TODAY’S HERO: Not Waiting For The Fed To Do The Right Thing

One mayor in the United States appears to have stepped up in order to do the right thing with regard to illegal immigration destroying his small town.
Unlike border state areas whose bureaucracies seem to think they must stand immobile and simply “take it on the chin,” the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania has decided to unleash his city’s forces not only on illegal immigrants themselves, but the businesses employing them — a measure logical to most but unthinkable to the business world or the GOP in general.
Barletta said he had to act after two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged last month with shooting and killing a man. Other recent incidents involving illegal immigrants have rattled this former coal town 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia, including the arrest of a 14-year-old boy for firing a gun at a playground.
“This is crazy,” said Barletta, who took office in 2000. “People are afraid to walk the streets. There’s going to be law and order back in Hazleton and I’m going to use every tool I possibly can.”
“Using every tool I possibly can” includes measures that would revoke the business licenses of companies and businesses employing illegal immigrants; the imposition of $1,000 fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants; and making English the city’s official language.
To me, these all sound like logical and rational choices — so logical and rational, in fact, that Mayor Barletta is about to be the subject of a Fecalstorm the likes of which he’s never encountered. He will frighten the Dems and the DEM because he has had the temerity to actually act, and he will frighten the GOP because he is acting whilst they are not and because he is calling for monetary sanctions on businesses.
President Bush call his packages and his approach to illegal immigration “comprehensive.” Well, being comprehensive includes the taking of immediate action and cutting illegal immigrants off at one of the major sources: those who hire them.
Mayor Hazleton: bravo! You are most definitely “Today’s Hero!”
BZ

Once Again, The LA Times Does Not Fail To Disappoint

The Los Angeles Times, in keeping with its long-standing tradition of leaning Left and, more recently, ridiculous editorial stances, unfathomable columnists and, as a result (like other DEM print papers), its hemorrhaging of readers, does not fail to disappoint with its current stance:

Sure, Hurrican Katrina victims misspent FEMA money but, know what? It’s not their fault!

From the Times:

COMMON CURRENCY
A hurricane of fraud?
FEMA did mismanage Katrina relief, but it’s wrong to blame victims for spending irresponsibly.
June 17, 2006

For every “Girls Gone Wild” video purchased, thousands of families used their cards for clothing, food and temporary shelter without having to deal with federal red tape. Bad spending decisions are an unfortunate side effect of a clever and responsive policy.

The 16% of improper expenditures is indeed high for a federal aid program — food stamps and unemployment insurance, by comparison, had respective rates of 5.9% and 10.1% last fiscal year. But these are established programs, not on-the-fly responses that had to process a sudden rush of 2.6 million claims. Unlike a permanent safety net, disaster relief’s top priority is to help as many people as fast as possible, which comes at the price of reduced efficiency (bold emphasis is mine. BZ).

It’s easy, and necessary, to criticize FEMA’s across-the-board incompetence in responding to the largest displacement of Americans since the Civil War. But obsessing about the spending habits of refugees comes perilously close to blaming the victim.

Blaming The Victim?

The LA Times is incompetent. Of course I blame the victim. Yes, the government response was lackluster. But the greatest lackluster performance was at the local and state level, not the national level. FEMA is not a first responder. No federal government agency is a first responder.

On one hand, the Times labels FEMA has having “across the board incompetence” and, on the other hand, writes: “Bad spending decisions are an unfortunate side effect of a clever and responsive (FEMA) policy.”

So which is it, Times? Is FEMA incompetent or not? Clever or not?

Come on, give me a break.

This is simply what happens when you give people things they had nothing to do with earning. Allow me to be frank. The greater bulk of persons requiring the aid were black. Ray Nagin said so, so it must be true. Many of these persons were on various local, state and federal programs already, whereupon they were provided with a level of substance for free. Items acquired for free allow little investment by the receiver nor an appreciation of how it is these items came to be budgeted. Let me provide a little hint: these programs and items were funded by me and you; the TAXPAYERS.

Giving anyone, at any time, a “pass” for their stupidity and/or illegal actions is doing nothing more than enforcing the thought that money and programs are literally free, that government somehow has an unlimited source of funding (hey, they can print more money, right?), and that there is no responsibility, discipline or even appreciation attached. It is why they are called entitlements: they are expected.

This is the federal government, once more, training people to depend on the largesse of its coffers and chaining those who receive this largesse into a permanent, enduring, generational underclass that will consistently vote for more and free.

“Good job, Katrina Victims; good boy; good girl! Here’s a biscuit!

Thanks, LA Times, for merely continuing to ensure The Pygmalion Effect will proliferate at its happy, rapid rate.

You morons.

BZ

Ronald Wilson Reagan: 1911 to 2004


RONALD WILSON REAGAN

Born: February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois
Died: June 5, 2004, in Los Angeles, California

__________________

Such is the second year of Reagan’s passing; I never revered and loved a president as I did Reagan. I understood his faults and his shortcomings and held him above nevertheless.

There will, as far as I am concerned, never be another American President as beloved.

God Bless you, Ronald Reagan.

BZ

PRECISELY What Is Needed: President Bush Stirs The Troops

It was a good day.

First: Karl Rove was exonerated Tuesday:

Top presidential aide Karl Rove will not be indicted in the CIA leak case, according to Rove’s lawyer. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had questioned Rove about his role in the public revelation that Valerie Plame had been an undercover CIA agent.

Rove’s lawyer says Fitzgerald has formally told him that Rove will not be charged. Already under indictment is former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The news, which came in a letter to Rove’s attorney, lifts a cloud from over the White House. It should also allow Rove to focus on the Republican Party’s efforts to maintain its congressional majority in the November elections.

Chuckie Schumer is pissed and demands the prosecutor to justify his decision to not burn Rove. Sorry Chuckie; no second “perp walk” for Karlie. Howard Dean said:

“He doesn’t belong in the White House. If the president valued America more than he valued his connection to Karl Rove, Karl Rove would have been fired a long time ago,” said Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, speaking Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “So I think this is probably good news for the White House, but it’s not very good news for America.”

Second: President Bush visited Iraq and proffered a stirring speech:

Bush foiled the press (the temerity!) and jetted into Iraq directly from Camp David, making his second visit to Baghdad since the 2003 invasion on Tuesday, days after U.S. forces killed al Qaeda’s chief in Iraq.

“Good to see you,” Iraq’s new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told Bush as they shook hands in one of Saddam Hussein’s old palaces. “Thanks for having me,” Bush replied.

From the Green Zone in Baghdad, President Bush spoke in front of the troops. In part, he said:

I have come today to personally show our nation’s commitment to a free Iraq. My message to the Iraqi people is this: seize the moment; seize this opportunity to develop a government of and by and for the people. And I also have a message to the Iraqi people that when America gives a commitment, America will keep its commitment.

I told you earlier we were laying the foundation of peace for generations to come, and we are, because we go with confidence knowing that liberty is the desire of every soul. When Iraq succeeds, reformers and people who desire to live in a free society will see such a hopeful example, and they’ll begin to demand the same rights and the same conditions and the same hopeful society.

And that’s why I tell you what you’re doing is historic in nature. People will look back at this period and wonder whether or not America was true to its beginnings; whether we strongly believed in the universality of freedom and whether we were willing to act on it. Certainly we acted in our own self-interest right after September the 11th; and now we act not only in our own self-interests, but in the interests of men, women and children in the broader Middle East, no matter what their religion, no matter where they were born, no matter how they speak.

This is a moment — this is a time where the world can turn one way or the other, where the world can be a better place or a more dangerous place. And the United States of America and citizens such as yourself are dedicated to making sure that the world we leave behind is a better place for all.

It is such an honor to be here. It is such an honor to be with you. May God bless you all, may God bless your work, may God bless your families, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.
____________________

This is finally, President Bush, “just what the doctor ordered.”

Keep it up.

BZ

P.S.
Once again Blogger will not allow photographs to be included.

Reading Between The Lines of the Three Gitmo Suicides


“Three Muslims committed suicide at the Guantanamo Bay prison and now, more than ever, this is a clear indication that Gitmo needs to be completely shut down and all those present set free.”

Only this scenario would please the American Left and others around the globe.

I do not believe this is prudent for any number of reasons, not the least of which is mindset and philosophy, a factor that, once again, liberals fail to take into account.

A bit of background; from The Economist:

THREE suicides at the weekend among inmates at Guantánamo Bay have brought renewed calls for the closure of the already widely-condemned American prison. Set up at an American naval base in Cuba in January 2002, the camp contains some 460 terrorist suspects, many of whom have been held for more than four years without charge. Lawyers for the prisoners called the suicides an act of desperation.

That from this British-based magazine to which I subscribe, amongst other left-leaning publications — in order to see and read “how the other half lives.”

A US military professional recently indicated that these suicides are a form of cogent and planned asymmetrical war against the United States, insofar as they realized their deaths would confound the plans of our nation and bring Gitmo further into a negative light in terms of its proposed eradication by those who have no concept of the War Against Islamists; why otherwise would three separate persons commit suicide and leave alleged “suicide notes” on the same day at roughly the same time?

In addition, all persons know that Muslims simply do not commit suicide. That is what we are told, yes? No? What about the downing of EgyptAir Flight 990 on 10-31-1999 in which the Muslim co-pilot deliberately drove the massive Boeing 767 into the ocean?

Two years afterward the U.S. and Egyptian governments are still quarreling over the cause—a clash that grows out of cultural division, not factual uncertainty. A look at the flight data from a pilot’s perspective, with the help of simulations of the accident, points to what the Egyptians must already know: the crash was caused not by any mechanical failure but by a pilot’s intentional act.

And yet that apparently matters not. The DEM are portraying the event as three poor, disaffected and oppressed Muslims simply becoming depressed by their horrific conditions and taking the proverbial “easy way out.” From the Associated Press:

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said, bringing further condemnation of the isolated camp where hundreds of men have been held for years without charge.

No charges? These individuals are ENEMY COMBATANTS. Pure and simple. Question for those history-challenged amongst us:

When American and allied forces were captured and forced into German prison camps, were they proffered, individually, with trials so they could provide exculpatory evidence as to their guilt or innocence in the war effort? Or were they simply warehoused under conditions infinitely worse than those experienced by Gitmo detainees? And what about American and allied troops and the conditions they endured at the hands of the Japanese? U.S. prisoners of war held by the Empire of Japan, 1941-1945, died at a rate exceeding 37% while in captivity. On the other hand, U.S. prisoners of war held captive by Nazi Germany died at a rate of less than 2% while held by the Germans.

How we, sadly, seem to ignore history.

Or, how about the conditions experienced by Gitmo detainees as opposed to the as-yet unconvicted military personnel detained in the Haditha events? These military persons are kept in shackles under conditions much more oppressive than those of persons in Gitmo.

These detainees knew precisely what they were doing and committed their deaths in the same fashion as Homicide Bombers. They too will be facing their virgin ration in the next life.

This was a wonderful PR move. And don’t think that “they” don’t have a grasp of our civilisation though we clearly don’t have a grasp of theirs.

These persons are not weak and they are not victims. They are strong-willed and they are single-minded and they are willing to sacrifice their bodies to what they perceive as the overall common good for their struggle. It is about Islam and it is about overcoming the unwashed and the infidels and the corrupt who do not believe in the teachings of Mohammad.

In the meantime we continue to compare and contrast Militant Islamists with our own sense of fair play, logic and common sense.

We do this because we are, simply, stupid.

Bottom line? Three Islamists dead?

Fabulous.

We need more dead Militant Islamists.

BZ