Roundup

Item The First:


New York City is distributing a letter emphatically stating that no one will check their immigration status when they seek medical services at city hospitals. Hospital workers will be fired for revealing information about the immigration status of a patient.

Adam Gurvitch, director of health advocacy for the New York Immigrant Coalition said, "It's really important for people to understand that nothing has changed. Health care remains a right for all people in America, for all immigrants, regardless of immigration status."

Excuse me? Could some one please tell me when there was a Constitutional Amendment granting the right to health care?

I'm pretty sure the letter distributed by the city must have had the words Gratis Medico
stamped in large letters at the top. It is rumored that in the interest of fairness to the law abiding citizens of New York City, a letter will be distributed notifying residents of a special tax being enacted to combat the rising costs faced by city hospitals.

Item The Second:

A judge in Nebraska is facing a petition drive to recall her from the bench for sentencing a sex offender to probation rather than prison time because the pervert is too short. William H. Thompson was convicted on two felony child sexual assault charges for sexual contact with a girl who was only 14 years old. The article doesn't say how old Thompson is.

The transcripts show that the judge said: "So I'm sitting here thinking this guy has earned his way to prison but then I look at you and I look at your physical size. I look at your basic ability to cope with people and, quite frankly, I shake to think what might happen to you in prison because I don't think you'll do well in prison."

I guess the judge didn't really consider how well the little girl was able to defend herself against a sexual predator. She needs to get voted off the island bench.

Item The Third:

Coulter nails it again.

Item The Fourth:

A convicted killer in Massachusetts (sorry kids, it's not Kennedy) is asking for the tax payers to fund his sex change. The murdering bastard wants to become a woman. The court has previously ruled that the state must pay for his hormone therapy and laser hair removal. His lawyer is arguing that failure to provide this 'treatment' for 'gender identity disorder' amounts to 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

A psychiatrist testified that Kosilek is likely to commit suicide if he doesn't get the operation. As far as I'm concerned that's one of the best arguments for denying him the treatment.

People That Should Be Shot

Here is a group of people that are announcing to the world that they are sick freaks

Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals.

This is one of those situations where every member of this political party should be immediately ostracized at the very least. I think it would be best for everyone if they were simply rounded up and shot.

Not only am I wondering why anyone thinks that it's ok to have sex with children, I'm also wondering why anyone is shameless enough to actually form a political party in order to further their sickness.

Here in America we have NAMBLA which is essentially trying to accomplish the same thing. Fortunately, they don't have much support here either.

Flashback Friday

One year ago today I posted this:

Well, I finally stopped drinking. After almost 25 years straight...

....oh, you thought I meant booze. Sorry, I meant Mountain Dew.

After almost 25 years straight of drinking Mountain Dew, I gave it up almost 2 weeks ago. I've quit before. I have forced myself to stay off of it for up to a month.

This time is different. I'm not forcing myself. Nearly two weeks ago, I cracked open a 2 liter bottle of anti-freeze, drank less than 1/4 of the bottle and felt a little sick to my stomach.

...read the rest

So now it's been over on year since I hit the bottle. I've pretty much maintained my weight around 205 for the last year. That's down from 235-240 18 months ago.

Now, if I can just go out and start getting a little moderate exercise, I could lose about 15 more pounds and be at what I (not some silly government health office) consider my ideal weight of 190. I can't imagine how I'd look now if I ever got back down to 175 again. I'd look downright sickly.

And You Will Get Nothing

WorldNet Daily reports:

The U.S. Senate today rejected an effort to limit Social Security benefits for illegal aliens who become permanent residents under an immigration reform bill being debated.

Yes kids, this means that people that were formerly in this country illegally can collect Social Security on wages that they earned when they shouldn't even have been here.

I'm not even going to say anything else......

What Part Of ...

... Sovereign Nation does Vicente Fox not understand?

Associated Press reports that Mexico would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if border troops become directly involved in detaining illegal aliens.

Excuse me El Presidente but the United States of America is sovereign nation and we have the right to protect our borders:

• Mexican citizens do not have any right to freely pass from your country in to ours.
• Mexican citizens do not have the right to free health care and education in the Unites states.
• Mexican citizens should feel obligated to protest against the corruption and graft that keeps their own country poor.
• Mexican citizens should understand that they are required to follow the laws of the land they are living in. It is illegal to be in the United States without authorization if you are not a citizen. Obey the law.

Julieta Nunez Gonzolez, the Ciudad Juarez representative of Mexico's National Immigration Institute (a government office) said that sending the National Guard to the border, "will not stop the flow of migrants, to the contrary, it will probably go up."

Even she understands that Mexicans are going to flood in to this country in response to any potential amnesty plan on the table. Like a baby to her mother's breast, they seem to understand better than most Americans that our government is totally spineless when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Gandalf The Blasphemer

Actor Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in Lord of The Rings and also has a role in The Da Vinci Code is has said:

"Well, I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction. I mean, walking on water, it takes an act of faith."

Newsbusters is reporting this story and they have provided links to the statements made by McKellen. Windows Media Player or Real Player.

I know we can't expect much from these Hollywood types but that was just a dumb thing to say.

VoIP Wars

VoIP = Voice Over Internet Protocol.

When you use a VoIP device, your voice is broken up in to lots of little data packets, routed through the Internet and reassembled on the other end.

I'm sure you've all seen the commericals and banner ads for Vonage which is the major player in the VoIP market. Vonage has a calling plan that allows for unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada for $25.00/month. They just announced last week that you can now call Italy, France, Spain, UK, and Ireland for free if you have the Unlimited calling plan.

Just days after Vonage announced thier plan, another VoIP player, Skype threw their hat in the ring and they are offering free calling from Skype to regular numberse in the U.S. and Canada for free for the rest of year. Previously, only calls to other Skype users were free and you had to pay for calls to numbers out of the Skype network.

Skype has pretty good quality but Vonage is better. Vonage uses an actual phone hooked to a VoIP ready device. In my experience with Vonage the quality was almost always just as good as a traditional land line.

Skype uses your PC to make the call so all you need is a mic and speakers. It's easy to use a Skype account from anywhere. There is an option to do that with Vonage, but it costs extra.

I'm not making a recommendation for either service really, I just want to demonstrate the unfettered competition in an almost entirely unregulated segment of communications. It will be interesting to see how the traditional telecoms deal with this "problem" from these young upstarts. My guess is that they will choose not to compete but they will attempt to use the government to drive these services out of business through excessive regulation. The major telecom companies don't want to compete, they're too big and bloated and they know they can't compete in an open market.

But They Mean Well

By now you've all heard that the NSA (National Security Agency) has been collecting a database of all phone calls in and out of the United States. They're not recording the calls, just the connections; who has called who. Why is that a problem?

Well, as I detailed in the post Asking For A Bullet, part of the problem is that what is legal today, may not be legal tomorrow. What is supposedly being done for our security today could be used to take away that security tomorrow. What is seen as patriotic today might be seen as subversive tomorrow.

Now it turns out there are fears that Washington has been sifting through the phone records of reporters trying to discover where the leaks are coming from. According to a report on the ABC News website, a senior federal law enforcement official has told them the government is tracking all of their phone numbers in an effort to root out confidential sources.

As much as I despise the legacy media, they should not be subject to open-ended fishing expeditions by the government any more than you or I should.

For those of you who still blindly trust Bush, and think that gathering these phone records doesn't pose any real threat to your liberty, imagine the uses these records can be put under the hand of Hillary. Remember the Whitehouse Travel Office? Remember the missing records that suddenly turned up in the Whitehouse? Can she be trusted?

Oh, but you're just a peon and no one cares about your phone calls. You really have no idea who are you very closely connected to without even knowing it. Someone that is innocent today might be guilty tomorrow and you could be caught in the net. By law, you're innocent until proven guilty but I think we all know what a sham that is.

You might not care about this now but it will come back to haunt you later. If nothing else, this will set a precedent for other forms spying, snooping and ultimately reductions in your liberty.

Must Be The Power Lines

The Guardian reports:

An unusual cluster of HIV cases has been discovered in the small Cornish resort of St Ives, health chiefs revealed yesterday.

The local primary health care trust took the rare step of calling a press conference to announce the disturbing finding and warn other residents in the close-knit community that they may be infected.

Health officials set up a hotline to field calls from worried residents of the harbour town, renowned throughout the world for its artists' colony and as the home of the Tate's Cornish outpost. Today and next week clinics will be run in St Ives and in Truro so that people can be tested.

...read the rest

Artist colony, HIV outbreak, what conclusions shall we come to? Well, if you read the article, you'll notice that they made special mention of the fact that a heterosexual man is believed to be at the center of the scare. The article also mentions another scare in the UK in which a heterosexual man was linked to half of the cases. The word homosexual doesn't appear in the article.

I have no doubt that they would not have gone public with this if it was found to be contained entirely within the homosexual population there. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it just wouldn't be newsworthy. The second reason is that they would fear backlash from the homosexual lobby; boycotts etc.

Textbook Indoctrination

California legislators would make even the best Cold War era progagandist proud. The California Senate Judiciary Committee has already approved SB1437 which mandates that California schools buy books that portray "the sexual diversity of our society" was also approved by the Senate Education Committee.

The bill would, among other things, remove those ugly and biased terms such as "mom" and "dad" from the text books in favor of sexually unbiased terms for the custodians of our young Comrades. The bill would also require that students be taught history related to "the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America."

You realize of course that the homosexuals portrayed in this history will almost certainly be leftists. For the purposes of equality, everyone mentioned in the history books should either be labeled as hetero or homosexual. Wouldn't that be fair? Wouldn't equality demand that we also teach the history of straight people?

What can you do? Well, I found out. Call the office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and use the automated system to register your protest. I don't care where in the country (or world) you live, please do this. It's possible they filter out the votes from people calling from non-California area codes but try it anyway. It's also likely that they filter out multiple votes from the same number so try to make it a point to call from as many phone numbers as possible. I have already called from 3 numbers.

Call - 916-445-2841
Press 2 to voice your opinion on legislation
Press 1 for Senate Bill SB1437
Press 2 to oppose the legislation

You can also use this form to send an email. Make sure you reference SB1437 and that you are opposed to it.

That's all you have to do. Make sure you listen to the prompts though in case they change things.

I have rarely ever asked you folks to repost anything on your blogs but feel free to simply copy and paste this post in to your own blog with or without proper attribution. California, because we are such a large purchaser of textbooks affect the books that are purchased by other states. Don't think that just because you're not in California that you won't be affected by this if it passes. Do this even if you don't have kids, it could affect us for generations.

Technorati Tags: SB1437, California, Education.

Worth The Wage

Reuters reports on a recent study which declared that a woman that stays at home full time with her children would earn $134,121/year if paid for all of her work.

The pay was based on the typical jobs a mother does such as housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.

First of all, I want to put to rest the myth that parenting is a job. It's not. It can be hard work, but it's still not a job in any traditional sense. So now hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of mothers are going to read the article I linked to or hear about it on Oprah or something like that and get snippy with their husbands because they're not getting what they're worth.

If parenting were really worth as much as the survey says it is, day care workers would be getting paid a lot more money than they currently are since they are pretty much raising our children for us anyway. With our children institutionalized they way they are, the best we can do is hope to counteract the damage done to them by the 'professionals'.

The bottom line is that we shouldn't attempt to put a dollar figure on parenting. The smiles, the hugs, the joy of watching them learn and grow are more than payment enough simply for having them around. I was with Little Dif in the bookstore a few weeks ago and I heard her tell another child, "...I learned that from my dad." Who needs a paycheck for that?

Bird Flu And The Border

Even a major outbreak of the bird flu in the United States would not prompt our beloved government to shut down the border between the US and Mexico.

According to a draft of a Federal response plan obtained by Associated Press, the border between the United States and Mexico will not be closed in the event of an outbreak of the bird flu or an super strain of influenza.

Go read the whole article for yourself.

I suspect that if there was a bird flu epidemic, Mexico would send its troops to the United States border and prevent anyone from coming in to Mexico. If the problem originated in Mexico that might not be the case since they would be suffering through their own problem, but you can bet if it came from Asia and spread through the US that Vicente Fox would order his northern border shut down immediately.

I wonder if the Minutemen would gather up volunteer forces to patrol the border if we had an epidemic? I'm not going to have the time to do it tomorrow, but if anyone does have the time, please give their office a call and see if it's been considered. A link to their website can be found in the previous post. If you can get a full quote from them, I'll post it here on my blog and you'll get full credit (if you want it).

Technorati Tag: Immigration

Third Party Contender

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minute Man Project, which has been patrolling the Southern border of the United States and reporting illegal border crossings to the Border Patrol is considering a run for President in 2008.

I certainly don't think he can win that seat but I think the immigration issue is a big enough hook that he could possibly rival the numbers of H. Ross Perot back in 1992 where he received 19% of the popular vote.

Like Perot, Gilchrist will be called all sorts of names by those still swallowing the Republican Kool-Aid. He'll be accused of watering down the Republican vote and getting Hillary Clinton elected. He'll be no friend of Hillary though since she's moving to the right in the immigration debate also. Gilchrist could steal her thunder. Since the press will be falling all over themselves to support Hillary, they won't be promoting Gilchrist despite his possible 'spoiler' factor for the GOP.

Gilchrist will have a hard time forcing his way in to the Presidential debates though because the Commission On Presidential Debates, in 2000 required that in order to participate in the debates, a candidate had to have 15% support level in nationwide polls. Perot qualified with only 7-9%. Certainly both major party candidates will be very afraid to debate Gilchrist on immigration because most Americans will agree with him.

Although I typically vote Libertarian, if Gilchrist runs, I will not only vote for him, I will also help out with campaign work. He's based here in Orange County and this would likely be the center of his campaign.