Carnival of the Curmudgeons - Mark Thirteen

Thirteen, supposed to be an unlucky number. Maybe that's why I'm a couple of days late posting it.

Pour youself another mug of what you need to read serious stuff, and come on back.

This is about immigration, again. Topic de jour.

Might as well get the pet peeves out of the way first. Why is Ted (the Swimmer) Kennedy getting all these props for being such a statesman? He was in the lead of things to keep the poison pill in the immigration bill.

Long story, but 10 days ago, the GOP tripped on their dick, and proposed an amendment making remaining in the country after illegal entry a second felony. They talked among themselves, and decided that the bill to be debated could do without this provision, which would seem harsh, so they decided to let the (D)onks excise it when the amendments got voted on.

Surprise! The (D)onks left it in, in fact refused, en bloc, to have the GOP remove it. Sort of a "gotcha", but the GOP did propose it, so they were stuck with it. This caused a split in the GOP ranks, with the RINOs considering the bill now too harsh, and the conservatives not having enough votes to do anything, so the (D)onks had a field day with a fillibuster for a couple of days.

Did I mention that I hate the very idea of fillibustering? Later on that.

The end result was that the bill, purposely harshed up by the (D)onks, failed. The MSM spins the whole message by saying that the Swimmer tried oh-so-hard to bring a good bill through, but couldn't because the bill just had too many flaws.

Fuck him. It was probably his idea to hoist the GOP on their own petard. That is a good political maneuver, but it certainly doesn't alter the fact that the (D)onks killed the bill.

Let's get serious about Immigration. Getting serious doesn't involve any kind of new law, it only involves enforcing the laws already on the books. That might require some healthy doses of enforcement money, but no new regulations or Federal Laws. Well, maybe one: any state or local jurisdiction that does not wholeheartedly assist the Feds when they begin their roundup of illegals (it's coming, folks) gets their Federal pork-money cut off immediately. All of it. Forever. Those that do assist will be paid generously for their assistance. OK, one more law: give all local and state law enforcement limited Federal Commissions to arrest under the immigration laws and place Federal holds on the arrestees.

As a retired LEO, I don't think we need huge new numbers of Federal ICE agents and Border Patrol. We have plenty of LEOs on duty now. If they added enforcement of Immigration laws to their duties, it probably wouldn't overstress many departments, and help could be given to the ones that WERE overstressed. What might get overstressed is holding facilities, so a VERY FAST system of deporting illegals will have to be developed, one that acts in days, not months as is the case now.

What is the downside? The Pew Hispanic Center, which has a dog in the fight and might have inflated these stats, says that 4.9% of the workforce is illegals. Let's take them at their word for now. OK, we are going to lose one out of twenty workers in this country. Does anyone think for a moment that our economy is going to collapse because of one in twenty workers leaving the workforce? The performance of certain businesses that use a large percentage of illegals will be impacted, but some lettuce rotting in the fields isn't going to crash the Market, it will just raise lettuce prices. If you can't grow your own lettuce, you're a dummy. Buy a 20# bag of potting soil, lay it on it's flat side in the sun, cut two rows of "X" slits in the top side of it, each 6" from the next, and push in seeds from your favorite kind of lettuce. Water moderately. In about 4 weeks you will have plenty of lettuce. Repeat as long as the growing season holds out.

No, the economy isn't going to collapse. In fact, your State welfare agencies wil suddenly find themselves not having spend all their budgeted funds, and will have a surplus. Many folks who would normally have to work for minimum wage, or not at all, now will have a chance to work for more than the minimum wage, sometimes quite a bit more.

There might be some inflation from rising wages, but there will also be a boosting of the economy from the spending of all those wages HERE IN THIS COUNTRY. Of course, you knew that most of the illegals send most of their money back home, didn't you? The largest single source of positive foreign exchange in Mexico is the dollars that the illegals here send back there.

Now imagine that two hundred billion a year, multiplied by a factor of rising wages, being spent here at home instead of going south. Imagine the lower welfare budgets, and increased tax receipts, which in turn might result in lower taxes, which results in more consumer spending, etc.

I find it hard to see a downside to deporting 12-20 million illegals. It doesn't have to be done at once, we just need to get a start on it. Getting local law enforcement involved, and ending the opposition of the La Raza pimps will open the door. Indicting a few business owners for employing illegals will keep the process going.

Mexico will be unhappy, but they will deal with it, and with us, when those dollars are at stake.

The monkey-wrench in these gears is the ACLU specifically and the American attitude about identification papers in general.

How do you tell a legal Hispanic worker from an illegal one? Right now, you can't. You can't because we have no form of proper identity cards, either for the workers or for anyone else.

If real US citizens and bona-fide LEGAL aliens don't have proper identification, how are we to tell ourselves from non-citizens and illegal aliens?

We brought this entire mess of 12-20 million illegals on oursleves, by our pig-headed attitude on properly-recorded identity. I'm going to hear from some conservative brother curmudgeons on this one, because many equate lack of identity documents to freedom, but they are wrong. It's not the existance of an identity card that subtracts from your freedom, it's what the government does or forces you to do to either obtain it or maintain it that subtracts from your freedom.

It's just like guns. They have a great potential to be used for either evil or good, but intrinsically, they are neither good nor evil. They are just a machine. An identity card has a great potential to save us from evil (identity theft comes to mind), but it could also be used for great evil (requiring them for everything and jailing upon lack of papers). It's just a paper. Actually it will be a high-tech device with a biometrics chip in it, so it's also a machine. There will be a need to closely monitor the government's issue and use of the identity card, but I'm here to tell you that without standardized proof of national status, we will not solve this issue, ever. We just won't be able to tell who's legal and who's not.

Enough on that.

Time for the Peeve of The Week (POTW).

The candidates are: my gimpy feet. Arthur-Write-us has been visiting me too regularily, both in the osteo form and the gouty form, and I'm getting more and more limited as to what I can do. Severe pain in the patoot. Speaking of pains in the patoot, my patoot came back in fine shape, according to the rubber-hose doctor. No cancer.

Candidate Two: Political Correctness: PeeCee is ALWAYS a candidate, but this permanent peeve actually had to swim in a shark-pool of it's own making this week. The PeeCee Police Chief of Portland, Derrick Foxworth, a man of color, ran into a little trouble. His troubles were BADLY compounded yesterday by the black community from whence he came. On the 5 o'clock news, there were a bunch of black residents of NorthEast gathered, and they had invited the press. They were there to lend support to the embattled Chief. They hung themselves out to dry. This gal speaks, in a very level, non-Eubonic voice, and calmly explains that the black community doesn't hold the dalliance of the Chief with a white female employee against him, because in their eyes, THAT'S NOT A SIN! I'm going to be presumptious here and refer to that concept as the Pimp/Ho relationship. Actually, I'm not all that presumptious. As a prison bus driver/guard for 7 years, I heard countless hours of that talk from the bus riders.

Candidate Three is the auto industry. If you've been following my comment threads in Random Nuclear Strikes and Dad's Garage, you will know that I'm NOT a fan of the high-tech, gizmo dependent engines the industry powers consumer vehicles with these days. I maintain that a low tech vehicle could be built that will have the emissions signature required, and would not be dependent on computer chips and twenty different sensors to balance the output of. Actually, the industry could resolve this matter with present technology. Put a reliable thumper V-8, updated only with non-variable fuel injection instead of a carburettor, into a half-ton pickup. Make the pickup light and rigid with carbon-fiber composite technology. Take the outrageous emissions from the thumper engine and run them through SEVERAL sets of catalytic converters, MADE TO BE CONSUMER-REPLACEABLE. Make it run on E85 alcohol fuel. The result is a vehicle with a low-revving engine, not particularily good with fuel, but on alcohol, who cares? The low-speed engine means that the vehicle will go where you want it to and you can control your traction without resort to anything more than a GEARED 4WD unit (as opposed to the electronic traction control units on high-end 4WD vehicles of today). In other words, a 1965 Chevvy, with it's act cleaned up a bit with just a bit of technology.

And the Peeve of the Week is....My @#$%^(*&^%$ feet! It's hell to have a young mind and an old body.

Curmudgeon Ranting: yes, there has been some, although this has been a quiet week amongst the ranters for the most part.

PawPaw has been working extra hours on a manhunt for an escaped murderer in his neck of the woods. The whole area is a little uptight, and this is what it looks like.

The new curmudgeon this week is NHS Blog Doctor, a curmudgeonly general practitioner in England whose blog rails at the ineffectiveness and general inadequacies of the National Health Service, Great Britain's version of socialized medicine that Hellary Clinton wants to bring Over Here. He gets medical-technical in most of his posts, but he also gets quite political. He doesn't support socialized medicine. 'Nuff said.

Retired Geezer at Blog Idaho links to the moonbat decision of Yale to allow a high-ranking member of the former Taliban ruling party of Afganistan (which the Tenth Mountain Division, together with a few B-52s, dispatched fairly easily) to matriculate at Yale. I think Ivy League schools may have invented Moonbattism.

GuyK at Charming, Just Charming has a proposal for elections: add a voting quorum. If not enough voters turned out, the election would be invalid. Actually, Guy, this was seriously proposed in Oregon a few years back, for Initiatives. There would be Yes, No, and None of the Above. If None of the Above won, the initiative would be withdrawn, and couldn't be refiled for two years. That would cure the problem with Initiatives. We see the same crap year after year, as there is no limit on how many times a thing may be voted on. For example, there have been three votes on Death With Dignity, the physician-assisted euthanasia law that conservatives love to hate (but would always reconsider if THEY were dying a painful, slow death). All of them were resounding wins for the law, but that didn't stop first the Catholic Church and then the US Attorney General from trying to end the law.

Curmudgeon Kim DuToit, owner of The Other Side of Kim blog, offers us this excellent post on what should be in your gun collection if you have one or contemplate one. Very comprehensive, as is everything Kim does.

The final curmudgeon ranter is a Dead President, Ronald Reagan, thanx to Mr. Completely.

Now we get to the Post Funny. This is double-cute, because it is both a Chamber of Commerce joke (you could tell it at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast) and a YouPee joke (about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I once lived):

Subject: Holy bear

A priest, a Pentecostal preacher and a Rabbi all served as
chaplains to the students of Northern Michigan University in
Marquette.

They would get together two or three times a week for coffee and
to talk shop. One day, someone made the comment that preaching to
people isn't really all that hard. A real challenge would be to preach
to a bear.

One thing led to another and they decided to do an experiment.
They would all go out into the woods, find a bear, preach to it, and
attempt to convert it.

Seven days later, they're all together to discuss their
experiences. Father Flannery, who has his arm in a sling, is on
crutches, and has various bandages, goes first.


"Well," he says, "I went into the woods to find me a bear. And
when I found him I began to read to him from the Catechism. Well,
that bear wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around.
So I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him and, Holy Mary
Mother of God, he became as gentle a lamb. The bishop is coming out
next week to give him first communion and confirmation."


Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, with an
arm and both legs in casts, and an IV drip. In his best fire and
brimstone oratory he claimed, "WELL brothers, you KNOW that we don't
sprinkle! I went out and I FOUND me a bear. And then I began to read
to my bear from God's HOLY WORD! But that bear wanted nothing to do
with me. So I took HOLD of him and we began to wrestle. We wrestled
down one hill, UP another and DOWN another until we came to a creek.
So I quick DUNKED him and BAPTIZED his hairy soul. And just like you
said, he became as gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the week in
Fellowship, feasting on God's Holy Word, and praising Jesus."


They both looked down at the rabbi, who was lying in a hospital
bed. He was in a body cast and traction with IV's and monitors
running in and out of him. He was in bad shape. The rabbi looks up and
says, "Looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way
to start..."

That's all folks...