You Mean DeLay and Abramoff Did Exactly What Nancy Pelosi Did???

One of the things that Tom DeLay was excoriated for was working with Jack Abramoff to keep the U.S. controlled Mariana Islands in the Pacific, free from the U.S. Minimum Wage and immigration laws.

Seems as though the Mariana Islands, including Saipan (pictured above) had been home to a number of Chinese run sweatshops since the very early 1980s. The Chinese loved this arrangement as it allowed them to label their goods "Made in the USA," avoiding both charges of "using slave labor" and the import duties that existed at the time.

A bad bit of business to be sure, BUT no worse than Nancy Pelosi's January attempt to do much the same for a San Francisco lobbyist (StarKist Tuna) who wanted her to exempt Guam from the U.S. Minimum Wage hike - she only caved when the story went public.

Stories like the Chinese sweatshops on the U.S. controlled Mariana Islands are important and they DO highlight a real example of American political corruption. What is hypocritical however is for some in the media to act as though this corruption is the domain of one Party more than the other - many those sweatshops arrived at the tail end of the Carter administration, and have existed there and grown ever since, under Congresses controlled by BOTH Democrats and Republicans, under BOTH Democratic Presidents and Republican ones.

To find out that within weeks of assuming the Speaker of the House position, that Nancy Pelosi would do precisely what Tom DeLay was excoriated for, responding to a lobbyist and trying to exempt an American controlled protectorate (Guam & the Mariana Islands) from the impact of the U.S. Minimu Wage laws is troubling, to say the least.

New York Allows Worst Sex Offenders to be Held Beyond Prison Terms

Newly elected Governor Eliot Spitzer worked with Lawmakers in the NY Senate and Assembly to pass a "Civil Confinement" bill that could keep New York's most dangerous sex offnders locked up after their prison terms expire, allowing them to be held in Psychiatric facilities until they are considered "no longer a danger to society."

Under the new law, mental health professionals will decide whether a given sex offender poses a real danger of commiting more sex offenses.

The Bill would creat an Office of Sex Offender Management and Spitzer claims that as many as 1,500 inmates in State prison could be subject to "Civil Confinement," but asserts that only a few hundred are likely to be institutionalized beyond their prison sentences.

Spitzer lauded the Bill saying, "We in government have a responsibility to do everything we can to protect the public. This is especially true when it comes to protecting the public from those individuals whose mental abnormalities cause them to make sexual attacks on others."

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (R-Rennselaer) says of the Bill, "We're going to try and pass it as fast as we can."

Workingclass Conservative says, "Long overdue."

Florida Moves to Ban Illegal Aliens!!!

No, not the actual illegal aliens, just the word "illegal aliens."

Makes sense, because "words kill people too."

Or is that "Words don't kill people, illegal aliens do?"

I forget, but at any rate, State Senator Frederica Wilson (pictured above) a Democrat (who'd have thunk it?) has gone on record as saying, "I personally find the word 'alien' offensive when applied to individuals, especially children. To me, an alien is someone from Outer Space."

OK, go ahead and roll that statement around your heads for awhile.

I don't know about you, but it seriously creeps me the hell out.

The fact that anyone so incredibly and irrevocably stupid could be elected to any State Senate from any State in this Union is bone-chillingly frightening to me.

My advice to Frederica Wilson is, "Don't drink another drop of anything alcoholic, nor smoke even another joint (if you do engage in such activities) because in your case, one less brain cell and you're a talking mannequin."

Compounding the already stunning level of stupidity, Ms. Wilson amplified her statement thusly, "There are children in our schools whose parents are trying to become citizens and we shouldn't label them. They are immigrants through no fault of their own, not aliens."

Hmmmmmm....OK, let me put this as simply as is humanly possible;

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There are people who are trying to become U.S. citizens through the proper channels and those people are called "immigrants."

They have Green Cards and Work Visas and things like that.

Those people AREN'T breaking any American LAWS!!!

There are also people who've come here ILLEGALLY and most of those people AREN'T really trying (at least not very hard) to become "American citizens."

Those people HAVE broken American LAWS and are thus called "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS" or "ILLEGAL ALIENS."

To date, no "aliens" have yet arrived from Outer Space, but should they arrive here in America and break our immigration laws and try to work and live here without going through the proper immigration procedures, they too will be called "ILLEGAL ALIENS," only in their case, as you (Ms. Wilson) astutely point out, it would probably be "Illegal Space Aliens."

See the distinction?

Illegal immigrants are NOT "immigrants," they're LAWBREAKERS.

Legal immigrants are NOT "illegal aliens," they ARE however, often referred to as "resident aliens," because they don't "come from here."

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Illegal Aliens (1) DON'T come from here (not a major problem) and (2) Have broken our immigration laws and thus DON'T BELONG HERE (a HUGE problem).

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I'm just trying to cure stupidity, one stupid argument at a time.

Global Reparations FROM England???....Think AGAIN!

Steven A. Grasse, the author of the book The Evil Empire: 101 Ways England Ruined the World, has created a website called britishreparations.org seeking reparations from England to the rest of the world to the tune of 31 trillion pounds (appx. $8300/person worldwide). And while I agree that nothing quite says, "Sorry for the historical butt-reaming," quite like eighty-three hundred smackers in cold, hard cash, that one silly-ass "solution" begs a single silly-ass question.

Why???

Well, at least according to Steven Grasse, it's because England has "ruined the world" by inflicting upon it a bunch of "British things" like The Industrial Revolution, and "Bad Inventions," claiming that, "If it hurts people, the British probably came up with it."

NOTE: As an impolite aside to Mr. Grasse; "Hey stupid! Have you ever heard of Nerve Agents, such as Tabun, Soman and Sarin? Yeah, they're called "G-agents" because they were all invented in GERMANY!

"How about Blister Agents? That's another class of chemical WMDs. They're called "Hun Stuff," because they too were invented in GERMANY! And "Genocide," nice try, but that was almost certainly NOT "invented" by the English. In fact, I'd look to blame that neat little "invention" ("discovery" is more likely the word your looking for) on those chimps with spears a few columns down...or at least their distant, hominid ancestors. Here's an idea, try and do a little cursory research next time.

He also calls for a Versailles Refund (oddly enough, France was behind the most brutal points of the Versailles Treaty), an Opium War Refund (oddly enough, again, it was British citizens and not the Chinese who suffered the most from the burgeoning opium trade). According to Grasse, everyone suffered because of Britain's "global misrule."

OK, Mr. Grasse is obviously an imbecile and I say that in the nicest possible way, but only an imbecile could possibly achieve the unlikely scenario of a descendant of an Irish-Catholic lineage defending...(GULP)... England. CONGRATULATIONS Mr. MORON...I mean, Mr. Grasse.

The TRUTH is that the rest of the world OWES England for a whole host of things, INCLUDING the aforementioned and excoriated Industrial Revolution!

Yes, the Industrial Revolution first took hold in England as the age of the Guilds gave way, first to proto-industry, a phenomenon that had taken hold across all of Europe and then moved onto industrialization, starting out in jolly old England. The truth of the matter is that those factories freed untold numbers of people from being tethered to the land by creating thousands of new jobs. This allowed for human advancement through more and more advanced industrialization on to the electronic and information ages that followed in the developped parts of the globe. The Industrial Revolution was a vital and necessary step toward all the advancements that followed, the inane opinions of nimrods like Mr. Grasse, notwithstanding.

England has given the world as close to a unifying language as is possible, as now more than 60% of the earth's people are at least somewhat conversant in English.

England along with its English-speaking Allies (Canada, Australia and the United States) saved the world from Axis Power tyranny in WW I and Nazi tyranny in WW II.

It was also the Irish monks, of "the British Isles" that "saved civilization" during the Dark Ages, by hiding and protecting and copying thousands of volumes of the world's recorded knowledge up to that point.

England was also the very first nation on earth to eradicate chattel slavery, outlawing it in England in 1807. Something the majority of the rest of the world has yet to accomplish, as chattel slavery still exists throughout the entire Islamic world, most of sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia.

But perhaps the greatest gift that England bestowed upon the rest of the world is FREEDOM!

The concept that bubbled bottom-up in Great Britain. From the Magna Carta (1215) that took power from the Monarchy, requiring the King to renounce certain powers, respect certain legal procedures and accept that the will of the Monarch could be bound by the law and it guaranteed the right of all English subjects free, or unfree, to Habeas Corpus.

John Locke's ideas and those of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776, set the stage for America's Founders who sought to rein in government excess and advance individual liberty even further. In fact, all of America's Founders were themselves of English descent, from Jefferson to Madison, to Franklin to Adams to Paine, all of them were of English descent!

No, if anything the world owes a great debt to England, for it's England that has forged the modern world, with all its conveniences, prosperity and greater individual liberty than any generation has ever enjoyed at any time in man's annals here on earth.

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Please send me your address Mr. Grasse, and I'll send you a pen...in hope of the unlikely event that you ever learn how to write.

A Universal Slavery?

Thats what Boston Abolitionist, American patriot and freedom-lover Lysander Spooner (1808 – 1887, pictured left) believed the American Civil War brought to America.

With one of my all time favorite quotes, Spooner put the Civil War and its aftermath into a proper and clear perspective; “On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was willing to do so, if the slaveholders could thereby be induced to stay in the Union.

“The principle on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: that men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

“No principle that is possible to be named can be more self-evidently false than this, no more self-evidently fatal to liberty. Yet it triumphed on the battlefield and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, then the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been really increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference in principle – only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor.” (Lysander Spooner 1886)

The fact that the importation of slaves into America was outlawed in 1809, is a noble one that far too many Americans seem unaware of. Another little known fact is the legacy of black Confederates, despite the fact that there are now many books chronicling that fact.

In fact, “It has been estimated that over 65,000 Southern blacks were in the Confederate ranks. Over 13,000 of these “saw the elephant,” also known as meeting the enemy in combat. These black Confederates included both slave and free. The Confederate Congress did not approve blacks to be officially enlisted as soldiers (except as musicians), until late in the war.

“But in the ranks it was a different story. Many Confederate officers did not obey the mandates of politicians, they frequently enlisted blacks with a simple criteria, “Will you fight?”

“Historian Ervin Jordan explains that “bi-racial units” were frequently organized “by local Confederate and state militia Commanders in response to immediate threats in the form of union raids.” Dr. Leonard Hayes, an African-America professor at Southern University stated, “When you've eliminated the black Confederate soldier, you've eliminated the history of the South.”

As the war came to an end, the Confederacy took progressive measures to build back up its army. The creation of the Confederacy States Colored Troops, copied after the northern colored troops came too late to be successful. Had the Confederacy been successful it would have created the world's largest armies (at that time) consisting of black soldiers even larger than that of the North. This would have given the future of the Confederacy a vastly different appearance than what modern day racist or anti-Confederate Liberals conjecture.

“Not only did Jefferson Davis envision black Confederate veterans receiving bounty lands for their service, there would have been no future for slavery after the goal of 300,000 armed black CSA veterans came home after the war.”

http://www.37thtexas.org/html/BlkHist.html

The Civil War was not about slavery, in fact, to his shame, Abraham Lincoln made very clear that he would've accepted an accommodation with slavery had the South acquiesced on the primary issue o preserving the Union.

But the South felt its agrarian economy was being stifled by northeast banking interests and after James Buchana botched things, the die was cast and the Civil War was all but inevitable.

The South fought for the original Constitution (localized governance and State's Rights) and against a growing federal monolith. Even the Confederate General James Longstreet is reported to have said, “We should've freed the slaves and then fired on Fort Sumpter.”

And I say that knowing that many of my ancestors, on my father's side, came “off the boats” in Boston and New York and went right to war.

It was a necessary war and one that had to be fought. Lincoln was right that a divided nation would not last very long, but one of the casualties of that war was the original Constitution.

Wa-Wa-Wa-WHAT!? The troop surge is working!??

How can this be???

At least according to the AP (and we're skeptical), it seems that there's been about a 65% reduction in sectarian killings in Baghdad in just the first two weeks since the troop surge has gone into effect in Baghdad!

While Baghdad saw this past January's total hit 954 such killings, after December's 1,222, there have been a total of 164 killings discovered since February 14th - that would translate to 328 over a month (about a 65% reduction from January's figure, a 72% drop from December's...the AP called it a "small success," while acknowledging that 390 bodies were found over the same two week period last year.

Crickey! An Aussie faces U.S. terror charges!!!

And he's not even one of those Australian's by way of Riyadh....he's a real bloomin' Australian.

His name is David Hicks (OK, it was Mohammad Dawood, but now it's David Hicks again, since he's purportedly given up Islam...at least for Lent) and he's a kangaroo skinner by trade. There's actually a huge need for kangaroo skinners in Afghanistan, especially in June, right after the annual "running of the roos," in Kabul.

Anyway, Hicks has been charged with "providing material support for terrorism," which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. He is the first Gitmo detainee to be charged under the new law for military commissions (detainees will be charged and tried in secret by military tribunals).

The U.S. military also wanted Hicks tried on attempted murder charges for battling coalition forces with the Taliban, a charge that carried a maximum sentence of death, but Susan Crawford, the head of the military commissions dropped both the attempted murder and siding with the enemy charges and charged Hicks only with providing material support for terrorism.

This past Fall, Congress passed a law thatoutlined the rules under which such detainees can be tried. it's designed to both protect classified information. The military tribunal provides detainees fewer rights than either civilian or open military courts do, but proponents argue that non-citizens aren't guaranteed every Constitutional right.

Once such formal charges are filed, a preliminary hearing will be scheduled within thirty days.

Australia's John Howard has asked that charges not be filed against Hicks by the U.S. so that he can be tried and punished in Australia.

NAMBLA's mouthpiece (the ACLU) among other organizations have vowed to challenge the new law in court.