MEXICANO 100%

Come check out this rhyme, The Last Laugh is Mine I just beat another case, right in your face this time. I shook a dime and a dozen- doing time with my cousins. Time flew by.

Estamos armados, por todos lados, somos los soldados muy locos en el mente, pero siempre marijuanos. Ya nos vamos a la guerra, luchando por la tierra con yeska en el mano, y cerveza en la llielera.

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Just a bit of insight for my readers.

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And the French government decided Monday to reconsider the taking of a national stand. As one might expect, the decision was to, essentially, completely fold. And of course how many of us are shocked and appalled? Not many, I suspect.

From BBC News:

French President Jacques Chirac has announced that the new youth employment law that sparked weeks of sometimes violent protests will be scrapped.

He said it would be replaced by other measures to tackle youth unemployment.

Millions of students and union members have taken to the streets over the last month in protest against the law, which made it easier to fire young workers.

Union and student leaders said it was a “great victory” but it is not clear if protests set for Tuesday are still on.

Union leaders had given the government until Easter weekend to withdraw the law or face a repeat of the recent general strikes.

What is the CPE? Contrat Premiere Embauche (CPE): A new work contract for under-26s allowing a two-year trial period. In that period, employers can end a contract without explanation. After two years, the CPE reverts to a standard full-time contract. It became law on 2 April, until Chirac’s revision.

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The French rolled over in another demand for government-supported entitlements.

Go here for information on the French labor law.

Illegal Mexican immigrants are demanding precisely the same thing. Give me. Make it free.

The backbone that we laughingly accuse the French of lacking — it would seem our national political backbone is equally missing.

Perhaps next week I’ll see a message for it on a milk carton.

BZ

Perhaps it really is the time to roll over and let anyone who is an illegal immigrant do what they wish when they wish.

Though it is clear that a good 70% to 80% of the American public, including those persons who waded their way through the unfriendly INS system of legal immigration (a kludgy, convoluted, lengthy and costly process which, on its face, helps to cause people to move into the illegal realm) do not want an amnesty and want our borders enforced, it is apparent that both of our current political parties are not particularly interested in what the electorate wants.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

LOS ANGELES – In Los Angeles, Eun Sook Lee will march on behalf of Korean illegal immigrants, at least 50,000, living in southern California. On Boston Common, Punam Rogers will join other Indian émigrés, as well as business clients and students from China, Germany, and Britain. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Ivalier Duvra will take to the streets to draw attention to Haitian newcomers who he says need refugee status.

Coming on the heels of demonstrations in several larger cities, a National Day of Action on Immigrant Rights Monday is expected to involve people in some 90 US municipalities, well above organizers’ goal of 10. Described as the biggest social movement of Hispanics since the United Farm Workers of Cesar Chavez, the plans for protests, vigils, and marches include a less-visible tier of people stirred to action over American immigration policy: non-Latinos.

The national day of action seems to have expanded exponentially with the organizing power of the Internet. Besides demonstrations, speeches, processions, and assorted performances (from drumming to skits), groups are planning work-walkouts, product boycotts, fasting, and other measures.

Anger has been building among immigrants for decades, Ms. Hong says, but it has intensified over the past decade, as immigrants felt targeted by welfare reform, what they see as a civil-rights rollback, and, most recently, anti- terror laws. Post-9/11 crackdowns, legislation denying social services to illegals in California, and Minutemen border operations have roused immigrants, legal and not. “Immigrants have been feeling like targets for all that is wrong and want to stand up and show how they contribute to the diversity and richness of America,” she says.

So anger has been building? And what would happen had the countries been reversed? What would happen had “anger” been building in:

• Russia
• Korea
• Mexico
• China
• Ethiopia
• El Salvador
• Guatemala

If we do not have the so-called cojones to defend our own sovereign nation, our borders, our language, our culture — well then, perhaps it really is time to let the barbarians past the gates and allow anyone, anywhere, for any reason, to do what they will when they will.

I once thought we were a nation of laws. I am no longer so convinced. Why should you or me, I posit, obey any laws extant in this country?

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell (1903–1950), British author. Animal Farm, ch. 10 (1945).

BZ

My Dad made it through his fifth surgery in 1.5 years. He is now 86. I find that statistic miraculous. I should be lucky enough to make it to 65, much less any age involving surgery. In 2005 he survived a colostomy and its resection. He now has an ileostomy. I have to tell him he must now relive everything he survived last year. His stay in a skilled nursing facilty. His inability to walk. His dealing with a bag on his stomach. His knowing he (possibly; no guarantee) must undergo another surgery to reconnect segments of his colon. He has survived two malignant tumors. Astounding.

I am on Wait And See status.

BZ

“A slew of new research shows how sorry is the plight of American blacks, most acutely men. Black men, particularly those who do not finish high school, have been falling off a cliff for decades.

If you include blacks in prison or not seeking work—which conventional unemployment surveys don’t—the true jobless rate for black men in their 20s without a high school diploma is 72 percent.

At the height of the economic boom, in 2000, it was still about 65 percent. This is twice the rate for white dropouts and three times that of Latinos. A University of California, Berkeley, researcher found that black dropouts in their late 20s are more likely to be in prison than working.

There’s a lot of Marxist-infused nonsense about how economics are at the root of black America’s problems. But this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Of course poverty makes social pathologies worse, but it’s the pathologies that cause poverty in the first place.

Family breakdown in the black community has occurred despite a steady rise in the wages of blacks since World War II, when 80 percent were born to married parents.

Racism alone cannot be blamed anymore for causing all black problems. By every measure, racism, particularly official racism, has declined even as these problems have worsened. Racism is surely still a problem, but it pales in comparison to family breakdown. Nothing more perpetuates the cycle of moral and financial poverty.

If you are raised by two married parents today, black or white, it is unlikely that you will be poor, or poor for long.

Obviously, black America’s problems are larger than the [Congressional Black] caucus. But the caucus has failed to provide the morally serious leadership—leadership that builds on the historic social conservatism and self-reliance of African Americans—that is sorely needed.”

—Jonah Goldberg

Orlando Patterson wrote, in part:

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960’s: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren’t always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation — that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for “acting white” — turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college (“We’re not stupid!” they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose culture” of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation’s best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

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Folks, I wrote the above post last evening and I had an observation planned; since then my father has gone into the hospital suddenly and is scheduled for an operation this morning. I am surmising I might be away from the Blogosphere for a bit; unknown when I will return. Take care, and never let fly those opportunities to tell those you hold dear: I love you.

BZ

First: FISA judges said (reported on March 29th):

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president’s constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

“If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now,” said Judge Allan Kornblum, magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and an author of the 1978 FISA Act. “I think that the president would be remiss exercising his constitutional authority by giving all of that power over to a statute.”

Second, the Supreme Court this morning refused to hear a case from a man held as an enemy combatant:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a man held until recently as an enemy combatant without traditional legal rights, in effect sidestepping a challenge to Bush administration wartime detention powers.

Stevens and two other court members, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, explained their Monday votes not to deal with Padilla’s case.
Although Padilla’s claims “raise fundamental issues respecting the separation of powers, including consideration of the role and function of the courts, (the case) also counsels against addressing those claims when the course of legal proceedings has made them, at least for now, hypothetical,” Kennedy wrote for the three.

This, of course, does not stop the Dems from attempting to “censure” President Bush for his tapping decision as, I am wont to frequently say, “never let the facts, proportion and reality get in the way of a good, screwed up decision.”

BZ