Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Political Digest for January 19, 2011

I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with every—or any—opinion in the posted article. Help your friends and relatives stay informed by passing the digest on.

Press Two For Racism
If you treat one group of people better and another of people worse purely because of their race or ethnic background would you agree that is racism? If so, then having Spanish on everything from phone voice-mail hells to government programs is clearly racist. After all, there are a lot of citizens, permanent residents and, yes, illegal immigrants whose native language is something other than English or Spanish. That immigrants from Mexico, legal or illegal, get to have everything presented in their native language while immigrants from Poland or Vietnam or Latvia or China do not clearly discriminates against those immigrants who come from a non-Hispanic culture. Oh, it’s because there are more Hispanic immigrants than those from other language groups? So you can discriminate if a group is a minority, and it’s okay? So if whites outnumber all other groups, it’s okay to discriminate against them? Given our litigation-happy culture, it won’t be long before a smarmy lawyer figures that out and decides to cast aside political correctness in favor or a payoff. Then we will see the courts tied in knots trying to promote “fairness”—the liberal chimera—for everyone.

The worse part is that the practice also discriminates against Hispanics as well. I have read that Hispanics who speak only Spanish earn significantly lower incomes than those who speak English, though because of the bi-lingual trend, those who speak both do best of all. But by making it easier for Hispanics to get by not learning English, you condemn them to poverty and welfare dependence. Which of course may be the point for political groups that depend on the government-dependent for their power base.

A last thought. By promoting a bi-lingual society, they promote conflict within the society. Yes, there are peaceful societies, like Switzerland, where there is more than one dominant language. But there are many examples, like Quebec, where it leads to political rancor, and sometimes violence, perhaps even disunion. America is a great country and a wonderful place to live, not because of the dominant race, but because of the dominant culture, which believes in hard work, self-sufficiency, integrity. (Don’t laugh. If we have corruption here, at least we abhor and fight it. In all too many cultures, it is accepted and expected. And they are always backward in economics and human rights.) We also have long exposure to the benefits of free markets and property rights, the foundations of economic advancement. Note the difference in income in English speaking versus non-English speaking industrial democracies.

Immigrants who come here and join the dominant culture enrich it. But if they wish to bring a culture of corruption, anti-free markets and disregard of property rights from their native lands to replace ours, we aide that to our destruction. We have enough challenges with the alternative culture that has grown up in our cities, which may destroy us, without importing the seeds of our destruction. If you don’t believe me, look at Mexico, a country rich in natural resources and agricultural potential. Which way do the immigrants flow?

Worth Reading: Budget Crisis Rhetoric by Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: Bankruptcy conveys the plain facts that political rhetoric tries to conceal. It tells people who depended on the bankrupt government that they can no longer depend on that bankrupt government. It tells the voters who elected that bankrupt government, with its big spending promises, that they made a bad mistake that they would be wise to avoid making again in the future. Legally, bankruptcy wipes out commitments made to public sector unions, whose extravagant pay and pension contracts are bleeding municipal and state governments dry. Is putting an end to political irresponsibility and legalized union racketeering dropping dead? Politics being what it is, we are sure to hear all sorts of doomsday rhetoric at the thought of cutbacks in government spending. The poor will be starving in the streets, to hear the politicians and the media tell it. But the amount of money it would take to keep the poor from starving in the streets is chump change compared to how much it would take to keep on feeding unions, subsidized businesses and other special interests who are robbing the taxpayers blind.

And a Caterpillar Shall Lead Us
Excerpt: I have never understood why the rest of us have sat idly by while unions have gobbled up so much power and money. Even as their numbers in the private sector have steadily declined over the years, they have surged in the public sector. My question is, just exactly when did we lose our senses and allow civil servants to unionize and strike? It had always been understood that the trade-off was that the members of the Civil Service had forfeited possible riches in the world of entrepreneurs and risk-takers for the security that went with a steady paycheck from the city, the state or the federal government. But now, they are paid more than the typical wage earner. What's more, even as the unemployment rate hovers around 10% for the rest of us, employment for this privileged class continues to increase. And it's all because they tithe their benefactors in the Democratic party. One hand washes another, and both hands remain as dirty as sin. Consider that over 300 New York City sanitation workers made over $100,000-a-year.

Bank Admits it Overcharged Troops on Mortgages
I can hardly wait until the next time Chase solicits me to move my business accounts there. They need to do more than just pay the money back to get right. ~Bob. Excerpt: One of the nation’s biggest banks — JP Morgan Chase — admits it has overcharged several thousand military families for their mortgages, including families of troops fighting in Afghanistan. The bank also tells NBC News that it improperly foreclosed on more than a dozen military families. The admissions are an outgrowth of a lawsuit filed by Marine Capt. Jonathan Rowles. Rowles is the backseat pilot of an F/A 18 Delta fighter jet and has served the nation as a Marine for five years. He and his wife, Julia, say they’ve been battling Chase almost that long. The dispute apparently caused the bank to review its handling of all mortgages involving active-duty military personnel. Under a law known as the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), active-duty troops generally get their mortgage interest rates lowered to 6 percent and are protected from foreclosure. Chase now appears to have repeatedly violated that law, which is designed to protect troops and their families from financial stress while they’re in harm’s way. A Chase official told NBC News that some 4,000 troops may have been overcharged. What’s more, the bank discovered it improperly foreclosed on the homes of 14 military families.

Excerpt: What provokes this observation is Harvard health economist David Cutler’s new study, published by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Cutler, who admits to a role in fashioning what many call ObamaCare, claims that the new health law is not going to destroy jobs. It’s going to create them: somewhere between 250,000 to 400,000 additional jobs every year over the next decade. Ah, I know what you’re thinking. How can a law that raises the cost of labor by up to $6.00-an-hour for every worker in the country and has significant taxes on capital as well possibly be a job creator? (See my debate yesterday with the editors of USA Today over the magnitude of expected job losses these provisions will generate.) The answer: Cutler’s study ignores those things. Ignores them? Yes, ignores them. Like the Andy Griffith commercials that focus on the $1 of benefits for seniors while ignoring the $10 of costs, Cutler’s study focuses only on the sunny, pro-job side of things and ignores the gloomy, anti-job provisions. What he’s actually produced is not a study at all. Instead, it’s a lawyer’s (one-side-only) brief masquerading as a study. No doubt it will be used like a lawyer’s brief as the House debates the repeal of ObamaCare this week.

Opposing view on health law: High labor costs = fewer jobs
Excerpt: At the low end of the wage scale, however, the effects of this new law are going to be devastating. Ten-dollar-an-hour workers and their employers cannot afford $6-an-hour health insurance. Although there are some small business subsidies tacked on in a Rube Goldberg fashion, nothing in the new law helps low-wage employees of large companies buy health insurance.

Small Businesses and Big Unintended Consequences
Excerpt: Winslow Sargeant, the top lawyer in the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, recently urged Congress to repeal a portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Sargeant’s request was not driven by the new law’s impact on small business efforts to provide employee health insurance. Instead, he was calling on Congress to repeal the requirement that businesses issue 1099 forms to all vendors paid more than $600 per year, set to go into effect in January 2012. This provision has angered many in business, who see it as an example of how the law of unintended consequences leads unrelated federal regulations to impose heavy compliance burdens on small business owners. In a law designed to increase employee health insurance coverage, Congress ended up forcing small business owners to expand their tax filings, an outcome that some in Congress said they did not foresee. If this were the only example of the law of unintended consequences at work on federal small business regulation, it might simply make for a funny segment of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” But Congress’s tendency to repeatedly pass laws that impose unintended costs on small business owners defeats much of the humor. The number of accredited informal investors is unrelated to the financial fraud that has plagued the housing and banking industries in recent years. Consider the
Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act. When debating the financial reform legislation, no one in Congress (or anywhere else) believed that we needed a law to reduce the number of accredited investors permitted to finance new and small companies.

China, High Speed Rail, and Mobility
Excerpt: Many in the U.S. point to China as an example of why investment in rail transportation makes sense here. Unfortunately, that's not really the lesson from China we should learn. While it's true that China's investment in high-speed rail is making it a world leader in this technology, it's not true that this is a model that should be emulated by the U.S. or other developed countries. In fact, China is investing in all forms of transportation to match unprecedented growth in income and the demand for mobility. In the last twenty years, China has built a national expressway network larger than the one that connects the European Union and almost equivalent of the US Interstate Highway System in order to improve access between provinces and metropolitan areas. Also, despite the investment in high speed rail, air travel is expanding rapidly. In 2009, 166 airports were open to civilian transportation. This number is expected to increase to 260 by 2015. So, China’s investment in rail is not necessarily seen only as a substitute for other means of traveling between cities and provinces although it is forcing a restructuring of the travel industry along shorter air routes.

How a tax hike increased the deficit
Excerpt: SLOWLY but surely, the real cost of the return to the politics of envy is becoming clear. Figures out last night confirmed yet again that crippling tax hikes are driving people and economic activity away from Britain. Rather than raising extra tax receipts to plug Britain’s budget deficit, there is growing evidence that the raids are actually reducing the amount of money collected by the taxman, thus inflicting even greater debt on the rest of us. Our predicament is depressing almost beyond words. The number of non-doms living in the UK collapsed by 16,000 in 2008-09, the most recent year for which data is available, according to yesterday’s figures. This is a dramatic decline: an 11.6 per cent drop from 139,000 in 2007-08 to 123,000. When in April 2008 Labour – egged on by the Conservatives – introduced an annual levy of £30,000 for those who had claimed non-dom status for seven years, pundits dismissed the tax as too low to make a difference. City A.M. never bought this – unfortunately, we were right. Non-doms are people who originated overseas and pay UK tax on their UK earnings but no tax on their foreign income. The original non-doms were Greek shipping moguls who fled their socialist country to base themselves (and their businesses) in London. Until recently, the UK fought to attract such people; they pay a lot of UK tax and are often employers or high spenders. Yesterday’s figures actually underplay the true extent of the exodus: the departure of non-doms is bound to have accelerated in 2009-10 and will continue in the coming years as a result of the 50p tax rate, the hike in capital gains tax, the extra national insurance contributions and the near-hysterical war on financiers and myriad other attacks on wealth-creators and foreign investors that are now routine in this country. (Most children, but few socialists, know and get the fable of the goose who laid golden eggs. ~Bob.)

We know who they fear --- and why
Excerpt: I was one of a handful of journalists to recommend that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, select then Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. I thought her personal story was compelling. A housewife with no family money or connections takes on a corrupt Republican establishment in Alaska and beats it. As governor, she works with Democrats to enact a tough ethics law, and wins approval of a natural gas pipeline her predecessors had sought unsuccessfully for decades. At the time she was nominated, Sarah Palin was the most popular governor in America, with the highest approval rating in the history of her state. A small town girl who shops at Wal Mart, Sarah Palin is us. But better than us, a star athlete and a beauty queen happily married to her high school sweetheart, she's had a successful career while raising five children. As handy with a rifle as she is with a skillet, she can hunt, fish and dress game better than most men. A thousand feature stories could have been written about her. For that reason alone, I thought my colleagues would fall in love with her. Boy was I wrong. Journalists and Democrats reacted to her the way vampires do to garlic. Instead of stories about how she'd toppled the Murkowski machine, we got speculation about whether she or daughter Bristol was the mother of her youngest son. No candidate for vice president has ever been subjected to such unfounded vituperation.

Defunding Obamacare
Excerpt: Today (1/18), as one of the first acts of this 112th Congress, the House is due to pass language I introduced to repeal Obamacare: "as if such Act had not been enacted." This legislation would validate the strategy for repeal that I have been advancing since the day the law was signed. It will also set the stage for the next component of my repeal strategy: the inclusion of language in every appropriations bill to prevent federal funds from being used to implement or enforce any of Obamacare's provisions. When Obamacare passed last March, I immediately introduced a bill to repeal this unconstitutional law. My bill offered a "clean" repeal - not weighed down by any replacement language.

Can Woolly Mammoth Be Cloned From Frozen DNA?
Excerpt: They've been extinct for about 10,000 years, but woolly mammoths could be back on Earth in just five years, according to Japanese scientists who plan to use frozen DNA to resurrect the behemoth. Last summer, researchers plucked skin and muscle tissue from an ancient mammoth's carcass that was found preserved under permafrost in Siberia. A nearly complete body of one of the animals was found there and has since been kept in a special freezer in a Russian research lab. Researchers from Japan's Kinki University have found a way to isolate DNA from the frozen mammoth's tissue. Now they plan to insert that DNA into the egg cells of a normal, modern African elephant and then plant the resulting embryo into the elephant's womb. (Why not make two, Adam and Eve? If the mammoth works, how about a saber-toothed tiger? Ron P. Do you think they could do the same for the conservative Democrat, like Scoop Jackson? ~Bob.)

“Serbian Myth” Proves True: Organ Extraction -- Follow Up
Excerpt: I have been following the explosive revelations coming out about brutal and bloody organ harvesting war crimes early on. Julia Gorin has been doing yeoman's work on this investigation, Pulitzer work, if that had any meaning anymore.....Back in April of 2008 I posted at Atlas that Serb prisoners "were stripped of their organs" by Kosovo Muslims, describing the grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how Serb prisoners had their internal organs removed and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war. Now we find that the leader of a much-trumpeted US-created muslim ‘country’ was heading the organs-trafficking racket. Albanian Muslims have been selling human organs of kidnapped Serbs to western countries, including Italy, since the 1998-99 Kosovo-Serbia conflict. As you can imagine, our government is working feverishly to make this go away. They are confident that it will, as things always do when it comes to the Balkans and American lack of interest in the big dump we took in the middle of Europe. Therefore, our State Dept. feels no risk in openly saying that it doesn’t matter if Thaci cut people up, we’re sticking by him.

Killings of newborn babies on the rise in Pakistan
This would explain why the Left supports the Islamists—both believe strongly in abortion. Okay, this is postpartum or, if you will, “full-birth” abortion. But the result is the same. Get rid of those pesky girls. This hardly bears contemplation by civilized people. ~Bob. Excerpt: "They can only have been one or two days old," says volunteer worker Mohammad Saleem, pointing at the two small corpses being gently washed by his colleagues at a charity's morgue. In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise. More than 1,000 infants -- most of them girls -- were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan last year according to conservative estimates by the Edhi Foundation, a charity working to reverse the grim trend. The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistan's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the largely rural nation, and the charity says that in December alone it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers….. Kazmi recounts the discovery of the burnt body of a six-day-old infant who had been strangled. Another child was found on the steps of a mosque having been stoned to death on the orders of an extremist imam who has since disappeared, he says.

Richard Lindzen: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
Excerpt: The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat. (Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advidory Council –Ron P.)

Dragon Week
Excerpt: Chinese President Hu Jintao is set to arrive in Washington, D.C., today, the first leg of a four-day trip to the United States that includes a lavish black-tie White House state dinner tomorrow night. The full “state visit” treatment that Hu will receive, including a joint reviewing of U.S. troops, is being used by the People’s Republic of China to cap Hu’s career as the PRC transitions power to Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang. Beijing is hoping that this trip can celebrate Hu’s career while avoiding any real substantive issues. For the United States, however, this outcome would be a major mistake. The U.S. has a long list of concerns about Chinese policies that reflect fundamental conflicts of interest between our two countries. Given Beijing’s interest in a smooth and uneventful visit, President Obama should press Hu on several key issues. Specifically, President Obama should seek public commitments to better policies on the economic role of the state, freedom of navigation in the western Pacific, and nuclear proliferation. And while the public’s attention is briefly focused on China, it is also imperative for Americans to recognize that the PRC leadership has an increasingly capable military at its disposal.

Well, someone is getting jobs
The Heritage Foundation reports that even as conservatives attempt to repeal it,
K Street
lobbyists have dubbed Obamacare “The Regulatory Lawyer Employment Act.”

Man who was shot in head by deputy dies
Shouldn’t the headline be, “Illegal immigrant criminal dies after threatening deputy”? ~Bob. Excerpt: An East Valley man who was shot in the head by a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy last week after pointing an assault rifle at a deputy died Monday from his injuries, officials said. Felipe Ramirez Castellanos, 43, who sheriff's officials said was an illegal immigrant, was shot once in the head and once in the hip after he pointed an AK-47 assault rifle at a deputy responding to a domestic-violence incident Friday, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.

Obama Launches Rule Review, Pledging to Spur Jobs, Growth
When the fox volunteers to guard the henhouse, why shouldn’t we take him up on it? It costs no more than we were already paying, and he was already in the area.... Ron P. Excerpt: In Tuesday's article, the president defended his administration's efforts to strike "the proper balance" between protecting the public and not interfering with economic growth. The president said the government sometimes failed to meet its "basic responsibility to protect the public interest," citing the run-up to the financial crisis. He also acknowledged the cost of regulation and said that sometimes "rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs." He also said: "Where necessary, we won't shy away from addressing obvious gaps: new safety rules for infant formula; procedures to stop preventable infections in hospitals; efforts to target chronic violators of workplace safety laws. But we are also making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb." For close to a year, the White House has been asking leading business groups in the capital to identify regulations they believe are obstacles to job-creating private investment. But these efforts are being dwarfed by complaints about the administration's unfriendly rhetoric toward the financial industry and large corporations, and regulations stemming from its legislative agenda.

WikiLeaks to Release Secret Swiss Bank Account Info
I’m hoping this will reveal the location of all the great wealth left wing readers constantly assume I have. It would come in handy. ~Bob. Excerpt: Swiss whistle-blower and former banker Rudolf Elmer gave WikiLeaks this morning information about bank accounts of more than 2,000 prominent individuals, potentially exposing tax evasion, the BBCreports. The data is not yet available on WikiLeaks, but it was publicly given on two discs by Elmer to WikiLeaks founder and owner Julian Assange at a press conference in London this morning. The data needs to be vetted before it gets released, and some of it will likely be handed over to the authorities. “Once we have looked at the data… there will be full revelation,” said Assange.

Obama's Internet Passport
Excerpt: The White House cybersecurity adviser joined Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on Jan. 7 to announce what amounts to a national ID card for the Internet. Their plan is straightforward. Instead of logging onto Facebook or one's bank using separate passwords established with each individual company or website, the White House will take the lead in developing what it calls an "identity ecosystem" that will centralize personal information and credentials. This government-approved system would issue a smart card or similar device that would confirm an individual's identity when making online credit-card purchases, accessing electronic health care records, posting "anonymous" blog entries or even logging onto one's own home computer, according to administration documents. Officials insist this would be a voluntary program and deliver significant benefits to the public. (Make it easy to track down dissenters. Voluntary at first. ~Bob.)

Death by Liberalism
Excerpt: Simply put, [Death by Liberalism] deals with the appalling and overlooked fact that liberalism kills. This is no metaphor, no exaggeration, and no mistake. Liberal policies put in place by liberal politicians to achieve liberal goals kill thousands of Americans each year. In the past half-century, liberalism may have killed up to 500,000 American citizens (and this is not even counting DDT or ethanol, which are responsible for a death rate orders of magnitude larger in the international sphere). We have known for years that liberalism is corrupt, wasteful, and futile. Now we know that it is even worse. Liberalism is lethal. How does this work? Is it some sort of grand Sorosian conspiracy to assure limitless political power? An environmentalist Green scheme to cut the population on behalf of Mother Gaia? Not at all. The soft lethality of liberalism is a result of that saddest of English phrases: "unintended consequences." Liberal politicians, academics, and operatives want to do good. They want to benefit Americans and the country as a whole. They want to do it their way, through large-scale governmental policy. They know exactly how it is to be done, and they will brook no interference. So they set out on their grand schemes, and it ends, always and without exception, in disaster.

VIDEO: Grandma on acid! Researcher finds rare footage of 1950s housewife in LSD experiment
Excerpt: Next time you hear someone say 'Back in the olden days, we had to make our own fun', this is probably what they are talking about. An American biographer - doing research for a book on pioneers in the field of hallucinogenic drug experimentation - has stumbled upon footage of a prim and proper housewife struggling with the effects of LSD. The bizarre and slightly creepy footage shows a doctor dosing up the young woman and filming the consequences. By now, of course, she's likely to be somebody's grandmother. (No, by now she is likely to be dead. ~Bob.)

Rush: 'Civility' is the new word for 'Shut Up'
Excerpt: As Rush Limbaugh said on his show, Friday; “civility” is the new word for “shut up”. We are brow-beated by the most uncivil of civilians. We are told to “watch our tone” by people who look the other way when conservative leaders are threatened, or verbally abused in the most obscene and unspeakable terms, or hung in effigy. How many leftists have been willing to defend Sarah Palin against the Tucson blood libel? Most have instead, attacked her for using the term, “blood libel”. How many have been willing to discuss at any length, threats of violence and hate speech against her?

Obama Coal Crackdown Sends Message to Industry
Excerpt: A move by the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the long-standing permits for a mammoth coal mine in West Virginia sends a strong signal that President Obama plans to implement key parts of his agenda even though newly empowered Republicans can block his plans in Congress. In the aftermath of the November elections, many political pundits predicted that the once-unchecked Obama legislative machine would turn it's energies to federal rulemaking as a way to circumvent Republicans on Capitol Hill. And the EPA’s decision last week suggests that those forecasts were spot-on. Much to the consternation of the West Virginia delegation in Congress, the coal industry, and the working people of the Mountain State, the agency took the unprecedented step of revoking a mining permit that it had issued four years ago to Arch Coal’s Spruce No. 1 Mine in Logan County, West Virginia.

Vanquishing Americans - An Endangered Species?
Excerpt: Around the time I was born - an era equated by my youngest descendants with Medieval History, but actually the mid-1920s - Hollywood produced an epic entitled "The Vanishing American." It depicted the plight of the Navajo nation, which had conquered the ancient cliff dwellers, only to be subjugated by our pale faced predecessors, for whom they were no match in determination and guile. Thus, they and their Indian brethren forever lost control of their homeland, today retaining only a few casinos, modest reservations, fading traditions and occasional gigs in Western flicks. It may seem a pessimistic comparison, but we here are being herded along a similar path by leaders with myopic visions, devious motivations and misplaced priorities. I cite the fact that I've seen in my fourscore years a deterioration of national pride, a surrender of world dominance and a squandering of the most massive inheritance in the history of mankind…..Vanquishing Americans are not yet extinct, but barbarians are storming our gates! (No, they are inside the gates and we are fighting house to house, street to street. And we are losing. ~Bob.)

Amnesty for Illegal Aliens is Left’s Divide and Conquer Strategy
Excerpt: Despite the thuggish Obama administration suing Arizona for simply attempting to uphold the law of our land, since the federal government refuses to secure our borders, it’s heartening to see that at least half of the states in America are pushing ahead with legislation that is similar to Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration legislation. I’m glad to say Mississippi is one of those states. It’s time we stopped letting the radical leftists among us shout us down on this issue. The moment legislation is drafted which proposes that illegal immigration be addressed within a state, here come the rent-a-mobs, waiving their foreign flags, to protest at the state capitol building and the so-called immigrant rights groups to wail about how unjust and racist it all is. Of course, the whole foundation of “immigrant rights” groups is fallacious, because they’re fighting for non-existent rights for illegal aliens, and I for one have long had enough of their malarkey. The fact is that America is a nation based on the rule of law. America, like all nations, has borders, and it is illegal to cross those borders without legal permission. If you are not an American citizen, you are not allowed into our country without legal permission. The illegal alien has the right to be ejected from our country, period.

Why the Left Hates Sarah Palin
Excerpt: Today the conversation turned to Sarah Palin and my new acquaintance blurted out: “Oh I hate her.” Since she did not yet know my politics, and since we were in Los Angeles, it is clear that she expected to hear back what you usually hear back in this city: “Yeah, I hate her, too.” Instead, I asked her why. At this point I could have predicted her response because it’s the same response you get from Liberals no matter who on the Right you’re talking about, “Because she’s stupid.” I replied: “Being stupid is no reason to hate someone, but tell me, which one of her policies do you disagree with?” It wasn’t hard to predict her response: “All of them!” I continued to push. “Well, then, if it’s all of them, it should be easy for you to name one.” Her reply? “They’re too many to list.” “So don’t list them, just give me one,” I said. This went on for awhile until my new acquaintance finally admitted that she didn’t know any of Ms. Palin’s policies. Before she ran off – Democrats always run off when asked to provide facts behind their hatred for Republicans – I looked her in the eye and said, “If you don’t know any of her policies perhaps you should look into them.” She promised she would. She won’t. If there are two things you can count on with Democrats, they are filled with hate and empty of facts. But it got me to thinking. Given that these people don’t know any of Ms. Palin’s political positions, what is it about her that they hate? It has to be her life story.

Boehner Declines State Dinner Invite
Excerpt: This week, House Speaker John Boehner raised eyebrows by turning down an offer to ride on Air Force One with President Obama and others headed to a memorial service in Tucson. Instead, he appeared at a reception for Republican operative Maria Cino. Now, on the heels of renewed calls for bipartisanship and toned-down political rhetoric, Boehner is saying “thanks, but no thanks” to another offer to appear at an event with the president – Wednesday’s White House state dinner. The dinner, honoring the Chinese President Hu Jintao, will pull together leaders on both sides of the aisle, along with celebs, CEOs, Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices and media bigwigs. A Boehner aide confirmed that the House speaker was invited to the dinner but will not be attending. Boehner also turned down invitations to the previous two state dinners held during Obama’s presidency, one honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November 2009, and the most recent state dinner honoring Mexican President Felipe Calderon in May 2010, the aide said.

Obama administration's revolving door
Excerpt: Candidate Barack Obama repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail that working in his administration would not be “about serving your former employer, your future employer or your bank account.” But with his administration at its midpoint, a traditional time for personnel turnover, it’s clear that despite Obama’s avowals, a longtime truism of Washington life — that a prestigious-sounding administration post can be a lucrative career enhancer — remains unchanged. In recent months, officials have quietly left the White House, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Highway Administration and the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security for high-paying gigs on K Street and Wall Street, for top PR firms including the Glover Park Group and VOX Global and to work or lobby for powerful media and telecom companies including Facebook, Comcast, Bloomberg L.P., DirecTV, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. (It’s not that most of his campaign promises were not true. It’s that so many people who should have known they weren’t true believed. ~Bob.)

China's Military Comes Into Its Own
Excerpt: Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting the United States, perhaps his last state visit as president before China begins its generational leadership transition in 2012. Hu’s visit is being shaped by the ongoing China-U.S. economic dialogue, by concerns surrounding stability on the Korean Peninsula and by rising attention to Chinese defense activity in recent months. For example, China carried out the first reported test flight of its fifth-generation combat fighter prototype, dubbed the J-20, during U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ visit to China the previous week. The development and test flight of China’s J-20 is not insignificant, but it is also by no means a game changer in the U.S.-China defense balance. More intriguingly, the test highlights how China’s military increasingly is making its interests heard.

Kent Conrad to retire in 2012
Excerpt: North Dakota Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad announced today that he will not seek reelection, creating a potentially prime pickup opportunity for Republicans in a GOP-leaning state.

Three facts House GOP cannot afford to ignore
Excerpt: House Speaker John Boehner needs to start talking now about the 'selective shutdown' of the federal government that is ahead if the president refuses to listen to the verdict of the voters rendered decisively in November." If confrontation and the threat of a government shutdown are all but inevitable, then Republicans must begin now defining what that means for the public. House Republicans must, according to Hewitt, "reassure Americans and especially senior citizens [in advance] that they have provided the Senate with the bills necessary to fund Social Security, Medicare and defense, but that the president is holding these appropriations hostage in order to defend Obamacare, the bureaucrats at EPA and the left-wing broadcasters at NPR." In other words, key functions of government can be maintained even as Republicans deliver what voters demanded in November.

Excerpt: As the United States prepares to introduce the massive new health-care program known as Obamacare, Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday that he plans to significantly reform his country’s state-run health-care system due to the program’s massive cost and lackluster performance. Cameron’s plan calls for allowing patients’ general practitioners more control over treatment, in contrast to the current system, in which government bureaucrats wield greater control. His government argues that this is the only way to increase productivity while controlling costs. Reforming the popular National Health Service, a massive government agency tasked with ensuring free “cradle to the grave” health insurance for every UK citizen, has long been considered the third rail of British politics. During a radio interview with the BBC on Monday, Cameron called Britain’s much-vaunted NHS “second rate.” The opposition Labour party quickly pounced, calling Cameron’s statement an insult to “millions of NHS staff.”

Mexico losing its war with drug cartels
Excerpt: What happens when a country declares war on its deadly illegal drug cartels and loses? The violent deaths of nearly 35,000 in Mexico in the past four years symbolize a growing crisis for the United States as its southern neighbor is increasingly destabilized by competing drug organizations that have infiltrated every level of government, according to numerous U.S. officials. President Felipe Calderon's efforts to dismantle the drug gangs since taking office in 2006 has increased the number of grisly killings without diminishing the strength of the various criminal groups so far, experts said. That has placed U.S. security and Mexican security at risk.

Loughner was a Bush-hater, says 43rd paragraph of NYT story
Excerpt: After all of the accusations against conservatives for supposedly causing or inspiring the Tucson shooting, it's a bit disappointing to see this buried in the 43rd paragraph of a New York Times story yesterday. He became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government and that the country’s central banking system was enslaving its citizens. His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government. Fortunately, the revelation is receiving plenty of attention because of a Drudge Report link. But now that we know this, should we start blaming the angry left of the Bush era for Loughner's paranoid behavior?

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