Tuesday, August 28, 2007

No secret ballots? Voter intimidation...

If there was any doubt about the communistic nature of the political Left, consider the case of SB 180 by Carole Migden, which just passed the Senate on a party-line vote on its way to the governor. SB 180 replaces vote by secret ballot for farm worker organizing elections with a process euphemistically called “card-check,” in which a ballot can be thrust in front of a worker by any one at any time.

I guess the Demunists are really taking their cues from Hugo Chavez and his style of "democracy", aren't they?

Hey Carol baby, what is it about the right to a secret ballot that bothers you?

That’s exactly what this issue comes down to: the right of every worker to hear both sides of a question and then – in the privacy of a voting booth free from coercion, intimidation or recrimination – the worker is free to cast his or her ballot according to his or her own conscience and best judgment.

This right assures that whatever the pressure – whether from the employer, the union, the supervisor, the shop steward, even the spouse – that the workers, in the private sanctity of the voting booth, can cast their own votes according to their own best lights – without worrying how it will affect employment or friendships or working relationships.

This is the absolute, fundamental pre-condition for ANY representative republic – NOBODY can look over your shoulder while you cast your vote. NOBODY.

This measure utterly guts this fundamental principle upon which all free societies are based. It provides that one side can cajole, pressure, threaten, plead, and demand that a worker cast his or her vote while in the presence of the mob. Hugo Chavez and other "populist" goons would be proud.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Goths at Disney: Turning Rebellion Into Money...



Original LA Weekly Story here. Quotes from that article:

Despite Fastpasses and supplies of $3 churros, there is plenty of time to kill in line as we stand among the goths, leaving ample opportunity for contemplation. How young is too young to start dressing your child as a goth?
Is it bad form to run up to goths and snap their picture without asking, lest your digital photo inadvertently steal their immortal souls?
How does one maintain the requisite deathly white pallor in this relentless California sun?
(Judging by a good many, one doesn't). The author goes on:

Sure, I was a poser goth in high school. I shared black eyeliner with my boyfriend and read Rilke and Oscar Wilde. I listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Smiths (who are arguably not goth) and the Cure (who are inescapably goth). But I was never able to sufficiently answer any of these questions.
Last year I was at the Magic Kingdom, not on this "Bats Day", and there were quite a few gothy kids around, riding the Haunted Mansion and the Twilight Zone Tower Of Terror over at the adjacent California Adventure Theme Park.

According to one of the park employees I spoke to, Disneyland officials at first tried to discourage the goths, but then decided to cater to them, with a gift shop the specialized in Goth paraphenalia and items. As well as hiring a Goth or two to work at the ride. That's not a Goth visitor, that's a park employee:
And why not? These people have kids too, future Disney customers:
And are these not family values? Fathers, Mothers and sons and daughters:



Although I could never go all out like that (I had a job to hold down and night school to go to, and I still have a day job to hold down now), I always liked and still do like these people. And I too still often wear black on the outside, because that is how I feel on the inside. And if I seem a little strange, well, that's because I am...

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Will they ever tell the WHOLE truth about slavery?

Probably not, because it doesn't fit the agenda of America-bashing.

While large parts of America once had slavery, it’s NOT an American idea. It STILL goes on in Africa, and America is where a Civil War was fought to stop it. American slave traders bought slaves in Africa not because they uniquely coveted or disliked Africans, but because it was the only place in the world people were still conveniently for sale. Neither Europe nor Asia had that distinction.

In 2000, at an observance attended by delegates from several European countries and the United States, officials from Benin publicized President Mathieu Kerekou’s apology for his country’s role in “selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders.” “We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation,” said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing. Cyrille Oguin, Benin’s ambassador to the United States, acknowledged, “We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.”

Also, remember, while the Atlantic Slave Trade and the horrors of the Middle Passage are what every American learns about in school, it wasn’t the only slave trade, and they weren’t the only horrors. Long before Columbus discovered America, Africans were selling other Africans to Arab slave traders in the North of Africa, and marching them north through deserts where many of them died. (Sadly this still goes on, as Sudan shows).

In the meantime, while whites are apologizing all over the place for their distant ancestors’ role in African slavery, (Clinton apologized, George W. Bush apologized, the next President will probably apologize) slavery still goes on in Africa, including Benin.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Let's Hear It For Newsweek

Global Warming Fraud mixes with chutzpah:

Introducing Newsweek's Aug. 13 cover story on global warming "denial," editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine's past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that "those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be." But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham shrugs it off.

"On global cooling," he writes, "there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases."

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were "almost unanimous" in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Moreover, it said, "the evidence in support of these predictions" — everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover to record-setting tornado outbreaks — had "begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as "alarmist" and "discredited." Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek's climate-change anxieties rest "on the safest of scientific ground."

Do they? Then why is the tone of Sharon Begley's cover story — nine pages in which anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries — so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as "deniers," or agents of the "denial machine," or deceptive practitioners of "denialism?" Wouldn't it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Dennis Prager: Putting the Party before America?

Dennis Prager observes that the Democrat Party:

....has linked all its electoral hopes on domestic pathologies, economic downturns and foreign failure. It is actually difficult to name any positive development for America that would benefit the Democratic Party's chances in a national election.
He then gives the examples of the Iraq War, race relations, marriages, and immigrant assimilation. And those examples do prove a point: that disgusting anti-American, anti-family, and "multicultural divide-and-conquer" viruses have infected the Democrat Party.

However, on one other example, Dennis is on shakier ground:

Concerning the economy, the same rule applies. The better Americans feel they are doing, the worse it is for Democrats. By almost every economic measure (the current housing crisis excepted), Americans are doing well. The unemployment rate has been at historically low levels and inflation has been held in check, something that rarely accompanies low unemployment rates. Nevertheless, Democrats regularly appeal to class resentment, knowing that sowing seeds of economic resentment increases their chances of being elected.

Well, Dennis, the disastrous economy of the late 1970's led to Carter being thrown out on his arse, and the economy of 1993-1994 was still in the doldrums, which helped fuel the Gingrich rebellion in the Congressional elections of 1994. Surely a Republican challenger will take advantage of an economic recession on his opponent's watch as well.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Now available online: "Alien Nation"

Now available online: Peter Brimelow's landmark 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Download it here.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Former Communist Agent makes revealing remark


Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former agent from the formerly Communist Romania, says "Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush." Nothing new there.
But one paragraph in his essay gave me pause:
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy.

Monday, August 06, 2007

"Californian" terrorist plot

Of course, the “Californian” turns about to be - well, read on:
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 3 — Federal authorities said Friday that a California man has been arrested on terrorism-related charges and indicted along with his Malaysian brother, a fugitive and suspected leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the group blamed for killing 202 people in the 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia.

Rahmat Abdhir, 43, a United States citizen of Malaysian descent living in San Jose, was arrested at his workplace in Sunnyvale on Thursday after officials issued a 16-count indictment charging him with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, lying to federal officials and contributing goods and services to a “global terrorist.”
Californian Arrested on Terror Charges, New York Times, (no byline), August 4, 2007.

This censoring of the race and/or national origin of crime suspects is generally justified on the grounds that race and/or national origin is irrelevant - absurdly, because no facts can ever be completely irrelevant.

But in this case the news that terrorists are not appearing among native-born California Girls (and boys) is highly relevant. So is the news that U.S. immigration and naturalization policy is apparently failing to exclude terrorists.
 That, of course, is exactly why the news is being censored.

The New York Times has a “Public Editor“. Readers should ask him why the headline was not the more truthful (and relevant) “Immigrant Arrested On Terror Charges”.

But is this just the out of touch East Coast elites of the New York Times? No, the terrorist suspect is also referred to as “San Jose Man“ by the local Jerk-The-Knee News, “South Bay Man” by San Francisco's KGO Channel 7, and even “U.S. Citizen,” by ABC News!!!

But one headline writer did refer to him him and his brother as ” Malaysian brothers.” That’s Eddie Chua’s story, "Malaysian brothers charged with having terror links." It’s in the Malaysian Star. Which is published in Malaya.

And the liberal media wonders why newspaper readership and network news viewership declines....

And that even goes if the terrorists ARE locals--of the "correct" religion AND the "correct" race. When I heard that the story of a worker at “Your Black Muslim Bakery” in Oakland, California who shot a journalist wasn’t getting as much play as you might expect, I wasn’t surprised. Even when the murder victim was a crusading African-American journalist for an African-American community newspaper.