27.3.08
26.3.08
19.3.08
Comment by Guido Continelli
I find it most amazing that in America it is considered perfectly normal to lynch a presidential candidate for words he has not uttered or believed, but those of a friend or someone to whom he is close enough to consider family. Since when was the qualification to be president dependent on what a priest or pastor says. Should Rome fall or every catholic politician disqualified because there is irrefutable evidence that some catholic priests have a proclivity for altar boys? Should we disqualify everyone who attended a church or had a rabbi, minister, pastor, priest, etc. with issues? The media is sometimes very juvenile and irresponsible in the way it trivializes the political process. There are some decision-makers in the media who are not serving America's long term interests. They behave with the intellectual maturity below that of a high school drop-out. In the last election they were accomplices in the destruction of Howard Dean's candidacy by replaying over and over again a sound re-engineered scream - reducing the presidential candidate to a single scream in the minds of people... and you are surprised by the quality of people you end up with in office. In the Clinton years the media was obsessed with little blue dresses and other distractions you ended up being blind-sided by a mini-recession and 911. These days it is the ranting of a priest while the financial system is facing a much more serious collapse. I can assure you that the people who are running the sovereign funds that are buying up America at fire-sale prices or those who are attracting American factories and jobs to their shores or dreaming up strategies of how to best America in future are not wasting their time in their countries over such tertiary trivia. California is proposing cutting education budgets and laying-off teachers while these countries are graduating ten times the engineers and scientists America is producing. HB1 visa anyone? Furthermore, the thousands facing foreclosure and lay-offs, or the millions having to contend with higher gas and food prices, ordinary men and women, do not give an ant's fart about what some pastor in Chicago thinks. They want to hear what these candidates are going to do about the serious problems confronting the country. If Obama is smart, which I am convinced he is, he will move on and not let himself be sucker-punched and hoodwinked into this non-productive exercise that ultimately leads nowhere. He has said enough on the matter and should steadfastly refuse to waste resources on that divisive agenda. He should devote the rest of the time and lots of resources to assiduously sticking to his positive message. Nothing frustrates and drives negative people to madness more than sustained positive energy and spirit. He should fight his way out of this trap and counter this strategy of distraction by ferociously sticking to his agenda - uniting this country to deal with the difficult challenges it faces. If the press bringsn up Jeremiah Wright, he should ask people how that will stop foreclosures, how it will reduce the price of gas, how it will increase consumer and market confidence, keep jobs in the country, enable parents and students to pay school fees, or end the war in Iraq... and then he should change the subject to one of those things that are relevant to American lives and running the administration in 2009. We have had enough of this nonsense and fools' game.
I find it most amazing that in America it is considered perfectly normal to lynch a presidential candidate for words he has not uttered or believed, but those of a friend or someone to whom he is close enough to consider family. Since when was the qualification to be president dependent on what a priest or pastor says. Should Rome fall or every catholic politician disqualified because there is irrefutable evidence that some catholic priests have a proclivity for altar boys? Should we disqualify everyone who attended a church or had a rabbi, minister, pastor, priest, etc. with issues? The media is sometimes very juvenile and irresponsible in the way it trivializes the political process. There are some decision-makers in the media who are not serving America's long term interests. They behave with the intellectual maturity below that of a high school drop-out. In the last election they were accomplices in the destruction of Howard Dean's candidacy by replaying over and over again a sound re-engineered scream - reducing the presidential candidate to a single scream in the minds of people... and you are surprised by the quality of people you end up with in office. In the Clinton years the media was obsessed with little blue dresses and other distractions you ended up being blind-sided by a mini-recession and 911. These days it is the ranting of a priest while the financial system is facing a much more serious collapse. I can assure you that the people who are running the sovereign funds that are buying up America at fire-sale prices or those who are attracting American factories and jobs to their shores or dreaming up strategies of how to best America in future are not wasting their time in their countries over such tertiary trivia. California is proposing cutting education budgets and laying-off teachers while these countries are graduating ten times the engineers and scientists America is producing. HB1 visa anyone? Furthermore, the thousands facing foreclosure and lay-offs, or the millions having to contend with higher gas and food prices, ordinary men and women, do not give an ant's fart about what some pastor in Chicago thinks. They want to hear what these candidates are going to do about the serious problems confronting the country. If Obama is smart, which I am convinced he is, he will move on and not let himself be sucker-punched and hoodwinked into this non-productive exercise that ultimately leads nowhere. He has said enough on the matter and should steadfastly refuse to waste resources on that divisive agenda. He should devote the rest of the time and lots of resources to assiduously sticking to his positive message. Nothing frustrates and drives negative people to madness more than sustained positive energy and spirit. He should fight his way out of this trap and counter this strategy of distraction by ferociously sticking to his agenda - uniting this country to deal with the difficult challenges it faces. If the press bringsn up Jeremiah Wright, he should ask people how that will stop foreclosures, how it will reduce the price of gas, how it will increase consumer and market confidence, keep jobs in the country, enable parents and students to pay school fees, or end the war in Iraq... and then he should change the subject to one of those things that are relevant to American lives and running the administration in 2009. We have had enough of this nonsense and fools' game.
17.3.08
NYTimes' bloggers on immigration
The Times seems to think that the road to dystopia is a rash of new Senate bills trying to solve the problem of what to do with illegal immigrants in this country. These bills won't do anything; the whole thing is too messy, too intrusive, too expensive to execute; it will hurt the feelings of illegals and immigrant communities, thinks the Times.
The real dystopia is already upon us: to wit, the inability of the country to come together as a whole to solve a common pressing problem. We're already too diverse, too divided to achieve an effective solution. And it will only get worse in the future.
The increasingly nasty Democratic primary food fight over race and gender is a grim indicator of this future. The gloves are off, the fiction that we are all the same and equal and identical is gone. Dystopia, Babel, here we come.
Blah Blah Blah! I tell you, you New Yorkers, ESPECIALLY the NYT editorial staff are completely UNQUALIFIED to comment on many things (Yes, I'm challenging your integrity as well as your intellectual honesty and experience) and Illegal immigration rises to the top of the list for me. I know New York City is a city of immigrants, but how many Canadians snuck over your border last night?
I will tell you that I have never met a more hard working and honest people than the Hispanics, predominately illegals, who populate a slew of menial jobs here in Louisiana. Despite their character and hard work, they need to be sent home, now. The reasons, seen from the perspective here "on the ground" where undocumented Hispanic populations have exploded in the last three years, are manifest.
Compassion is a sorry justification for tolerating the presence of these folks. Churches are compassionate, people are compassionate, governments are NOT, and if they ever decide to become truly compassionate, our economy will grind to a halt. We cannot afford the social and economic burden created by a whole class of people who come to work in "below the radar" industries (like construction) and bypass paying taxes yet still manage to get what they need to work (drivers licenses, food stamps, free healthcare, free education, subsidies).
A good local example is Jefferson Parish (county next to New Orleans) which has 460,000 people in it and the highest per capita income of any county in Louisiana and is going broke because 12% of the students in their classrooms require special training because they don't speak English (Brookings Institute Katrina Index). Drawn by the construction dollars being poured into the area after Katrina, illegals have flooded both major hospitals in the parish, which now face 20%+ rates of uncompensated care as they are set upon by waves of undocumented workers without health insurance. Neighborhood covenants are being stressed and shattered as three or four families of illegals pool their resources to purchase (or rent) a single house. Their culture and lifestyles then exhbited publicly drive down house prices. This is not complex, this is not xenophobia, these are simple economic equations.
Eventually, despite my tithing at church, local government is going to look to me to fund a new tithe, to support waves of illegals who operate completely under the radar, who take but do not give to local government. This system is not sustainable. It's certainly not worth what we are saving in cheaper labor.
So don't you dare lecture to me, editorial board of the NYT about what constitutes sensible immigration policy, or what should be done with illegal aliens. You're simply not qualified until you are rolled by the wave yourselves. Then we'll talk.
mrb
— Mike Bertaut, Baton Rouge
The real dystopia is already upon us: to wit, the inability of the country to come together as a whole to solve a common pressing problem. We're already too diverse, too divided to achieve an effective solution. And it will only get worse in the future.
The increasingly nasty Democratic primary food fight over race and gender is a grim indicator of this future. The gloves are off, the fiction that we are all the same and equal and identical is gone. Dystopia, Babel, here we come.
Blah Blah Blah! I tell you, you New Yorkers, ESPECIALLY the NYT editorial staff are completely UNQUALIFIED to comment on many things (Yes, I'm challenging your integrity as well as your intellectual honesty and experience) and Illegal immigration rises to the top of the list for me. I know New York City is a city of immigrants, but how many Canadians snuck over your border last night?
I will tell you that I have never met a more hard working and honest people than the Hispanics, predominately illegals, who populate a slew of menial jobs here in Louisiana. Despite their character and hard work, they need to be sent home, now. The reasons, seen from the perspective here "on the ground" where undocumented Hispanic populations have exploded in the last three years, are manifest.
Compassion is a sorry justification for tolerating the presence of these folks. Churches are compassionate, people are compassionate, governments are NOT, and if they ever decide to become truly compassionate, our economy will grind to a halt. We cannot afford the social and economic burden created by a whole class of people who come to work in "below the radar" industries (like construction) and bypass paying taxes yet still manage to get what they need to work (drivers licenses, food stamps, free healthcare, free education, subsidies).
A good local example is Jefferson Parish (county next to New Orleans) which has 460,000 people in it and the highest per capita income of any county in Louisiana and is going broke because 12% of the students in their classrooms require special training because they don't speak English (Brookings Institute Katrina Index). Drawn by the construction dollars being poured into the area after Katrina, illegals have flooded both major hospitals in the parish, which now face 20%+ rates of uncompensated care as they are set upon by waves of undocumented workers without health insurance. Neighborhood covenants are being stressed and shattered as three or four families of illegals pool their resources to purchase (or rent) a single house. Their culture and lifestyles then exhbited publicly drive down house prices. This is not complex, this is not xenophobia, these are simple economic equations.
Eventually, despite my tithing at church, local government is going to look to me to fund a new tithe, to support waves of illegals who operate completely under the radar, who take but do not give to local government. This system is not sustainable. It's certainly not worth what we are saving in cheaper labor.
So don't you dare lecture to me, editorial board of the NYT about what constitutes sensible immigration policy, or what should be done with illegal aliens. You're simply not qualified until you are rolled by the wave yourselves. Then we'll talk.
mrb
— Mike Bertaut, Baton Rouge
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