You Shall Reap What You Sow

I have spent my whole adult life in a place that they call Staten Island, New York. While growing up, one thought of the Island as a small, tight-knit community where people lived , worked and played. At some point, everything began to change dramatically. The big change began in and directly after college. The Island turned from a small "home" community to a growing crowded suburb of Manhattan and Brooklyn. With this growth came more people, more cars and inevitably more houses. The filthy, greedy, scumbag contractors would knock one house down and build two or three in it's place. These contractors started hiring illegal Mexicans to do their labor, as did the store owners and restaurateurs. The contractors paid these illegals well below minimum wage as they flooded into the city to take the jobs. These illegals hang out on corners like gangs when they are not picked up for work. They flood the parks after work and take up all of the fields. Ah, but I digress. It is the filthy, greedy self-employers that created this mess we are in. They reaped all of the benefits while the ordinary schmoe, has to educate, and provide health care for these bloodsuckers. These people have created a second welfare state in this country that will never be able to be turned back. What shot does this country have, when our best shot is McCain, who wants to legalize all of these scum suckers.
But the part that really irks, and twists my stomach is the fact that these cocksucker employers are the same people that ruined this island to begin with. Staten Island is like the wild west. No adherence to stop signs, traffic lights, no signals and no care in the world. The police are not to be found, and when they are, they prove impotent. I can understand why foreign nations hate this country. Most of the time when they come here, they see New Yorkers,who happen to be the most arrogant, scum sucking, scumbags in the world. A BMW or Lexus does not make you any more important than a guy with a Honda. Neither does getting your fingernails done once a week. They ought to chop these peoples hands right off and shove them in a meat grinder. Everyone is a prince or a princess. They are all special and can do no wrong. When did they start teaching this bullshit? Everyone is special and great? Our arrogance as New Yorkers is one day going to come back and haunt us. For those seeds that we plant and nurture, will one day have to be sown. I just today saw a man crossing Hylan Blvd with a cart of groceries and these cocksucker drivers were driving at him as if he were a bowling pin. How about a cop (haha) take this guy out of his vehicle and split his thick skull open with a billy club? How about these people are put in their place once and for all? How about the cops do something to justify their salary and early retirements? How about that New York's finest? Do something, anything. Like I stated earlier, it is no wonder that foreigners hate America, because if they are using New Yorkers as their example of an American, they are justified in their feelings. It's time to harvest our crops.
posted by Frodgie at 6:34 PM

 

Italy arrests 400 in illegal immigrants swoop

ROME (Reuters) - Italian police announced on Thursday the arrest of hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in a sign of the new right-wing government's determination to clamp down.

Police arrested 383 people including 268 foreigners, with 53 immediately taken to the border for expulsion, in a week-long operation stretching from northern Italy to the Naples area.

Silvio Berlusconi swept back to power for a third term as prime minister last week promising to get tough on illegal immigrants, blamed by many for crime. He is readying new laws to screen immigrants and jail or expel those breaking the law.

Those arrested came from Eastern Europe, Albania, Greece, North Africa and China and face charges ranging from illegal entry into Italy to prostitution, drug trafficking and robbery.

In Libya, police have arrested 240 would-be illegal migrants from several African countries over the past four days as they prepared to sail to Italy, the Interior Ministry said.

Libya is a springboard for hundreds of thousands of Africans trying to reach Europe via Italy on board unseaworthy boats.

The policeman in charge of the Italian operation, Francesco Gratteri, told a news conference the sweep "wasn't aimed at any specific category or ethnic group. The sole objective were criminals who have caused a sensation of rising alarm in society".

The focus of Italian concern about immigrant crime are the Roma, known here as "nomads", who come mainly from Romania and other Eastern European countries. In Rome, police raided the biggest Roma camp and took away about 50 men for questioning.

The arrests coincided with a visit by Romanian Interior Minister Cristian David. Romania has Europe's biggest Roma population and its prime minister warned this week that Italy's crackdown could cause "xenophobia" against other Romanians.

Italy has tried to reassure the fellow European Union member that Romanians are not being targeted. The two countries have launched a joint police effort and Romania will despatch a task force of 15 officers to work with Italian police this month.

MIGRANT MISERY

Illegal Roma camps in Naples had to be evacuated by police this week after local people, angry at an alleged baby-snatching incident involving a 17-year-old Roma girl, set fire to their shacks repeatedly during the night. Nobody was injured.

Pope Benedict held an apparently unrelated meeting with the Vatican body for the care of migrant people, run by Cardinal Renato Martino who spoke of "miseries related to migration" and mentioned "gypsies", a word some Roma consider offensive.

Italy's new interior minister, Roberto Maroni from the anti-immigrant Northern League party, is rushing out emergency laws to bring back passport checks on Italy's EU borders, despite its membership of the Schengen passport-free zone.

He also wants to make illegal immigration a jailable offense and speed up the deportation process.

The League made strong gains in national and local elections last month and is imposing tough measures to control immigrants in many northern cities. Its leader, Umberto Bossi, who often uses violent anti-immigrant rhetoric, said regarding the events in Naples: "People do what the political class can't manage."

"This operation against illegal immigrants is good because , it's what people want. They ask us for security and we have to give it to them," Bossi told reporters in parliament.

In League-run Verona, Mayor Flavio Tosi said his city had the biggest Romanian community in Italy. "There are 7,000 of them, working as builders, artisans and domestics. And they themselves say the Roma are a problem," he said.
posted by Frodgie at 10:12 PM

 

Wiretap

This is a break from political discussion. I have not posted in over a month, and it is time for me to start blogging again. First off, I would like to wish a good friend of mine a big chunk of luck, as he will be going through a divorce very shortly. I would also like to take this time to express something that has been bothering me for quite some time. It is on the subject of snakes and snoops. I literally hate a snake and a snoop. They creep when you are not looking and listening, and they throw their sinister thoughts around like Spalding in the middle of the night. I actually think it is more insulting for others to think they have one up on you, when you know exactly how their little detective work is going and being planned. How is the new recorder? The VCR or the DVD? We know what has been done……we know what you are doing. It has all manifested itself just as planned. They are willing to ruin a whole for a part that will forever be miserable. I speak in riddles, because we know where the truth truly lies. Maybe it was a mike? Those Saturday trips make it all the more fun, in order to justify all of this nonsense. Let’s lay it all out on the table to put all those silly little plans on hold. We have you right where we want you mister. You do as we say, or we will show the evidence. The evidence is already well known. There are no secrets withheld. Anything that was ever uttered was already uttered to the accused. Another lesson is not to throw rocks if you live in a glass houses. Most don’t believe in that confessional booth any longer, maybe a trip back would do some good. A candidate also resides in me. Control is a force of nature that can be abused. It’s hard for many people to “lose” control and not get exactly what they would like. I was always taught that self-reflection humbles the soul. Ones selfish happiness, wants and needs, does not justify their end. We live in a much smaller world, and in a world that is much different than 50 years ago. People have things that they don’t really want, or pay attention to. These same people beg for, or want, what they once had. Silly little world Silly..
posted by Frodgie at 10:59 PM

 

Pastor to the President?

When the assassination of John F. Kennedy horrified a nation, Black Muslim Minister Malcolm X declared it payback for America's violence in the world, a case of "chickens coming home to roost."

"Being an old farm boy myself," said Malcolm, "chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad, they've always made me glad."

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright surely had Malcolm's words in mind when, the Sunday after the 9-11 massacre of 3,000 Americans, he declared this, too, was a case of "America's chickens ... coming home to roost."

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

So Wright told his congregation on Sept. 16, 2001.

In a sermon delivered at the Howard University chapel on Jan. 15, 2006, reports Ron Kessler of NewsMax, Wright "blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president." Wright told the Howard students:

"Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president ... and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.

"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. ... We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers. ... We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against (Fidel) Castro and (Muammar) Ghadhafi. ... We put (Nelson) Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority, and believe it more than we believe in God.

"We started the AIDS virus. ... We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty." Thus did the Rev. Wright conclude.

This virulent strain of anti-Americanism and Afroracism has long fed the rage, resentment and paranoia in precincts of black America, which manifests itself in the horrendous (and hidden) statistics of black-on-white crime in America. Nothing exceptional there.

What is exceptional is that Wright is the spiritual father of Barack Obama, the pastor, teacher and mentor who brought Barack into the church, married him and Michelle, baptized their children and has been a confidant to the man who would be America's president.

For 20 years, Barack has attended Wright's church, listened to his weekly sermons, entertained him in his home. Yet, says Barack, he never heard any racist rants at church, nor was he aware that Wright held so poisoned a view of his country.

Sorry, that is not credible. Wright is a famous preacher in black America, and Barack's denial he was aware of his views marks him down either as a dissembler or a man so obtuse he ought not be a security guard at Wal-Mart, let alone president of the United States.

It is easy now to understand why Michelle Obama, before Barack began to win, had never once been proud of her country. Who could be proud of the America that lives in the malignant imagination of the Rev. Wright?

Barack has now moved to separate himself from Wright's rants and removed him from the campaign roster. And he will likely be forced, with anguish, to turn his back on, repudiate, and reject his beloved friend and teacher.

But it is too late for that. For Wright has, for millions of Americans, filled in the blanks about Barack. Wright tells us the kind of company Barack keeps, the kind of men he holds close, the kind of attitudes and beliefs he finds acceptable, if not congenial.

That Wright is a revered preacher in black America also tells us that, far from coming together, we Americans are further apart than we were in the 1950s, when Negroes could be described as Christian, conservative and patriotic. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad did not speak for black America then. Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and Dr. Martin Luther King did. But Jeremiah Wright makes Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown sound like the Mills Brothers.

Truly, the Democratic Party is now headed for a train wreck. Though Barack seems likely to win more pledged delegates than Hillary, the super-delegates will have to decide whether they want to offer America a nominee whose pastor and mentor embodies the anti-white racism and anti-Americanism that has ever brought the patriotic blood of Middle America to a boil. Wright is not the sort of fellow you want to bring with you into "Deer Hunter" Country.
posted by Frodgie at 8:56 AM

 

Bill Buckley: Dead at 82

NEW YORK (AP) - William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.
His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.

Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.

Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."

Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down "Firing Line" after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. "You've got to end sometime and I'd just as soon not die onstage," he told the audience.

"For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television," fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. "He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement."

Fifty years earlier, few could have imagined such a triumph. Conservatives had been marginalized by a generation of discredited stands—from opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the isolationism which preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that the critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand "athwart history, yelling `Stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it." Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.

Although it perpetually lost money, the National Review built its circulation from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 in 1964, the year conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate. The magazine claimed a circulation of 155,000 when Buckley relinquished control in 2004, citing concerns about his mortality, and over the years the National Review attracted numerous young writers, some who remained conservative (George Will, David Brooks), and some who didn't (Joan Didion, Garry Wills).

"I was very fond of him," Didion said Wednesday. "Everyone was, even if they didn't agree with him."

Born Nov. 24, 1925, in New York City, William Frank Buckley Jr. was the sixth of 10 children of a a multimillionaire with oil holdings in seven countries. The son spent his early childhood in France and England, in exclusive Roman Catholic schools.

His prominent family also included his brother James, who became a one-term senator from New York in the 1970s; his socialite wife, Pat, who died in April 2007; and their son, Christopher, a noted author and satirist ("Thank You for Smoking").

A precocious controversialist, William was but 8 years old when he wrote to the king of England, demanding payment of the British war debt.

After graduating with honors from Yale in 1950, Buckley married Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, spent a "hedonistic summer" and then excoriated his alma mater for what he regarded as its anti-religious and collectivist leanings in "God and Man at Yale," published in 1951.

Buckley spent a year as a low-level agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico, work he later dismissed as boring.

With his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Buckley wrote a defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954, "McCarthy and His Enemies." While condemning some of the senator's anti-communist excesses, the book praised a "movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."

In 1960, Buckley helped found Young Americans for Freedom, and in he was among the founders of the Conservative Party in New York. Buckley was the party's candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, waging a campaign that was in part a lark—he proposed an elevated bikeway on Second Avenue—but that also reflected a deep distaste for the liberal Republicanism of Mayor John V. Lindsay. Asked what he would do if he won, Buckley said, "I'd demand a recount."

He wrote the first of his successful spy thrillers, "Saving the Queen," in 1976, introducing Ivy League hero Blackford Oakes. Oakes was permitted a dash of sex—with the Queen of England, no less—and Buckley permitted himself to take positions at odds with conservative orthodoxy. He advocated the decriminalization of marijuana, supported the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal and came to oppose the Iraq war.

Buckley also took on the archconservative John Birch Society, a growing force in the 1950s and 1960s. "Buckley's articles cost the Birchers their respectability with conservatives," Richard Nixon once said. "I couldn't have accomplished that. Liberals couldn't have, either."

Although he boasted he would never debate a Communist "because there isn't much to say to someone who believes the moon is made of green cheese," Buckley got on well with political foes. His friends included such liberals as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who despised Buckley's "wrathful conservatism," but came to admire him for his "wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even for his compulsion to epater the liberals."

Buckley was also capable of deep and genuine dislikes. In a 1968 television debate, when left-wing novelist and critic Gore Vidal called him a "pro-war-crypto-Nazi," Buckley snarled an anti-gay slur and threatened to "sock you in your ... face and you'll stay plastered." Their feud continued in print, leading to mutual libel suits that were either dismissed (Vidal's) or settled out of court (Buckley's).

The National Review defended the Vietnam War, opposed civil rights legislation and once declared that "the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail." Buckley also had little use for the music of the counterculture, once calling the Beatles "so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."

The National Review could do little to prevent Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964, but as conservatives gained influence so did Buckley and his magazine. The long rise would culminate in 1980 when Buckley's good friend, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. The outsiders were now in, a development Buckley accepted with a touch of rue.

"It's true. I had much more fun criticizing than praising," he told the Washington Post in 1985. "I criticize Reagan from time to time, but it's nothing like Carter or Johnson."

Buckley's memoir about Goldwater, "Flying High," was coming out this spring, and his son said he was working on a book about Reagan.

Buckley so loved a good argument—especially when he won—that he compiled a book of bickering in "Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription," published in 2007 and featuring correspondence with the famous (Nixon, Reagan) and the merely annoyed.

"Mr. Buckley," one non-fan wrote in 1967, "you are the mouthpiece of that evil rabble that depends on fraud, perjury, dirty tricks, anything at all that suits their purposes. I would trust a snake before I would trust you or anybody you support."

Responded Buckley: "What would you do if I supported the snake?"
posted by Frodgie at 5:02 PM

 

A National Primary

Six states have voted in the Republican nomination contest, and the field has merely been winnowed. Former senator Fred Thompson dropped out, having run an honorable campaign but also shown his distaste for presidential politics. We were always skeptical of former governor Mike Huckabee’s chances, but it took his loss in South Carolina to make nearly everyone share that skepticism.

It is now a two-and-a-half-man race. Sen. John McCain has a lead in national polls and has won two contested primaries. Former governor Mitt Romney has the most delegates, the most popular votes, and the most money. On the sidelines is former mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He is running fourth in the national polls and has only one delegate.

If Giuliani wins the next big contest, the Florida primary, he could revive his campaign and do well on Super Tuesday. (Beating McCain, while losing to Romney, might also keep his candidacy alive.) His tactics are being second-guessed, but those tactics were the inevitable result of his fundamental political flaw. He could not compete in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina because he is not a good fit for the Republican party nationally.

McCain’s supporters are telling one another that his victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina prove that he can ignore and isolate conservative opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh. That’s what they said when he won primaries in 2000, too, and McCain paid dearly for listening to them. Our guess is that the voters who are leaving Huckabee and Thompson will go disproportionately to Romney. McCain has yet to win a plurality of self-identified conservatives anywhere.

McCain will never win over all conservatives, even if he gets the nomination. But he can reassure conservatives if he pledges to name a conservative running mate and identifies respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges. He can promise to approach immigration reform piecemeal rather than comprehensively. He should say that strong evidence that the illegal-immigrant population is shrinking will have to arrive before he legalizes any large segment of that population. And he can acknowledge that scientific advances have weakened the case for federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.

Governor Romney’s chances have been discounted because he left South Carolina before its primary. But his choice may have been shrewd, or at least may have reflected an accurate understanding of the race. By not doing everything in his power to stop McCain from winning South Carolina, he increased the likelihood that McCain would get the flattering media attention we call “momentum.” But it has become clearer and clearer in recent weeks that the outcome of this race is more likely to be determined by who won the most delegates than by who won pivotal states. As the most conservative viable candidate, Romney is still in a good position to win that contest.
posted by Frodgie at 6:59 AM