So... seriously, can you count the number of times over the last few days that you have heard the term "illegal" connected to the words "immigrant" or "immigration"? I mean OUTSIDE of conservative talk radio... like on the news (radio or TV) or in a newspaper.

I can tell you how many times for me:

ONE.

All over the airwaves and print media the word "illegal" is conspicuous in it's absence:

"Immigration debate defies easy political categories"

"Immigration Protests"

"Immigration law backlash not likely"

"Kentuckians join immigration rally"

"Does immigration bill cross the line?"

"Washington's anti-immigration policy: How tough is too tough?"

"Another day of immigration rallies"

You get the picture...

Immigrants are and always have been welcomed in the U.S. if they enter LEGALLY. Just because you pick the lock or bust down the door to my house, doesn't mean that now you're welcome (and entitled to) dinner.

How can I put this in a way that makes sense? Imagine paying your annual Costco membership or your monthly gym membership so that you have the privelege of going to these places and taking advantage of what they have to offer. So are people trying to tell me that if someone sneaks in somehow, just by virtue of getting inside they are entitled to the same benefits as someone who has payed for the privelege? What about the other folks "of color" who have gone through the legal process, waited years and are now citizens? How are they supposed to feel?

One thing I find amusing, is that The Left, supposed friend of the downtrodden, is throwing around the usual: "They do the jobs Americans won't do." and I've heard "Who will watch our kids, mow our lawns..." etc. Now if you look just a tiny bit past the surface of those statements, doesn't that say that we want illegal immigrants here to do the crap, slave-labor types of jobs? Heck, we don't want them sitting next to us in a cubicle, but by God, we need our damned lawns mowed and they are JUST the folks to do it!!

Sounds pretty elitist and class-dividing to me... just the stuff that Liberals accuse Conservatives all the time.

Why isn't THAT called a racist view?

Just wonderin'...

And BTW, could it be that having what amounts to a slave-level class working for wages depresses said wages for those jobs? Could that be part of the reason "Americans won't do" those jobs? Could it be impacting technology and methods of productivity related to those industries because with such cheap labor there's no POINT to improving how things are done?

Again, just wonderin'...

Posted by Vic at 08:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

More incredibly stupid social engineering coming to a Kindergarten class near you. It's been decided that starting on Monday, 5 & 6 year olds apparently need to know about HIV and AIDS.

At least they'll be putting it in "kiddie terms", saying that HIV is a "germ", is "not easy to get" and that it could lead to AIDS which is "hard to get well from." At least for now (oh, you just wait) teachers will be leaving sex and drugs out of the discussions.

Education Department spokeswoman Kelly Devers:

"The curriculum is absolutely developmentally appropriate and contains positive messages about staying healthy,"

Can you believe this crap? So they'll teach them about HIV and AIDS, but then in High School they'll turn around and have them putting condoms on bananas...

You want to teach "positive messages about staying healthy"? How about BASIC NUTRITION!?!?! The percentage of people in the U.S. who have HIV is approximately 0.3% while the percentage of Americans who are obese is over 60%.

For the most part (of course there are always exceptions) both obesity and HIV/AIDS are preventable. The former through educating people about basic nutrition and the latter by not getting involved in unprotected (and in particular, gay) sex or use of intravenous drugs.

However at a +60% level, I would think that tackling obesity would be a FAR better place to start in Kindergarten than HIV/AIDS education.

So tell me again how there's no agenda to "normalize" homosexuality in our culture when out of all the possible health-related issues to tackle out there HIV/AIDS continues to dominate the spotlight. Far more people suffer from cancer and heart disease, and record numbers of kids are developing adult-onset diabetes due to parents feeding them crap to the point they weigh 50% more than they should.

Look at this picture and tell me we don't need to address obesity more than HIV:

And you KNOW that's not some freaky anomaly. Take a GOOD look around folks.

Source: New York Daily News

Posted by Vic at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

According to a new study, it's being reported that aging Canadian Baby Boomers spend more time watching TV or surfiing the 'net than they do on sex and romance.

The survey by pollsters Ipsos Reid, commissioned by Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra, found that Canadians between the ages of 40 and 64 spend an average of 15 minutes a day on sex and romance, but can spend as much as five hours a day watching TV or surfing the Internet.

Um, ok... off the top of my head, the only group I can think of that might possibly spend MORE time on sex than on other activities would be porn actors.

I mean seriously, what the heck is this survey supposed to be saying? They say their figures are based on averages... 15 minutes X 7 days = 1 hour and 45 minutes a week. Now outside of the early stages of a marriage/relationship when folks can't keep their hands off each other, anyone who has been married a while or in a long term relationship will probably agree that almost 2 hours a week is a pretty darned good number. :-)

What would they prefer to see? Three hours a day on average? For one thing, who the heck has the time and energy and on the other hand you'd probably be told you had a sexual addiction.

Yeesh.

Source: Reuters

Posted by Vic at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I can think of no one in the Federal government who is tougher on, or more concerned with the security of the United States than President Bush. This is why although my knee-jerk reaction to the news that a UAE-based company was in line to take over management of a number of U.S. ports was astonishment and concern, I didn't go all-out ballistic at the idea.

Although President Bush's press office, Cabinet, or whoever is in charge of such things has an ABYSMAL record at communicating policy to the public, I know that the man is not the clueless fool the Left has made him out to be. It just didn't make any sense that a president who is SO tough when it comes to national security would approve a deal that would put the U.S. at risk. Quite the opposite, one would think that there must be something GOOD that would come out of something like this in regards to security.

Although he is brutally frank and as far as you can get from "politically correct", I tend to agree with radio talk show host Michael Savage on a lot of points. It was from him that I first heard about the deal and I imagined him frothing at the mouth while he raged against the insanity of it on his program. From there the news started spreading to other media outlets and soon after the first politicians to jump on the "outrage" bandwagon were a couple of Democrats (predictably) including Senator Hillary Clinton.

That right there told me that all could not be as it seemed with this deal, and that I was probably going to end up disagreeing with Dr. Savage. What shocked me was the avalanche of Republicans that jumped on this bandwagon as well, eventually killing the deal due to all the backlash.

Of course all the radio talk show hosts got into the act, whipping people up into a frenzy. Folks who normally don't bother contacting their representatives started flooding them with emails railing against the deal. As far as I know, the ONLY radio talking head who brought a common sense view to the whole thing was Fox News' Tony Snow. He actually broke the specifics down for his listeners, describing what the effect of the change of management would be. The upshot is that there would be no change in employees or protocols at the ports in question (which were not many), along with the fact that this company manages ports all over the world AND is DEEPLY involved with supporting military ships in the Middle East.

Personally, I think that we have shot ourselves in the foot here, and that Bush's plan was to bolster relations with the more moderate members of Middle Eastern countries. This will no doubt come across as anti-Muslim hysteria. I find this particularly ironic considering the Left's usual point of view on racism and "racial profiling", which they usually accuse Republicans of. We've just "racially profiled" an entire corporation due to it's country of origin.

Whoever is in charge of press in the White House has done an absolutely AWFUL job during Bush's administration, especially in this second term. There should have been a "pre-emptive" strike-type announcement of the deal, outlining the benefits and talking about the fears and how they would be misguided. Just as they've done an awful job of countering all the Iraq war negativity and highlighting the massive progress that's been made, they dropped the ball again, making the president look bad.

From what I've read, the United Arab Emirates is one of our bigger supporters in the region and is critical to our military operations. Pissing them off by lumping them in with the likes of Iran, Syria and Al Qaeda may NOT have been the best idea.

In the end, President Bush may be proven right.

Posted by Vic at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I wish I had a camera with me this weekend. I drove by a local high school and on the electronic billboard outside the stadium was the following message:

Hopefully you can tell why I thought that was funny. ;-)

Posted by Vic at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I just found out about a feature of Google Video that allows you to add video to a web page easily, and I just had to try out. I selected one that I thought was pretty funny and represented a place I have definitely been before with my computer. :-)

Posted by Vic at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)