2525 Tom Tancredo condemns the Senate bill

The House Immigration Reform Caucus Chair, Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) said this about last Thursday's fiasco in the Senate:

"The battle is joined," said Tancredo. "Today, the U.S. Senate passed the largest illegal alien amnesty in American history. It is bad for our national security, it is bad for American workers, and it sends a very bad message to those waiting legally for their chance at the American dream. The only good news is that Congressmen are going home next week where they are guaranteed to get hell from their constituents for this amnesty."

"A majority of House Republicans are holding firm as the last line of defense against the Senate’s amnesty plan," continued Tancredo. "The President is well known for arm-twisting, but immigration is in the front of Americans' minds, and I doubt Members will easily flip on this issue. Speaker Hastert has reaffirmed his 'majority of the majority' rule, which makes sure that my party’s leadership doesn’t collude with the Democrats to pass an amnesty bill." Key features from his press release.

Senators DeWine and Voinovich of Ohio, both Republicans, definitely sided with businesses interests rather than the people they represent. If it looks like Republicans are in disarray, indistinguishable from their Democratic colleagues, who are beholden to unions which take illegals into membership, seeing is believing in this case. Follow the money.

In my opinion, to attempt any sort of "comprehensive" bill before securing the border will endanger the lives of millions of Mexican illegals and decimate their villages as they rush north to take advantage of amnesty and all the social benefits their relatives will receive. Amnesty did not stop illegal immigration in 1986 with IRCA, in fact, it increased because our borders are porous. All the same points were made in the 1970s during the Carter years, the 80s during the Reagan years, and the 90s during the Clinton years. Remember? They thought NAFTA would keep more Mexicans working at home.

We didn't secure the borders in Iraq, so we'd better do it at home.

2524 Blogger burping

Blogger seems to be rebelling about uploading my photos for my Thursday Thirteen (in draft). I'm guessing bunches of you are posting your holiday picnic and memorial observance photos. My TT this week will be on automobiles, so I really had to do a hunt through the photo albums. But my, what fun. Hope I can get the photos to work--it will be much more interesting. It also occurred to me that I almost never took photos of cars, and if I did, they didn't get into the family albums.

As I was explaining to my husband what I was doing he began to tell me about our Packard. We never had one. However, my sister Carol and I shared a Packard (about 1950 model I think) for driving back and forth to college--she was at Goshen and I was at Manchester (both in Indiana about 50 miles apart). Talk about a tank! It was even the color of one. We could get 4 other co-eds in it with all their luggage. The trip was 250 miles on 2-lane roads, and I think Dad figured it was cheaper to buy us a car to drive back and forth than to take time off work to drive us to college.

2523 The trophy wife

At dinner last night I was browsing through the latest GSLIS Annual Report (University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science)--the campus wide bioinformatics master's program, the certificate of advanced study in language and speech processing, advanced study certificate in digital libraries, and its LEEP (online education) program. I said to my husband, "If I were 20 years younger, I might just try one of these." Without missing a beat he said, "If you were 20 years younger, I'd have a trophy wife."

Monday Memories Honoring our Veterans

For all who have served, thank you for our freedoms. May we honor you by not abandoning them.
Dad and his brother in 1944

"From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli
We fight our country's battles
In the air on land and sea.
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to bear the title
Of United States Marines."
The Marine Hymn

"After the Marines participated in the capture and occupation of Mexico City and the Castle of Chapultepec, otherwise known as the "Halls of Montezuma," the words on the Colors were changed to read: "From the Shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma." Following the close of the Mexican War came the first verse of the Marines' Hymn, written, according to tradition, by a Marine on duty in Mexico. For the sake of euphony, the unknown author transposed the phrases in the motto on the Colors so that the first two lines of the Hymn would read: "From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Tripoli." "

Victory in Tripoli, our first war with Islamic terrorists in the 18th century.

Who would have thought when Dad and Uncle Russell had this candid shot fighting in the Pacific, that members of our Senate 62 years later would be trying to gut our history, honor and country?

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2521 The ultimatum

After seeing this fashion trend several times this week at Lakeside, I told my husband that if he starts wearing suspenders with plaid shirts, I'm outta here.

men's fashions

2520 Charlie Gibson's Amazing Escape

Can you imagine how happy Charlie must be to escape all those ladies on Good Morning America? I'm a woman and I'm often embarrassed by the chatter and talking over each other they do on that show attempting to be bright and cheerful. It seemed to me they often passed to him some stories that were definitely less than a guy-thing.

I don't know when he starts his evening duties anchoring the news, but I just watched for what seems the umpteenth time an overview--just in time for Memorial Day--of the latest Iraq scandal. If ever the mainstream media deserved the moniker "lamestream," it has been this story. Our troops perform with honor and courage 99.99% of the time, and this is what gets airplay on one of our most solemn holidays to honor our war dead. It is being investigated, as it should be--our system works. I hope it will turn out to be as phony as the Jesse MacBeth story.

Charlie, I'm going to give you a break here and assume someone else wrote the words and you were told to read them. Good luck in the new assignment.

Charles Gibson
ABC News

2519 Is the Kerry story going to be flipped again?

Let it go. Viet Nam would never have been an issue in the last presidential campaign if Kerry hadn't trotted out his make-over. (His behavior after his service, yes--that would have been an issue.) Now Captain reports that Kerry might be trying to bring the Swift Boat Vets up again. Story here. Captain says he hasn't posted on this topic in 18 months, but has a list of unanswered questions ready.

John Kerry, who by the way, served in Viet Nam.

2518 Who would lie about Spudnuts

My entries on how to fix a broken zipper (can't be done) and memories of Spudnuts in Urbana, IL (University of Illinois) in the 1950s and 60s get a lot of hits. This week I heard from Mark, who left this comment:

"My grandfather, Herman Trapp and my dad, Fred Steffens; owned and ran the Spudnut stores in Urbana, IL until my grandfather’s stroke in the middle ‘60s. I love spudnuts and Krispy Kremes don’t come close. I remember as a kid, crawling on bags of potato flour and helping Grandpa stock the stores on the weekends. Glad to see you have fond memories of the Spudnut and the Spudnut coffee house.

Mark Steffens
CPS - Sales and Technical Service"

Now, I haven't checked out the veracity of this memory, but I want to believe it, so I asked for his permission to post it. Roadfood.com has a forum about Spudnuts, the various shops, and people like me still yearning for them.

Here's a recipe for spudnuts, using mashed potatoes, not potato flour, but this lady says they taste really good.

Spudnuts
potato flour

2517 Saling at the Lake

Yard Saling, that is.

The right image is important--I wore two shades of denim and sensible librarian shoes

Lots of variety in this one--chairs, toys, mattresses, floral wreaths, picture frames, pots and pans

Lakesiders use the honor system--just drop the money in the jar and make your own change. This jar was full and I didn't see anyone around to take it in the house.

Every house on this corner had a sale. I think some people are just trading.

Yard sales
Lakeside, Ohio

2516 Bloggers, too

Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote "People such as [Howard] Stern and [George] Carlin have built careers out of making obscenity funny, that is, if you're emotionally trapped in a 7-year-old boy's psyche." . . .[who] find great hilarity in body functions and are prone to uncontrollable giggles upon hearing vocabulary that refers to human anatomy."

I've noticed that about female bloggers--only they seem to be trapped in a tipsy ditsy babe-at-the-bar persona. Twice this month on Thursday Thirteen I've come across women who tried to use the F-word the maximum number of times in 13 sentences. If there is anything uglier in our language than the Stern and Carlin dog and pony excrement show, it's ladies' night out at the potty mouth party. It's their blog and they can write what they want, but they shouldn't get indignant and hostile when I comment on their juvenile behavior. If they aren't craving attention, turn off the comment feature.

Thursday Thirteen

2515 When Maria was Bridget

If your ancestors were Irish and immigrated to the USA, Canada or Australia in the 19th century, you may think that because millions of immigrants were absorbed before (about 15% of the US population was foreign born in the early 20th century), why should it be any different now with illegal workers from Mexico who will get amnesty (displacing those who have been waiting on the legal quotas) and bring into legal residency their entire families, including parents and adult children? The rest of the story

illegal immigration

2514 Spam blocks

Many blogs now support spam blockers, and some require registering name, e-mail and URL in order to comment. Many comments are not visible at that site until the blogger approves them. Some comments can go through automatically because they were checked earlier and accepted.

These are the borders of the blog world, put up to keep other writers out who are interested in selling a product, advocating a life style, or just being nasty. If there were no money in it, there would be very little spam. The blog citizen wants to have borders and decide who is allowed in. So why do we care? Wouldn't 1000 messages in our comments window, all the same, be good for stats? What if the spammer wants to sell hot lesbian sex or cheap Viagra or a new cookbook. Why shouldn't he use my bandwidth? Why should I be allowed to deny them access to my blog or make it more difficult? What if the spammer isn't leaving a thousand messages for me to delete--just 150? Wouldn't that be OK? I mean after all, arent't these just guys trying to make a living, and once they scam a few thousand folks, they'll turn to honest work?

That is the attitude and point of view that some of my readers have about the illegal immigrants and the USA border--and my comments were way down this week mainly because people just moved on not wanting to "get involved." But here's a few--imagine you're reading about spammers intruding on your space and bandwidth instead of people sneaking into your country, your town, your workplace, and your identity.

People deserve to live. It is easy for those of us who have much to look down our noses at those who have little.

I can't say I agree with your take on the issue, but I admire you greatly for researching and voicing your concerns.

For instance, with a virtually open border, 100,000,000 Mexican didn't come over the last 20 years. Only 12 million did.

Hot topic that I'll not debate but I don't think anyone can deny the fact that those numbers are mind-boggling.

I'm in Canada so I'm not going to voice my thoughts on these issues.

Claudia, a Hispanic-American leaves a plea

at About.com's Immigration Issues.

2512 Our neighbor to the South and the Narcos

LinknZona looks at the information in the CIA Handbook (something all libraries have for many countries) and comments on how the facts are either laundered to not look so bad, or just can't be determined--like Mexico's population.

"Mexico has 48 consulates in the US while we have only 9 in Mexico. This is a gross imbalance and as has been shown elsewhere (e.g. michellemalkin.com) the Mexican consulates are deeply involved in influencing, or even running, American illegal immigration policy."

Kennedy and McCain had help with the S.2611 "reform" bill from the pro-immigration forces. But it would seem there are strong interests here at home in not closing the border, and it isn't for humanitarian reasons.

"These major drug syndicates, also called drug cartels, are run by people called Narcos, although Narcos can also refer to lower level gangsters and smugglers. If you travel professionally in Mexico and have professional friends from Mexico (as I have and do), you will hear that virtually all the politicians in Mexico are controlled by the Narcos. This includes the current and several former presidents of Mexico. Presidente Fox has much more than a phony concern for the poor people in Mexico behind his demands for an open border. By telling the poor and oppressed of Mexico to migrate north, Mexico relieves its social pressure for reform, gains as much as $50 billion sent back from illegal immigrants in America, and serves its Narco masters. Presidential elections in Mexico have been fixed (see here for example) and it looks as if Fox is headed down this path. Reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to the Mexican economy, the crooked politicians, and to their Narco allies."

2511 They are missing a prefix

I e-mailed DeWine and Voinovich today telling them what a disaster they are for the party and the nation, and would you believe the e-mail forms won't work without a prefix--like Mr. Miss or Mrs. Well, fellas, when are you going to add Senora and Senorita because that's where you've taking us.

Business interests, Democrats and Unions

They got what they wanted out of the Senate--S.2611 passed. The Democrats and Republicans who actually need to be responsive to the voters, weren't for it. They'll need to be reelected. It is a really ugly, ugly coalition. In 1986 it was the agricultural interests--now it's the Chamber of Commerce and other business interests. Republicans who are not up for reelection must have their sticky fingers in investments that will benefit. They don't need to worry about their Social Security, which theft of will be forgiven under this plan, because they are exempt and get to have a private plan. The Democrats need a permanent underclass in this country or they can't get elected. They need new ways and new folks to make tax transfers to. The unions have been losing numbers and strength for years and need a transfusion. And the Republicans have sold their soul for a mess of pottage.

There's even some in this mix, and I hope they are few, who don't want to interrupt the flow of drugs into this country, but I don't know what to call them--old fashioned criminals?

2509 Laid back at the Lake

The painting above the fireplace is us at the beach our first summer at Lakeside (the beach being East Harbor State Park since Lakeside just has rocks). My husband is stretched out over two chairs watching a very fuzzy, snowy Canadian TV show on our non-cable TV. This is window washing time--an exhausting, grubby job. We have division of labor--he does the tough stuff, I do the easy jobs.

2508 The game we won't play this week-end

We opened our new game, Lighthouse-opoly tonight. Bill and Joyce are coming for the week-end--thought we'd give it a try. But oops. There are supposed to be 6 tokens, a lantern, captain's wheel, ship, keeper's cap, bell and buoy. All we got was a buoy. So I logged into the site to fill out a customer report and noticed that one of the categories was "missing pieces." Makes me wonder if they have this problem often. I suppose we could create little tokens from twisty ties and q-tips, but somehow, that just doesn't sound like as much fun as a captain's cap or a bell.

All sorts of changes in the neighborhood (at the lake). Took some photos today. My azalea, which is planted in the wrong spot because I have such a brown thumb, is blooming like crazy.

Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen reasons I have called my SenatorsSenate bill 2611 (Hagel/Martinez bill) will be called Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act if it passes. (Or Mexamerica.) We're not talking just about workers. There are 13 groups to think about. CIRA will have both amnesty (for current illegals) and a guest worker plan (legals). And a plan for all their extended families. These are the cumulative figures for the next 20 years. While our Senators dither and blather about agreeing on a "comprehensive plan" millions are scrambling this moment to get across the border so they can claim amnesty under this plan.

1. Amnesty for current illegals--10,000,000

2-3. Spouses and children of Amnesty recipients--6,000,000

4. Guest workers--20,280,000

5-6. Spouses and dependent children of guest workers--24,330,000

7-8. Siblings and adult children of newly legal immigrants listed above--5,080,000

9-10. Employment based visas with spouses and children--13,580,000

11-12. Parents of the newly naturalized citizens listed above--4,970,000 (his and hers)

13. The usual immigrants still allowed under our current laws--19,000,000

Like the enabling parent who never cuts the apron strings for its helpless adult child, the USA contributes to Mexico's poverty by employing 15% of its labor force who can then send money back home to keep the inept government afloat.

You may check out these figures at www.heritage.org/research/immigration/wm1076.cfm

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2506 Taylor Hicks

I've seen American Idol maybe once in five years. Reminds me of the Arthur Godfrey show--which I never watched either since my parents didn't have a TV. But this guy, who RR put on its front page this morning, certainly has the look, although I'd have guessed him to be CW. Maybe someday I'll hear something he sings.

"CBS owner William S. Paley detested Godfrey but bowed to his incredible popularity. CBS president Frank Stanton loved Godfrey because his shows were so cheap to produce but drew consistently high ratings. In 1955 when Disneyland cost $90,000 per hour, and costs for a half hour of The Jack Benny Show totalled more than $40,000, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts cost but $30,000. This figure was more in line with the production of a cheap quiz program than fashioning a pricey Hollywood-based show on film." MBC Archives

Cheap to produce and high ratings. Nothing's changed much in 50 years.

Taylor Hicks
American Idol
Arthur Godfrey