This Is One Pandora’s Box Chicago Didn’t Want to Open

P-D:

Bill to re-allocate Illinois lottery proceeds to poor areas fails

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – A group of Chicago lawmakers just now presented a bill in the Illinois House that would redistribute the state’s lottery revenue based on which areas buy the most lottery tickets – meaning, poor urban areas, especially in Chicago. (The bill is HB618.)

If there’s anything more divisive in Illinois than party politics, it’s regional politics. It was little surprise, then, that rural and suburban lawmakers in both parties slapped this down, hard, on a 37-77 vote.

(One counter-argument heard on the floor: How about re-allocating all the state’s income tax revenue as well, to go to the areas that paid it? That was the line that pretty much killed it.)

President John F. Kennedy once said that a requirement for a President was that s/he is able to hold two contradictory views at the same time and not go crazy for it.  That’s how I could describe my opinion about lotteries, or rather the opinions I absorbed from two people that know each other.  One the one hand, lottos are a tax on the mathematically impaired.  On the other hand, they are the only real chance that the average person has to get rich.

That said, why are we to assume that poor blacks are the only kind of people that buy lottery tickets, such that lotto revenue should be their personal slush fund?  There are lots of white people that play the lotto, too.

Global Metrics

Schalfly:

Will the Real Secretary Geithner Please Stand Up?

Does Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner favor replacing the U.S. dollar with a global currency, or doesn’t he? Or, as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) pointedly asked on Sean Hannity’s program, “Which Tim Geithner do we believe?”

It hit me like a ton of bricks last night, trying to figure out why the American establishment wants a global currency.  It would eliminate the need for currency conversions and exchange rates between existing national currencies, thereby making it easier in a bureaucratic sense and in the realm of the language of business to outsource jobs to Bangalore or China.  Similarly, American big business is all for America switching to the metric system, because it would make global business easier for them.

Hot White House Mess

Ilana Mercer, in WND:

Gangsta gifts

“Hip” is how rapt reporters referred to the iPod the president and first lady gave the queen of England. Thanks to his fawning friends in the British and American media, Barack Obama got away with giving another foreign dignitary a vulgar gift.

Shades of the reality show “Cribs” …

The MTV series features hip-hop rappers, and other American royalty, showing off their incredibly gaudy homes, CD, DVD and iPod collections. (If there are any books in the house, these are well-hidden.) They then send the loving camera crew packing.

The Obama iPod was no ordinary “small portable digital audio player capable of storing thousands of tracks in a variety of formats, including MP3.” As any teenager would for his crush, the tacky pair had personalized the thing. How do you customize an iPod for an 82-year-old monarch?

I’m surprised that President Obama wasn’t inspired by “Pimp My Ride” to give QE2 some of those gawdy retro-spinning chrome wheels for the Queenymobile.

When Did the United States Annex Yemen, Tunisia and Afghanistan?

AFP:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A federal judge has ruled that some inmates at a US military base in Afghanistan can challenge their detention in US courts, a legal right granted to Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Although the Supreme Court has ruled that detainees at the US naval base in Cuba have the constitutional right to challenge their detention, the government had argued that inmates held at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan did not.

But Judge [*****] ruled Thursday the Bagram detainees were “virtually identical” to those Guantanamo inmates being held indefinitely without due process.

“Bagram detainees who are not Afghan citizens, who were not captured in Afghanistan, and who have been held for an unreasonable amount of time” may invoke the right to habeas corpus, [*****] wrote.

(snip)

The case involved four detainees at Bagram — two Yemenis, a Tunisian and an Afghan — who were apprehended elsewhere and held there for at least six years.

This is one area where I disagree with the Ron Paul – Lew Rockwell – Paleo-Libertarian mindset on the right wing.  Is the United States supposed to annex the rest of the world such that foreign terrorists are on the same legal footing as a purse snatcher in Des Moines?  To think that we do cedes the argument to globalists and racial egalitarians.

This is why I opposed the “war on terror” to the extent of foreign occupation, because I know of the quisling civil rights mentality that acts like a retrovirus on the American ability to wage war, just as the same one precludes our resolve to stop domestic violent crime.  The same American liberal/egalitarian mentality that means that we pander to black thugs in Chicago also means we pander to Iraqi terrorists in Baghdad.  It was inevitable that liberal-paleolibertarian whining would seditiously destroy the morale of the American Armed Forces, not to mention the Pentagon’s attempt to prosecute American soldiers that do their jobs a little to well in Iraq, based on that same “civil rights” mentality that is used to prosecute white American inner city cops that also do their jobs a little too well when the subject of interest is a protected minority.  What’s bad for the goose is also bad for the gander.

It’s Nad Cutting Time

Look out Jack, Comprehensive Immigration Reform is back.

Now it’s ‘nad cutting time for Senate Democrats like Claire McCaskill that voted against it in 2007.  Did they vote against it because they were really opposed to it, or did they vote against it merely because a “Republican” President in the person of George W. Bush propose it, and they presume that, just as members of the party of the President lose elections in a bad economy even if their party isn’t in control of of the House or Senate at the time of the sinking economy, and even if they disagreed with the President’s economic policies, they were punished for merely having the same party label as that of the unpopular incumbent President, President Bush and all Republicans would have benefited from Hispanic approval of a successful attempt at soft amnesty for illegal aliens, though it would have happened mostly because of House and Senate Democrats, and in spite of Republicans in the same bodies?

We’ll have our answer pretty soon.

Suppertime

In Detroit?  I’m sure there are plenty.

P-D:  Unrest in species-rich Madagascar worries local scientists

But only one of its species is responsible for the unrest.

WaPo:  Senate Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity

RIP, Cybersecurity.  1964-2009.

KVFS-12:  Dump truck overturns on Highway 13

A truck driver has been turned into a triskadekaphobiac.

P-D:  Immigration laws threaten to break up same-sex family

These women from the Phillippines have one last trump card — claim that some white man called them “f*gg*t fl*ps,” and no immigration judge would dare deport them.

AP:  US atty. plans ‘significant’ Chicago court filing

Take out the weasel words, and they’ve got nothing.

McClatchy:  Tax problems won’t derail Sebelius nomination, senators say

Surely it won’t, the Senate has approved every tax cheating man that Obama has proposed, they won’t want to be mysogynists.

PC World:  Microsoft Office Coming to the iPhone?

Lotsaluck doing that 200 page sales report on Word, that ten-sheet Excel spreadsheet, or that 40-slide PowerPoint presentation, with your thumbs on a plastic screen.

AFP:  Coke ads ‘totally unacceptable’ in Australia

Judging from what is acceptable in Australia, what must have been in this ad?  Full frontal nudity with sadomasochistic sex?

Reuters:  NBA reality show another step for growth in China

Donald Trump says “You’re Fired” with that hand gesture.  Gordon Ramsay asks for your apron.  On Survivor, you get sent off the island.  How will an NBA reality show narrow down its contestants, by telling them to hit the showers?

AP:  Man cries after attempt to rob liquor store fails

Big tough brave man is tough with a gun, but is a wussy pussy without.

AP:  McDonald’s fumes over strip club’s nude nipples

Especially since women with those hard bodies didn’t get them by eating McDonalds.

AP:  Cat on NY TV news truck’s roof becomes the story

The cat went from stray to LOLcat in two seconds.

D.C. to Empty Its Prisons, Thereby Doubling Its Civilian Population

Washington Times:

D.C.’s money-saving plan: Free inmates

Up to 80 percent could qualify to leave prison early

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty wants to help balance the District’s recession-squeezed budget by allowing as many as 80 percent of the city’s inmates to qualify for early release, borrowing a tactic that has stirred controversy elsewhere in the nation.

The city hopes to save $4.4 million in fiscal 2010 under the plan, which would reduce the prison population by 2 percent from its current daily average of 3,000 inmates.

Remember, D.C. is heavily black, and most of its few whites are liberal.  Therefore, D.C. isn’t some rural area with hanging judges that send you to prison just for possessing a little bit of weed.  The only way you go to prison in D.C. if you are black is to do something gravely serious like murder.  Thanks to black/liberal prosecutors, judges and juries, black criminal suspects have the wind to their backs.  Therefore, those that will be released for the city’s budget problems will almost to a man cause nothing but trouble.

An Educated Guesser

This may backfire on Democrats really hard.

AP:

Obama to nominate sampling expert to head census

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has chosen Robert M. Groves to be the next census director, turning to a professor who has clashed with Republicans over the use of statistical sampling to lead the high-stakes head count.

The White House will announce the selection of Groves on Thursday, a Commerce Department official told The Associated Press. The official demanded anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak before the announcement.

(snip)

When he was the bureau’s associate director, Groves recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to make up for an undercount of roughly 5 million people, many of them minorities in dense urban areas who tend to vote for Democrats.

In other words, he wanted to use proven methods to arrive at a more accurate estimate of the true number of blacks and Hispanics in urban areas.  They are notoriously hard to count using traditional methods, because of their transiency, and other reasons.

If Democrats are thinking this will lead to more Democrat gerrymandered districts, they might have another thing coming.  It will also lead to a more truthful report on the percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the country, it’s higher than the official stats present, and whites as a percentage of the whole country are lower than the official stats suggest.  It might get white people pissed off enough to realize that they’re about to be dispossessed, and they might do something about it like joining the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Here We Go Again — Another “America’s Losing Its Competitive Advantage” Sob Story

This time, with space exploration.

Really, it doesn’t bother me in the least.  The more countries that become space powers, the more countries there are that can share the expenses when it comes to space projects.

However, red flags always go up in my mind when some group of suits starts gabbering on about “America losing its competitive advantage.”  Usually, those are code words for their wanting more cheap labor in the form of H-1B visa allotments.  Nothing to that effect was said in this article, but I bet that immigration concerns are on their boilerplate.

Let’s Throw Tea Against the Wall and See If Any Sticks

Malkin has a Google Map transposed with the locations of the Tea Parties that have happened so far.

One thing that kinda jumps out at me is that, in comparison to the population as a whole, there are a disproportionately high number of these tea parties in Florida, the Carolinas, the Gulf Coast, much of Louisiana and the eastern half of Texas.  Of course there have been a lot in the northeast, there are a lot of people in the northeast corridor to begin with.  And the blue dots are almost indicative of American population density in general.  It’s just that the areas I mentioned seem to have more tea parties relative to their numbers than everywhere else.

This observation of mine is crucial to what I’m about to say.

I have mixed feelings about the tea party movement.

On the one hand, I don’t want to dump all over anything that what appears to be a mass conservative resistance to the Obama agenda.  It gives our people hope to see news reports on TV and blog posts showing masses of people showing up to resist the Obama attempt to bankrupt the country.

On the other hand, I get the feeling that they’re all whistling in the wind, that it won’t do any good in the long run because of fundamental flaws of modern day lamestream conservatism.

Let me give you an example.  The leader of the St. Louis tea party movement is someone named Bill Hennessy.  As I did until the beginning of this year, he lives in south St. Louis City, and maintains a blog called Hennessy’s View.  If you are familiar with the blog you’re reading right now, then you know that this very URL was that of the official weblog of the St. Louis Chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens until June 2007, at which time I split up personal interests (remaining on this URL) with official organization issues (moving to a new URL).  I did both blogs until this past November, when, in advance of my moving, I had to hand off the St. Louis CofCC Blog to a new blogmeister at a new URL.

In late July of 2007, I found out that a blog called Hennessy’s View added the St. Louis CofCC Blog (the official one, by then, not this URL you’re on right now) to his blogroll.  The next day, I reciprocated, adding him to the blogrolls of both the St. Louis CofCC Blog and this one, blockquoting his complimentary comments.  I later found out that Bill Hennessy was its blogmeister.  I read almost every one of his posts from that time going forward for a couple of months.  Though I don’t know why, there was exceedingly little redeeming about any of his posts.

As time went on, I just glossed over his posts looking for a nugget of useful information, usually to no avail.  I kept doing so because he was so nice to the St. Louis CofCC, and I figured I owed him that much.

Then all of a sudden, several months after he linked to the St. Louis CofCC, he makes a new post delinking to us, and apologizing to the twits that find his crap profound for having linked to us, using Deesesque language about how “horrible white racism” was.  To tell you the truth, once he did it, I was not surprised, and deep down in my gut it was something I knew was coming.  But it took him actually breaking from us publicly for me to realize what my gut did.  I immediately took him off both my blogrolls, and declared that he should go fornicate with himself.

Out of sight, out of mind, until earlier this year, when I read on the P-D’s and Channel 5′s websites from here in my new Carbondale abode that that bastard sonofabitch cretin organized the St. Louis Tea Party.

Here you go.  Bill Hennessy organizes a couple thousand people on the Arch Grounds to complain about an excessively bloated Federal government (not that I don’t agree), but he won’t tell you why and for whose benefit the Federal government is becoming excessively bloated.  No way, that would be “horrible white racism.”  No wonder the media kinda fawn about these tea parties, because they’re trying to lead conservatives into the arms of Hennessy-like pied pipers that they know won’t solve the problem.  The St. Louis CofCC held numerous protests and events in the 2002-2007 time period, no fawning media coverage here.  Reason?  The CofCC actually wants to solve the whole problem, and knows that you can’t solve a problem unless you first identify a problem, and you can’t identify a problem if you’re prevented from doing so by the dictates of political correctness, even if that political correctness calls itself “conservative.”

James Edwards expressed my feelings in this stead better than I could:

Some four or five thousand people rallied in downtown Cincinnati against big spending this weekend. And just about every person who showed up was white. Of course, they just don’t get it, as there was apparently no mention of race or what massive immigration is doing to this country. Rest assured the media would be shouting it from the housetops if the white folks at the Cincinnati tea party had shown any sign that they’re waking up, and starting to realize just what’s going on. It would be all over the national news. But no one at the rally breathed a word about race. And until they’re willing to discuss the elephant in the room openly, and quit pretending it’s not there, they’re never going to make much progress in cleaning up all the manure in the room. They wave signs saying “Honk if you’re paying my mortgage” but it has apparently never registered with them that tens of millions of non-whites are perfectly happy with the government using other people’s taxes to pay their mortgage.

And I could add to that that if Bill Hennessy is any example, the tea partiers (or at least their laughable “leadership”) actively supports or at least does not resist importing tens of millions more non-whites who “are perfectly happy” to have Uncle Sap pay their everything.  Why should we believe that, with that mentality, they’ll actually succeed in reversing government welfare for existing minorities?  Wouldn’t that be “horrible white racism?”

If that’s the way the St. Louis tea party movement is, I suspect that’s the way it is for most of the rest of the country.  But I can’t say that for sure, because the tea party movement is only a movement, not a cohesive formal organization with any modicum of central control.  It is merely a collection of somewhat like-minded individuals who want to engage in public exhibition and protest in reaction to President Obama’s liberalism.

If you click on to my earlier post where I add Hennessy’s blog to my personal blogroll, and follow that link to Hennessy’s blog post where he announces it, you will get the 404.  I suppose he’s trying to eliminate any evidence that he ever did link to the St. Louis CofCC juxtaposed with laudatory prose.

One more thing — I’m getting the feeling from Michelle Malkin’s map that the reason there are blue dots where there are and the reason why there are not blue dots where there are not is not just because of population density, but it’s really because of white reaction to pro-minority actions on the part of the Obama administration.  That is why the Deep South is proportionately blue-dotted on this map, because of Patterson’s First Axiom.  Where there are a lot of whites and a lot of minorities, you see blue dots.  Places that are almost entirely white?  No blue dots.  James Edwards notes (and plain ole common sense can tell you) that these tea parties are almost all white.

A Time To Screw

InfoWorld:  Red Hat ponders going proprietary

I figured it was an April Fools gag when I read the line about “the stability and security of proprietary systems.”

KTVI-2:  Brazilian prison inmates receive cell phones by carrier pigeons

Why not just use them to send the messages?

KTVI-2:  Education secretary: Mayors should take over more big-city school systems

Any city whose school system needs to be taken over probably doesn’t have a mayor worth writing home about, either.

P-D:  Gravedigger who fell into pit is rescued

Every occupation has its hazards.

CNS:  ‘Junk Mail’ Seen As Contributing to ‘Climate Change’

I’m worrying about global warming all of a sudden.

P-D:  Some Democrats, including Obama, embrace education reforms pushed by Republicans

What does this say for today’s Republican Party that their ideas can be adopted so easily by the most liberal President in American history.

KFVS-12:  Raid turns up drugs, weapons

Get back to me when a raid turns up a house so badly decorated that it’s stuck in 1969.

KFVS-12:  High demand for ammo, guns

Whodathunk that Barack Obama would be the country’s best salesman for guns and ammo?

AP:  Obama arrives at Buckingham Palace to meet queen

QE2 stares back at Obama and asks, “You’re kidding, America.  Right?”

AP:  Obama accepts invitations to visit China, Russia

Great, two more big countries that are about to become enemies.

Reuters:  U.S. reconciliation offer “lunatic”: Taliban spokesman

Coming from a group that knows a lot about lunacy.

Business Weak:  H-1B Visa Season Is Here

To every thing there is a season, including the American middle class getting fucked up the ass.

AFP:  Lenin gets it in the end

Speaking of…

InfoWorld:  Microsoft asks feds for a bailout

Pardon me, but bailouts are supposed to be for companies that lose money, not for those that have made more revenue and net profit year after year in my conscious memory.

AP:  NBC a lot different from days when `ER’ started

Back then, people actually watched NBC.

E!:  Chart Shocker! Miley’s Hannah Montana Soundtrack Not No. 1

Another female singer with the initials M.C. wore out the American music consumers’ appetites for hearing and then buying the same song over and over again for more than a decade.  Fool me Mariah, shame on you.  Fool me Miley, shame on me.

Civil Rights in the News

(1)  Several women Democrats in the Missouri House are accusing the Republican leadership (all men) of running a chauvinistic show.  They might be advised to rule out partisan explanations first.

(2)  If you are a potential employer, the only element of a prospective employee’s history with the criminal justice system that you are allowed to ask about and investigate and consider in your hiring decisions is the person’s felony convictions.  Misdemeanor convictions, and unrequited charges of either a felony or misdemeanor variety are off limits, as well as arrests for any felony or misdemeanor.  It’s already a violation of Federal civil rights law to look beyond and ponder anything other than a felony sheet, and Illinois wanted to add it to their civil rights rostrum as well, but that effort failed in the Senate.

I think the main reason it failed in a majority liberal Democrat body is that it is superfluous.

(3)  SCOTUS says that states must provide public defenders to condemned murderers who are guility of state murder charges who want to appeal their execution sentence through the Federal judiciary.  I don’t know how I feel about this decision, but I can tell you that, with very tight state budgets almost all around, it’s going to be yet another disincentive to hand out the death penalty to those convicted of Murder 1st.

Taking My Business Erstwhile

SIL:

Herrin men sentenced in tax, immigration case

BENTON – Two Herrin men in the restaurant business who pleaded guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens were sentenced Tuesday in federal court at Benton.

Duo Chen and Justin Qiu, both 37, had pleaded guilty on Oct. 28.

(snip)

Chen owned and operated Kew Garden, Inc., which did business as the Kew Gardens Chinese restaurant in Herrin.

Chen also shared in the ownership of Southern Grill, Inc., with his brother-in-law, Justin Qiu. Southern Grill, Inc., operated Wok N’ Roll, a buffet-style restaurant in Marion.

I’ve eaten at both places.  Imagine, yours truly, your ever-loving smart ass snarky blogmeister, who rails against illegal immigration almost on a daily basis in this space, has inadvertently contributed to the cause of illegal immigration.

Not anymore.

A Series of Unfortunate Names

I dealt with this story about NBC’s illustrious past compared to its dim present in today’s Fun With Headlines, but I noticed the name of one of NBC’s entertainment division co-chairs.

Mark Graboff.

Jack Abramoff was bad enough sans the “Abram,” and Bernie Madoff had the perfect surname if you pronounce the “a” as a long “a,” having made off with billions of dollars.  I’m waiting to read about someone important named “Getoff.”