing of the original design ( see: Fence) will be up on a nearby landowner's property as soon as we can get the steel order placed and shipped.

At Last! A Break in the Clouds!

There is hope on one front, folks, and if we can do this, it might give courage to enough people to protect our nation's security and sovereignty. If we can do that, maybe we can begin to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Please email or call your Representatives - it's so important!

"Path to citizenship" Faces House Foes
By Charles Hurt
WASHINGTON TIMES May 25, 2006

Liberal House Republicans are taking an increasingly tough stance on immigration reform and are more determined than ever to delete the portions of the Senate bill that grant citizenship rights to more than 10 million illegal aliens."I don't want to see a bill come to the floor of the House that gives them a path to citizenship," said Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress.

This is a change from three weeks ago, before Mr. Shays attended 18 community meetings in his district, where the questions invariably turned to immigration. At the first meeting, he told a group of constituents that he supported providing a path to citizenship to illegals. Not anymore."There were real questions about that," Mr. Shays said yesterday. "There is not much tolerance for allowing people to become citizens who came here illegally."

It's the same reaction many House Republicans in moderate and liberal districts have had after hearing from angry constituents in recent weeks, said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, the former chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee who can cite encyclopedic knowledge of congressional districts off the top of his head."It is the hottest issue out there," he said, referring to public reaction nationwide, including his own moderate district in Northern Virginia. "Everywhere I go, even the ethnic groups, everybody is talking about this."

It was with much uneasiness, Mr. Davis said, that he voted for the House's tough border-security bill last year. But since then, he said, he has been stunned by the overwhelming public support for the House approach to immigration reform. "Voters have no faith that the federal government will secure the borders and begin enforcing immigration laws," Mr. Davis said, "and they are outraged over the Senate's citizenship proposal. I have seen it out in my own district, which is a very wealthy, educated, thoughtful district," Mr. Davis said. His constituents "are not knee-jerk people," he said, but "have taken a look at this thing and are very, very tough on immigration right now. They want a tough bill."

U.N. Making Homeschooling Illegal?

Homeschoolers listen up: "Threat seen from U.S. judges who bow to child-rights treaty.

A U.N. treaty conferring rights to children could make homeschooling illegal in the U.S. even though the Senate has not ratified it, a homeschooling association warns.

Michael Farris, chairman and general counsel of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, or HSLDA, believes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child could be binding on U.S. citizens because of activist judges, reports LifeSite News.

Farris said that according to a new interpretation of "customary international law," some U.S. judges have ruled the convention applies to American parents.

"In the 2002 case of Beharry v. Reno, one federal court said that even though the convention was never ratified, it still has an impact on American law," Farris explained, according to LifeSiteNews. "The fact that virtually every other nation in the world has adopted it has made it part of customary international law, and it means that it should be considered part of American jurisprudence."

The convention places severe limitations on a parent's right to direct and train their children, Farris contends.
The HSLDA produced a report in 1993 showing that under Article 13, parents could be subject to prosecution for any attempt to prevent their children from interacting with material they deem unacceptable.

Under Article 14, children are guaranteed "freedom of thought, conscience and religion," which suggests they have a legal right to object to all religious training. Further, under Article 15, the child has a right to "freedom of association."
"If this measure were to be taken seriously, parents could be prevented from forbidding their child to associate with people deemed to be objectionable companions," the HSLDA report explained.

Farris pointed out that in 1995 the United Kingdom was deemed out of compliance with the convention "because it allowed parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes without consulting the child."

Farris argues, according to LifeSiteNews, that "by the same reasoning, parents would be denied the ability to homeschool their children unless the government first talked with their children and the government decided what was best. This committee would even have the right to determine what religious teaching, if any, served the child's best interest."
Offering solutions, Farris suggests Congress use its power to define customary law and modify the jurisdiction of federal courts.

"Congress needs to address this issue of judicial tyranny by enacting legislation that limits the definition of customary international law to include only provisions of treaties that Congress has ratified," he said.

Farris also suggested Congress could pass a constitutional amendment stating explicitly that no provision of any international agreement can supersede the constitutional rights of an American citizen.

He pointed out two such amendments have been proposed in Congress.

Finally, he says specific threats to parental rights can be solved by "putting a clear parents' rights amendment into the black and white text of the United States Constitution."

Remember that a goal of contemporary education is to create "world citizens" in the image mandated by social engineering. The education of children outside their influence and mandates is anathema.

Could Semantics Help Us Win the "War Against Terror"? 8 Achievable Goals

"Ignorance always accompanies tragedy. "

Muslims, after decades-long studying on the principles of Western Democracy, are using these against us. Baffled Westerners are at a loss as to how to effectively counter this trend. If we are smart, we can use the same strategies to the turn the tables on them: use islamic history and semantics to own ends.

Things have not been going well in our "War on Terror" which then became known in some circles as the War Against Islamic Jihad. According to J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker, a more precise denomination, referring to what could be common ground in Muslim history, could rally the Umma, the universal brotherhood of Muslims, to our cause. The West has made progress because, out of our ignorance of Islam and Islamic history, the Ummah can't understand us as our cause has no context nor common vocabulary to which they can relate. They need our help, but first we must educate ourselves. Beyond that, how can we help them, and in turn, allow them to help us?

The Umma Needs Our Help in Modernizing

The first is that they simply don’t have the resources. The Muslim intelligentsia, which is the sole reservoir of opinion leadership that can be placed in opposition to dictatorial governments and throwback preachers, is extremely small – too small even to refer to as a class. Many Muslim intellectuals are living in authoritarian states or worse, subject to harassment, arrest, and assassination by their governments or by terror groups themselves. (As nearly occurred to Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s master novelist and Nobel laureate, whose acceptance of the prize so infuriated a local neanderthal that Mahfouz – nearing eighty at the time – was stabbed in the back while walking the streets of his own neighborhood.) Many of these intellectuals are sympathetic to the West (they after all share many of our ideals), but we can’t expect a few thousand out of a  polity of one billion to take up that kind of a burden.

A second reason is that the Islamic media is, in almost all cases, controlled by government and acting as mouthpieces for the established order. (Al-Jazeera is only a partial exception.) No open debate is possible under these circumstances; no information contrary to the status quo will make it past the censors. Alternatives are in the process of creation, as we have seen with the establishment of blogging in liberated Iraq. But the infowave has only recently struck the Islamic world, and the establishment of an alternative Net culture will require time.

And third: to be frank, many of the Islamic umma remain in a medieval or even tribal mindset. Except for political and business elites, a majority are separated from the soil by one generation at best. They are still living with ancient concepts, attitudes, and beliefs. They are uncertain about modernity, and to some extent fearful of it. They are bewildered by things that we take as a matter of course. Often enough, that bewilderment is expressed as hostility.

None of this means that they are inferior or incapable. It means they are inexperienced, and require guidance from those who have gone before them. That guidance must come from us. By “us”, I mean, of course, the United States and other members of the Anglosphere; nobody else cares, and in point of fact, it’s unlikely that the Muslim people would pay much attention to them if they did.

A final complication is mutual incomprehension. It would be surprising if this weren’t the case. Islam and the West are, after all, different civilizations, with differing histories, worldviews, and values. Separate paths result in separate products.

"What is required of us is an effort to pinpoint ideas and concepts within Muslim culture and history that can act as points of commonality between the West and Islam, anchor points for bridges between the two civilizations..."

Dunn suggests that we focus on the kharijites who were the first sect to bring schism into the new Islamic community.

They began as followers of Ali ibn Abi Talib, grandson of the Prophet, who became the fourth caliph in 657 after the assassination of Caliph Uthman.

Ali was immediately challenged by the governor of Syria, who refused to pledge his fealty. (Early Islamic history is a parade of one succession crisis after another.) By all accounts one of the most reasonable men of his time, Ali agreed to subject the matter to arbitration.

This set the Kharijites, who consisted of members of three tribes, ablaze. Ali, in their opinion, had been selected by no less than Allah, and in putting the divine choice up to human arbitration was committing a gross and unforgivable sin. Pulling up stakes, the tribes headed toward Kufa, south of Baghdad, in the process earning themselves their name.

Ali pursued them, first to remonstrate, and then, when that failed, to bring them to battle. The Kharijites were defeated, with many killed. Some of the remnant returned to Ali, but the hard core retreated across the Tigris. Ali let them go, assuming that they’d been taught their lesson and would be no further problem.

He was mistaken. In 661 he was assassinated, by a Kharijite. The Kharijites possessed a straightforward and easily-grasped theology: Anyone who wasnot a Kharijite was an unbeliever, and all unbelievers should be killed.

The Kharijites introduced a number of concepts and practices into Islam: the politicization of religion, the conviction that the earliest days of the caliphate marked a state of perfection against which all human society must be judged, the practice – called takfir—of anathemizing individuals and groups as heretics, the use of extreme methods, including the slaughter of entire families, against opponents – methods that we today would describe as “terrorism.”

For the next two centuries the Kharijites attempted to ensure the spread of this simple, invigorating faith by killing everyone who disagreed with them. They set up a series of independent theocratic states throughout the region, using them as operating bases to target the Ommayad holdings. They encouraged revolt, took over entire provinces and massacred those who refused conversion. They practiced a form of guerilla warfare, retreating onto the Iranian plateau  when things went poorly only to burst out once again when opportunity beckoned. Their activities weakened the Ommayad caliphate so grievously as to guarantee the success of the Abbassid revolt. The Abbassids themselves required maximum effort to finally wipe out the Kharijites in the 9th century.

Although the Kharijites were destroyed, their influence lived on...

I would say that it lives on in fundamentalist movements and notions of superiority and intolerance against apostates and non-Muslims. It became the dark side of Islam.

There are some existing groups that are directly influenced by Kharijite beliefs: Takfir wa-l Hijra in Egypt, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as several North African Bedouin tribes.

Some contend that Kharijism is a component of all Islamic terrorism, "pointing out that Said Qutb, the inspiration of Osama bin-Laden and others, was well-read in Kharijite doctrine, [and that] The Wahhabis, with their fundamentalism, their eagarness to anathemize opponents, and their proselyte activities, [demonstrate] Kharijite tendencies."

What does this mean and how can we use it?

Muslims possess their own understanding of terrorism, derived from their own history and experience and based on their own principles. The Muslim view of terror, unsurprisingly, concentrates on the effect that it has on Islam and the Muslim community. The impact on the world beyond in strictly secondary.

But the crucial point is that the Muslim’s Kharijite is the same as the Jihadi, the Jihadi the same as a Kharijite. For all practical purposes, they are identical. There is not an iota of difference between the two.

Here is our bridge.

By adapting and by calling our fight the "War on Kharijism" , we will achieve several things:

1) The West can undermine Jihadi attempts to portray the War on Terror as a clash of civilizations or a campaign against Islam, definite turn off for the billion-member Ummah.

2) It would define clearly and unambigously what were are fighting against and why.

3) It would increase chances of gaining understanding and support form the Muslim Ummah.

4) It will put in historical context the large mass of proganda by the Jihadis...as the behavior not of heroic rebels or defenders of Islam, but of deadly misfits well-known to Muslim history.

5) Adapting the concept would assure Muslims that we're talking about the same thing and fighting the same battle, giving the Muslim masses an enemy they can understand.

6) It would go a long way toward explaining our own actions as simply a response against Kharijism, which has spilled over into our territory.

7) It would enable Middle Eastern governments, often pilloried for allying themselves with the U.S., to lay claim to the high ground of defending accepted Islamic practice.

8) The West would be able to develop means of prophylaxis to combat and prevent the development of these movements.

How can we achieve our goal without further alienating a fifth of the world's population?

1) We must educate ourselves by learning how such movements grow and develop; their methods and tactics, their effect on the Muslim Umma as a whole, and their weakness and how they are destroyed.

2) Use the concepts and rituals of Islam about Kharjite as a gate into Muslim thought and behavior. In other words, talk to them using language and concepts they can understand, a common-sense approach.

3) Reminding some Muslim regimes that they owe more than one honor debt - Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and now Iraq, under Islamic principles should be beholden in a debt that is "sacred even when involving a Nezerin, (that is, a Christian).

4) The People of the Book - The Koran is clear that Jews and Christians, as People of the Book, are believers and must be respected as such, a reminder than many continue to ignore, or of which need to be reminded that feelings of "hostility and superiority" must be put aside as a religious obligation.

5) A revival of the Mutazilite School of Islam.

The Mutazilites were a rationalist movement that appeared in Islam in the wake of the Kharijites. Based on Greek philosophical sources (with much reference to Aristotle), they believed in a reasoned analysis of all aspects of religion and society. They died out early, overwhelmed by the traditionalist Ashariteschool. But the movement has experienced a revival in the past century, in response to Islam’s confrontation with modernity.

Since much of the difficulties afflicting Islam today arise from that very conflict, it would appear that a school of thought like Mutazila would be a high-value proposition. Like everyone else, Muslims will not adapt to modernity except on their own terms. Some idea of what those terms comprise could very well be found in Mutazila.

6) Americans must overcome their traditional ignorance of other cultures which, to our detriment, has "been the hallmark of American engagements". An example is seen in the closing events of WWII in the Pacific.

Failing to grasp what "unconditional surrender" meant to the Japanese, the phrase was uttered offhand by FDR, much in the same way that President Bush used the term "crusaders" in his speech. These loaded terms have caused resentment and heightened hostility. "To Japanese thinkng, [unconditional surrender] meant subjecting the Emperor, the divine presence on this earth, to criminal prosecution and the possibility of death. They could not allow this, as they proved with their blood at places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Ignorance can be no excuse as our very existence depends on smart thinking as well as on a show of force.

Read it all.

Another Senate Sellout of Sovereignty

Yup - it's true, all true; our country is being sold off at a bargain basement price to our Neighbors south of the border! It's the kind of thing that gives the name "New Mexico" a whole new meaning!

Here it is, folks, a last minute addition to the Senate Amnesty Bill, thanks to Senator Dodd:

S.Amdt.4089 contains the following language:

(b) CONSULTATION REQUIREMENT

"Consultations between United States and Mexican authorities at the federal, state, and local levels concerning the construction of additional fencing and related border security structures along the United States-Mexico border shall be undertaken prior to commencing any new construction, in order to solicit the views of affected communities, lessen tensions and foster greater understanding and stronger cooperation on this and other important issues of mutual concern."


Ok, people, the House is our last chance. Don't give up, keep on nagging. Go let your Representatives know what you think.

Some Mexican migrants turning to bicycles

Many migrants are skipping the use of unreliable and perfidious "coyotes", smugglers and are hiking through the desert. And new trend is the use of old bicycles that will soon be abandoned. The trip is not for the faint of heart, and most don't fall in the faint-of-heart category.

The 110-degree heat and rough terrain of the Arizona desert would exhaust the fittest of cyclists, but these migrants are often middle-aged housewives or farmers, riding battered second-hand bikes for 30 or 40 miles.
The bikes also carry their supplies and belongings, so if rocks or cactus spines shred the tires, they get off and push.
The prize? A chance at a low-wage job.

"We've seen them going by on bicycles right by our offices ... in whole groups," said Mario Lopez, an agent for Mexico's Grupo Beta migrant aid agency, whose offices sit just a few hundred yards from the border. "They're usually old bikes because they're going to abandon them anyway."

Most start their trip in Sonoyta, a Mexican border town where the bikes are sold for $30 in a dusty, vacant lot a few blocks from the chest-high, three-rail fence that marks the U.S. border. The fence has prevented vehicles from driving across into the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, but migrants can easily toss a bike over and slip through the rails.
From there, it's a brutal ride over Organ Pipe's hard-packed terrain. Though the park prohibits off-road biking, sets of fresh mountain-bike tracks can be seen running down its foot trails, and the National Park Service often finds abandoned bikes with crumpled wheels and water bottles hanging off the handlebars.

Fred Patton, the park's chief ranger, says "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds" of migrants bike through the park. No count is kept and he can't be precise, but he provides pictures of abandoned bikes. "It's a relatively common means of transport," he said.

Read the rest.


They sound like tough, enterprising risk takers, just the kind of people America needs. The problem is that we can't absorb ten to twenty million at one time or over one or two decades.

It's seems really sad that the Mexico under-utilitizes in Mexico their most valuable asset in: people. My guess is that sending them over in a demographic hoard is exactly the business plan conceived by the smart, tough, and ruthless Mexicans that have never forgotten the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe and the lessons learned by allowing Yankee entrepreneurs to settle Americans in their northern territory, resulting in the Texas Rebellion and the subsequent Mexican American War.

One large difference between then and now is that American settlement was legal. Mexico granted large tracts of land to men like Steven Austin with the proviso that settlers would become good Mexicans by obeying all laws, becoming Catholics, and learning to Speak Spanish. Just like today's migrants, the 19th century variety that moved into what is known as the American Southwest took exception and did not comply. They preferred their native English language, their Protestant religion, and the "peculiar institution of slavery" that was illegal in Mexico. Enforcement of these and other infractions of Mexican law compelled the dictator, Santa Ana, to march against them, with a humiliating defeat, and a transfer of territory after payment. And the rest is history.

A new history is being written and there are new questions to be asked and answered in a relatively short period. Soon enough we will find out of which country or union we are citizens, and which language will be lingua franca of North America.

Will our capital remain in Washington D.C. or moved to a more "convenient" location? Will we continue to have an elected legislature or will we be ruled by an oligarchy? (Are we being ruled by an oligarchy now? Sometimes its hard to tell.) Will a minority of the equivalent of 3 or 4% of our present population be tough enough to take us over? Old-line Europeans are having a similar and growing problem with their migrant populations. It appears that America's migrant minorities are taking their cues from the rapidly-expanding and vocal Muslim minority population that varies from about .5% to 8% .

It's hard to believe what problems a tiny, unassimable minority can cause.

"The United Nations in Your Wallet"

The United Nations is salivating at the prospect of tapping the wallets of developed nations through taxes or surcharges on anything that "globalized": commerce, use of the internet, and now airline tickets.

Sally McNamara, Director of International Relations at the American Legislative Council, reports at Townhall:

In spite of some pretty torrid scandals in recent years, the United Nations (U.N.) is far from finished. In fact, Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the U.N., is leading the gambit for perhaps its biggest power-grab yet – independent tax-raising powers or globo-taxation.

In fact, the U.N. is deeply committed to establishing this ‘sovereign’ power for itself – independent of the scrutiny and direction of its large aid donors (namely the United States). It wraps this concept up in the intentionally boring globo-speak of ‘enhanced dialogues on tax co-operation’ and ‘new innovative funding mechanisms,’ but that is just intended to put a pretty bow on top of a very ugly concept – the removal of the exclusive sovereign power of nation states to levy taxes on its citizenry.

Cliff Kincaid, President of America’s Survival, Inc., has just published a devastating chronology of the U.N.’s sustained campaign for global taxes, noting the 2001 High Level Panel on Financing for Development as a turning-point in the debate. Not only did that meeting call for the establishment of an International Tax Organization, it blatantly outlined two major areas where globotaxation might easily be levied – a currency transactions tax and a carbon tax – both of which would disproportionately hit the U.S.

Since then, a succession of high-level meetings, summits and conferences have been busy gathering steam for this concept: the Millennium Development Goals, the 2005 World Economic and Social Survey, the World Summit on Sustainable Development,  the World Commission Report on the Social Dimension of Globalization and so on and so on; they all share this notion that globotaxation is the most ‘innovative’ solution to long-term funding for the U.N. They propose globotaxes on everything from air transportation to aviation fuel, from airline tickets to carbon emissions, from currency transactions to arms. The list is as ambitious as it is scary. The long arm of the U.N.’s IRS could be in your pocket soon. 
 
One of the U.N.’s more fruitful attempts at global taxation is the formal plan to levy a tax on airline tickets. In November 2005, Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, and Spain issued a joint statement calling for a ‘nationally applied, internationally coordinated’ tax to be levied on air transport travels. The French government has been the first one to bite the bullet, and from July onward, passengers will pay between one and 40 euros on all flights taking off in France. With enthusiastic U.N. support and much back-slapping for President Chirac, Chile has undertaken plans to do the same, with Belgium and Germany currently hovering in the wings to do so. Luckily, both Great Britain and the U.S. have resisted Mr. Annan’s calls for others to follow suit. But make no mistake: the rot has started. Britain’s Liberal Democrats are openly advocating for taxation on aviation fuel as a way of reducing climate change, and with the current spin-over-substance streak running through the Conservative Party, anything is possible from our normally reliable British partners.

Of course, France’s projected annual revenue of $248 million is not nearly enough for the U.N.’s aspirations and the finger-pointing – largely toward to U.S. – is really gathering steam now. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to Secretary General Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, has gone as far as to say that the U.S. is coming up short in its global aid commitments to the tune of $65 billion a year. Of course, Dr. Sachs is a vocal proponent of globo-taxation to make up the difference. At the 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development, Dr. Sachs helpfully points out that: “A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin”.  



The undercurrent of this debate should not be ignored – any global tax will not be a tax on income, at least not at first; there wouldf be riots in the streets if that happened. Any global tax will stealthy enacted and will have to be far-removed from the scrutiny of ordinary taxpayers. So, what better way to circumvent the problem than to tax corporate America, especially the energy companies who both the U.N. and the European Union have been collectively obsessed with since President Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Feeding on media hysteria about imminent global disaster and excessive corporate profits, the proposition seems easier and easier to sell from a public relations perspective.

There is maybe a glimmer of hope though. John Bolton, the ever-sensible U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has flat-out said that the United States accepts neither global aid targets nor global taxes, and President Bush has backed him. But it cannot always be assumed that the White House will be this sensible. Indeed, Bill Clinton told the Millennium Summit in 2000 that national sovereignty needed to be put aside for the sake of a more active U.N.. And for activism you can read – more of the same, with a tax raising platform to boot.

I would never vote for this, and it seems that cavalier politicians play over the heads of the American people.

"Fox Thanks Bush for Surrender"

"Surrender", doublespeak for a done deal, a step on the way to the North American Union that the elites of Canada, Mexico, and the United States want.

Be sure to access the internal links in this blog report.

Why We Still Need Our Military

Recently commissioners of San Francisco declared San Francisco a "military free zone." Anti-war protests again are happening on America's campuses, and calls to impeach Bush are on the rise because of our involvement in Iraq. Don't these people understand that the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union don't mean that America is in any less danger? Perhaps they need to reminded of the rise of other world threats:

China has been increasing spending on military equipment,expanding the size of their military force to include an enormous army and a deep-water navy that could challenge the United States in waters all over the world.

The concern is that U.S. interests in East Asia, the Straights of Malacca, and even in the Western Hemisphere, could be thwarted by Chinese businessmen backed up by their navy and expanding army.

Japan can't help but notice the rising threat by its neighbor, China, and is revising its constitution to allow them "broaden the government's ability to send forces overseas... [and] The revision also opens the door to a broader interpretation of the constitution, permitting what some call "collective self-defense" -- or coming to the military aid of other countries."

Russia, flush with oil wealth, again is making a resurgence, but not without international tension.

Relations between Washington and Moscow are at their lowest ebb in 10 years, and in his recent Address to the Federal Assembly -- equivalent to the State of the Union address -- Putin remarked that "far from everyone in the world has abandoned the old bloc mentality and the prejudices inherited from the era of global confrontation."

The speech as a whole was an intricate balance between the need to arrest Russia's internal societal decline -- one-third of the population, which is shrinking rapidly, lives in poverty -- and a desire to play an ever-greater role in world affairs. Moscow's involvement in the Iranian nuclear affair is a case in point. Its refusal to sanction serious Security Council measures against Tehran is a growing source of concern to the United States and Britain.

This newfound confidence has its basis in Russia's economic resurgence since the collapse of the rouble in 1998, the single largest cause of which is the high (and rising) price of oil...

Continued tensions betweenThe Koreas and between North Korea and the United States are matters of concern. Disturbances from Iran and its surrogates, such as Hamas and other Palestinian groups threaten and annoy Israel and the United States.

The is no let up "The War on Terror", the "War" in Iraq, and tensions and hostility in the Middle East. The rise in the price of oil and oil products cause by increased competition among nations for access in a crucial reason for keeping our military as our economy and lifestyle are based on oil.

South America is not tension free:

Populists movements in Venzuela, Bolivia, and Peru are worrisome, joining the ranks of Cuba and Brazil in a growing dissatisfaction with the U.S. As an example, Venezuela is actually teaming with Iran and has decided to buy war planes from Russia.

Mexico's upcoming elections could put a populist president in power. Nevertheless, relations with Mexico have been tense because of the strain over immigration, the border, and the legalization of many millions of Mexican migrants that are present in the United States, inducing the United States to post armed National Guardsmen close to the border.

The head of the U.S. National Guard surprised Border Patrol officials, declaring some of the troops he will send to assist them will work in close proximity to the border, be armed and allowed to fire their weapons if necessary.
"Any soldier assigned to a mission where he would be placed in harm or danger, where his life would be threatened potentially, will in fact be armed and will have the inherent right of self-protection," Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum told the San Antonio Express-News Thursday.

Federal troops are scheduled to begin deployment to the four states on the Mexican border next week once the Guard and the Defense Department approve the memorandum of understanding that will define the mission's parameters. The document will also require signatures from the border governors.

Representatives from the National Guard and the offices of the governors of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have been meeting in Phoenix this week to craft an agreement on the use of force. The talks have focused on "harmonization" of the different states' laws on self-defense and the use of deadly force, said Texas National Guard commander Army Maj. Gen. Charles G. Rodriguez.

The rules of engagement "will be the same in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas," said Blum.

According to the current plan, the National Guard will conduct border securty operations for two years while the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs increase their numbers. The number of troops deployed at any given time would represent less than 2 percent of available Guard forces, none of which will be assigned from states likely to experience hurricanes this year.
While the Guard will assist with many support functions – conducting aerial surveillance and reconnaissance, building new roads and fences, providing intelligence and analysis to help track illegal crossings, transporting Border Patrol officers and detainees, and assisting with a number of logistics functions – some of their duties will put them in close proximity to the border and illegal crossers.

Troops stationed at vehicle inspection stations and engineers working along the border could be armed, said Blum, with M-16s, 9-mm handguns and shotguns.

"But we're not going to be carrying machine guns. We're not going to be carrying heavy weapons. We're not at war here," Blum said, adding he wants his troops "to be in a position to protect themselves."

Some folks seem to think that withdrawal into the territory of the United States would solve all America's problems. However, U.S. interests could not be protected without the use of the military and access oil and other necessary commodities would surely be denied, or be used as a weapon against us by hostile countries or groups such as al Qaeda.

The catalog listed above is only a small sampling of current and possible conflicts for which we a strong military.

FYI

New article on The New Enlightenment: "TV's Season Past."

Mexico Gets Veto Power? "Consultation" Required?

Michelle Malkin has pulled together a few links that should make your blood boil.

Here are some questions:

Since when does the American Congress kowtow to Mexico?

Why are our state and federal legislators and legislatures "consulting" a foreign power on any American policy?

Why are they more impressed by, and care more for the ideas and opinions of foreigners over their legitimate constituents, the American people.

Why are they putting the interets of the citizens of another nation ahead of those of the United States? Could it be that our two, or is it three, nations are already entwined...and we just know it?

Villaraigosa, Fox's emissary in the Los Angeles, weighs in:

The mayor stressed the importance of the region's economic ties with its southern neighbor. He said he intended to discuss trade and tourism with Fox on Friday and avoid the contentious immigration debate, which is a federal issue.

At the same time, he acknowledged a federal border crackdown involving thousands of uniformed troops and new barriers could hinder, rather than help, his attempts to expand business with the city's southern trading partner.
Mexico sends more tourists to Los Angeles than any other country an estimated 1.5 million in 2005. Trade between Mexico and the Los Angeles region totaled $25 billion last year, which supported an estimated 42,000 jobs in Los Angeles County, the mayor said.

"We gain more by embracing the world, rather than turning our backs on it," the mayor said. "By working toward the mutual benefits of increased trade and foreign investment, we've taken steps beyond enforcing laws and building walls to address the flow of immigrants."

Improved business ties, he said, "will ultimately work to reduce the underlying economic factors that push people away from Mexico and toward the United States."

As mayor of an ethnically diverse city and the son of a Mexican immigrant Villaraigosa has spoken sympathetically of those "who clean hotel rooms, who sweep the floors, who watch our children." At the same time, he has also called for secure borders and the enforcement of immigration law.

As he has in the past, he urged Congress to forge a compromise that "holds people accountable for breaking the law, but also provides a pathway for citizenship for the 12 million people who are currently living and working here."
Fox has faced criticism for a U.S. visit that overlapped with the congressional debate. But the mayor said the timing was not inappropriate.

Antonio...weren't you elected by American citizens, and, upon inauguration, didn't you swear to uphold the Constitution? But he's no better or worse than other American politicians...at every level.

Check out this post at "A Certain Slant of Light."

Immigration Proposals...So Far

Here is a comparison chart comparing the various bills and "hurdles to overcome in conference."

A tidal wave is sweeping over us...for the sake of the North American Union and the New World Order! Why else would subsequent administrations look the other way, tie the hands of the Border Patrol and continuously extol the virtues of immigrants over the interests of legitimate citizens?

Check out this post from "A Certain Slant of Light.

A Dollar Bubble?

"Soaring Commodity Prices Point Toward Dollar Devaluation"

A very troubling report:

The astonishing rally of commodity prices during the past 12 months has taken most analysts, economists and investors by surprise. Rather than a dramatic change in the relationship between supply and demand for the underlying commodity, surging commodity prices have been driven by the devaluation of the preeminent marker of international commodity values -- the U.S. dollar. In the months ahead, the dollar's devaluation will increasingly register against other major currencies. Rapidly deteriorating U.S. economic fundamentals, questionable policy at the Federal Reserve, increasing political instability and extreme global geopolitical instability may trigger significant foreign capital flight from the United States.


Brief History of Commodity Prices


In late 2005, the Commodity Research Bureau's broad commodity price index, known as the C.R.B. Index, quietly surpassed record high levels set in the early 1980s. By the third week of May 2006, the C.R.B. Index gained another 12 percent. Behind this year's rise in the C.R.B. Index have been unprecedented price rallies of individual commodities. In the first five months of 2006, crude oil prices have increased by a mere 14 percent followed by gains in corn and wheat of about 10 percent. Price gains for other commodities have far outpaced the gains of oil and grains.


Zinc prices have doubled in the past five months, copper prices are up 80 percent, silver has risen by 60 percent and palladium, tin, gold, aluminum and platinum have gained 50 percent, 40 percent, 39 percent, 36 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Prices for other commodities including lead, iron and scrap iron have followed a similar path this year. While these commodities have vastly varied uses from industrial to food production, they all have one common feature -- they are denominated and traded internationally in U.S. dollars.


It is a dubious notion that global economic growth has suddenly reached a point where worldwide demand has overwhelmingly and simultaneously outstripped worldwide supply of all these commodities. In 2005, real global economic growth slowed to about 3.2 percent from nearly four percent in 2004. Slower global economic growth was led by slower real economic growth in the United States, which decelerated to 3.5 percent in 2005 from 4.2 percent in 2004. Global demand for commodities was actually declining, as prices for these commodities began to gallop higher in 2005.


Falling Commodity Value of the Dollar


While U.S. and global real economic growth accelerated in the first quarter of 2006, this acceleration was hardly sufficient to be behind the further rise of commodity prices in the first five months of this year. Rather than demand pushing the value of commodities higher in the past 18 months, it has been the dollar's devaluation against commodities that has pushed commodity prices to record highs. In other words, it is not zinc, copper and silver prices that are gaining; it is the value of the dollar that is declining against these commodities.


The devaluation of the dollar against the world's major commodities is being driven by the exceptional growth in the world's supply of dollars during the past two years. Growth in the world's supply of dollars has come from two primary sources: rising international oil prices and the very large and growing U.S. trade deficit.


Rising international oil prices during the past two years have dramatically increased global demand for and supply of dollars, which are used to buy crude oil. These dollars end up in the hands of the world's crude oil producers, who have invested some of this windfall in U.S. Treasury, agency and corporate bonds. Similarly, the U.S. trade deficit has lavished dollars on many countries that produce exports bound for the United States during the past two years. Again, most of this windfall has been invested in U.S. Treasury, agency and corporate bonds.


To get an idea of the magnitude of growth in the world's supply of dollars during the past two years, one must calculate the dollar value of rising crude oil prices and add to this the size of the U.S. trade deficit. In 2004, global demand for crude oil grew by about four percent. Higher oil prices, which advanced by 34 percent, and demand for oil combined to increase the world's dollar supply by about $330 billion. In 2005, international crude oil prices gained another 35 percent and global demand for oil grew by only 1.6 percent. Nonetheless, the world's supply of dollars increased by a further $460 billion.


The U.S. trade deficit was $666 billion in 2004 and $782 billion in 2005. Thus, in 2004 the world's supply of dollars grew by over $1 trillion, which was overshadowed in 2005 when the supply of dollars grew by a further $1.2 trillion. Adjusting these figures downward for double counting the portion of the U.S. trade deficit linked to crude oil imports still leaves the average annual growth of the world's supply of dollars in excess of $1 trillion per year in 2004 and 2005. According to data from the U.S. Treasury, foreigners invested about $900 billion in U.S. securities in both 2004 and 2005. At the end of 2005, foreigners held about $4 trillion worth of U.S. debt securities and about $2 trillion worth of U.S. equities.



Of course, the world's supply of dollars has also been pushed higher during the past two years by rising prices of other dollar-denominated commodities such as zinc, copper silver, palladium, and tin, among others. Although most of the increase in the world's supply of dollars since 2004 has been reabsorbed into U.S. bonds and equities, as much as $600 billion remains outside of U.S. asset markets. Some of this money has undoubtedly found its way into the asset markets of other countries. Most of it, however, has been parked in alternative investments such as commodities. Rather than a bubble in commodity prices, as at least one prominent economist has asserted, recent commodity price action is indicative of a growing bubble in the world's supply of dollars.

Read the rest.

The Evolution of Math Instruction in the US, 1950 to the Present

Subject: evolution of new math; story as told to me:

Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The countergirl took my $2, and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort, and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help.

I tell you this to demonstrate the evolution in teaching math since the1950s:

1. Teaching Math In 1950

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

2. Teaching Math In 1960

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?

3. Teaching Math In 1970

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is$80. Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Math In 1980

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is$80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Math In 1990

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of$20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds andsquirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers.)

6. Teaching Math In 2006

Un hachero vende una carretada de madera para $100. El costo de la producciones es $80.

"Is Islamic law "extremist"?

Robert Spencer at JihadWatch comments on moderation and extremism in Islam. While Muslims attempt to convince non-Muslims, especially Westerners, that Islam is peaceful and "moderate", their argument for reform are ineffective for they don't and can't convince the extremist and "an exercise in self-deception.

He is responding to a piece by Abdurrahman Wahid in the Washington Post.

Here is Spencer:

...What peaceful Muslims like Wahid need to do is not spend their time writing articles in Western media outlets, but convincing the mujahedin. I am all for real moderate Muslims, but if I can see that a moderate's account of Islamic teaching is inaccurate, a mujahid will certainly be able to also. And if that moderate's moderation won't convince Muslims, what's the point of it? To make non-Muslims feel better? I would rather have the truth than feel better on the basis of half-truths, thank you.

Reform isn't accomplished by deception or self-deception. Reform is accomplished by acknowledging the problem and coming up with ways to deal with it. Let Wahid confront the specific Qur'anic passages, Hadith passages, examples from the life of Muhammad, and rulings of the madhahib that the mujahedin use to recruit and motivate Muslims to commit violence and attempt to subvert Western societies, and find new ways to understand those passages that will be convincing to Muslims...

Read it all.

"Feared Saudi religious police reined in"

This is good news,

The Interior Ministry said it is taking measures to restrict the powers of the agency that runs the religious police, a force resented by many Saudis for interfering in their personal lives.

In a decree carried by the official Saudi Press Agency late Wednesday, Interior Minister Prince Nayef said members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or the religious police, can still make arrests in cases like the harassment of women, but probes will now be conducted by the public prosecutors.

"The role of the commission ... ends with the arrest of the suspect or suspects," said the decree, sent to provincial governors across the kingdom.

The morality squad has long enjoyed wide and unchallenged powers. Its members roam public places, such as malls, markets and universities, looking for such infractions as unrelated men and women mingling in public, men skipping the five daily prayers and women with strands of hair showing from under their veil.

They've scolded salesmen for dressing elegantly, waiters for serving food with a smile and young women for carrying pictures of heartthrobs, such as actor Leonardo di Caprio.

After the arrests, the religious police, known as muttawa in Arabic, would sometimes hold people incommunicado and insist on taking part in ensuing probes.

While some Saudis believe the commission plays a vital role in ensuring full compliance with the strict school of Islam Saudi Arabia follows, others have been speaking out against its intrusions. Some newspapers have published anecdotes of Saudi encounters with the feared agents.

The commission has said it is training its members to be more civil.

An increase in civility is not good enough in light of the action that has had deadly consequences.

Vicente Fox Is Smiling

Why is Vicente Fox calmly making his progress through the western section of the United States, "promoting trade," lecturing the Congress on immigration, fairness, and the need work together to "solve the problem"? Unperturbed, he knows that he probably has nothing to worry about, that there is little risk of being thwarted, of the border being sealed, of Mexican remitters being branded felons or, really any meaningful change and the partnership, the done deal has already been arranged, in conferences, behind the scenes, out of view of the American people.

Vicente Fox is smiling because the "President [Is] Quietly Creating 'NAFTA Plus'

Without announcing his intentions to do so, President Bush has decided to support the creation of a North American Union through a process of governmental regulations, never having to bring the issue before the American people for a clear referendum or vote.

The Bush Administration has decided to "back-door" the creation of a North American Union political entity that would effectively erase our borders with Mexico and Canada and create several super-regional governing bodies that would have jurisdiction over the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.

This analysis has been advanced by economist Miguel Pickard at the Center for Economic and Political Research for Community Action (CIEPAC) in Chiapas, Mexico. Writing for the International Relations Center in New Mexico, Pickard explains how what he calls "NAFTA Plus" is being put in place by political elites in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, largely without explanation to or understanding by the public in any of the three countries:

Contrary to NAFTA, whose tenets were laid out in a single negotiated treaty subjected to at least cursory review by the legislatures of the participating countries, NAFTA Plus is more the elites’ shared vision of what a merged future will look like. Their ideas are being implemented through the signing of "regulations," not subject to citizens' review. The vision may initially have been labeled NAFTA Plus, but the name gives a mistaken impression of what is at hand, since there will be no single treaty text, no unique label to facilitate keeping tabs. Perhaps for this reason, some civil society groups are calling the phenomenon by another name, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPPNA), an official sobriquet for the summits held by the three chief executives to agree on the future of "North America."

We have previously discussed the March 2005 summit in Waco, Tex., where President Bush, President Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Martin made their joint statement announcing the formation of "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America" (SPP). The Department of Commerce documents the extensive working agenda undertaken by the U.S. government to implement the SPP directive.

Miguel Packard goes on to note that Bush has signed onto the North American Union agenda:

After initially rejecting it, the idea of a "North American community" has come of age among U.S. government strategists and a convinced George W. Bush is now vigorously pushing it forward.
We have also pointed to the Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) task force report entitled "Building a North American Community" that contains the blueprint for creating a North American Union by 2010. The CFR task force report makes clear that a fundamental goal of the contemplated North American Union would be to redefine boundaries such that the primary immigration control will be around the three countries of the North American Union, not between the three countries.

Packard argues that a driving reason Bush has embraced the idea of creating the North American Union is to secure natural resources -- Canadian water as well as oil and natural from both Canada and Mexico. Regarding water, Packard notes that "Bush declared that Canada’s water was part of the United States' energy security." As evidence, he cites "mega-projects" proposed by the U.S., such as a "Grand Canal" that would transport "plentiful water from Canadian rivers and lakes to the Great Lakes." Regarding oil and natural gas, Packard comments that a North American Union would "guarantee a relatively cheap flow of oil," making the idea of creating a single North American space suddenly "not so ludicrous."

Packard documents the extensive work the CFR independent task force (ITF) took to create their blueprint report. ITF had three meetings, in Toronto (October 2004), New York (December 2004), and Monterrey (February 2005), before releasing their final report (May 2005), just after the Waco trilateral meeting. A key adviser to ITF was Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University. Even though Pastor supported John Kerry for President in 2004, he ends up having a major impact on Bush as the current administration moves forward to implement the CFR plan to form a North American Union.
Even before joining the ITF as vice chair, Pastor was preaching the need for the North American Union to have a political agenda. In a speech titled "A Modest Proposal" in snide homage to Jonathan Swift, Pastor told the Trilateral Commission in 2002 that the North American Union needed to implement a series of political proposals which would have authority over the sovereignty of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Specifically, Pastor called for the creation of North American passports and a North American Customs and Immigrations, which would have authority over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security. A North American Parliamentary Group would oversee the U.S. Congress. A Permanent Court on Trade and Investment would resolve disputes within NAFTA, exerting final authority over the judgments of the U.S. Supreme Court. A North American Commission would "develop an integrated continental plan for transportation and infrastructure."

Pastor also advocated the creation of a new currency, the "Amero," to replace the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso, much as the Euro replaced the currencies of the individual participating countries. The creation of the Amero had first been proposed by economist Herbert Grubel in a 1999 report to the Canadian Fraser Institute calling for a North American Monetary Union."
Bush's determination to press for a North American Union may well be a key reason the Bush Administration has not secured our border with Mexico. Since 1986, important law enforcement provisions of our various immigration laws have been largely ignored, while "amnesty" provisions have grandfathered millions of illegal aliens to stay and gain citizenship.

The Bush Administration has supported adding enforcement to the Kennedy-McCain bill (S. 2611) currently being debated in the Senate. Are provisions to build a 370-mile wall and to send the National Guard to the border being added merely to look tough, with the real goal being to legalize the 12 million illegal aliens the administration admits are already in the country? Conservatives in the Senate and the House must demand be answers before final votes are taken and a conference committee sets to work.

What is your goal, Mr. President, to establish a North American Union where the border with Mexico is erased, or to secure the border once and for all, such that the invasion of Mexico's underclass into America stops?

I didn't vote for this? Did you? Why hasn't this been reported on the front page of every newspaper in America? The Bush and Fox "good cop, bad cop routine" has gone on long enough.

The sad part is that most of Congress probably is also complicit. Everyone has been informed that the Senate bill won't meet muster in the House and the whole process will shut grind down. Part of the wall will be built, 1,500 Border Patrol agents can be trained yearly and put into place, the National Guard is there to "assist", but nothing more. Illegal "foreigners" will trickle in or pour in with no barrier to stop them and, eventually, there will be so many here that "Nafta Plus" will seem natural and the merger will be complete.

And yet they come, using any route possible.

Way Off-Topic, But Perhaps of Interest. . .

My husband and I took the updated versions of our wills and health directives to our lawyer last week.

We are both retired physicians, so the health directive - the part where you indicate how you wish to be treated when you became terminal, with no hope of recovery - was of some interest to both of us. We both want to receive pain relief as if we were fully conscious and in pain, and while we would have nutrition withdrawn, we do not want hydration withdrawn.

Just in case there is pain, pain medication can ease the discomfort of hunger more easily than the severe discomfort of dehydration. It would take longer to die, but since our state does not permit euthanasia (unless you're a convicted murderer, of course), it would be our choice to die as comfortably as possible.

We well remember the Terri Schiavo case, where a young woman lay in a persistent vegetative state for several years before all life support was withdrawn. We saw copies of her brain scans, and there was no doubt that she was beyond recovery. Her brain was shrunken, and the anatomy was abnormal and indistinct.

However, with fluids and nutrition, she was alive, and according to her parents, appeared minimally aware of, and responsive to, her surroundings. The videos we all saw on TV were said to be several years old, so it was hard to say how she actually appeared then.

Her parents wanted to have custody of their daughter so that they could continue to care for her, at their expense. As we all know, the court refused to allow them to do this, and gave the responsibility for her fate to her husband. He chose to withdraw nutrition and hydration, and Terri died about two weeks later.

To me, it seemed as if the court considered Terri's husband as her owner, and legally, she became no more important than a piece of inanimate property. If there had been no one else willing to care for Terri, then perhaps we could understand why, after several years of declining function, it would not be totally inappropriate to withdraw support and allow her to die; had Terri lived not very many decades ago, she would have died long before, because the means to keep her alive over the long term, even though low-tech, were not available then.

But the technology to maintain her was available to her, and her parents were willing to care for her at their own expense. Given that in her state, someone had to care for her if she were to survive, I thought that it would not be inappropriate for the court to transfer the responsibility for her care to a willing volunteer.

It is all but certain that nothing would have come of it; Terri had already had very advanced rehabilitative efforts, and her condition was declining in spite of every effort made on her behalf. But if someone volunteered to relieve her husband of that encumbrance, it seemed a reasonable thing to allow.

Why not?

The parents kept saying they wanted to try again, try longer, and try harder. It was their hope that "something" would appear on the scene to help their daughter. Almost certainly, they did not truly think that there would be any real recovery, but they would have had the satisfaction of knowing that every effort had been made, thus erasing any doubts, and might have been able to say goodbye to their daughter with some peace.

It seemed highly unlikely at the time, but as the old saying goes, you never know about the "something." I found the following piece of some interest, and thought you might too:


Groundbreaking Study Finds Drug Arouses People from a Permanent Vegetative State

5/24/06
Terry Vanderheyden

SPRINGS, South Africa, May 23, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – South African researchers have discovered a medication that temporarily arouses patients from a permanent vegetative state.
Scientists Ralf Clauss, now practicing nuclear medicine in the UK, and Wally Nel, in family practice in South Africa, found that Zolpidem, an insomnia drug, effectively restored consciousness to three individuals who were all in permanent vegetative states for at least three years before commencing the trial. After administering the drug, which the doctors have been doing every morning for three years, the three individuals all “wake up” to varying degrees, answer simple questions and engage in activities like watching television.

Their findings, published in the most recent issue of the journal NeuroRehabilitation, describe the confirmed permanent vegetative states of two motor vehicle accident patients and one near drowning patient. Drs. Clauss and Nel stated that, according to accepted measures of cognitive function – the Rancho Los Amigos Cognitive score – their level of consciousness was dramatically improved from a range of I-II before to V-VII after the drug.

According to BBC News coverage, patient L had been in a vegetative state for three years, showing no response to touch and no reaction to his family. After Zolpidem, he was able to talk to them and answer simple questions. Patient G was also able to answer simple questions and catch a basketball. Patient N had been ‘constantly screaming,’ but stopped after being given the drug when he started watching TV and responding to his family.

Dr. Clauss told the BBC that “For every damaged area of the brain, there is a dormant area, which seems to be a sort of protective mechanism. The damaged tissue is dead, there’s nothing you can do,” he explained. “But it’s the dormant areas which ‘wake up’.”

I Guess He Just Forgot...

Hmmm. . . What's wrong with this picture?


Presidential Oath of Office:

"I, name, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and I will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."


The Constitution of the United States of America (referred to above, in the Presidential Oath of Office), Article IV, Section 4:

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion. . ."

California High School Exit Exam Reinstated

The California Supreme Court today reinstated the state's high school exit exam one week after a Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction against the test that students need to pass to graduate.

The high court granted a request by the state education department to lift the injunction and referred the case to the state appellate court for further action.

With graduation ceremonies fast approaching at many schools, it is not immediately clear how the Supreme Court's decision today affects the thousands of high school seniors who have failed the exam and would have been prevented from receiving their diplomas.

On May 12, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Freedman issued a preliminary injunction against the mandatory testing requirement, ruling that it places an unfair burden on poor and minority students who attend low-performing schools.

The decision threw into question the fate of many of the 46,700 seniors statewide -- roughly 1 in 10 -- who have failed the two-part test. This year's 12th-graders were the first class to face the testing requirement, which includes a section on eighth-grade math and another on ninth- and 10th-grade English. Students are required to answer little more than half the questions correctly and can take the test multiple times. Students with learning disabilities are exempted from the test.

Originally slated for students in the class of 2004, the test was postponed for two years because of low passing rates. In January, State Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, who wrote the legislation mandating the exam in 1999, rejected calls from civil rights groups and others to consider alternatives to the test.

The challenge to the exit exam was filed by attorney Arturo Gonzalez on behalf of a group of students and their parents.

In issuing the injunction, Freedman said he was swayed by Gonzalez's argument that many impoverished and minority students -- particularly those learning English as a second language -- attend low-performing schools that do not prepare them for the test.

Of the 46,700 seniors who have failed the test, 20,600 are designated as limited English learners and 28,300 are poor.

Limited English learners need to get out of the "language ghettoes" in which English is rarely heard nor seen. The learning of any language is best achieved through immersion over an extended period.

Fitzgerald Is Worried and So Am I

Suicide bombers, WMDs are scary, guns and bullets and rampaging beheaders are scary, but more sinister and effective forces worry me more:

The main weapons of Jihad, to spread Islam so that it will dominate and Muslims will rule, are not those of military combat (qital), and "terrorism" is not the main or most effective instrument of Jihad.

The main or most effective instruments of Jihad are:

1) Demographic conquest.
This can take several forms. One is merely outbreeding the Infidels both in
a) The dar al-Islam (where excess population then finds its inexorable way, or has over the past forty years, into the Lands of the Infidels); as well as

b) Within the Lands of the Infidels. For in Western societies, advanced education, the need or desire or inculcated desire to work, as well as sexual freedom, have all contributed to a decline in the birthrate of the indigenous Infidels. Meanwhile, Muslims exploit to the full the structure of generous state support (free education, free health care, subsidized housing, family allowances) with in some cases polygamous relationships hidden from or silently ignored by Western governments. And women’s function for all too many Muslim households is to breed; they are able to do so by that very exploitation of Infidel taxpayers (just as Muslim states were supported by the Jizyah taxes on Infidels).

Within lands where Muslims dominate, the Dar al-Islam, over time, and even in the last century, the relative and in some cases absolute numbers of non-Muslims has much diminished. Mass murder will do it: the Christian Armenians massacred by Turks and Kurds (with others picked off by Arabs in the Syrian Desert). The Christian Greeks killed at Smyrna or in similar attacks, and whose numbers steadily went down until there are only a few thousand Greek Orthodox left. The Jews, who fled everywhere in the Muslim world, except under the Iran of the Shah, but not that of Khomeini. The Hindus who have steadily declined, from 15% (in 1947) to 1.5% of the population of Pakistan, and Hindus and other non-Muslims who have fled from Bangladesh, where non-Muslims now make up not 35% (in 1947) but 8% of the population. The non-Muslims -- Chinese and Hindus -- of Malaysia, who have seen their relative numbers steadily go down, as the fierce pressure to convert to Islam (not least on the indigenous tribes) has only increased as the new Muslim majority feels the need to exercise its power. Both the law, to the extent that it enforces certain aspects of the Shari'a, and extra-official pressures on non-Muslims are always present in a Muslim-dominated society. And a society can be dominated by Muslims even when they constitute a slim majority, or perhaps not even a majority, depending on their determination and ferocity.

2) Da'wa, carefully targeted at the

a) the economically marginal (including prisoners and recent immigrant groups), who are fed a line about "Islam and social justice" (just look at the rulers and ruling classes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, and then look at the ruled masses). They are led to believe that Islam is the perfect vehicle for the expression of alienation from capitalism or Amerikka. They’re also told, or led to believe, that their criminality, when the targets are Infidels, has religious justification and sanction. Robbing Infidels is simply helping oneself to Jizyah. Raping Infidel women is simply treating them as they deserve, in their lewd abandon, to be treated.

b) the psychically marginal. Modern societies, with all that soullessness and anomie (fill in here, with whatever pseudo-Durkheimian observations you wish) throws off all kinds of John Walker Lindhs who are engaged in some goddam Spiritual Search, looking for the Truth, the Way, call it what you will. Some of them are lonely; some of them seek a Total Explanation of the Universe. Some of them cannot stand individualism and yearn for the Collective. All of this was part of the appeal of National Socialism. And these people can be picked off, or picked up, by Islamic missionaries, and usefully exploited.

The appeal of Bolshevism was largely that described in 2(a), and the appeal of National Socialism that described in 2(b). "Social Justice" and the Total Regulation of Life, a man as of no moment except when he subsumes himself under the Collective -- that's the appeal of Islam to marginal Infidels. And there are plenty of them.

3) The "wealth" weapon. Until 1973, when the tripling of oil prices began the largest transfer of wealth in human history, it would have been hard for Muslims bent on Jihad to pay for all those mosques and madrasas and endless propaganda in the Western world. Muslim societies are economic failures, doomed through the kind of inshallah-fatalism that we see everywhere. There are, however, three ways for such societies to enjoy some outwardly impressive economic success:

a) Exploitation by local Muslims of the talents of a large non-Muslim population. That is the case in Malaysia, where Muslims constitute just a bit more than 50% of the population, but through the Bumiputra system manage to exploit the far more entrepreneurial and industrious Chinese and Hindus.

b) The Jizyah of foreign aid from Infidels, which has helped Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and the essentially unviable local Arabs who carefully redefined themselves as the "Palestinian people."

c) The manna from Heaven, or rather sous-sol manna, of oil and gas revenues. Without such revenues, based on an accident of geology (that oil was discovered, produced, and a use found for it by Infidels, not by the local Muslims), the Jihad would still exist as a central element in Islam, but the wherewithal to conduct that Jihad would not exist.

These are now the main weapons of the Jihad. Outright military conquest, which was not necessary to islamize a great deal of the East Indies (or the Malayan peninsula, which even fifty years ago did not contain a Muslim-majority population) is not the problem it was in, say, 700 or 800 or even 1500 A.D. There may be Muslims at the gates of Vienna again, but they are not besieging it with swords and mangonels. No, they are already inside the gates of Vienna, and inside Madrid, Rome, Paris, London, Marseille, Berlin, Rotterdam, Malmo, Brussels, and hundreds of other cities. And very few of them show signs of abandoning Islam -- how could they? -- or of somehow reinterpreting those immutable texts of Qur'an and settled "authentic" Hadith -- how could they?

This doesn't mean that the occasional assassination (of Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh), the demonstration (against Danish cartoons), or terrorist plots, will not have their effect. But there is no possibility of outright military conquest. But that doesn’t mean there is no threat. It is false to assert that "nowhere has Islam conquered by means other than military."

That is not true. It is not true that the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, became Muslim as a result of military conquest by some Muslim army. This is not the same thing as saying that violence is never used, that there has not, over the past thousand years, been the use of force in the East Indies by local Muslims (Islam being introduced by Hadrami traders, like all good Muslims eager missionaries as well, into Java). But that has not always and everywhere explained how every bit of Dar al-Islam became Muslim.

It is a soothing idea. It is a pollyannish idea. If only it were so -- if only there were no threat from the other instruments of Jihad described above. After all, they can only acquire major weaponry if we allow them to do so, and of course we have allowed them to do so.

I worry not about military conquest, but about all the other instruments of Jihad which, I continue to repeat, has already helped create the large-scale and so far unopposed and unchallenged Muslim presence that helps to spread the power of Muslims, that in every country in Western Europe has created a situation that is much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the indigenous Infidels, than it would otherwise be.

As long as the armies of Islam are not descending on us, and the rockets' red glare from Iran or Pakistan, or perhaps in the future from Egypt or Saudi Arabia (bought-and-paid-for), are not headed toward Dar al-Harb, many seem to think we can all remain sanguine.
I don't.

Moscow angered by US plan for 'star wars' bases in Europe to counter threat of Iran

Not all politics and problems are local. Distracted by lack of security on the border, 10-20 million possible new instant citizens, the aftermath of Katrina, the "War on Terror," and all these ***### rest, I overlooked this one:

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

24 May 2006 In a move that is raising hackles in Moscow, the US is proposing to install an anti-missile defence system in central Europe to counter any future attack from a nuclear-armed Iran.

The plan, for which the Pentagon has requested $56m (£30m) of exploratory funding from Congress, would cost $1.6bn and involve 10 interceptor units.

The most likely base for the system is Poland, followed by the Czech Republic, officials said. For the moment, the scheme ­ first reported in The New York Times this week and which would parallel the anti-missile shield under construction in Alaska and California against attacks from North Korea ­ is largely symbolic and hypothetical.

Iran currently has no weapons capable of hitting western Europe, let alone an intercontinental missile that could strike the United States. But as a showdown moves closer between the West and Tehran over its uranium-enrichment programme, and with the Israeli Prime Minister in Washington warning that Iran represents a threat not only to Israel but to Western civilisation, the US is determined to send another signal of its determination to act.

The new shield would bring a direct US military presence deeper into Europe. And for Russia, the project reeks of American encroachment into what used to be its own sphere of influence. The move would have "a negative impact on the whole Euro-Atlantic security system", Sergei Ivanov, the Russian Defence Minister, told a Belarus newspaper, hinting at further strain on ever-delicate relations between Russia and Nato. The mooted site for the system was "dubious, to put it mildly", he said.
This is not the first time the missile shield has divided the two countries.

In 2002, President Bush upset Moscow by unilaterally pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, long regarded in Moscow as the cornerstone of nuclear arms control.

The possible extension of missile defences into Poland or the Czech Republic ­ both staunch American allies ­ is the latest episode of a story that has inspired dreams and controversy in equal measure since it was first sketched out by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 as the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), quickly dubbed "Star Wars". But despite more than 20 years of work and tens of billions of dollars in spending, it is now accepted that any such shield would be overwhelmed by an attack from Russia, which possesses a nuclear arsenal comparable to the US.

It has now been scaled back to cope with the far more limited strike that North Korea might be able to deliver to the continental US by the end of the decade. So far, nine interceptor rockets are in place at Fort Greely in Alaska, and two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But the viability even of this version is questionable.

"It [the shield] has been doing very poorly," a former Pentagon official involved in the testing told The New York Times. "They have not had a successful flight intercept test in four years."

But the slow progress has not deterred extensive contacts between the US and Poland in particular. Polish press reports have said that Boeing, the lead company on the project, has already agreed to subcontract work to Polish concerns.

According to The New York Times, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is expected to receive a recommendation on a European site in the summer. If the plan for interceptors in Poland goes ahead, it would create the first permanent American military presence in the country.

At least as logical a site for the shield would be Britain, where the Pentagon is already upgrading equipment at the early warning radar base of Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. But the intense domestic unpopularity of Tony Blair ­ who is meeting President Bush in Washington tomorrow ­ and hostility to the Iraq war have ruled that option out.

Poland, on the other hand, has been a staunch ally of the US ever since Communism collapsed there in 1989. It is now a member of Nato, and has contributed troops to the occupation of Iraq.

Be sure to scroll down for the killer graphic after the text. (Ooops, pardon the pun!)

We need short-range "star wars" technology at the border. Perhaps this is what Bush means by a "virtual fence".

Et tu, Arnold?

Hattip: Allah at Hot Air via: Michelle Malkin

Could this be a reason why Schwarzenneger finally relented and is giving Fox a statedinner tomorrow in Sacramento?

The latest Rasmussen Reports election poll shows Schwarzenegger and State Treasurer Phil Angelides each with 45% support. When matched against State Controller Steve Westly, Schwarzenegger trails by two points, 46% to 44%.

Schwarzenegger will doubtless benefit from the spate of spit balls the Democratic candidates are hurling at each other as California's primary election, to be held June 6, approaches. 

But the immigration debate may have dampened Schwarzenegger's numbers in recent weeks. Our April survey showing temporarily improved support for the governor was conducted before the large immigration rallies held around the country, demonstrations that provoked a backlash among foes of illegal immigration.

The nation's highest-profile immigrant has been navigating a sometimes wavering course through the minefield of the immigration debate—in a state with more illegal immigrants than any other. The eventual Democratic nominee will have to face the same minefield, though, and without the advantage of being both an immigrant and a legal one.

Our national polling shows that just 39% of Americans agree with President Bush's approach to immigration. Typically, American voters favor a policy that begins with gaining control of the border but is also welcoming to  immigrants.

Just 25% of California voters say the President is doing a good or excellent job on the immigration issue. But, they are equally divided as to whether they trust Republicans or Democrats more on the issue.

Ah, politicians...don't you just love them!

What Does a Siege Look Like?

Anyone who has attended a war movie knows what war looks like, but few in the United States know anything about sieges as we have seen few since the Civil War era. The Siege of New Orleans, the Battle of the Alamo, and various sieges of 18th century Revolutionary War forts, coastal cities and places along the 19th century frontier are all that we know until the modern "sieges" at Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco which were really law enforcement actions. In short, we know nothing about being under and living under siege or what a siege looks like except for those overseas.

Border Towns Under Siege.

Prior to the First Gulf War, the Bush 41 administration continued Reagan’s plan to have DoD assets support the war on drugs.  Air Force and Navy aviation and maritime support were key components, but this still left large chunks of ground in the desert southwest uncovered.  The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in coordination with DoD started searching for ways to fill the gaps.

The threat estimates of the time were sobering.  The end of the Cold War had caused some terrorist groups who had worked for foreign governments to align themselves with international crime organizations.  Now cut lose from the operational control of these hostile nation-states, a ready-made manpower pool of seasoned mercenaries hit the streets under the pay of drug cartels.  They were experts at infiltrating across international borders, and most importantly, they were experienced in corrupting and destabilizing local governments and law enforcement agencies.  This component of their operation was to have decisive consequences for years to come in our ability to stop illegal immigrants and drug smuggling.
Tactically, the narco-terrorist force had capabilities matching those of modern infantry units: assault rifles, crew-served machine guns, anti-tank weapons systems, and man portable anti-aircraft missiles of both Western and Warsaw Pact manufacture.  The enemy had also dug tunnels, established hidden staging areas, weapons and food caches, and most importantly, had infiltrated operatives on our territory to gather intelligence and undertake direct action missions in border towns.  Expecting the Border Patrol and the DEA to deal with these guys with side-arms and arrest warrants was and still is laughable.

Initial plans therefore envisioned an operation similar to the 14th Cavalry’s mission last year in southern Luna and Hidalgo Counties of New Mexico .  In a nutshell, Army units would maintain ground and air surveillance of assigned sectors and hand off the perpetrators to federal or local law enforcement authorities.  It was judged that the joint effort would be able to shut down large sections of the border forcing the terrorists and smugglers to move their infrastructure elsewhere.  Of course, US air and ground mobility would permit our Soldiers to follow the bad guys and interdict the new smuggling routes.  And in contrast to the current deployment plan, units had the combat powers to handle the terrorist threat if they decided to use the weaponry at their disposal.

Eventually, the financial and operational burden would cause the drug smugglers and human traffickers to retreat and regroup.  However, these operations were never conducted; not because of lack of funding or support, but because of the ability of this modern-day Fifth Column in our midst to threaten our law enforcement agents and their families right in our own border communities.  The potential civilian bloodbath put the program on indefinite hold by the very civilian agencies who had requested DoD’s help.  From the standpoint of the local and federal cops and civic leaders, it just wasn’t worth the risk.

These narco-terror operations have now extended beyond the immediate border area in the time since combat units were nixed for duty on the southwest frontier.  Consider this example in San Antonio, Texas from over three years ago.
A tragic shooting of a 14 year old girl by a DEA agent should have led to a confidential investigation by supposedly “neutral” law enforcement agencies, but then the intelligence network of the terrorists went to work.  Within 24 hours, the agent’s name was leaked to the press, his family’s address, his kids’ schools and their daily schedules were then determined by unknown groups.  Threats were called in against the child while in school requiring additional security measures at the facility.  Ultimately, the family had to leave the area for good.

This is just a small taste of what will happen to our border towns unless the National Guard deploys in greater numbers and with the ability to use the arsenal at their disposal.  Now, radical Islamists have taken advantage of our neglect and this could potentially result in a national security crises that Sheriff Gonzalez and other local cops cannot possibly handle without the help of trained combat forces.

Without the teeth in the Guard units moving to the border, this becomes just another exercise in politcal half-measures to portray the denizens of DC as “doing something” about this appalling situation  Meanwhile, the Guard will fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and will continue to pass the buck to beleaguered local and state cops, who more than likely are themselves under the watchful eye of the Fifth Column in their own hometown.

Our nation is endangered from external enemies who in some cases have co-opted the very agencies that are supposed to protect us.  If this situation isn’t what the military is for, then the President and Congress are not performing their constitutional duties.  And it’s our own fault if we allow this farce to continue.

And external enemies come in forms. Just as Jihad uses many instruments and programs, such as education and commerce, as weapons, so a siege can be bloodless: a migratory movement of millions will accomplish the same effect.
Our attention is riveted on the border for violence captures attention and the imagination in the same way that the super-hero figure eclipses our view of the average guy who quietly perseveres: but that doesn't make one or the other more or less heroic.

We are under siege and we are under occupation and the smug, triumphal general is making a three-state tour of his troops and vassals. Will he be successful in his triumph? The answer could be yes.

Immigrants, reconquistas and economic systems

From: Immigrants, reconquistas and economic systems

But even today in Mexico, key industries remain nationalised, and wealth is concentrated in the hands of elites. Prevalent ideologies view wealth as "a zero-sum game," in which what one person acquires can come only by taking money or property from someone else. These doctrines help foment class conflict.. demand "more equitable" distribution of wealth, and condemn globalisation and foreign investment, rather than seeing them as agents of improved opportunity, health and environmental quality.


Mexico's poor own their limited property in "deficient form", says Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. with inadequately documented rights and assets. They have what he terms "dead capital" -- "houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation." Worse. they have little opportunity to improve their lot, as long as they remain in Mexico.


Much of rural and small-town Mexico does not even have electricity, telephone and internet service, sewage treatment, water-purification or decent roads, schools and healthcare. Just five miles from Cancun, I visited Valle Verde, where several thousand people live in primitive wood shacks, with electricity for only a few light bulbs and no running water or sanitation. One cannot help wondering where all that petroleum and tourism money has gone.


Low-skill wages today are less than 15 per cent of what Mexican workers can earn in the US, and half of its 106 million people still live in poverty.




Instead of investing in Mexico, affluent families often go where there are fewer barriers to establishing new businesses, and less crime, corruption, onerous taxation and threats of confiscation.


So while America creates jobs, grows richer and becomes more technologically advanced, Mexico limps along, its oil reserves are declining, and its government fosters illegal migration northward, as a pressure-release valve for the growing frustration of its impoverished masses.


Mexico is not poor because it lacks natural resources or bright, industrious citizens. It is blessed with both in abundance. Mexico is poor because it retains an antiquated legal and economic system -- and its populist leaders scapegoat the United States for what ails Mexico, rather than adopting the practices of successful nations.



If the southwestern United States had remained part of Mexico, this region would have been governed under Mexican laws -- and would probably be as impoverished and bereft of opportunity as Mexico is today. It would never have generated the inventions, innovations, industries, minerals and wealth that its hardworking people have produced as the bounties of their creative genius, risk-taking and labours.



The Southwest's vigorous cities and universities, its medical centres and Silicon Valleys, its upward mobility and thriving middle class, its transportation, communication and power generation systems would be a mere shadow of what they are today. Las Vegas and Hollywood would still be sleepy desert way stations. There's a silver lining in every cloud, some would say.


If La Raza, MeCha and the other reconquistas were to "take back' these lands, they would likely impose the same disastrous policies that have enfeebled Mexico. They would squander, rather than capture, America's prosperity and opportunity -- turning America's gold into lead, like a reverse King Midas. Countless poor Mexicans would still be drawn to the magnetic North. And our immigration problems would simply move to the southern borders of Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Oklahoma.



Mexico needs to pay less attention to the tenets of liberation theology and leftist populism -- and more to Pope John Paul II's Centesimus Annus encyclical, which underscores the benefits of private property rights, free trade, entrepreneurship, reduced taxes and government intervention, and evenhanded rule of law. It needs to do what rich countries have done to become rich -- and what China, India and many eastern European nations are doing today.



If it does, if it can finally break its feudal shackles, Mexico will give its people the opportunity, health, environmental quality and prosperity they seek, and so richly deserve. Those who want to migrate will still able to. But all classes will have a better future, and Mexico will become an inspiration for all of Latin America.

Why Utah?

A story in this morning's L.A. Times on the visit of Mexican president Vicente Fox answers my questions: Why Utah? Why Utah first?

Vicente Fox began his visit yesterday. Depending on your news source, the visit will last 3, 4, or 5 days. The consensus is that he will visit three states. But why did he begin in Utah and what does he expect to gain by entering a neighboring country and telling the Congress how to legislate and telling the citizens what they must do?

WEST VALLEY, Utah — Mexican President Vicente Fox kicked off a four-day U.S. visit Tuesday by decrying congressional proposals to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants in Mexico, saying that "we won't resolve this problem with fences, but hand in hand, working together."

Fox told a cheering crowd of 1,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans — some of whom had come from as far as Montana to hear him — that they helped keep the U.S. economy running and displayed the hard work and honesty that did their ancestral country proud.

"Even though you are far from Mexico, you are an integral part of Mexico," Fox said. "We will never forget you. We love you."

Fox's visit, which takes him to Washington state today and to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles later in the week, comes on the heels of President Bush's proposal to station 6,000 National Guard troops at the border and amid growing frustration over illegal immigration..

Here it comes:

But, in a sign of the state's pro-immigrant nature, Fox got an ebullient welcome from the region's political elite Tuesday afternoon when he spoke at a community center in this Salt Lake City suburb. Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff, a conservative Republican who just won reelection, choked up as he praised Mexican traditions in fluent Spanish.

"It's a culture that shows the importance of family, in which parents teach and care for children," Shurtleff said to cheers. "It's a culture that teaches by example the importance of labor and work. These are values that, unfortunately, we are losing here in my country."

Utah's Republican governor, Jon Huntsman Jr., a former diplomat and trade official, invited Fox to the state during a trade mission to Mexico City last summer.

Fox on Tuesday praised Huntsman and the state government for being one of the few in the U.S. to allow illegal immigrants to pay the same tuition at public universities as legal residents, and for providing otherwise undocumented immigrants with cards that function as driver's licenses.

Claudio A. Holzner, a political science professor at the University of Utah and an expert in Mexican and Latin American issues, said Fox may be able to take advantage of his good relationships with state officials.

On an immigration or guest worker law, "it certainly allows him to have conversations with governors and local representatives at a time when it would be too delicate for him to try to influence the national debate directly. He's trying to influence the debate in a more low-key way," Holzner said.

In a luncheon speech to a business group in Salt Lake City, Fox touted Mexico's growing economy. He also met privately with state and Mormon church leaders.

In his speech to the crowd of immigrants, Fox spent as much time praising them and urging them not to forget Mexico as he did talking about immigration.

That reflects Mexico's dependence on its migrants, who send an estimated $20 billion home annually, making them the nation's biggest industry after petroleum.

"Over there, we wait for you with open arms," Fox told the crowd. "Your family is over there. Your family that appreciates and loves you. Your home is over there."

Someone needs to really talk to Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. He doesn't seem to get what a dangerous path he has chosen for his state, or perhaps he does. Perhaps trade is more important than national security.

I switched to a Salt Lake City newspaper:

Fox's address came before today's anticipated preliminary vote in the Senate on a sweeping immigration reform bill that could put millions of undocumented immigrants on a pathway to citizenship. Last week, the Senate voted to add 370 miles of triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border to the bill, and a House enforcement-only measure also calls for a border fence.

An earlier luncheon had been focused strictly on economic development, but Fox used his speech to some 800 people, many Mexican immigrants and grass-roots volunteers, to stress the importance of reaching an immigration solution that recognizes the dignity, hard work and contributions of all people.

While he spoke mostly in Spanish, Fox switched to English at times during his remarks.

"Mexico promotes new mechanisms that allow for a legal safe, orderly migration, respecting fully human rights and dignity," he said in English. "Mexico wants to be part of the solution, not of the problem."

He added that Utah's immigrants have a friend in Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who helped persuade other Western governors to adopt a resolution supporting comprehensive immigration reform. He praised the Utah Legislature for passing laws allowing undocumented immigrants to drive using a driving privilege card, and to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

An hypocrisy, for the only dignity and human rights in respect to immigrants that Mexico is interested in is toward those that emigrate to other countries because of Mexico's infamous anti-immigrant program that shows no respect for anyone attempting to enter Mexico, illegally or legally.

So he's ready to talk...but he's not ready to listen. The majority of Americans don't want what he's selling and they're tired to being taken to cleaners and being treated as dopes.

What if Congress decides to a) make all those millions of "foreigners" citizens. (I am using the term "foreigners" because in Mexico anyone not born there is called a foreigner, and even if naturalized can never have same rights); or, b) gives a path to citizenship to the majority of these alien foreigners, would these foreigners instantly become loyal to the United States and forsake, let's say, Mexico?

Probably not. The likely outcome would be disastrous, giving a group, many of whom really dislike the United States and prefer their home country, a way of using the vote against the legitimate citizens in order to promote their ethnic and the interests of the home country.

What could make millions of Mexicans to take the trouble and expense of thousands of dollars apiece to get to the United States, to migrate into a culture that they profess to dislike, to work under unpleasant, serf-like conditions, to again face humiliation at the hands of Gringos that they feel robbed them of wealth and of territory in the 1840s? Would people of this mentality make good and loyal citizens?

Fox smugly has come because he knows the answer and he hopes that the Gringo Congress has been hoodwinked and will foolishly legislate themselves and the United States out of existence. "Fox no tiene cara," Fox is shamelessly promoting sedition. I doubt that he doesn't understand what he is doing. But of course, he's standing in for Mexican oligarchy that has created and probably funded this "spontaneous" Reconquista movement.

Update "Lonewacko" put me on to other links in his comments. One in a particular describes Utah Governor Huntsman participation on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (Be sure to follow the internal links.) Yet another traveller on the road to New World Order.

Out of curiosity? Did any of YOU sign up for this?

The Not So Strange Alliance of Islam and Hispanics

A lot of us understand the intimate connection between the Islamic ambitions of world conquest and their use of Hispanic footsoldiers "conned" by the Muslims into doing a lot of their dirty work for them.

Iran is cozying up to Hugo Chavez, who is trying to make life uncomfortable for the Jews living in his country, and Chavez, Castro, and Bolivia's Evo Morales are cozying up to each other to "break" the United States.

Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist grunts, are cozying up with the drug lords and gang leaders of the infamous Tri-Border Region in South America (Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay), where they are forming alliances in order to get Hispanics to work for them (since they can get across the border so much more easily than a ME-looking person can - although, as we now know, there are a lot of them doing that, too).

The alliance is being encouraged by Islam in order to further its goal of world-wide conquest. That's easy to understand.

But why are the Hispanics so vulnerable to Islamic influence? I believe there may be a little more to it than the simple envy of a more prosperous culture and the influence of Communism.

More and more, I think that there exists a subconscious cultural bond between Hispanic culture and Islam.

Spain, a largely Catholic country, has a history of suffering longer at the hands of Islam than any other European nation. The Spanish fought bravely for 300 years to get the heel of the Muslims off their neck, and 500 years ago, they finally succeeded. You would think that their experience would be a "lesson well learned" that would translate into the attitudes of their cultural heirs.

Yet, despite a long history of Islamic abuse and occupation, and even despite recent terrorist killings at Muslim hands, we see their cultural children in Central and South America allying themselves with Islam in an effort to bring down the United States. Many of them even want to carve out a separate nation from the United States, an entity they propose to call "Aztlan." It would include all those lands paid for, upon mutually agreement, by the United States taxpayer under the terms of the Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.

I think that it is unavoidable that some remnants of the attitudes and worldviews that were formed under the influence of 700 years of Islamic occupation years still remain. After all, most human beings still feel the influence of our Stone Age ancestors whose children played hide-and-seek, a game that is supposed to have been passed from one generation of children to the next over many thousands of years.

It is not difficult to believe that while the European Spanish have continued to make progress in shaking off the relics of destructive Islamic influences acquired during the centuries of occupation by Islam, it has been harder for their Hispanic children to do so. Spain was in the middle of all the action of the Italian Renaissance, which was just getting under way as the last Muslims were finally kicked out; Spain was right there during the thunderous philosophic growth of the birth of the Englightenment in Great Britain, and the Industrial Revolution was born.

The Hispanic cultures of South and Central America were too far removed physically to experience this rapid change; communications were poor, so the people of the Spanish colonies didn't benefit as quickly or as much from the changes that wer taking place in Europe. Even more, the primary reason for the Spanish conquests in the New World was to find gold to send back to the Spanish Mother Country, throroughly impoverished from her wars with Islam. That was why Queen Isabella, in the very year that Spain met with success in removing Islam, had to sell her jewels to financy Columbus' voyages of discovery - after fighting Islam, there was no other source of money left.

The Hipanics have remained far closer to the Islamic ideals of "machismo;" the common practice of having women/families outside of marriage; a visible contempt for women and physical labor; an attitude that considers the "little people" to be somehow less valuable than the elites; problems with self-esteem, and a political system that institutionalizes poverty and a caste-like system of social immobility. Even the battle cry of "reconquista" seems to resemble closely the Islamic notion that wherever a Muslim has ever set foot, the land belongs to Islam. There are even traces of Arab influence in the language - for example, the elaborate, almost poetic curses, as contrasted with the shorter, decidedly unpoetic expletives of much of the rest of Europe. Even the commonly used expression "Ola" is said to come from "Allah." In addition, there is an element of fatalism, determinism, and mysticism in their view of existence that is greater than we see elsewhere, especially in Britain and Northern Europe.

Since the worldviews of both Islam and the Hispanic culture is a collectivist one, where the "collective" (in Islam's case, the fusion of state and religion) is supreme and the individual is unimportant, the Hispanic cultures remain relatively more vulnerable to collectivist doctrines such as socialism, fascism, communism, and ultimately, to Islam's peculiar form of totalitarianism.

I believe that this cultural relationship explains, in part, why the Hispanics are so easily (if subconsciously) inclined to join with Islam in this "pincer" action attack on the United States.

In our current President's abject refusal to secure our borders, as well as a like-minded Senate, these allies have found powerful friends to help them achieve their goal.

Under the circumstances, is there any hope for a sovereign and secure United States?

There is, if we can get someone in office who 1) takes his oath of office seriously, 2) who believes that the United States is a sovereign nation, and 3) who believes that our national security is a legitimate concern.

There are many such people, but perhaps few are as well known as one seasoned politicican, Tom Tancredo (R-CO).

Here is a talk he gave when President Bush visited the border, seen on his website:

Congressman Tom Tancredo's (R-CO) Weekly Capitol Update
Tue, 23 May 2006

VISIT COLORADO'S SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT'S WEBSITE: http://www.house.gov/tancredo

If you would like to contact Congressman Tancredo, please do so through our website at http://www.house.gov/tancredo/contact_tom.htm



Tancredo Urges Enforcement Action as President Visits Borders


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the 97-Member House Immigration Reform Caucus, urged the President to take several steps to secure America’s border as the President visits Arizona, today.

“I’m glad that the President keeps saying he wants to secure our border, but a Presidential visit won’t do that. Press conferences without Administration action is, as border ranchers say, all hat and no cattle,” said Tancredo.

Tancredo continued, “While the President is down at the border I hope he sees firsthand what I see when I’m there—mass illegal entries, threatened ranchers, overburdened Border Patrol officers, and environmental degradation.”

“If the President takes a clear view of the situation in Arizona – scars, blemishes and all – he won’t have an excuse to stall increased border enforcement,” said Tancredo.

There are at least nine enforcement actions the President can take that require no new legislation:

1) Suspend the visa waiver program.
Citizens of 27 countries are allowed to travel to the U.S. without a visa, which could pose a serious national security threat.

2) Encourage Basic Pilot Program use.
DHS’ Basic Pilot Program allows employers to check the legal status of potential employees instantly through the Internet. The program is fee-based, thus wider use will not require any new federal resources.

3) End ‘catch and release’.
Persons caught who are illegally in the U.S. but are not Mexicans or Canadians are released by ICE and told to show up at court for deportation proceedings. Not surprisingly, few return to court. Despite an announcement from DHS to the contrary, catch and release is alive and well. In fact, a majority of the persons arrested in the highly-publicized IFCO raids were released by the following day.

4) Instruct the Justice Department to identify local governments’ sanctuary policies.
Federal law prohibits local governments from enacting illegal alien sanctuary policies. The Attorney General could easily identify such sanctuary policies and prosecute localities that violate federal law.

5) Do more high-profile raids on businesses that hire illegals.
With limited resources, an effective way to execute interior enforcement is to go after businesses who regularly hire illegal aliens. Such raids would make other businesses think twice before hiring persons illegally.

6) Deploy mothballed military technology on the border.
Military technology, such as mothballed UAVs, can be deployed effectively on the border, and military training can be relocated to land adjacent to the border.

7) Facilitate volunteers who want to backstop the overwhelmed Border Patrol.
Instead of calling the Minutemen ‘vigilantes’, the President could encourage volunteers until more Border Patrol can be hired and trained.

8) Remove the Mexican and Canadian exceptions from the USVISIT system.
USVISIT requires all non-citizens to be recorded when entering and exiting the U.S. President Clinton unilaterally exempted Mexico and Canada from the system. In addition, there is no ‘exit’ component to USVISIT for any country, which prevents the U.S. from knowing whether visa holders leave when they are supposed to. Approximately 40 percent of illegal aliens in the U.S. are visa overstays.

9)Begin extending the border fence.
The Defense Department has the resources to begin extending the border fence which exists near San Diego."



In addition to the nine points he made above, he made the following comments ahead of the President’s Immigration Speech (also seen on his website):


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the 97-member House Immigration Reform Caucus, made the following statement ahead of the President’s immigration speech tonight:

“Sending National Guard troops to the border is a necessary stop-gap measure to gain control of our borders. The government has chosen to limit the National Guard to a supporting role, but that will allow the Border Patrol to do its job—stopping illegal aliens from breaking our laws.

“It appears that the Administration has begun to understand the breadth and depth of frustration with our open borders, and I welcome the President’s support of increased enforcement. But if the President thinks by taking one step forward with enforcement the House will follow him two steps backwards with amnesty, he’s confusing us with the Senate. The American people understand that blanket amnesty is not a pre-requisite for border security.

“The Senate’s 12-million person amnesty – the largest in America’s history – would crush our background check system. It would dishonor legal immigrants who came here the right way. And, it would only encourage more illegal immigration. The President may say that the Senate’s plan isn’t amnesty, but when you reward people with citizenship and you allow them to continue to work in the U.S. for the sole reason that they broke the law, what else can you call it?

“A few weeks ago, the Administration announced a crackdown on illegal employers, arresting more than 1,100, nationwide. But by the next morning, more than half of those arrested were released. Public relations in lieu of enforcement won’t fly with the American people. We will all be watching and waiting to see if the President follows through on his pledge to enforce the law.”

The HAMAS Lobby

An exposé of CAIR, of course. A longish article with very many internal links.

"Why Mohamoud may be madder than Mao"

From: The American Thinker

But contrary to the appeasement crowd, Mahmoud isn’t Mao. Here are some important differences.

1. Mao didn’t belong to a suicide cult, but Ahmadinejad says it over and over again
“He who is ready for martyrdom is always victorious.”

“Martyrdom is the peak of mankind’s perfection and the martyrs enjoy the highest status of humanity in this world and the Hereafter.”

 ”People spend tough years of strenuous work in a bid to achieve the peaks of grandeur and pride, while our dear martyrs achieved those high peaks in shortest possible time.” 

2. Mao didn’t look forward to Armageddon – he was an atheist. Mahmoud believes in the return of the Twelfth Imam, to bring about the conversion of the heathen amidst flame and fire.

3. Mao was personally corrupt to the eyeballs, but Mahmoud’s been put into power by Counsel of Guardians, in part because he is personally ascetic, “the street sweeper of the people.” As the UK Guardian quaintly puts it, he is “A devout working-class hero.” Mao liked an endless series of underage girls. Mahmoud may get off on self-flagellation.

4. Mahmoud came of age as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard during the Iran-Iraq war, when he would send men and boys (and possibly himself) to kill Iraqis behind enemy lines. According to some sources, boys with plastic “keys” to martyrdom would be sent into minefields to blow themselves up, and clear the way for assault troops. Iranians recruited the devout followers of Khomeini to assault Iraqi artillery until the trenches piled high with the dead.

Experiences like that mark any human being, traumatize them, and in the context of a suicide cult, can make it easier to start another war.  Hitler was a poison-gas survivor in World War I, but it didn’t stop him from starting World War II – just the opposite. For Hitler, World War II was revenge for the “stab in the back” that made Germany lose World War I.

Mahmoud’s personality therefore may be frozen in his past. He may think of himself as a miraculous survivor, and may harbor deep guilt feelings toward his dead comrades. That kind of guilt about holy martyrs is a powerful theme in the Persian Shiite tradition, updated by Khomeini circa 1979.

5. There is reason to think that Mahmoud believes himself to be appointed by Allah. That kind of grandiosity is consistent with a nuclear suicide-homicider.

All that doesn’t mean Ahmadinejad will push the button as soon as he gets one. The fact that he’s a scary guy is one reason why the Mullahs put him into place. They know all about  psychological warfare. (They always accuse the United States of using it.) Mahmoud acts as a scary guy  because that’s the message they want to send. But he may not be acting.

So Tehran has set up a confrontation that is entirely unpredictable.

To understand the limits of our knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

Read it all. Contains interesting internal links.

Vicente Quietly Enters the U.S. to Pursue Trade and Other Interests

Vicente Fox arrives today, May 23, 2006, on a 3-day, 3-state visit to the U.S. Although political and business leaders in Utah, Washington State, and California all falling all over themselves to meet, greet, wine and dine him, you probably his visit probably will be given passing notice in the press for the fear of further antagonizing Congress and ordinary Americans as his "presence might be seen as meddling in U.S. internal affairs".

I almost burst out when I read that. Meddling in internal affairs of the United States? For the past several years, Mexico, under various leaders, has done nothing but meddle. Nevertheless, he's here to meet with business leaders, state and local politicians, local Latino groups, special interest groups, such as the apple growers of Washington State, various chambers of commerce and so on. A "side trip" to the Yakima Valley has been slipped in. Perhaps he'll give up sleep time to fit that one in.

The Mexican Senate blocked an earlier trip. This one is seen to be essential in order to promote Mexican business and immigration issues. But you will hear very little for fear of the "boomerang effect" or blowback.

Fox will address the state legislatures of all three states, meet with three governors as well as with Bill Gates and other Seattle luminaries. Also he will meet with California Latino big wigs, such as L.A. mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. So far, no surprises.

But I am surprised by the first leg of his trip to the State of Utah where he will meet with the requisite civic and business leaders and the leadership of the Mormon Church that has property and membership within Mexico.

Press coverage in anticipation of the trip of "Utah Mexicans" and business leaders has been the most revealing. "He's (Fox) our president. He's our representative. Even though we live here, we still love Mexico," a long-time Mexican ex-pat permanent resident. A local businessman wants to increase business with Mexico as " One of the big advantages of trading with Mexico is that their business practices are similar to ours."

What's wrong with that? Here's something to ponder from a fellow "lived for two years when an American electronics firm sent me there to help upgrade the engineering capabilities of its local plant in Mexico City, becoming familiar with, among other things, Mexico’s civic festivities and history."

I learned as well that Mexico is potentially rich for it has vast resources in the form of petroleum, natural gas, coal, iron ore, silver, copper and other minerals, as well as vast arable lands in the center and south of the country, plus a climate that could allow to plant and harvest multiple crops per year, it has sea ports on the Pacific and the Atlantic, it has a massive population that –if educated and skilled- could sustain a thriving internal market for durable and non-durable goods...and it is a next-door neighbor to the U.S., a most technologically advanced society and the most powerful economy in the world, from which Mexico could have absorbed since decades ago, by osmosis, capillarity or simple emulation, the many U.S. advancements as, wisely, Canada has.

I furthermore learned that the main problem of Mexico is that it wasted 71 years under the boot of the infamous PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) flirting with socialistoid policies, in part to blackmail the U.S. during the Cold War with the threat of supporting the Soviet Union if not left alone looting the country, and in part to co-opt its own arch-corrupt Left and cover up for the endemic, pervasive and intense corruption at all levels of government -which is practically an apparatus of systemic venality and peculation gone wild- and society in general -which is practically a kleptocracy where every body cheats, and steals from, everybody. (When paying for something in Mexico, always watch for your change!)

I learned besides, that there is the prevalent surrealistic and bizarre notion in Mexico that if one gets cheated it is only because one deserves it, out of one’s ingenuousness and candidness, virtues that the average Mexican considers stupidity and imbecility. As an example of the cynicism of Mexicans regarding honesty in government, they recur to poetic rime when referring to the last year of a presidential term, of which they say:
“Este es el año de Hidalgo...pendejo el que deje algo”

“This is the year of Hidalgo...an a@#hole is he who leaves anything behind,” referring to the last chance that public functionaries and employees have to loot the public coffers. Miguel Hidalgo (y Costilla) was one of the founding fathers of Mexico, but Mexicans don’t hesitate to profane his sacred name in cynical lyrics celebrating venality.

Moreover, I learned during my stay in Mexico, that in that climate of rampant systemic and systematic corruption, with its logical destructive consequences on society and the economy, the PRI, along with the Left, systematically promoted and used hatred of America among the populace to distract it from the real causes of the misery that the vast majority of pauper Mexicans live in: socialistoid policies and pervasive, endemic, systemic and systematic corruption.

Nothing more needs to be said...for day, that is.

"This time the crocodile won't wait" - British appeasement and the Islamist threat against the West

Melanie Phillips, promoting her new book, Londonistan, spoke at the Heritage Foundation's Lehman Auditorium. Here is a link that offers links in both video and streaming MP3 format.

Melanie Phillips, Oxford educated, author and playwright, longtime journalist, and now columnist for London’s Daily Mail, pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed. She posits that the advance of the global jihad is being facilitated by a wholesale collapse of western values and national identity within Europe and in which Britain is taking the lead. Paralyzed by minority rights and the terror of Islamist violence, Phillips argues that the British establishment is even now failing to confront the religious fanaticism in its midst and is choosing instead to appease it. Meanwhile, the post-modernist onslaught upon the concept of truth itself has produced such confusion that, instead of standing up to the ideas that threaten democracy, many in Britain now subscribe to the false narrative of those who are laying siege to their society. This disorientation of the once-implacable British bulldog has major lessons and warnings for America as well.

According to Phillips, Britain is experiencing "a progressive cultural enfeeblement that is being exploited by Islamism." Thus, Britain is the weaker link in the Anglo-American alliance.

Thus, a cautionary lesson for America.

AsiaTimes's essayist "Spengler" has reviewed Phillip's book.

In retrospect, it seems oafish of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister in 1938, to have betrayed Czechoslovakia to Nazi rule in return for the empty promise of peace. Yet an overwhelming English majority looked with horror on the prospect of confrontation with Germany and a new world war, until Adolf Hitler forced England's hand by invading Poland. "The appeaser hopes the crocodile will eat him last," said Winston Churchill. Today's crocodiles may not be so patient.

Opposing voices in 1938 rang lonely and shrill, and just as shrill today sounds Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in her portrayal of an emasculated Britain ashamed of its own national identity and anxious to appease the "clerical fascism" of the jihadis. That will change, perhaps even before the print is quite dry on her new book. She warns that the West faces a religious war with Islam. I concur, and recommend Londonistan as indispensable background.

Britain, Phillips warns, is reaping what it has sown. A large minority of British Muslims are disaffected at best and seditious at worst. Phillips cites a 2004 Home Office survey finding that 26% of British Muslims felt no loyalty to Britain, 13% supported terrorism, and about 1% (up to 20,000 individuals) were "actively engaged" in terrorism or support for terrorism.

Another poll found that 32% of British Muslims agreed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". In the event of a violent collision between the West and Iran, for example, civil conflict might arise in Britain on a scale resembling that in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Phillips accuses British security services with complicity in the gestation of a terrorist apparatus in London. Her documentation of overt terrorist activity centered in London is exhaustive, and raises the question of why the open scandal was tolerated. Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian requests for extradition of suspected terrorists were refused, and Arab diplomats vented their frustration over British recalcitrance in public.

A cynically narrow concept of national interest guided this policy, she argues, charging that MI6 (Military Intelligence Section 6, now officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service) believed "that if the Islamists were being left undisturbed to conduct their activities on the assumption that they would not then attack Britain".

But that can explain only part of the story, and Phillips searches for deeper causes of Britain's cowardice. "Denial" is a recurrent theme. She cites an unnamed "foreign intelligence source" as follows:

During the 1990s, many attempts were made to enlighten the British about what was happening. But they refused to see this problem as having a religious character. If this was a religious problem, it became a religious confrontation - and the specter of a religious war was too horrendous. A religious war is different from any other war because you are dealing with absolute beliefs and the room for compromise is very limited. Religious wars are very protracted and bloody, and often end up with a very high toll of lives.

That is not denial, though, but revulsion. The British establishment may have recoiled in horror from the prospect of religious war precisely because it has sufficient institutional memory to know just what such wars entail. Religious war, however, is precisely what it will have, on the worst possible terms, and with an extensive fifth column in place.

Successful manipulation of religious conflict is a lost art. Cardinal Richelieu and his successor Jules Mazarin kept the Thirty Years' War aflame in Germany by subsidizing new entrants into the fray, notably Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus (King Gustavus II), deploying French forces when proxies were not available.

The carnage claimed the lives of more than half of the German speakers and left France the dominant power in continental Europe until 1870. On a smaller scale, Britain played such divide-and-conquer games throughout its imperial history, most obviously by transplanting Scottish Protestants to Northern Ireland. Some in India read malice aforethought into the 1947 partition of the sub-continent. Britain no longer has malefactors with the iron stomach and broad culture of a T E Lawrence or a Sir Richard Burton to undertake such projects.

Phillips soft-pedals the imperial sins for which today's problems are part payment. As Phillips observes, the legacy of Britain's imperial past in the form of Northern Ireland distracted the security services' attention from the Islamist threat:

Instead of studying the Middle East as a cause for concern, they were staring across the Irish Sea at Northern Ireland, where a terrorist insurrection against the UK had been in progress since the 1970s. The mindset, on both sides of the Atlantic, was that terrorism was tied to discrete grievances against individual states. And with the end of the Cold War, the notion of a global threat rooted in ideology was assumed to be dead and buried.
But the Northern Ireland disaster was more than a distraction. Britain has a glorious past, and its role in defining individual rights and representative democracy is central to the success of the West. But real crimes can be laid at Britain's doorstep, including the mistreatment of the Irish over centuries. That does not excuse the thuggishness of the Irish Republicans, but it does help explain the moral palsy that afflicts today's British establishment.

At this point the discussion shifts to comparisons of other conflicts and back again to Britain, as did Phillips in her Heritage Foundation lecture linked above.

Former US president Jimmy Carter's ability to see the better side of his country's worst enemies comes to mind. In this month's issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bowden reports that Carter forbade the Delta Force commandos to use deadly forces against the kidnappers of American hostages in Tehran in the ill-fated 1980 rescue attempt.

In his ignorance and provincialism, Carter could not see any conflict in terms other than the black-white confrontation during the US South in the 1960s. Palestinians, Iranians, or other self-defined victims of Western imperialism are the blacks of Selma in the diminutive mind of the former president. But the civil-rights movement in the United States brooks no comparison to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a Christian-led movement appealing to the conscience of other Christians under the law of the land, and succeeded with minimal loss of life.

Black and white Baptists made their peace in the US South a generation ago. Protestants and Catholics yet might make peace in Northern Ireland. But that is an entirely different matter, says Phillips: "True, the IRA [Irish Republican Army] were Catholics and their adversaries were Protestants. But their cause was not Catholicism. It was a united Ireland. They did not want to impose the authority of the pope upon Britain ... There is simply no comparison to the agenda of the Islamists who want to defeat the West in the name of Islam."

The institution that should understand this best, namely the Church of England, seems most eager to liquidate itself. Notes Phillips: "In America, the churches have been in the forefront of the defense of Western values. Some of the strongest support for Israel comes from evangelical Christians. In Britain, by contrast, the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage."

The Archbishop of York, the black Ugandan Dr John Sentamu, praises the British Empire and the culture it spread around the world, whereas the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, apologizes for taking "cultural captives" through the export of English hymns and liturgy. Sadly, the "cultural captives", mainly black African converts, are all that is left of the C of E. Its evangelical wing, represented by former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey - a vocal critic of Islam in the past two years - cannot compete with dissenting churches, and the High Anglican side barely breathes.

It is a bit late in time for a national church. The Roman Catholic Church can make a case that Benedict XVI has the right to head a universal church by virtue of his apostolic succession from St Peter, and thus can forgive sins in Jesus' own stead. But why should Queen Elizabeth II, much less the overtly Islamophile Prince Charles, enjoy this privilege? Perhaps the moment is ripe for the remnants of English Catholicism to join the Roman Church, and for British Protestants to find their way to more robust dissenting denominations.

In any case, Western liberalism, including the sexual habits of English curates, does not appeal to Muslims. On the contrary, Phillips says:

British Muslims are overwhelmingly horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behavior of a Britain that has torn up the notion of respectability. They observe the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves there in opposition to their host society's guiding values. What they are recoiling from, of course, is the breakdown of Western values. After a visit to the United States in 1948, Sayed Qutb wrote: "Humanity today is living in a large brothel!"

Revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them. That is not a recipe for co-existence but for escalation, as last year's subway bombings should have made clear. But the issue now is not terrorism but rather outright war.

The British authorities may have turned a blind eye to terrorism directed against others, and may even have dragged their feet at confronting the terrorist threat at home that erupted in the July 7, 2005, subway bombings. Terrorism is dreadful but, like many nasty things, one can develop a tolerance for it. Now it is not merely terrorism that the West confronts but a strategic debacle of intolerable proportions in the form of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

In that sense Melanie Phillips' book comes too late, for it reports a set of circumstances shortly to be overthrown by events. She is writing about 1938, and we are entering 1939, when the West will have to respond to an external challenge in a way that it never could to an internal threat. Britain will have the religious war it sought to dodge.

From: "Losing to Islamism"

An interview with Abigail R. Esman, an award-winning author-journalist and columnist in World Defense Review, whose work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Salon.com, Esquire, Vogue, Town & Country, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic and many others. She is currently working on a book about how Islamism is winning over democracy.

Among the many topics discussed is the problem of estranged and radicalized youth which are found in all modern societies, including our own. Adding Islam and Jihad to the mix creates an added lethality:

FP: Can you talk a bit about the impact that Muslim immigration is having on Europe?


Esman: That's a sweeping question - and maybe no longer even relevant in all cases. I can really only speak for Holland and Belgium, though, where I would say that immigration itself is far less of a problem than is integration: where honor killings take place in immigrant communities, for instance, Europeans are not affected (though I wish they'd take it upon themselves as if they were). What does affect Europe is the radicalization of the second- and third-generation -- the ones who were born and raised here.


FP: Tell us about how the second -- and third-generation - of Muslims, who were born and raised in Holland and Belgium, are radicalized. Why does this process occur and why do these societies allow it? What can be done about it?


Esman: We could probably talk about this for hours, but I'll try to condense my thoughts on the subject as best I can.  Because the thing to bear in mind is that there is no single reason for any of it. 


Recently, I gave a talk at the University of Leiden, where I was asked a similar question. And what struck me was that the people I spoke to there seemed to be looking for a kind of magic bullet, a swift program that could or would change the course of Muslim radicalism in the Netherlands.  But there is no magic bullet -- just as there is no single cause. It's more a kind of intermingling of various potent poisons in a single cauldron, and as such, takes more than one simple spell to break it. 


So how are they radicalized? You have a combination of adolescent rebellion and adolescent rage, you have children and teenagers who are growing up in violent homes, in a culture where what they learn is that the way to solve problems or exert your will or express your needs is through violence, not words.  Add to that radical imams in local mosques that are often funded by the Saudis, radical Islamicist propaganda that circulates in various Islamic "Sunday schools," satellite dishes feeding propaganda from the Arab world into their homes -- and these shows are turned on all day most days, especially in homes where the parents have not yet learned to speak or understand Dutch.


And then you have the Internet, and web fora, and misinformation, and the kinds of elements that can contribute to any sort of immersion in a trend, a cult, a way of life.  But unlike dressing Punk or Gothic, becoming a radicalized Muslim overtakes your entire way of life: you are reading the Koran and listening to your radical peers and hearing the words of your heroes, you are mentored. And every step into that world leads to another, further and further in.


Why do the societies allow it? In some ways, I think for the same reasons that it happened to begin with: they just close their eyes. They don't want to see. They don't want to talk about things that are politically incorrect, or that indicate a form of intolerance.  Holland has especially been traumatized by the Holocaust. Their guilt is tremendous.  So they hesitate to discriminate against a religious group, or do anything that even gives the appearance of doing so.

Read it all.

The same process, cause and effect, connected with Islam is at work here in the United States. Change the name from Islam to Atzlan or Hip Hop generation, or anything to do with disaffected, radicalized youth, the result will be the same. Thus, the commonality is the disaffection, the anger, and raging hormones of youth that are not constructively channeled.

However, who's to say whether the channeling is constructive as "one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist." Oh, but that's "relativistic thinking."

Moving to down under where Islamism is Rolling Over Australia.

Before discussing the effect of Islam on Australia, author Sharon Lapkin adds a few bits of information about Europe:

And so it unfolds. This war. Based on cultural infiltration rather than traditional warfare, the Islamists exploit the democratic spaces within our society and insert their religious dogma via our own societal modes. And when Islam oversteps and the ignorant Westerners protest, Islam screams, “Racism, Xenophobia”, and the gatekeepers of Western culture rollover and go back to sleep.

In France – where in some parts of the country the Islamic population has increased to 20 or 30 per cent – the inequities of Islam are altering the social landscape of a country steeped in age-old Christian traditions. Recently, Fallaci says, a “Catholic farmer was ordered to remove the cross” he kept in his own cornfield, because “the sight of that religious symbol caused tension with the Muslims.” And at the Collége Edgard Quinet, where 95 per cent of students are Muslim, a “fifteen year-old girl was savagely beaten by her classmates and thrown into a garbage-bin because she was wearing blue jeans.” The school Principal rescued the girl as her fellow students were about to set fire to her. He was stabbed twice.

And then she adds:

"In Australia, where 300,000 Muslims live within a melting pot of 20 million citizens, the warning bells out to be waking the cultural gatekeepers from their slumber. But, here too, they are weeping for the Muslims...Late in 2005, ten Muslim men were arrested by authorities on alleged terrorism offences. Despite the nature of the crimes the men were allegedly planning to commit against Australian civilians, two of the country’s largest newspapers reported sympathetically. The men, they claimed, were in “solitary confinement, dressed in ‘Guantanamo Bay orange’ and banned from touching loved ones.”

The Sydney Morning Herald was weeping so hard for the alleged terrorists that in a story entitled “Terror Suspects: Christmas in Solitary” it reported the men were near breaking point because the conditions were hard, and the Muslim prisoners were not permitted to spend Christmas with their families. The Australian media machine stretched Islam all the way to a nativity scene in order to appease it.

It seems that turning every incident into Islamophobia or discrimination against Muslims is a useful tool!

In 2000, gangs of Lebanese Muslims in Sydney hunted down young Australian girls on the basis of their ethnicity and raped and tortured them while calling them “sluts” and “Aussie pigs”. One of the convicted rapists, Bilal Skaf, sent a text message on his mobile phone, “When you are feeling down ... bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up.” Despite this, the mainstream media painted the crimes as run-of-the-mill rapes and deleted ethnicity from the crime scene. When the Premier of NSW publicly acknowledged the ethnic background of the rapists, the politically correct thundered its disdain.

Asylum and refugee status has been granted to members of known terrorist groups, books sold in Islamic bookshops spouting jihadism "are not in breach of the country's anti-terror laws, the Commonwealth Criminal code or the NSW Crimes Act of 1900.

Role reversal is planted in the minds of the public: rapists are victims, rape victims are the aggressors; the police are "rapists" who based young boys, and politicians were conspiring against to turn Muslims into drug addicts...complete idiocy!

The sixteeth century-invader Hernán Cortés was successful in his invasion because the Aztecs did not understand the Conquistadores and did not see the danger much in the same way that the West has not been able to see the danger to them caused by Islam: That does not make it any less real.

There’s an old saying that “Democracy, like love, can survive almost anything except neglect and indifference. And the West, it appears, is determined to sleep through the invasion. Just as in Europe, Australia is appeasing and ignoring. It is censoring its own freedoms and democratic principles to assuage Islamic cultural sensitivities. It is turning a blind eye to Islamic racism against Australian citizens and succumbing to the bullying tactics of those who attempt to frighten anyone who dares to name it.

We in America are beginning "to see" the dangers to us by a variety of stealth invaders. Let's hope that we take action sooner rather than later.

Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites and Blogs?

via: LGÏ

Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.

At first blush, one can easily ignore such business decisions by the most powerful company on the Internet as being routine. However, on closer examination, such behavior could give one relatively small technological corporation (when measured by the size of its workforce) a degree of political might that frankly dwarfs its current financial prowess...

The Results Speak For Themselves

Obviously, the results have been stellar. Google has quickly moved to the forefront of all things Internet. According to the April 2006 Nielsen/NetRatings report, 49 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2006 were carried out on Google. This is an astounding market share that continues to grow.

In addition, a recent study by Hitwise ranked Google News as the fifth most visited news website behind Yahoo, the Weather Channel, MSNBC, and CNN, clearly making it a growing force in news aggregation.

This penetration has given the company unprecedented influence on society. Appearing on the first page of any word search result list all but assures higher hit rates, which equates to higher revenues for e-tailers as well as brick and mortar retailers using the web to drive traffic, and more reads for news and opinion providers.

In fact, Google ranking can actually be a determining factor in the success and, perhaps, very viability of online business ventures, especially to companies with limited or no domain name recognition. This reality has given rise to a cottage industry that offers enterprises measures to improve their standings. These Search Engine Optimization companies make use of approved and, sometimes, dubious techniques to coerce better page rankings and, thereby, superior public exposure.

Ghosts In The Machine

With this much influence and with so much at stake, challenges are inevitable. A lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, by Kinderstart.com, which seeks to prove that Google has become an "essential facility” to business, and that its arbitrary manner of banning sites from its search results represents anticompetitive behavior.

Maybe more important, when it comes to the dissemination of news, if any aggregator – be it Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. – is creating arbitrary rules to determine what will be accessible on its pages, the potential for bias in what gets reported rears its ugly little head.

Read it all.

Please Read - This Is Not a Drill

Folks,

In case you aren't listening to the radio or watching TV, you need to know something we have heard in the last few minutes:

Discs containing financial records of every single living American military veteran have been stolen. The CIA and the FBI are on it.

Please keep a very close check on all your bank, credit union, credit card etc. records until this thing is solved, one way or another.

Diana's Right on the Mark

"American alien nation"

Rhetoric, nothing more. Talk and more talk, an attempt to placate the American people. Nothing concrete is being done... except betrayal.

Steyn-"Not Just Immigration: It's societal transformation"

The cause: failure of the perfidious institutions of government, rapacious special interest groups, the so-called watchdog press and the interference of a meddling foreign government.

You probably can tell that I am INCENSED about that immigration problems that have been ignored over several decades by several administrations of both parties and by the mainstream press that has chosen to ignore the issues and the fact that our illustrious elected leaders have failed in their duty to uphold the Constitution and to protect the American people against..whom? Not armed force lobbing shells over the border to assault people in the streets. Not against the terrorists and suicide bombers that are reported every day in the press. No, our elected officials have failed to protect us against Middle Eastern oil sheikhs..but that's another story. Today's target is the horde of the innocent looking, the workers, blue and white collar, that have come in a tidal wave that was not reported or, at least under-reported.

The effect: societal transformation on a massive scale.

This is not an "immigration" issue. "Immigration" is when you go into a U.S. government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to 5 percent of the U.S. population is now "undocumented." Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried. Fiji, for example, comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, currently 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col. Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups.

Don't worry, I'm not predicting any coups just yet. But, even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec.

Sometimes the differences are huge -- as between, say, anything-goes pothead bisexual Dutch swingers and anti-gay anti-drugs anti-prostitution Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, the Washington Post's Bob Samuelson wrote that "we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict."

The key words are "unnecessarily heightened." In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America's political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

No, law-abiding Americans, however incensed, are unlikely to rise up an effect a coup d'etat. The more like candidate could be meddler Vicente Fox, who manipulates American law and the foreign dignitary to be received at a state dinner by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would be a bloodless coup as Fox wouldn't have to fire a shot: ten percent of his population is here already, the majority of our troops are in Iraq. The paltry National Guard force sent to back up the Border Patrol on the southern border would be no match for the superior numbers of well-armed, though corrupt and undisciplined forces on the Mexican side, reminiscent of the 19th Century Texas Rebellion that led to the Battle of the Alamo and all the rest that followed, something that most Mexicans have not forgotten nor forgiven. The prize: a developed countryside, several large cities and ports, and a state with the seventh largest economy in the world. Well worth the wait...don't you think.

And who knows, if he's smart he could extend his reach over the rest of North America.

Victory tour '06: Vicente Fox comes to California

Via: Michelle Malkin

After accessing the internal links, refer to the situation in the Balkans: Montenegro Votes to Secede From Serbia, a possible outcome in the Western U.S. due to the massive population transfer from Mexico to the United States.

Educating the World in U.S. Schools: "1982 ruling a catalyst in immigration debate"

In 1977, they got the ball rolling in Texas when a group of "undocumented parents", after attempting to educate their children in escuelitas, store-front schools on the northside and East End of Houston, decide to file a class-action lawsuit.

The case played out in a district court in Houston, where lawyers representing districts from across the state argued that the influx of undocumented students could ruin public schools.

"So many states, like California, New York and Illinois, they were waiting to see what was going to happen here," Torres said. "There was a lot of interest."

It took about two months to try the case. The ruling to overturn Texas' policy was upheld in appeals to the 5th Circuit in 1980 and then to the Supreme Court in 1982. (Plyer v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982) )

Now, because of the protections afforded to immigrants under the ruling, schools don't even try to count how many undocumented students are enrolled.

"There's no reason to ask. Even if you could do it legally, why would you want to?" University of Texas law professor Barbara Hines said. "It has a chilling effect."

Others say that putting numbers and costs on the issue would add depth to the immigration debate.
"We certainly could count. They're just unwilling," said State Board of Education member David Bradley. "We track everything: who eats breakfast and lunch. We track cattle ... It'd be kind of nice to see who's going to school and where."

Who are these students?

Many students who primarily speak a language other than English were born in the United States to parents living here illegally. Others entered the country with temporary permits or have won refugee status.

The numbers that are available: 59 percent of HISD's 208,000 students are Hispanic, roughly 60,000 are classified as "Limited English Proficient," and 10,130 students are considered "immigrants" — meaning that they were born outside the U.S. and have been in U.S. schools for three years or less.

The number of Hispanic students in HISD has more than doubled since the 1982 ruling. The district now spends $158 million a year on bilingual and English as a Second Language programs and hires 2,391 teachers — about 20 percent of the teaching staff — for those classes, according to state records.

The cost of illegal immigration to Texas' public schools jumps to about $4 billion a year, according to one study, when the immigrants' children — some of whom were born in the United States and are, therefore, citizens — are counted.
In return, their families contribute nearly $1 billion to the state sales and property tax coffers, according to a study by Jack Martin, special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that supports tighter restrictions on immigration.

The financial impact:

In addition to using state and local tax dollars, each student enrolled in a Texas school draws a share of the Permanent School Fund, created more than 150 years ago when Texas was annexed. Last year, the state spent $1.6 billion of the $20 billion fund, which is made up of stocks, bonds and the proceeds from land sales, Bradley said...

In addition to using state and local tax dollars, each student enrolled in a Texas school draws a share of the Permanent School Fund, created more than 150 years ago when Texas was annexed. Last year, the state spent $1.6 billion of the $20 billion fund, which is made up of stocks, bonds and the proceeds from land sales, Bradley said.

The problem is not limited to students in Texas. In a decision following arecent lawsuit in California, the high-school exit exam was thrown out because so many seniors could not pass the test. They didn't have sufficient math proficiency to pass a test for 7th graders or English proficiency of 10th graders because...they didn't speak, read, or write English.

Florida's illegal immigration population is costing the state's taxpayers nearly two billion dollars be per year for education, medical care, and incarceration, amounting to the fiscal burden of about $315 per Florida household. Education of K-12 immigrant population costs $1.5 billion for the 8.7% illegal alien students.

The Urban Institute's 1994 calculation of the cost of K-12 education in Florida was based on a per-student cost to state taxpayers of about $4,363. This was higher than the state's comparable cost estimate of about $3,932 per pupil per year. If costs remained constant, the Urban Institute's estimate of outlays on the education of the 2004 population of illegal alien students would have risen because of the increase in illegal alien students from about $419 million to a present cost of about $426 million and the costs of educating the children of illegal aliens born in the United States would be about $962 million. However, educational outlays have risen considerably.

The FAIR research report on educational outlays for illegal immigrant education used the $5,831 average per pupil cost in Florida reported by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for the 1999-2000 school year and calculated the cost of educating illegal immigrant students in Florida in 2000 to be about $378 million based on the U.S. government's estimated illegal alien population in 2000.

NCES data indicate that educational costs per pupil have risen to a current level of about $6,848. Using an average cost factor may underestimate the costs associated with the illegal resident population. As the authors of the 1994 Urban Institute study explained, "We believe that undocumented aliens are more likely than other students to live in urban areas where per student expenses are relatively high."

Using the estimate of the illegal K-12 immigrant population — updated to 2005 — and the estimated per pupil current cost results in a current cost to Florida's taxpayers of at least $.67 billion per year. Using the same per pupil cost estimate for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens suggests that the additional expense of educating these children through the 12th grade is at least an additional $.84 billion per year — or a total annual public educational cost from illegal immigration of more than $1.5 billion per year.

The state's admission of illegal aliens into the state's public universities and community colleges at taxpayer subsidized in-state tuition rates is an additional expense not included in the above calculation. Our estimate of that outlay in Florida is that it could be costing the taxpayers $38-49 million per year.

Tax-payer subsidy of illegal-alien students is not limited to K-12. Nine states are allowing students to circumvent the "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996" that prohibits public colleges from favoring undocumented students by offering them in-stte tuition rates and not extending that offer to U.S. citizen.
A 2003 study by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development noted "that if every one of Illinois' 2,226 eligible undocumented students that year graduated from Chicago's high schools and attended a public university, the annual cost to the state for each graduation class of that size would be between $3.3 million and $11.6 million."

From a report by David W. Stewart, author of "Immigration and Education: The Crisis and Opportunities":

The U.S. school-aged population has reached an all-time high of 55 million. Between 1990 and 2000, enrollment increased by 14 percent. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the size of the student body will almost double by 2100. Yet without school-age immigrants (about 250,000 a year) and the children of immigrants (about 725,000 a year), school enrollment would not be rising at all.

The share of students in the U.S. who are immigrants or the children of immigrants has tripled in the past 30 years; in 1970, they were only 6.5 percent of the student body. Today, one in five students has at least one foreign-born parent. In California, almost half of the students starting school are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

As a result of this immigration-driven population growth, about 14 percent of schools exceed their capacity by six to 25 percent, and eight percent exceed it by more than 25 percent. To alleviate overcrowding, more than one-third of schools use portable classrooms, and one-fifth hold classes in temporary instructional space, such as cafeterias and gyms.
The problem has become severe enough that there is now a federal Bilingual/Immigrant State Grant program to assist school systems that experience large increases in their student population due to immigration. This program awards about $700 million a year to affected districts (National Association of Bilingual Education).

The "No Child Left Behind Act" "has the potential to improve the education of children of immigrants and limited English speaking children in several important ways:

Most key provisions affecting limited English proficient (LEP) and immigrant students are set out in Title I and Title III of the Act. Title I requires schools to improve the performance of LEP students on assessments of reading and mathematics beginning in 3rd grade (U.S. Department of Education 2002). Many children of immigrants are limited English proficient. They also fall into one or more of the NCLB Act's other protected classes, including "major racial and ethnic groups" (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians), low-income students, and students in special education programs.

Obviously schools with large populations of students living in language-segregated areas and attending the same school will pose special difficulties for schools attempting to meet program mandates.

Another FAIR report, "Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration is Sending Schools Into the Red", gives a chart with costs broken down by state and a calculation for expenditure of the top ten states: 1) California - $7.7 billion - nearly 13% of the overall 2004/5 education budget; 2) Texas - 3.9 billion; 3) New York - $3.1 billion; 4) Illinois - $2 billion; 5) New Jersey - $1.5 billion; 6) Florida - $1.2 billion; 7) Georgia - $952 million; 8) North Carolina - $771 million; 9) Arizona - $748 million; 10) Colorado - $564 million.

Their conclusion:

All of our children—native-born and immigrants alike—are receiving a poorer education as a result of the federal government passing its immigration law enforcement failures on to the states. The implications for the coming generations of workers, our future economy, and our long-term competitiveness in the world cannot be ignored.
If the federal government remains unwilling to undertake serious enforcement of the United States’ immigration laws, it will eventually be forced to provide massive federal education funds to the states. A far more logical and cost-effective alternative—and one with considerable pay-offs in other areas as well—would be to substantially reduce illegal immigration.
Without a serious commitment to doing just that, the open borders and lax enforcement that allow millions of illegal aliens to enter the U.S. each year— and to obtain driver’s licenses and other official identification documents with virtually no fear of the law—will continue to undermine the will of the American people, overburden our communities’ financial resources, and imperil our children’s future.

Note: The original 2003 data and amount of $7.4 billion was amended:

Increases in the estimated per pupil educational cost in the ‘03-’04 school year were based on the rate of increase between ’00-’01 and ’01-’02. These increases generally were between 10%-25%. There were three states with increases of less than 10% and eight with increases greater than 25%.

The estimate of the increase in the illegal alien student population was based on an estimate of the overall increase in the illegal alien population, i.e., from 7 million in 2000 to at least 10 million in 2004. The estimate of the illegal alien K-12 school population is assumed to have similarly increased by about 43% (from slightly less than 1.1 million to slightly less than 1.6 million students).

A 2003 Carnegie Corporation report, "Immigrant Students, Urban High Schools: The Challenge Continues", explains:

Including students of all ethnic backgrounds:

In the 2001-2001 school year, there were an estimated 4.6 million students, or 9.6 percent of the total, who were classified as Limited English Proficient. That represents a 105 percent increase since 1990-1991 school year, a rate far exceeding the 12 percent growth in the general population during the same 10-year period. The vast majority, or 79 percent, of non-English speakers were native Spanish speakers, followed by Vietnamese at 2 percent, Hmong at 1.6 percent, Cantonese at 1 percent and Korean at 1 percent.

These trends have led experts to conclude that the level of education achieved by immigrant -- particularly Hispanic -- students will play a major role in determining the quality of the country's future labor force. A breakdown of Census figures by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University reinforces the point. It found that immigrants account for half of new wage earners in the 1990s, up from around 25 percent in the 1980s and 10 percent in the 1970s.

The report states that 87 percent of immigrants say "it is extremely important for immigrants to be able to speak and understand English," and "it's not unreasonable for American society to expect it of them: about 2 in 3 (65%) say, ' the U.S. should expect all immigrants who don't speak English to learn it." Yet, "schools are not doing a good job" although many schools "provide intense doses of English-language instruction. It's part of what every classroom -- math, science, or social studies -- does.

Motivation is the Key: first generation immigrants, those that have fled from some where are more motivated than their offspring. But those that are poorly educated to begin with often have poorly-educated offspring.

In an April 2004 report by economist David Card, "Is the New Immigration Really So Bad?", the educational progress and attainment depends on the location and the immigrant group.
He states that

the fraction of low-education immigrants in Los Angeles, for example, led to a rise in the fraction of high school dropouts in the local population. In Pittsburgh and Cleveland, on the other hand, immigrant densities have fallen over the past two decades and fractions of dropouts in the local population declined sharply. Most high-immigration cities, including New York, Houston, San Francisco, and Miami, experienced relatively small declines in the fraction of dropouts between 1980 and 2000, whereas most low-immigtration cities, including Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, experienced bigger reductions...If inflows of less educated immigrants are offset by outflows of native dropouts (or if less educated immigrants tend to move to cities where there is a bigger positive trend in the educational attainment of the native population), immigration will have little impact on the overall dropout share and coefficient B (in the equation stated in the report) will close to 0. If mobility flows of native dropouts (and trends in native educational attainment) are uncorrelated with the inflow rate of low skilled immigrants, the coefficient B will close to 1.

Study after study has shown that schools have little effect in an area of an influx of low-skilled, poorly educated immigrants into a language-ghetto where they will have little opportunity to reinforce English after school hours and that the billions spent is essentially wasted. It's not that immigrant children should not be given opportunities nor should funds be denied them, but the reality is that unless they are willing to move away from "colonias" or "barrios" or concentrated neighborhoods or districts where English is read and spoken, there can be little if any educational improvement.

This isn't rocket science. Everyone understands the concept. The problem lies in the aspirations of the different groups; to they to assimilate to integrate, or do they want balkanization into cultural and linguistic enclaves and should American taxpayers subsidize such an arrangement? Furthermore: Should the American taxpayer be expected to educate the children of other countries that either can't or won't do the job?

From D. C. Watson's Forthcoming Book: TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts

Our friend and colleague-in-arms, D. C. Watson, has given us the opportunity to read his forthcoming book. Here is a delicious excerpt following our brief review:


[6thCAJ] Editor's Review of D. C. Watson's Forthcoming Book

If anyone who follows the anti-jihad movement on the websites and blogs does not know D. C. Watson by now, we assume they are really, really new to all of this. We began to notice D.C. a good while back from his comments on Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch/Dhimmi Watch. His comments had a growl to them, "pithy" some would say. But they were always "right on." Soon others commenting on D.C.'s comments on Jihad Watch were saying things like "D.C. for president," "D.C. for secretary of state," and "D.C. for secretary of defense." Then this American original began publishing articles on Jihad Watch and a few other places. We were very fortunate to publish some on this site and on our blogsite, Sixth Column. No one really knows when D.C. will surface next with a pithy article about the Islam problem or the Borders Security and Immigration problem. D.C. keeps his own schedule, and it is close to the vest.

A while back, D.C. let us know that he is dangerously close to publishing his first book. Even better, we had a chance to read it before publication. What follows is a chapter from that book, one that has not been published previously. It is very typical of the contents of this book in that it has something important to say and says it very well.

The book is entitled TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts. You can read it in two sittings, and it will keep your attention.

It begins telling about this very typical American young man and how he was living his life. He loved wrestling and thrived doing it on the circuit. Life for him moved from one event to another, and he was living chronically in a comfort zone.

Then came the events in America of 11 September 2001. D.C. had an epiphany. Life in the comfortable lane, as he had been living it, ended abruptly. His book takes you through that change from relatively halcyon days to 11 September 2001. In fact, it is hard to proceed right away after reading his chapter for that day. It is hard because it summons up the emotional memories and images of the day. I felt the profound sadness and the profound rage all over again.

The rest of the book is about the education of D.C. to Islam and his efforts to educate others out of their comfort zones. It makes good reading.

At the end are extensive references.

We don't want to give more away than we have in the foregoing, short review. We will let the following chapter speak for D.C.

~~~~~

From TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts

Muslim immigration in the West: When opposites don't attract

Qur'an 48:29: "Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another."

I'd much rather be spending my time worrying about how much I can 'max' out on the bench press, who the Steelers are trading for who, if the Pistons are gonna make it back to the finals this year, and whether or not my beer is getting warm. However, since the West has been infiltrated by century impaired antagonists, that's going to have to wait. This may sting those who have a tendency to riot, start fires, make death threats over nothing, and offer up million dollar bounties for the deaths of cartoonists, but that's too bad. As citizens of the United States, you, and our cousins in all Western nations deserve to know the truth. While integration problems certainly exist with mass Muslim immigration alone, these problems are compounded by their often self appointed Islamic 'leadership'. Islamic 'civil rights and advocacy' groups, Imams, and clerics have stirred up unacceptable amounts of trouble and disharmony.

Out of one side of their mouths come the calls for pluralism and tolerance. Out of the other, we hear the exact opposite, as they play a phony race card, call for jihad, and express their desires for the implementation of Islamic law in the West. While these people are supposed to be leading, and assisting Muslims with assimilating into Western culture, they are instead spewing hate speech and inciting violence. They don't need to be standing on street corners, rocking from side to side, gobbling down sandwiches as they recruit gullible Mohammedan sheep for future homicide bombings. They don't need to be standing in mosques preaching hate for Westerners. And, they don't need to be running to the press screaming 'Islamophobia' or 'racism' because a local financial institution happens to be giving away free 'piggy banks' to their customers. They need to be rounded up and removed. Jailing them only forces the public to spend tax money in order to house, feed and clothe them. So, wouldn't the more economical alternative be to deport every last one of them and permanently bar them from re-entry?

The chances are good that many Muslims now live in the West because they don’t have an interest in this “Islam must rule the world” mentality that their co-religionists possess. There's also a good chance that they just want a quiet life without having to live under Islamic law. However, an over abundance of Muslim spokespersons and their followers have migrated to Western nations for the purpose of undermining democracies in order to inject their Islamist ideology. They are a constant irritation, and they need to go.

Behind some of their Islamic representatives, many Muslim migrants to Western nations have brought with them a bothersome, and complex cultural problem. If we actually examine this situation, instead of trying to not fracture a massive collection of fragile, seventh century egos, the realization may come to pass that we are in a culture clash with a certain percentage of immigrants who believe in entitlement. Entitlement to ignore the laws of the land to where they have migrated, and entitlement to behave the way their culture has allowed them to behave in their homeland, all while hiding behind a curtain of 'religion'. Who ends up paying for this? The citizens of their host nations.

The current trend, now on display primarily throughout Europe, demonstrates that the larger the Muslim population becomes, the more angered and “offended” it becomes with the non-Islamic culture that it has infiltrated. Certainly at first, when their population figures are relatively small, they are less vocal, and less violent. However, as we have seen in European nations, which have allowed the seemingly endless immigration of Muslims, problems are on the rise.

You won't see too many of the following stories being run in the mainstream Western press, which collectively is too afraid of these people to publish stories about their ridiculous behavior. Seeing or hearing about one or two incidents only every so often tends to allow them to be viewed as something forgettable. So, a compiling of events has been put together with the intent to demonstrate that this issue is widespread, consistent, and needs to be formally addressed. If Muslim organizations wonder why so many millions have no use for them or their constant squawking, the following should provide them with a clue:

[Read the rest on 6th Column Against Jihad.]

Skip the United States. "We Want a County That Looks Like Canada."

Until recently I was totally unaware of the antipathy held by our near neighbor, Mexico, for the United States. I knew that before reading Brenda Walker's blog entry in which she quotes Stephen Haber, director of Stanford University's Social Science History Institute and a Latin American specialist at the Hoover Institute.

"We want Mexico to look like Canada. That's optimal for the United States. We never talk about instability in Canada. We're never concerned about a Canadian security problem. {...} That's the optimal for Mexico: a wealthy and stable country."

And warns Haber, "What isn't wanted is an unstable country on your border, especially an unstable country that hates you."

Is Mexico an unstable, failing state? Do they really ... hate us?

If this is true, it must be really difficult for the Mexican diaspora to live and work within the United States, and could this be the reason for the existence of MEChA and the movement called Aztlan.

Is it an accident that the acronym MEChA,"Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán", has another real-word meaning?

In Spanish, the word mecha means fuse or match, as in strike the match and light the fuse. And put in context: An up-to-now slow-burning fuse in a rapidly deteriorating part of North America.

Two Saudi Men Board School Bus in Tampa, Are Arrested: A Case of the Wrong Bus, or Something More Serious?

What would you think if two unknown adult men boarded your child's school bus and rode to school with them? Would it matter whether or not they were Saudi Arabians?
I think not.

(Shown above: Tampa Municipal Bus)

Attempts by CAIR and others to explain away the behavior of two men supposedly have been studying at an English language institute for six months are almost laughable if it weren't for recent memories about hostage taking and murder of school children in Russia by Muslims and other incidents.

Michelle Malkin has gathered a few news items together to jog our memories.

To be fair, I searched for examples of buses in Tampa, Florida. Frankly, the only possibility of mistaking a yellow school bus for public transportation would be if the bus was being used for the purpose of evacuation during a hurricane. Other examples of yellow buses in Tampa are: church camps and Sunday schools. Some electric trolleys are yellow, but to my knowledge, none is known to go to a high school.



And then there's the question of why one of the men was wearing a long trench coat in the month of May in Tampa, Florida: the temperature is 90 degrees! What's that all about. I'll give you three guesses.

(National Guard Uses School Buses During Evacuation)

Update The two young men have been releeased on a misdemeanor charge as the judge decided that "they are no risk". Hmmm. Could be, but incident reminds me of trial runs on airplanes to gauge the response of security and public awareness.

Sigh! Unfortunately more security means a greater expenditure and a curtailment of rights and freedom. Students now go to school under conditions we could never have imagined: metal detectors, security guards, lockdowns, and the rest. One wonders what kind of security will be necessary and possible to now make America's school buses safe.

Impoverished "Peones" Aren't All That Mexico Has Been Accused of Dumping in the U.S.

"Building a Mexican Giant"

Cemex, the world's third-largest cement maker is in Mexico, today run by Lorenzo Zambrano & family, is doing very well. The Monterrey-based cement firm, founded by Zambrano's grandfather, in 2005 spent $5.8 billion acquiring British cement firm RMC Group. Zambrano and family are worth $1.8 billion, and he also owns a good chunk of telecom company Axtel.

Cemex has operations in more than 50 countries and 50,000 employees worldwide.

Despite the fact that Friday, May 19, 2006, Cemex shares closed down 2 cents, the stock is up 6% on the year as Cemex "managed to slash costs and free up buckets of cash to start paying down the $10 billion in debt weighing on its balance sheet after the purchase. The company delivered record earnings last year, and its stock ended 2005 up 63%.

They are doing very well for a variety of reasons including low cost of labor, a smart marketing plan, a high-profit margin, and charges of "dumping in the United States."

Cemex even makes loans for home expansion.

Cemex has also found a way to peddle more cement to the nearly half of Mexican families who live in poverty by offering them something most can't get anywhere else: credit.

Shut out by banks, Mexicans have long embraced the use of lending circles, known here as tandas. Families or neighbors kick in a few pesos a week to help one another pay for weddings, appliances and other major purchases.

Cemex has updated the tradition to finance home expansions with a program called Patrimonio Hoy, or Patrimony Today. The company provides professional design services and lends small groups of borrowers 80% of the cost of building materials, secured by nothing but the peer pressure of the lending circle. When one family's project is completed and paid for, the cycle restarts with the next member of the group.

Started in 1998, the program has helped 140,000 families expand their homes, with a default rate of less than 1%, according to Hector Ureta Morales, director of social programs for Cemex. Projects that used to take years are now completed in months. Ureta said the model was such a hit in Mexico that the company recently expanded it to Colombia and Nicaragua and would soon add Venezuela and Costa Rica. He said the program was profitable and made good business sense because families were likely to call on Cemex when it came time to add another room.

"We're building brand loyalty," he said.

And they're selling the same concept in the United States:

Cemex has launched a related concept in the United States known as Construmex to channel into home construction some of the $20 billion that migrants send back to their families each year. Workers in the U.S. can walk into a Construmex office, design their home addition and get the materials delivered to relatives in Mexico. Ureta said migrants saved the hefty fees charged by money transfer companies while maintaining control of how their remittances were spent in their absence.

Such grass-roots knowledge has helped Cemex thrive in developing markets where others fear to tread.

Mexico is rich country, populated by some wealthy and intelligent people. The question is: Why haven't these people used their education, talent and wealth to improve the lives of Mexicans rather than foisting their problems onto the United States?

Read it all.

Should one ally with those with whom one disagrees? (updated)

(Republished following some minor editing).

Robert Spencer published a very thoughtful and chronically relevant article on 19 May 2006:

Should one ally with those with whom one disagrees?

Paul Weyrich once told me that I should never hesitate to ally with someone with whom I had disagreements on some issues.

Allies are hard to come by in any case, and agreement on one issue didn't require agreement on all issues. There are some with whom one should never ally, but they are few. I think it's good advice. This is important today, as I have called repeatedly for Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and others to unite against the global jihad. This will require working with people with whom one disagrees.

The reason Mr. Spencer published this statement is because of some recent attacks:

This has come up because Lawrence Auster, a conservative writer, has been attacking me on a more or less regular basis lately for defending Hirsi Ali and other sins -- including the contention that I'm a "neoconservative." So I write this not to convince Auster of anything, but to try to clarify these issues for people of good will who may read this.

And why is Mr. Auster unhappy with supporting Ms. Ali?

Anyway, the heart of Auster's pique at me is that he believes that by defending Hirsi Ali, an atheist liberal, I am allying with someone who would destroy what I am ostensibly defending. He calls her "an enemy of our civilization."

The most important statements from Mr. Spencer follow:

I don't believe Hirsi Ali is an "enemy of our civilization." She holds to some positions with which I disagree, but the key difference between her and the Islamic jihadists is that I am confident Hirsi Ali will never try to murder me. We can work out our differences in peace in the public sphere, in rational discourse and debate.

And,

It may be that she and I will be in the position of Murray Rothbard and William F. Buckley; Rothbard told Buckley, according to Auster, that although they were allies against Communism, they would be on opposite sides after Communism was defeated. That may be, but at this point I am only concerned with defeating the jihad -- and if that future break with Hirsi Ali or someone else does happen, it will happen within the political arena, and not play out with guns and bombs.

What about the "long run"? What about the longest run, after the war has been won?

It may be that I will be on opposite sides with many of my present allies if Islamic jihad is defeated and we all survive to work out our disagreements after that.

Periodically, we get similar attacks from those who believe that we are treasonous to our most fundamental philosophical values:

1. We share the blog with a "conservative," as they see it, who addresses issues from that perspective. (Our co-blogger never loses sight of the big picture or fails to hierarchicalize issues and values properly, however, but that seldom gets praised by detractors).

2. We are "soft" on Christianity, we are told, because rarely articles by some contributors make some small reference Christian values and concerns.

In Mr. Spencer's case, he indicates that his attacker sees him as insufficiently Christian. However, whatever position Mr. Spencer takes, he will always draw fires from those ideologues whose minds are two standard deviations or more away in either direction. Any position one takes will attract supporters and detractors. Both may be right or wrong in toto or in part. Bad supporters are just as deleterious as bad detractors.

However, success comes significantly from knowing and holding context. No, it is not the whole matter, but context comes hard to some supporters and detractors.

Mr. Spencer is "dead on" when he points out that his focus is ending the threat of Islamic jihad internationally, starting with us first.

I have often said that we need a broad coalition of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and more -- everyone threatened by the jihad -- in order to defeat the jihad. I stand by that statement, because as far as I can tell, no single one of those groups is strong enough to defeat the jihad by itself.

Mr. Spencer is not naive enough to think that any of us can win with a single group, no matter how dedicated. However dedicated they may be, there must be numbers of people who share the context of facing existential threat from Islam and see the need to neutralize it. When we fought WWII, for example, we allied with sundry nations, having differing cultures. Our own combatants came from differing races and religions. No one, taking a cue from Mr. Spencer, tells someone to stop sharing his foxhole and killing the enemy bent on his annihilation because he is ________ (Christian, atheist, Jew, negro, white, and so on).

None of us could or should ally with certain people, even if they want to defeat Islam. If these groups are among the anti-American and anti-reason fifth columnists, they cannot be allied with because they oppose our deepest values. They seek to overthrow our Constitution and destroy our country along with us. Christians, Jews, and a number of other of the religious per se do not.

Differences must be thoughtfully considered and not become sources of rejection just because of differences. For example, I am an atheist and have never made it a secret, but I ally with religious people, except Muslims. I am, if any classification fits, more of a "classic liberal," who has had the inestimable advantage of maturing under the power of the philosophy of Objectivism. This advantage has helped me understand and deal with an otherwise very difficult to understand world far better than any religion could ever provide. The philosophy really does not accommodate names like "liberal," "conservative," "moderate," and so on, because none of these terms really get to fundamentals, where the rubber really meets the road. However, I can ally with conservatives (excepting the militantly religious), liberals, and moderates, if they hold enough of the proper values for this fight with Islam.

What makes that possible? Is it craven compromising of my own values? Am I "making nice" to curry favor and win allies by pretending that some of their values, including their deepest values, do not run counter to mine?

Hardly. I keep in mind one of the themes of the negro civil rights movement that started in the mid-20th century. They used the phrase and the song, "Keep your eyes on the prize." And, they did, very successfully, thereby achieving moral and existential victories, long overdue.

Enter our Constitution. It keeps those of differing views at bay from imposing their views by physical force. Lose the Constitution, and we lose everything.

"Keep your eyes on the prize" really says it. It means, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Put another way, it means hierarchicalizing one's values and having the integrity to achieve them. It means recognizing, among other things, that rarely in life do we have the luxury of dealing with pure cultures of anything. We must work with those who share cardinal values and do all we can to pursuade others to adopt our values as reality-based and rational--we are far more likely even to be heard and be in a position to persuade people to consider our values if we are not busy rejecting them so quickly because they differ. Even there, we will achieve a range from full to partial success to lack of success: It is much quicker and easier to move the Empire State Building without disassembly that change a culture in the same time or with the same amount of effort.

Of course, after the war has been won, we may go our separate ways. Bless the Constitution. In many cases, we may well be on opposite sides, but united under the Constitution. But, one must be alive and thriving in order to go those separate ways. One must first win the war. Otherwise, well, there is no otherwise.

In Remembrance

While writing this, my memory was jogged:

Remember what happened when the Saudi muttawa allowed fifteen girls to burn alive rather than to appear sans chador?













And the Taleban beat women:



The Taleban in back in Afghanistan and is making a move into Pakistan. In reality, they never left. Life for women in these societies is so sad and so very deadly, another reason why allowing the presence of Islam in the West is

TOTALLY INSANE!!!

Exercise a Challenge for Saudi Women

Although there are no laws against women exercising outside their homes, "many in this conservative society are influenced by scholars and clerics who argue against it. "

No one should be surprised as scholars and clerics seem to regulate every moment of their lives, every aspect, every thought, and perhaps, even their dreams.

In Riyadh, hotel gyms and pools are off limits to women. Along the city's walking trails, where the women walk covered in the mandatory black cloaks, they are sometimes harassed by the muttawa.

Remember the incident with the muttawa preventing girls from leaving a burning building because they couldn't put on their chadors? Fifteen girls died that day.

Now they harass women who walk:

Rana al-Abdullah said one such official ordered her to go back to her car when she was out walking one day and wouldn't leave her alone until she did. She now walks in malls.

Many Saudis say they are baffled by the religious arguments.

At a clinic that treats obesity-related diseases, a booklet left by a writer named Muhammad al-Habdan, warned that if girls' schools began P.E., Saudi girls would have to change into workout gear — and good girls should not disrobe outside their homes. Changing in a locker room might cause them to lose the shyness that is the hallmark of good morals, the booklet warned.

What is the moral objection raised by the clerics?

"It went on to say that the girls might be come attracted to each other after seeing their classmates in tight leotards and tops."

That's right. Not content with the strict separation between male and female, clerics are convinced that exercise in the presence of other women will create a rash of Lesbians. Once again, the overwhelming regulation of thought, word, and deed.

Women are to be confined, under wraps, to their homes, where they are again to be strictly monitored for any infraction. The result: obesity.

Changing such attitudes has become the goal of many health-conscious women who are alarmed about the rising rate of obesity in their country.

About 52 percent of Saudi Arabia's men and 66 percent of women are either obese or overweight, according to Saudi press reports. Among adolescents the rate is 18 percent and in preschoolers over 15 percent.

Saudi Arabians do very little as they can afford to import contract labor to do most everything for them.

Health officials blame the plush, oil-fueled Saudi lifestyle for the expanding waistlines. As Saudis have become richer, they have abandoned fiber-rich meals for fast food and meat-based dishes. They have brought in millions of Asian workers to do manual jobs. And they are addicted to technology that encourages staying at home in front of a computer or the TV.

"We're a very affluent society, so we have the luxury not to have to move," said Yasmin al-Tuwaijri, an epidemiologist who studies the obesity epidemic at a leading Riyadh hospital.

"It's because the whole environment doesn't support a change in lifestyle," said al-Tuwaijri.

One of those lifestyle changes is getting more women to work out. But it's not just a matter of persuading them to get off their couches. It's changing a mentality that believes that workouts in schools, gyms or outdoors are an evil that will lead, through giving women more freedoms, to the decline of society.

The government understands the health dangers of obesity, but the clerics will have nothing of that:

One of those lifestyle changes is getting more women to work out. But it's not just a matter of persuading them to get off their couches. It's changing a mentality that believes that workouts in schools, gyms or outdoors are an evil that will lead, through giving women more freedoms, to the decline of society.

"There is no faster way to corrupt nations than the emancipation of women — that is getting her out on the street to entice men and ruin their morals," he added.

"The Muslim woman should realize that she is a target for corruption," said al-Habdan in another booklet on why women should not go to fitness clubs.

"There is no faster way to corrupt nations than the emancipation of women — that is getting her out on the street to entice men and ruin their morals," he added.

For some reason clerics don't see sloth brought on by immense wealth and the use of contract labor for everything as "corruption".
The issue isn't dead..or is it?

Several years ago, some members of the appointed Consultative Council, the closest thing Saudi Arabia has to a Parliament, raised the issue of physical education in girls' schools.

Those who voted against it pointed out that exercise classes in boys' schools have not had much effect on male obesity, according to press reports. That is the same argument al-Habdan makes in his booklets.
Badria al-Bani, a member of the walking campaign al-Nahda is spearheading, said the group's effort will focus on raising awareness among Saudi men of the importance of exercise in a woman's life.
"The first point many women have raised is this point," she said.

She said the group will suggest that girls' schools dedicate 15 minutes of the lunch break for walking. "Isn't that better for the girls than eating?" she asked.

Some months ago, veteran Arab News columnist Abeer Mishkhas said she "was basking in the glow of satisfaction" at some of the successes women had made in 2005 when an article caught her eye and mocked her.

It was a Ministry of Education press release that said rumors that girls' schools will have P.E. classes soon were baseless and misleading. And it reprimanded newspapers for suggesting the possibility.

Some regulation in life is necessary. Even the American Founding Fathers couldn't get around it...and they tried.



But the Muslim clerical-thought police go overboard. In this case they are ruining women's health.

But, what else is new.

Islamic Terror Plot in Switzerland

An Islamic terror cell in Switzerland plotted to blow up an El Al Plane in Geneva. Plots by jihad terrorists are almost ho-hum affairs as there are so many that we automatically link the words jihad, terrorism and bomb.

The bizarre twist to this plant is that the Swiss secret service agent who revealed the plot by going undercover at an Islamic center in Geneva is now working for the Islamists.

A plot to blow up an El Al plane at Geneva’s international airport has been thwarted. Swiss intelligence agencies uncovered a terrorist cell last December that plotted to strike an Israeli plane while it was taking off through an RPG rocket attack in December 2005.

 The French website Le Point featured a report on Friday saying that “intelligence of the Swiss secret services carrying the date December 2005 shows that two people, an Libyan and an Algerian, held a mortar bomb, and planned to carry out an attack against an Israeli airlines El Al plane at Geneva’s airport.” ...

The plot to shoot the plane was uncovered by Claude Kuvasi, a Swiss secret service member who worked under the codename Babylon. Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Kuvasi was planted as an undercover agent in an Islamic center in Geneva to find out if a terror cell was operating in it. In order to encourage the trust of the head of the Islamic center, Hani Ramadan, Kuvasi converted to Islam.

According to reports, one of the operatives of the centers told the agent, who was dining with him, that he was a member of a cell planning to blow up an El Al plane. Phone taps carried out by the Swiss agent found that the terrorist cell was made up of an Algerian immigrant, 40, named Assam, and a Libyan immigrant, 34, named Adar. 
  
Although the two lived in the Zurich area they planned on blowing up the Israeli plane in Geneva, due to the fact that the airport and its takeoff pad can be viewed with ease from surrounding mountains.
Phone taps on the terrorists revealed that the terrorists planned to smuggle an RPG rocket from Russia and fire it at the plane, before escaping to Iraq. ...

The episode was kept secret for six months, until the Swiss agent exposed it on his own. Kuvasi, who became closer to the head of the Islamic center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, feared that his new friend will face complications due to the fact that some of his students planned a terror attack. Kuvasi wrote a letter to Ramdadan saying his conscience guided him and he was therefore obligated to reveal how Swiss intelligence spied on him.
 The revelation has since taken a bizarre twist, with the Blick newspaper reporting that Kuvasi, who recently carried out a spying job in Syria, escaped his handlers, and is hiding in Egypt. The former agent is now hoping that the current revelation will prevent Swiss intelligence from interrogating and torturing Islamic suspects.

So they Islamized the undercover agent. Going native, joining up, turning is a hazard for any undercover agent. For those going undercover among Muslims, the hazard is greater because the indoctrination by Muslims is so thorough and on-going, much like Communist indoctrination.

Remember that Muslims are required to pray five times a day and attend Friday prayers, at which time they often hear fiery sermons condemning and ridiculing non-Muslims. The Koran is chock full of intolerance and violence and Muslims are fearful of appearing "non-islamic" that they spend all their waking moments trying to figure out things: in which direction they are oriented to pray, to use the bathroom, which products are "halal", with whom they can associate or even talk without being polluted, etc. This is a method of indoctrination and maintenance in which the Stockholm syndrome can be applied.

Read it all.

Scrolling down the comment section at LGF where I found the story, I was alerted to another regarding CAIR and undercover monitoring of mosques using the Freedom of Information Act, "which was enacted by Congress in 1966 to give the public greater access to the federal government's records." In this case, our government's ability to monitor facilities, mosques, that aren't transparent, that have historically been used to spread jihad philosophy, and, in certain locations, have been used as citadels and weapons caches, will be hampered.

CAIR wanted the records request filed on the belief that no person or organization should be monitored because of peaceful religious practice, Khan said. There must be a legitimate probable suspicion of illegal activity, she said.
"Also, based on the history of innocent people who have gotten into trouble due to incompetence, human error or even untruthful informants, it is necessary to insist on transparency from our government," Khan said. "This is our right as Americans."

CAIR and the ACLU claim that "peaceful religious practices" go on in mosques. Monitoring is necessary to ensure that nothing else happens there.

The day that Presbyterians or Catholics, or even Methodists are found to use churches in the same manner as have Muslims in our time, the government should monitor them as well.



There would be no need for monitoring if people would do what they are supposed to do.

I notice that drivers slow down at our local speed trap only after they spot a sheriff's deputy ready to hand out tickets or after being tagged. The same principle applies.

The founding fathers debated as to whether or not we should have a government. During the colonial period experiments without government abounded and settlers moving out into unchartered territory were thrilled when an authority was set up to help protect them from the anarchy caused by unbridled freedom on the frontier. People simply will do what they can get with, even "religious people." The complaint lodged by CAIR and the ACLU is another attempt to create a situation where Islam has unbridled freedom in West, a dangerous condition even if Islam wasn't so dangerous to non-Muslims.

"Ask Spengler - - Yankee Noodle"

Spengler's answers to Romano in Rome and Worried in Washington may be satire, but some make better sense than do the "real answers" given by "experts."

He--re------'s Spengler! (The crowd roars!)

"The Unvarnished Immigration Debate"

Mark Halprin, a novelist, is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and distinguished visiting fellow of Hillsdale College< writes in the Washington Post:

Not a single illegal immigrant should or need enter the United States, not one. Contrary to the common wisdom, the borders are easy to seal, and controlling entry is hardly totalitarian. This is not the same as the question of how much immigration to allow, an important matter rightly the political decision of the whole people rather than of a febrile militia of Willie Nelson look-alikes or the purposeful inefficiency of a fence. And lest the government nurture a parallel and unrepresentative authority, it would best attend to its responsibilities and displace the armed geezers who have stepped in where it has failed, though to do so with the military is wrong on half a dozen counts.

This spring's "pro-immigration" marches attempted lamely to confuse legal and illegal immigration. Of course everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children. That is not, however, license either for illegal entry or America's failure to have an immigration policy except by unregulated default.

Businesses large and small, careerists with Latin nannies, and those who want wages low, the unions suppressed and their gardens well tended have made common cause with their political opposites. The latter, who have embraced multiculturalism and bilingualism, and who, though they may be little blast furnaces of ostentatious compassion, are in their disdain for America as ruthless as commissars, would be delighted to see it changed any which way as long as it becomes unrecognizable. If you worry about the potential for California and the Southwest to calve like melting glaciers and cleave to Mexico, or vice versa, the left will mock your distress as it once mocked and reviled anticommunism. And in the same vein the equanimity of the business right is similar to the self-satisfaction of those who would have sold Lenin the rope with which he planned to hang them. This is the lobby, strange as it may seem, for illegal immigration.

Their position is indemnified not only by stupidity and greed but by the fact that it is impossible to make a simple case for sovereign control of the borders without attracting nativists and xenophobes who pollute the argument with racism, protectionism and statist economics. Tossing aside one of America's great strengths, they would simply end immigration. As a graceless technique of law enforcement, they would deny basic services to the children of illegal immigrants, and they speak of rounding up 12 million mainly Latin Americans for deportation, forgetting the signal fact that over the years, by our lack of a policy, neglect of enforcement and systematic indecision we have at the very least made of ourselves an attractive nuisance.

By allowing the bloc that benefits from illegal immigration to extend its invitation and welcome, the whole nation is complicit in luring these people here. After doing so and benefiting immensely from their labor, to make their children truants, turn them away from emergency rooms or expel them would be beneath contempt. And yet it is not surprising in light of the trajectory of our politics and morals that this is something some of us urge and the rest are forced to contemplate.

Read it all.
Immigration should be regulated, not ended, and control cannot occur without controlling entry.

A Warning

Because of their humanity, culture and language, the workers and their families who cross the borders are far more influential than even the destabilizing flow of goods from China. Thus, the question of how much to relieve wage pressure by the importation of labor should be put to the country unadorned and in its simplest form: To what extent is economic advantage sufficient to justify the consequences of the evolving common-law marriage with the countries and cultures of Latin America? If this is decided merely parochially as a test of strength among business, labor and ethnic lobbies, there will be no policy, no borders, no justice and no relief. For it is a great question, to which the answer must be given by the whole people.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad Joined at the Hip

Here's a piece from the intensely anti-Jewish, pro-Palestinian/Muslim Ernesto Cienfuego, owner of La Voz de Aztlan (you ought to go to http://aztlan.net and scroll down the left side to see some of the nasty stuff they publish there).

Anyway, I'm sure there is a great big grin on his face as he reports on Chavez' statement. Next thing you know, he'll be requiring the Jews of Venezuela to wear yellow ribbons on their clothes, in the good ol' Muslim tradition of yore (and last week).

Maybe, just maybe, there is something to all those news reports about Chevez getting chummy with Iran.

Ya think?

LA VOZ DE AZTLAN NEWS BULLETIN
Los Angeles, Alta California
May 18, 2006

President Hugo Chavez wants Jews out of Venezuela

The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, said last Christmas Eve that "the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world.”

The statement by President Chavez brought strong condemnation by the Zionist Simon Wiesenthal Center, and now the approximate 15,000 Jews who live in Venezuela are feeling a bit uncomfortable and many are making preparations to move to Israel.

A delegation of Jewish community leaders from Venezuela arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday to explore options for Venezuelan Jews who want to leave and move to Israel. The delegation of 16 community leaders met Wednesday with President Moshe Katsav in Jerusalem. The Jewish delegation told President Katsav of the growing unrest in Venezuela and their fears for the future of the 15,000 Jews living there. The Jewish delegation, led by Freddie Pressner, President ofthe Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, visited a Tel Aviv University program for Spanish-speaking students yesterday, and today they will tour Kfar Saba, which has been designated by the Jewish Agency to absorb the growing number of Jews immigrating from Venezuela. "The city of Kfar Saba is happy to be affiliated with the Venezuelan Jewish community," said Kfar Saba Mayor Yehuda Ben-Hamo. "I see this initiative as an important Zionist endeavor of which Kfar Saba is very proud." Ben-Hamo saidthat 25 families have settled in the city in recent months and that more Venezuelan immigrants are scheduled to make Kfar Saba their home this year.

Jewish Agency officials estimate there are around 2,000 Venezuelan Jews already living in Israel and that just over100 Venezuelan Jews arrived here during the past year. "We expect that number to rise," one official said.

La Voz de AztlanWebsite: http://www.aztlan.net

"Required Week-End Reading: Sessions Reveals Senate Punting on Immigration Bill"

Read the comments made on the Senate floor May 19th, 2006, by Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions: he charges that his colleagues had a "studied and carefully carried out plan to conceal" the fact that S. 2611 would bring more than 100 million unskilled workers to America in the next two decades.

According to Sessions, only three or four Senators" showed up for the single hearing allowed to discuss the population and wage impact of S. 2611.

Here you will find Sessions whole speech in which he reveals "that the Senators are saying among themselves that the important thing is to get a quick vote on S. 2611, get it off the table, and let the House of Representatives bail them out by blocking it.

"Going Home"

"Home is where the heart is." In Mexico the refrain reads, "Home is where the soul is."

Millions around the world don't like American culture. Tens of millions of those people are Mexicans living in the United States. Even though poverty is widespread and wages are less in Mexico than in the United States, why do they come? Here's why:

And Brenda posed this question: "Why are millions fleeing a rich nation?"
Her answer: "America's immigration permissiveness that prevents long overdue economic and social reforms in Mexico."

What could happen to Mexico IF they went home?

... illegal aliens living in America can go home to fight for a better Mexico by summoning up the courage they draw upon when they cross the border, the cunning they deploy when they arrange for false documents, the guile they use when they learn how to milk our system and the tenacity they display when they march in the streets for " justice."
Imagine the impact 20 million determined Mexicans could have on their country’s future.

Perhaps this is why the elites of Mexico and other places don't want them back.
Read it all. Contains interesting internal links.

"Something's Missing for Bush's 'Comprehensive' Immigration Reform"

Charles Krauthammer should get another Pulitzer Prize for lucidly and succinctly identifying the problem that is eating at the gut of most Americans today:

WASHINGTON -- I do not doubt the president's sincerity in wanting to humanize and regularize the lives of America's 11 million illegal aliens. But good intentions are not enough. For decades, the well-traveled road from the Mexican border to the barrios of Los Angeles has been paved with such intentions. They begat the misguided immigration policy that created the crisis that necessitated the speech that purports to offer, finally, the ``comprehensive'' solution.

Hardly. The critical element -- border enforcement -- is farcical. President Bush promises to increase the number of border agents. That was promised in the Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty legislation in 1986. The result was 11 million new illegals.

The president himself boasted about having already increased the number of border guards by one-third under his administration. Yet he acknowledges in the same speech that we do not have the border under control -- "full control,'' as he comically put it. The president's new solution? Increase the number of border guards again, by half this time. Everyone knows that anything short of enough border guards to do Hands Across America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean won't do a thing to eliminate illegal immigration.

The only thing that might work is a physical barrier. The president offhandedly dismisses a wall as something that could never stop the "enormous pressure on our border.''

By what logic? Opponents pretend that these barriers can always be circumvented by, say, tunnels or clandestine entry by sea. Such arguments are transparently unserious. You're hardly going to get 500,000 illegals lining up outside a tunnel or on a pier. Such choke points are exactly how you would turn the current river of illegals into narrow streams -- which is all we need to turn the illegal immigration problem from out of control to eminently manageable.

President Bush's enforcement provisions were advertised as an attempt to appease conservatives. This is odd. Are conservatives the only ones who think that unlimited, unregulated immigration is a detriment to the Republic? Do liberals really believe in a de facto policy that depresses the wages of the poorest and most desperate Americans, African-Americans most prominently among them? Do liberals believe that the number, social class, educational level, background and country of origin of immigrants -- the kinds of decisions every democratic country makes for itself -- should be taken out of the hands of the American citizenry and left to the immigrants themselves, and in particular, to those most willing to break the very immigration regulations the American people have decided upon democratically?

And is it just conservatives who think the United States ought not be gratuitously squandering one of its greatest assets -- its magnetic attraction to would-be immigrants around the world? There are tens of millions of people who want to leave their homes and come to America. We essentially have an NFL draft where the United States has the first, oh, million or so draft picks. And rather than exercising those picks, i.e., choosing by whatever criteria we want -- such as education, enterprise, technical skills and creativity -- we admit the tiniest fraction of the best and brightest and permit millions of the unskilled to pour in instead.

The president's speech made a fine case for temporary workers. But what possible confidence can we have that when the time comes to return home, they will not stay on? After all, having lived here for years, they would have an infinitely easier time melting into American society than the current millions of illegals who wandered into places they knew nothing about and successfully melted in.

I am not against legalization. Admittedly, legalization is desperately unfair to the further millions who have been waiting in line at U.S. consulates around the world. And by itself, it would only encourage future illegals. But if coupled with a program that closes down the border, it would make sense. It would resolve the problem once and for all.

Serious border enforcement is what's missing in the president's "comprehensive'' program. And that is why so many "conservatives'' are extremely unhappy. Not out of nativism. There are many like me who cannot wait to end the shadow life of the illegals. But doing so while fraudulently promising to close the border is a simple capitulation -- and an invitation to the next president to declare the next amnesty for the next torrent of illegals who will have understood from the Bush program that crossing the border at night and finding a place to hide is the surest road to the American dream.

Charles has it right: What's to stop another president from offering yet another amnesty for the torrent of immigrants that will not stop unless we take immediate action? This isn't rocket science. In order to preserve the America that we know, the border must be closed by overwhelming enforcement. Only in that way will the message get out to lawless elements at home and abroad, to governments that have too long used the United States as a convenience, and to soothe the growing fears of citizens.

E pluribus unum? I no longer think so.

Noting that special interest groups and hyphenation of Americans has created "an institutionalized disunity" among Americans and within the overwhelming tidal wave of aliens, in "E pluribus unum", Mark Alexander at The Patriot Post describes how this untenable and unthinkable situation came to be. He quotes Teddy Roosevelt and then goes on to explain:

How does a nation that has institutionalized ethnic disunity integrate millions of immigrants?

In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt penned these words: "In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here.

Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Unfortunately, the Left has spent four decades hyphenating and disenfranchising every ethnic group it can in order to create special-interest constituencies. Challenging this disunity exposes one to substantial ridicule -- claims of intolerance, bigotry and jingoism. Yet these subcultures, including immigrants, fail to become properly integrated into civil society.

We are now beginning to bear the social consequences of multicultural politicization in both American and immigrant minority populations. "Progressive" policies -- bilingual education being the worst offender -- have the effect of insulating and ultimately ghettoizing otherwise hardworking and well-intentioned immigrants. For fear of appearing "culturally imperialistic" by forcing newcomers to learn our language, history and laws, we've condemned them to permanent impoverishment.

Read it all.

It appears that many contemporary Americans would not meet Teddy Roosevelt's criteria for being an American for they care more for their racial, ethnic, or religious identity than for being an American. To them America is just an address, a place to exploit, to have a "good life". Rather than create their lives in a new mold as did the Americans of old, they have decided to recreate the old country while using the resources of the new.

I inquired of an immigrant family why they wanted American citizenship. The answers of the adults should surprise no one: we want a better life for our family. We want to be able to bring our parents and grandparents to the United States. We want to be able to vote so that "we can have our rights." Now Latinos can have their own way.

When told that rights always bring with them a responsibility to the community, to their neighbors, to the country as a whole, they were less forthcoming; their answers were ambiguous. The husband shrugged his shoulders and replied in Spanish, "No sé nada de eso," "I don't know anything about that".

Annoyed, the wife picked up her youngest child and said,"I need my mother to come soon to help with the children." Then she walked into the other room leaving me with a clear understanding of their intentions.

We WILL Defend Our Nation Against Foreign Invaders!

Folks,

National sovereignty and national security took the expected hits when President Bush announced in his speech to the nation what his plans for the borders were. It appears that he believes that by throwing a bone to us, the "little people," he can distract us, and because of our "short attention spans," we'll just forget about it.

Not. Inasmuch as the President has refused to take his oath of office seriously, and has failed his country, it looks as if the adage "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" applies, so the patriots of the Minuteman organization plan to move ahead with their privately funded, privately built fence on private property with the permission of the property owners.

Here's their announcement:


Minuteman Border Fence ALERT!

Schedule of Events Ground Breaking May 27, 2006
6501 Greenway Parkway Suite 103-640 Scottsdale, AZ 85254
Phone (520) 829-3112

Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Takes Action! Minuteman Border Fence Volunteers to BREAK GROUND in AZ!!!

Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) will be conducting a weekend border operation in Palominas, AZ that includes a border watch, Minuteman Border Fence Ground Breaking and repair of existing fence on the US Mexico border.

MCDC is moving forward with plans to build the Minuteman Border Fence. President Bush’s response will not secure the border and the ground breaking will be done on 5/27/2006 Memorial Day weekend in conjunction with the AZ Chapter Memorial weekend border watch operation. We have been working hard to put plans in place for this historic undertaking. Please read the following; we have tried to include everything possible for questions about who, what, where and when below.

Many have talked of building a secure fence between Mexico and the United States. Now Chris Simcox and MCDC is taking action again and doing the job the Federal Government will not do. We are overwhelmed with calls asking: What can I do to help right NOW?

Donate to Build the Minuteman Border Fencehttps://secure.responseenterprises.com/mmfence/?a=571
VOLUNTEER to Build the Minuteman Border Fencehttp://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/volunteer.php

WHO :
Due to security concerns and respect for the private ranch property made available to MCDC, only registered Minuteman MCDC Volunteers will be able to participate in the weekend ground breaking operation as well as the AZ weekend border watch.
Go to www.minutemanborderfence.com to volunteer and see the latest posts.

WHAT :
Ground Breaking: Minuteman Volunteers will conduct a Minuteman Border Fence Ground Breaking Ceremony as well as build the initial 1/8 mile section of a 26 mile long range fence to local ranch requirements.

WHEN:
Minuteman Border Fence Schedule: Friday Evening 5/26 – Movie under the Stars in Tombstone, AZ, " Cries from the Border," a powerful film documenting the destruction of one community in Arizona by the assault of the illegal alien invasion of the USA. Director Mercedes Maharris will attend. Open to the general public.

Directions to Tombstone, AZ From Tucson I-10 E via the ramp on the LEFT toward EL PASO. 38.3 miles , I-10-BL / AZ-80 exit- EXIT 303- toward BENSON / DOUGLAS. 0.5 miles, Stay STRAIGHT to go onto I-10 BL E / AZ-80 E / W 4TH ST. Continue to follow AZ-80 E. 25.4 miles, Turn RIGHT onto 3RD ST. 0.1 miles Turn LEFT onto TOUGHNUT ST. <0.1 miles, End at Tombstone.

Saturday 5/27 – Registered Minuteman Volunteers Only.
7 AM – 9 AM – All registered participants check in at the Palominas Trading Post and will be escorted to the ranch after check in.
10 AM – Noon - Groundbreaking Ceremony – includes MCDC volunteers and guests installing new fence and base poles for a 150’ security fence model.
Master of Ceremony - Stacey O’Connell (MCDC) .
MCDC Speakers – Chris Simcox President Carmen Mercer, Vice President Al Garza, Executive Director.
Additional Guest Speakers: Colin Hanna – President, WeNeedaFence.com; Don Goldwater - a Minuteman, and candidate for AZ Governor; Steve King – US Congressman, Iowa 5 th District; and Ambassador Alan Keyes – Chairman, Declaration Alliance.
12 Noon - Lunch provided at the border.
1-3 PM – Continue to install new fence.

Some numbers:

Over 1021 people have signed up to volunteer to build the Minuteman Border Fence.
More than $225,000 has been donated to a dedicated Minuteman Border Fence fund.
National talk radio shows and local talk radio shows are promoting the fence.
We are planning to raise $10M for the next phase of the fence.
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps welcomes all those who want to secure America as it leads the way with a bold initiative. One operation alone cannot secure the Border.
What can I do to help right NOW?

Donate to Build the Minuteman Border Fencehttps://secure.responseenterprises.com/mmfence/?a=571
VOLUNTEER to Build the Minuteman Border Fencehttp://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/volunteer.php

MCDC will continue to man our posts and watch and report as the Minuteman Border Fence is built. Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has shown that illegal aliens can be stopped with dedicated volunteers sitting in lawn chairs for 30 days. Building a Minuteman Border Fence will help protect all of the American people 365 days every year.

“Should President Bush and Congress fail to fulfill their oaths of office, and meet their Constitutional obligation to protect these United States from invasion, we, the sovereign people of the United States, having suffered a long train of abuses at the hand of a willfully insolent government, do hereby declare that these States ought, should and will be protected by American Minutemen.” – Chris Simcox
Sincerely for America,Chris Simcox, PresidentMinuteman Civil Defense Corps

If you cannot attend and want to donate or volunteer for the ongoing effort to build the Minuteman Border Fence go to the following link: Online http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/
Call 520.829.3112 to volunteer, or Mail Checks to:

Minuteman Border FenceDept Code 571PO Box 131808Houston, TX 77219

Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Inc.6501 Greenway ParkwaySuite 103-640Scottsdale, AZ 85254 (520) 829-3112 http://www.minutemanhq.com

The Power of Art

Thank you Cox and Forkum.

"The Senate:'An Impenetrable Wall Between Itself And The American People' "

via: Vdare.com.
A Certain Slant of Light address the House of Representatives:

Ironic, isn’t it, that the United States Senate, which only begrudgingly passed an amendment to S-2611 to build just just 370 miles of security fencing along our 2,000+ miles’ porous southern border with Mexico, has shown no reluctance whatsoever in building an impenetrable wall between itself and the American people? And isn’t it altogether indicative of a president whose plummetingjob performance poll numbers underscore a sharp decline in credibility, that he plans to send National Guardsmen to the border for just a year and only to do road building, maintenance, and innocuous desk-jockey paper-pushing, for fear of upsetting the government of Mexico, all the while playing a shell gamewith $1.9 million billion in funding for hard assets for the U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard?

Read the whole thing.

A Marshall Plan for Mexico?

Steve Sailer notices what else Washington insiders are proposing to do with your tax money:

Bill Clinton’s chief of staff,now a Washington insider, has just proposed a Marshall Plan for Mexico:

“Thomas McLarty said the United States should partner with Mexico, and to a lesser degree with Canada, in a ‘Marshall Plan’ effort — named for the U.S. aid offensive for a ravaged Europe after World War Two — that could inspire Mexico’s work force to remain at home.


“‘In Mexico, we need to consider some type of Marshall Plan,’ McLarty told a Latin American energy conference in a San Diego suburb. McLarty said the three countries could provide $20 billion in development aid over a 10-year period.


“‘That sounds like a lot of money, and it is,’ said McLarty, who served as White House chief of staff from 1993 to 1994 and is now a consultant. ‘Consider that the United States spent $100 billion in Iraq in just this past year. Unless we help out our neighbors to the south, and especially Mexico, we will continue to have this issue of immigration which will hurt our relations.’”


A week before 9/11, I (Steve Sailer) kicked the same idea around in VDARE.COM in my article "A Marshall Plan for Mexico.

The obvious problems, of course, is that so much of the money would likely end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the Mexican ruling class that it would have no effect on the immigration rate.

So, I proposed a mechanism to make the subsidy dependent upon Mexico cutting the number of border crossers:
“Mexico needs help if it’s ever to be a good neighbor to the U.S. Our political establishment’s plan for helping Mexico is to take even more unemployed Mexicans off Fox’s hands. The moral problem with this plan, among others, is that most of the burden of helping Mexico this way falls on those Americans least able to afford it.

“A better solution would be to put more of the burden of helping Mexico on American taxpayers. The progressive income tax means that the costs would fall more on the right half of the American bell curve, who can afford it, rather than on the left half.

“We should demand that Fox use his military to police his northern border regions against Mexicans trying to illegally enter America as vigorously as he’s doing on his southern border. In return for quantified cuts in illegal immigration from Mexico, we would offer a Marshall Plan-type arrangement to help Mexicans stay in Mexico. For example, we could offer Fox $4 for every $1 that private remittances from Mexicans resident in the US decline. So, if Fox helped cut the number of Mexican illegals in the US by enough that the amount of money wired home fell from $7 billion to $4 billion per year, we’d give him $12 billion. To us, that’s a pittance to pay annually to help solve a pressing social problem.”

More and More Hypocrisy - They Don't Have to Use the Word Amnesty

If it waddles, smells like, quacks like, it's a duck. The President and Congress may call the process "legalization" or whatever name they choose, but the concept of amnesty keeps poking out from under the covers.

Yesterday English, rather than been the official language, became the "unifying" language. Here's today's latest outrage:



Illegals granted Social Security

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment -- even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents.

    "There was a felony they were committing, and now they can't be prosecuted. That sounds like amnesty to me," said Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who offered the amendment yesterday to strip out those provisions of the immigration reform bill. "It just boggles the mind how people could be against this amendment."

    The Ensign amendment was defeated on a 50-49 vote.

    "We all know that millions of undocumented immigrants pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for years and sometimes decades while they work to contribute to our economy," said Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican.

    "The Ensign amendment would undermine the work of these people by preventing lawfully present immigrant workers from claiming Social Security benefits that they earned before they were authorized to work in our community," he said. "If this amendment were enacted, the nest egg that these immigrants have worked hard for would be taken from them and their families."

    Mr. Ensign was among 44 Republicans and five Democrats who voted to block such payouts.

    "It makes no sense to reward millions of illegal immigrants for criminal behavior while our Social Security system is already in crisis," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican. "Why in the world would we endorse this criminal activity with federal benefits? The Senate missed a big opportunity to improve this bill, and I doubt American seniors will be pleased with the result."

To add to this outrage, we all know that once given legal status, these same aliens will apply to bring family members who will then qualify for Social Security benefits.



American Sitting Ducks


Bush's run at the border and the hemming and hawing in Congress is all for show. A pre-determined outcome has been arranged by special-interest groups through their lobbyists.

What will we get in this transformation? More poverty.

"The new power behind Osama's Throne"

Focusing only on bin Laden or even al Qaeda is counterproductive as Islamists come in all shapes, colors, and represent a movement rather than a nationality.

An old, familiar group has re-emerged to take up the slack and fill the vacuum left an absent bin Laden and a disintegrating al Qaeda. The truth is, Islamism is only an extreme form from the fount: Islam.

PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN border - Whether he is viewed as a living legend for jihadis or as a reviled terrorist, the mere mention of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's name provokes strong reactions, and is an invaluable tool in the propaganda war between the two sides.

On the ground, though, at least in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that span Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reality is that bin Laden, while remaining a source of inspiration in the anti-West struggle, is acknowledged as no longer being in command of al-Qaeda's operations.

In that role, he has been superseded by Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to investigations and interviews conducted by PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN border - Whether he is viewed as a living legend for jihadis or as a reviled terrorist, the mere mention of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's name provokes strong reactions, and is an invaluable tool in the propaganda war between the two sides.

On the ground, though, at least in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that span Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reality is that bin Laden, while remaining a source of inspiration in the anti-West struggle, is acknowledged as no longer being in command of al-Qaeda's operations.

In that role, he has been superseded by Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to investigations and interviews conducted by in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It would be absolutely wrong to say that al-Qaeda has evaporated into the air," a man from the Pakistani tribal areas of Waziristan told Asia Times Online. "The organization is very much active on the ground, but the sharp edges of circumstance have modified it into a new shape and it is now part of mainstream jihadi activity. The ultimate goal of the [jihadi] organization is to launch jihad from Khorasan [Afghanistan] to Jerusalem."

Read the rest.

The players in this instance are Mullah Omar and the Taleban in Afghanistan. Within the Jihad movement the names and faces are interchangeable. Regardless of location, the motive is the same: the complete destruction of non-Muslims and eventual Islamic triumphalism. And here's an operational strategy.

North American Union to Replace the USA?

Why doesn't the President just tell the truth and be done with it? Sooner or later we will have to find out, or is the progressive admixture of citizens of the three nations a signal that "it's a done deal"?

There signs are all there. Here's Jerome Corsi on what is becoming everyday more obvious:

President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration's true open borders policy.

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA to include Canada, setting the stage for North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada.

President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed.

The blueprint President Bush is following was laid out in a 2005 report entitled "Building a North American Community" published by the left-of-center Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR report connects the dots between the Bush administration's actual policy on illegal immigration and the drive to create the North American Union:

At their meeting in Waco, Texas, at the end of March 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin committed their governments to a path of cooperation and joint action. We welcome this important development and offer this report to add urgency and specific recommendations to strengthen their efforts.
What is the plan? Simple, erase the borders. The plan is contained in a "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America" little noticed when President Bush and President Fox created it in March 2005:

In March 2005, the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States adopted a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), establishing ministerial-level working groups to address key security and economic issues facing North America and setting a short deadline for reporting progress back to their governments. President Bush described the significance of the SPP as putting forward a common commitment "to markets and democracy, freedom and trade, and mutual prosperity and security." The policy framework articulated by the three leaders is a significant commitment that will benefit from broad discussion and advice. The Task Force is pleased to provide specific advice on how the partnership can be pursued and realized.

To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that "our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary." Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

The perspective of the CFR report allows us to see President Bush's speech to the nation as nothing more than public relations posturing and window dressing. No wonder President Vincente Fox called President Bush in a panic after the speech. How could the President go back on his word to Mexico by actually securing our border? Not to worry, President Bush reassured President Fox. The National Guard on the border were only temporary, meant to last only as long until the public forgets about the issue, as has always been the case in the past. (My emphasis added)

The North American Union plan, which Vincente Fox has every reason to presume President Bush is still following, calls for the only border to be around the North American Union -- not between any of these countries. Or, as the CFR report stated:

The three governments should commit themselves to the long-term goal of dramatically diminishing the need for the current intensity of the governments’ physical control of cross-border traffic, travel, and trade within North America. A long-term goal for a North American border action plan should be joint screening of travelers from third countries at their first point of entry into North America and the elimination of most controls over the temporary movement of these travelers within North America.

Discovering connections like this between the CFR recommendations and Bush administration policy gives credence to the argument that President Bush favors amnesty and open borders, as he originally said. Moreover, President Bush most likely continues to consider groups such as the Minuteman Project to be "vigilantes," as he has also said in response to a reporter's question during the March 2005 meeting with President Fox.

O'Reilly May Call for Boycott Against Mexico

Oh, and folks, you are probably aware of the threat by Mexico to enter lawsuits against the U.S. if we should be so bold as to (gasp!) actually determine who and what comes across our border.

Well, I have been boycotting all things Mexican for quite some time, now, but O'Reilly, on Fox, says that the first time the Mexicans try to sue us for (gasp!) trying to pretend that we are a sovereign nation with legitimate concerns about national security, he, O'Reilly, will call for a nation-wide boycott, beginning with travel and going all the way to burritos, against the Mexicans.

Of course, we can all be pretty sure that whatever the individual private citizen tries to do, Our Leader will compensate Mexico for any significant financial problems it faces as a result of any boycott.

O'Reilly may not be the brightest bulb in the lamp, but he's right on about this.

GUEST BLOG: Charlie Daniels on the Mexican Standoff (Thanks to SirSeth)

 





Mexican Standoff :



I don't know how everybody else feels about it, but to me I think Hispanic people in this country, legally or illegally, made a huge public relations mistake with their recent demonstrations. I don't blame anybody in the world for wanting to come to the United States of America, as it is a truly wonderful place. But when the first thing you do when you set foot on American soil is illegal it is flat out wrong and I don't care how many lala land left heads come out of the woodwork and start trying to give me sensitivity lessons. I don't need sensitivity lessons; in fact I don't have anything against Mexicans! I just have so mething against criminals and anybody who comes into this country illegally is a criminal and if you don't believe it try coming into America from a foreign country without a passport and see how far you get. What disturbs me about the demonstr ations is that it's tantamount to saying, "I am going to come into your country even if it means breaking your laws and there's nothing you can do about it." It's an "in your face" action and speaking just for me I don't like it one little bit and if there were a half dozen pairs of gonads in Washington bigger than English peas it wouldn't be happening. Where are you, you bunch of lily livered, pantywaist, forked tongued, sorry excuses for defenders of The Constitution? Have you been drinking the water out of the Potomac again? And even if you pass a bill on immigration it will probably be so pork laden and watered down that it won't mean anything anyway. Besides, what good is any other law going to do when you won't enforce the ones on the books now? And what ever happened to the polls guys? I thought you folks were the quintessential finger wetters. Well you sure ain't paying any attention to the polls this time because somewhere around eighty percent of Americans want something done about this mess, and mess it is and getting bigger everyday. This is no longer a problem; it is a dilemma and headed for being a tragedy. Do you honestly think that what happened in France with the Muslims can't happen here when the businesses who hire these people finally run out of jobs and a few million disillusioned Hispanics take to the streets?

If you, Mr. President, Congressmen and Senators, knuckle under on this and refuse to do something meaningful it means that you care nothing for the kind of country your children and grandchildren will inherit. But I guess that doesn't matter as long as you get re-elected. Shame on you.

One of the big problems in America today is that if you have the nerve to say anything derogatory about any group of people (except Christians) you are going to be screamed at by the media and called a racist, a bigot and anything else they can think of to call you. Well I've been pounded by the media before and I'm still rockin' and rollin' and when it com es to speaking the truth I fear not. And the truth is that the gutless, gonad-less, milksop politicians are just about to sell out the United States of America because they don't have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the face reality. And reality is that we would never allow any other group of people to have 12 million illegals in this country and turn around and say, "Oh it's ok, ya'll can stay here if you'll just allow us to slap your wrist."

And I know that some of you who read this column are saying "Well what's wrong with that?" I'll tell you what's wrong with it. These people could be from Mars as far as we know. We don't know who they are, where they are or what they're up to and the way the Congress is going we're not going to. Does this make sense? Labor force you say? We already subsidize corporate agriculture as it is, must we subsidize their labor as well? If these people were from Haiti or if they were from Somalia or Afghanistan would we be so fast to turn a blind eye to them? I think not.

All the media shows us are pictures of hard working Hispanics who have crossed the border just to try to better their life. They don't show you pictures of the Feds rounding up members of MS 13, the violent gang who came across the same way the decent folks did. They don't tell you about the living conditions of the Mexican illegals some fat cat hired to pick his crop.

I want to make two predictions. No. 1: This situation is going to grow and fester until it erupts in violence on our streets while the wimps in Washington drag their toes in the dirt and try to figure how many tons of political hay they can make to the acre.

No 2: Somebody is going to cross that border with some kind of weapon of mass destruction and set it off in a major American city after which there will be a backlash such as this country has never experienced and the Capitol building in Washington will probably tilt as Congressmen and Senators rush to the other side of the issue.

I don't know about you but I would love to see just one major politician stand up and say, "I don't care who I make mad and I don't care how many votes I lose, this is a desperate situation and I' m going to lead the fight to get it straightened out."
I don't blame anybody for wanting to come to America, but if you don't respect our immigration laws why should you respect any others.

And by the way, this is America and our flag has stars and stripes. Please get that other one out of my face.

Pray for our troops

What do you think?

God Bless America Charlie Daniels;
April 10, 2006

There's Still Hope for National Sovereignty and Security

Folks,

What we all suspected has now been proven to be true; our leaders, particularly the President and the Senate, think we're "stuck on stupid" and that we have "short attention spans."

They figure that once they throw out a few bones to these dogs, they'll accept, move on, and forget about it all.

If that happens, it will be only until it is seen that the problems - economic disaster, importation of disease, Balkinization, alliances between hostile Hispanic elements and Islam, destruction of the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded, and the fulfillment of the UN's (and Bush's) dream of a "borderless world" - once again become obvious.

But there is hope; Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who was hurled into national "notoriety" by publicly stating that "nothing" should be left "off the table" in the event of a nuclear attack by Islam on the United States, also "gets it" about the danger of an unprotected border with our neighbors to the south.

We still have about two and a half years to find a candidate for the Oval Office who "gets it." Maybe it will be Tancredo, or maybe someone like him, but either we field such a candidate and win, big time, or the United States as we know it is toast.

Here's what Tancredo has to say on his website about Bush's "solution" to the border issue:

Tancredo Slams Senate’s Compromise on Amnesty

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Chairman of the 97-member House Immigration Reform Caucus, slammed the Senate’s compromise amnesty deal that was announced today. The amnesty compromise, brokered by Senators Harry Reid and Bill Frist, brings the Senate one step closer to passing an illegal alien amnesty next week.

“By caving in to the Democrats this morning, Bill Frist pushed the Senate towards the biggest illegal alien amnesty in American history. It is a sad day for legal immigrants who embrace this country by following our laws, and it is a sad day for all Americans who are concerned about our national and economic security,” said Tancredo. “Frist has put the Senate on a collision course with the House. I again ask Speaker Hastert to abide by his word and to resist bringing up any bill that doesn’t have a majority of the Republican Conference behind it.”

The amnesty compromise would bring the failed Hagel-Martinez bill back to the Senate floor this Monday as the cornerstone of the Senate’s approach. Hagel-Martinez creates a three-tiered system: illegal aliens who have been here longer than 5 years would be granted blanket amnesty; those here between 2 and 5 years would be given foreign worker privileges with a right to citizenship; those who arrived within the last two years – since 2004 – would be told to leave. Critically, Hagel-Martinez allows illegal aliens to “prove” how long they’ve been in the U.S. with almost any document imaginable including pay stubs, time sheets, and union or day labor center records.

Tancredo continued, “No illegal alien with half a brain would admit that they came here after 2004. And how could law enforcement tell? The Senate deal asks people who have broken the law for years – often using fraudulent documents – to provide proof that they’ve lived here. And it permits unscrupulous employers who have illegally hired and concealed them to vouch for their new legal status. I can guarantee that many of those fraudulent documents – which law enforcement hasn’t been able to detect yet – will be used to obtain legal status.”

The amnesty compromise allows Frist and Reid to appoint 7 conferees each, while 12 more conferees will come from the Senate Judiciary Committee (7 Republicans and 5 Democrats). This conference set up virtually guarantees that a majority of Senate conferees favor amnesty because only 6 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the Specter amnesty plan in committee. (Under the best case scenario, if all 6 of those Senate Judiciary Committee members were appointed to Conference and Frist’s 7 appointees were all solidly against amnesty, the Conferees would be split 13-13 on amnesty. Harry Reid previously blocked consideration of bills that didn’t include amnesty, so it’s highly unlikely that any of his 7 appointees would favor enforcement-first).

“The Senate amnesty deal continues the running joke that is our immigration system by treating the same crimes differently. In a perverse rendition of hide-and-seek, it grants a reward to those who evaded law enforcement for the longest time. And, as we did in 1986, it will encourage more illegal aliens to come into this country in the hope of yet another amnesty,” said Tancredo.

"The Border is already militarized...on the Mexican side!"

Why isn't this on the front page of every American newspaper?

So much for gratitude!

On May 15th, President Bush delivered a lame and belated flim-flam speech, to bamboozle Americans into thinking he cares about controlling the border.

But even this was too offensive here in Mexico, where they are complaining about the militarization of the border—even though the Mexicans have militarized their own border.

Mexican Military at the border.

The posturing began even before Bush gave his speech. On May 14th, Bush’s amigo, Mexican president Vicente Fox, called Jorge on the phone to express his concern. And Bush reassured Fox that the border wasn’t being militarized…he was only thinking of sending the National Guard, and not the Army. [ Dialogo Presidente Vicente Fox con su homólogo George W. Bush, Presidencia de la Republica—May 14th, 2006]

Hey, I’m in the National Guard. The Texas Army National Guard. Our uniforms don’t say "National Guard", they say "U.S. Army." When we went to Iraq, they said "U.S. Army".

Some of our soldiers died there, and that’s what their uniforms said too.

But if Bush thought he could insult the National Guard in order to make Mexico happy, he was sorely mistaken. They don’t even want us lowly Guardsmen near the border!

The Fox administration is assuring folks that the border is not being militarized. But Mexicans don’t seem to believe it...

And the border is already militarized—on the Mexican side.

Mexican Foreign Minister Derbez admits that there are Mexican troops on the border. In fact, he’s even boasted about it.

In an interview with El Universal, Derbez tried to downplay the deployment of National Guard troops to the border. Here’s how El Universal explains Derbez’ view of the National Guard:

"In an interview with El Universal, Foreign Minister Derbez guaranteed that the Americans who will be deployed to the border are ‘civilian sector persons’, although he admitted that they had been trained by the Pentagon and had even participated in the Iraq conflict. ‘They answer to the governor and are not part of the regular Army’ he mentioned."

[En entrevista con EL UNIVERSAL, el canciller Derbez aseguró que los elementos estadounidenses que serán desplegados en la frontera son "personas del sector civil", aunque aceptó que han sido entrenados por el Pentágono e incluso han participado en el conflicto de Irak. "Responden al gobernador y no son parte del Ejército regular", mencionó.]

"He [Derbez] pointed out that, in contrast to the United States, Mexico does have regular Army troops on the border. ‘ These are real soldiers’ he said, although he added that this can’t be interpreted as militarization of the border either."

[Señaló que, a diferencia de Estados Unidos, México sí tiene tropas del Ejército regular en la frontera. "Esos sí que son soldados", expresó, aunque añadió que tampoco debe ser interpretado como militarización]. [ Envío de soldados no es militarizar: Bush y Derbez, By Jose Carreño y Carlos Benavides, May 17th, 2006]

Even the U.S. "Homeland Security" department has admitted repeated incursions by the Mexican Army (or a facsimile thereof) onto U.S. soil.

How could it get onto U.S. soil if they weren’t on the border to begin with?

The reality is that the Mexican Army is used extensively throughout Mexico to carry out police functions. Like checkpoints. I’ve been stopped at Mexican Army checkpoints in various parts of Mexico. It’s standard operating procedure.

In fact, on one of my main routes to the U.S. border, there is a permanent Mexican Army checkpoint. I’ve been through it numerous times. The bus routinely stops there, the passengers are removed and luggage examined. There’s nothing unusual about it.

Mexican territory is divided into 12 military regions, and subdivided into 44 military zones. This arrangement includes 11 military garrisons on the northern Mexican border. The 11 garrisons are located at Tecate, San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonoyta, Agua Prieta, Ciudad Juarez, Ojinaga, Palomas, Ciudad Acuña, Piedras Negras, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

The Mexican Secretariat Of National Defense website has a list of "Commandancias Territoriales". This section includes all the military regions, zones and garrisons under "Regiones Militares", "Zonas Militares" and "Guarniciones Militares". [Map])

That’s the northern border. Way over in the state of Chiapas which borders Guatemala, the Mexican army is used to apprehend illegal immigrants.

There is even a joint task force called BOM (Base de Operaciones Mixtas, in which the Army and the local police cooperate to detain illegal aliens.

Hmm, that’s an idea! Thanks, Mexico! [Detienen en Chiapas a 205 indocumentados]

But if we put the U.S. Army on the border, wouldn’t some ugly international incident ensue?

There already are “ugly international incidents” on the border. Life on the U.S. border is already an ongoing, day-by-day, chaos.

Read it all, and be sure to access the internal links. Then forward this article to your Congressional representatives and your local newspapers.

In case you think that the Mexican military is a force of weenies, a "toothless tiger." Perhaps they are corrupt, but they're a well-armed force that deals ruthlessly with their opponents. Here they are "suppressing" drug gangs at the border.

If they are at the border all the time, why don't they stem the flow of illegal immigrants rather than assist them in the crossing to El Norte? It appears that, they too, like to come here.

"Seeking to Control Borders, Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors"

The "quick fix" may be sending the National Guard, but is Bush's choice of a virtual fence any better?

From: The NYT ( Be sure to access the sidebar graphic )

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson,told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.
The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.
"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.
"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.
More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.
"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

Yesterday the stock market took a dive. However, it appears that the fortunes of these Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin are on the rise.

What happens when tecnology fails as it often does? "Boots on the ground" may not be the answer; but I would feel better knowing there's a force of real people looking south, facing down the enemy as unstable conditions in Mexico and points south are moving north.

"Ahmadinejad: President Rock Star wants a nuke"

What makes Ahmadinejad happy?

Yesterday, a collection of European nations offered to give Iran a light-water nuclear reactor in an attempt to persuade Tehran to permanently give up uranium enrichment - or face the threat of U.N. Security Council sanctions. Ooooooooh, scarey. The U.N., oh please, not that!

Shortly after the European proposal, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded with a nationally televised speech. “Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?”
Members of the crowd shouted back: “We love you, Ahmadinejad!”

No doubt. President Bush makes mushy promises about border security then quickly calls fellow rancher, Mexican Presidente Vincente Fox to tell him that posting the national guard was only temporary and besides, it was just to appease the nativist mouth breathers who think a thousand miles of open border might be a security threat. We’ve got George Bush covering our back, the Iranians have Ahmadinejad telling the rest of the world to shove it, he’s doing what’s in the best interests of his country. Who do you think has a higher national approval rating?

I had never heard of Ahmadinejad until he was elected president of Iran in late 2005. Then his speeches started getting international coverage, and it seemed like what he was saying came straight out of the pages of Prayers for the Assassin. He blamed the Jews for everything, threatened to eradicate Israel, and, most interesting to me, he spoke of the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam and the creation of a Caliphate (a major theme of Prayers) which would dominate the world. Ahmadinejad made it clear that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to achieve his spiritual and political goals. Most of the American press quickly pronounced Ahmadinejad a fool, a nut, a puppet of the Mullahs designed to frighten the gullible. I thought the press and the politicians were wrong then, and I think they’re even more wrong following the release of the 18-page letter Ahmadinejad wrote to president Bush a few weeks ago. Commentators on the left, right and every spot in between have found the letter risible, with Jon Stewart having perhaps the most fun with the flowery language used by Ahmadinejad to address Bush — “As your Excellency is aware…” Funny stuff, to be sure, particularly if you overlook the fact that Persian is a 2,000 year old language with a tradition of poetic imagery. Not to be a buzz-kill, or anything.

Rather than a source of entertainment, I consider Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the most intelligent and dangerous foe the US faces. Not the Mullahs who currently hold power in Iran, and whose machinations put him in office. My reasons for concern about Ahmadinejad are based on the character and deportment of the man himself, his religious beliefs, and the “true” recipient of the letter ostensibly written to Bush. The common US media portrayal of Ahmadinejad as a grandiose bumpkin and the letter as mere rambling is a dangerous mistake. I would remind those making such assessments that Hitler appeared ridiculous for a long time, a skinny little man with a toothbrush moustache and a look of perpetual constipation. Idi Amin was also considered a buffoon, a late night comic’s easy joke. Ask the dead how funny these men are.

Let’s take a little historical jog here, and, since I believe humility is my greatest ally, let me state that I AM NO EXPERT, but I have read widely the work of others much more learned. My own gifts involve synthesizing data, the basis for any success I have in writing fiction. I’m providing links which you can use for your own edification.

Read the rest; includes internal links.

"Fjordman" Says: "They are a bunch of hypocrites."

The renown Scandinavian blogger, "Fjordman" posts at LGF:

(Scroll down to comment #12)

I know I have posted this link before, but it really does make a compelling case for stating that the USA is now at war with Mexico. They are threatening you, from the very top level of their government. And besides, they are a bunch of hypocrites: The Second Mexican War

If "Fjordman", way over in Northern Europe has figured this out, why haven't we all?

Rush Can Count, But Can Congress?

"The largest expansion of the welfare state."

In spite of his recent legal problems, Rush is able to reason better than most in Congress!

Senate 'Compromise' Bill Must Change, or This Country Will Change Forever. This article contains an audio link.

Be sure to go to the other links in the original blog story.

"Although the action is in the Senate, the saviors of the country are in the House."

This is scary stuff!

I can't repeat this often enough:

Contact Your Congressional Representatives Before It's Too Late!

Look, Ma, They're Kicking Us in the Teeth--Just Like We Taught 'em

Hand Dr. Phil, the television psychologist, another cigar: The beggar is gettin' uppidy, fearing encroachment on his "begging rights."

Mexico Threatens Lawsuits Over U.S. Guard Patrols

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border, and some officials said they fear the crackdown will force illegal crossers into more perilous areas to avoid detection.

Now, bring out the window-dressing, the lipstick for the pig:

"If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people ... we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates," Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said in an interview with a Mexico City radio station. Mexican officials worry the increased security at the U.S. border will lead to more deaths. Since the bolstered surveillance at crossing spots in Texas and California in 1994, migrants have flooded Arizona's hard-to-patrol desert and deaths have spiked.

Like they really give a damn about anything moral down there:

Julieta Nunez Gonzalez, the Ciudad Juarez representative of Mexico's National Immigration Institute...Nunez said she planned to ask the Mexican government to send a migrant protection force, Grupo Beta, to more remote sections of the border. The dusty outpost near the New Mexico border has turned into a smugglers haven after the U.S. Border Patrol increased its presence on the Arizona border.

Follow the link to read all of the article, but keep the air-sickness bag nearby.

Old Dr. Phil keeps saying that we teach people how to treat us. That applies to a government as well as an individual. The fact that the Mexican barbarians would even dare make such threats shows you how far we have declined as a nation.

Let's replace just about everybody in our government and settle for nothing less than getting back to rational, American principles. We can cut Mexico loose to seek its own level, which means it will sink out of sight.