Jim Guest’s Opposition to SPP/NAU Is Personal

The next Governor of Missouri not only opposes SPP/NAU because it’s wrong, but he has a personal stake in the matter — his State House district, the 5th, includes part of Interstate 35 that traverses through northwest Missouri, and I-35 is proposed to be upgraded to a “Nafta Corridor” for job-busting and illegal aliens.  His district is also close to Kansas City, which is proposed to host the inland port for Nafta-style truck traffic.

First It Was Dog Food, Then It Was Toys…

…now condoms.

Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of condoms provided free by the District to curb HIV-AIDS have been returned to the health department because of complaints that their paper packaging is easily damaged and could render the condoms ineffective.

Demand at two distribution sites in Southeast set up by nonprofit groups plummeted more than 80 percent after the condoms, in a mustard-yellow and purple wrapper, were introduced this year. More than 2,000 packets a week were scooped up in mid-March, but by late May, only 400 were being given away each week.

Volunteers concerned about why interest had dropped began asking people who had picked up the condoms. They were told about packets ripping in purses or bursting open in pockets. As a result, recipients said they had little confidence that the condoms would offer protection.

In addition, expiration dates on some of the Chinese-made condoms were illegible.

“People were saying, ‘These packets aren’t any good,’ ” said Franck DeRose, executive director of an organization called the Condom Project, one of those involved in the grass-roots distribution system. A coalition that includes the Condom Project sent back 100,000 condoms to the city, about 15 percent of what the city says has been passed out to groups.

This article suggests that the people of D.C. will now be treated to brand-name condoms as a result. How long will it be before black extremist groups start claiming that the Chinese government was engaged in a conspiracy to infect blacks with STDs? Though since I doubt any such rhetoric will sucker the Chinese government into giving American blacks and their civil rights pimps any money or consideration (only white liberals are dense enough to fall for that scam), there might not be any incentive for the black leadership to peddle such paranoia.

Another Plausible Theory for the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

As I couldn’t sleep for awhile last night, I flipped around the St. Louis radio dial. One of the spots I landed on had the host talking with a civil engineer from Colorado about the Minneapolis bridge collapse. He said that a standard tractor-trailer truck carrying the legal maximum of 80,000 pounds forces the same wear-and-tear on roads and bridges as 12,000 regular passenger cars. If the same truck is overloaded to 120,000 pounds, then the truck’s effect on the infrastructure jumps to the equivalent of 100,000 cars.

Because many politicians want to NAFTA, North American Union, NAFTA Superhighway and SPP America to extinction, and many Mexican trucks have poor safety standards, including being overweight, and since this bridge serves one fork of Interstate 35 that goes through the Twin Cities, and since I-35 is cited as an important part of the NAFTA Superhighway, one can’t help but wonder if overweight Mexican trucks contributed to the collapse.

If this is so, then it makes all the open borders hacks, both Democrat and Republican, who are now mouthing off about infrastructure and blaming Iraq, look like fools.

Another possibility is that heavy paving and construction equipment was left on the bridge surface even outside of operating hours.

This is the Last Place I Would Have Expected Such a Bill to Originate

Minnesota now requires all American flags in the state to be American-made. Isn’t this the same Nordic/Scandinavian politically correct racial egalitarian “we are the world” bunch of libs that has produced politicians like Hubert Humphrey, who boasted that he and his lib friends in the Senate were going to make white Southerners eat integration?

All of a sudden, they’re discovering nationalism.

Note to Minnesotans: Shop here to comply with your state’ s law.

An Investment We Can All Live With

If Dubai is interested in New York’s high fashion, then that’s fine by me. It’s only when they get interested in New York’s ports that some of us have a problem.

What’s the worst thing that could happen with this if the UAE and the USA become mortal enemies? A few New Yorkers will be running around naked? I mean, it wouldn’t be a pleasant sight, but certainly nothing compared to a dirty bomb.

Keep On Truckin

The Bush Administration, while on the one hand, it’s trying to fool Republican U.S. Senators into thinking that he’s serious about border security, to grease the skids for his soft amnesty wishes, is on the other hand pressuring the Senate not to pass a House bill approved last month that would block NAFTA-style open borders for Mexican trucks.

Reading Is Un-Senatorial

Reading is fundamental to noticing legislative scams, as he found out

CNN:

A new biography of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has once again raised the issue of whether members of Congress read a key intelligence report before the 2002 vote to authorize war in Iraq.

Clinton did not read the 90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, according to “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

For members of Congress to read the report, they had to go to a secure location on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that no more than six senators and a handful of House members were logged as reading the document.

They’re assuming that politicians read the junk they pass. When GATT was ratified in 1994, it was so long that it exceeded 10,000 printed pages. Then-Sen. Hank Brown (R-CO), was the only Federal politician who claimed to have read the whole monstrosity, and said that because of it, he changed his vote from Yes to No.

I understand the same thing is happening with the 600-page Senate Amnesty bill, that some ambivalent Senators are cooling to the proposal once they read the whole thing. Most of those that vote for it won’t actually read a word of it.

Is that Bart as in Simpson?

PC Magazine:

In a article in the Spring issue of Issues in Science and Technology, Congressman Bart Gordon, chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, lambasted the education system for not giving students the solid grounding in math and science needed to succeed in engineering careers.

Gordon based his critique on reports from the National Academies, Electronic Industries Alliance and the Council on Competitiveness that argue that the United States is in danger of falling behind the economic competition of the 21st century.

“Unless the United States maintains its edge in innovation, which is founded on a well-trained creative work force, the best jobs may soon be found overseas. If current trends continue, along with a lack of action, today’s children may grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents,” wrote Gordon, urging Congress to consider it its central goal to provide quality jobs.

You’re more off base than your first-name cartoon analogue taking a test in Mrs. Krabapple’s classroom. Education is not the problem. The problem is corporate greed, racial pandering, virtually open borders, cheap labor free trade, and H-1-B visa mania.

Once upon a time, Democrats like Mr. Gordon cared about these sorts of issues.

Feds Threaten to Throw Texas into the Briar Patch

If they don’t cough up their share for the NAFTA Superhighway.

Memo to American Government: It’s Not 1945 Anymore

So you don’t need to occupy Germany and Japan anymore, and you can give up anti-American generous foreign trade packages meant to rebuild countries post-WWII, when those countries were rebuilt long ago.

Speaking of Roads and Mexico

The NAFTA Superhighway project is in trouble, thanks to the Texas legislature.

Another big unspoken problem with the project is its high price tag. Missouri had to scramble to come up with the $600 million it needed to rebuild the oldest parts of Highway 40 through St. Louis City and County, yet nobody seems to be balking at the $400 BILLION that the NAFTA Superhighway/Trans-Texas Corridor will cost.

They’ve Been No Help

AFP Headline:

Auto union chief sees middle-class dream slipping away

The rest of the article is about United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, and his lamenting the loss of the American working middle class.

The trouble is, most modern day labor unions are helping to engineer the loss of the American working middle class, with their support for amnesty for illegal aliens and open borders, and their tepid at best opposition to free trade, i.e. they’ll make noise about NAFTA and “Fast Track” trade treaties, but say nothing about GATT, WTO and North American Union.

Oh It Isn’t?

Headline on the neocon blog American Thinker today:

NASCAR Ain’t PC

The rest of the story, by one Earl Wright, follows suit.

Mr. Wright, talk with a NASCAR fan in the South. He might disagree with your assessment.

Of course, this is the same blog that also has this headline today:

Is Pat Buchanan Economically Illiterate?

The reason for the question is that its author questions Buchanan’s protectionist trade policies. The answer is no, he is not economically illiterate. If you look at the world in terms of pure economics, then free trade is the ne plus ultra of economic reason and literacy. But Buchanan, like a lot of sane people, and unlike economic determinists like Mr. Warshawsky here, realizes that there are other, more worthy concerns than economic prosperity.

Dude, Dell’s Gettin’ Hell

Dell Computers is putting out a digg-style clarion call for ideas on how to improve their  business.  Of the top ten requests, all but the eighth-place request involve either open source software and operating systems (Linux, Firefox, Open Office), or clean OS installs, or OS-free computers (for do-it-yourselfer types), or having tech help call centers in America.

And going to the second-tier of requests, I see requests for dual-booting Linux and Windows systems right out of the box, and a request to keep Windows XP offerings extant, a relatively non-abusive, non-restrictive and non-invasive Windows version compared to Vista.  I also see a request for Dell to get Apple to sell licenses for preinstalling Mac OS X to itself; trouble is, Apple would never do that, because they need to marry their OS to their brand of hardware to sell both simultaneously, in order turn a profit on anything they do that’s not called iPod.

These results are the next best thing to this blogmeister actually having clicked a million diggs on his own.

Kansas City, Mexico, Here They Come

Gov. Matt Blunt is groveling in Mexico.  Ostensibly, it involves the Kansas City central clearinghouse for American imports destined for Mexico, which probably are raw materials for construction of manufacturing facilities so that they can produce shoddy goods made of cheap labor that will go the other way.

However, what I’m curious to see is what Blunt will do with any anti-immigration bills that get out of the General Assembly and make it to his desk.  Note to Jay Nixon:  If Blunt vetoes such bills, make issue of it, and you won’t have to break a sweat in 2008.

More Converts to Economic Nationalism

They’re the ones who turned a blind eye when working middle class American proles lost their prosperity to cheaper foreign competition

McPaper:

When Main Street jobs go overseas, Wall Street generally shrugs. The typical response from the nation’s financial elite is that people who have lost work should tough it out and acquire new skills.

Now the tables may be turning, as Wall Street ponders its own potential job losses. Foreign companies are increasingly bypassing New York and listing their shares on overseas markets. If the trend continues, it could mean the migration of high-paying investment banking jobs.

The horror! Faced with this threat, Wall Street and its political supporters have sprung into action, commissioning studies and urging that the government help by easing post-Enron accounting regulations, adopting lawsuit reform and pre-empting state banking regulations.

Maybe soon we will see the Wall Street Journal come out against free trade?

Now if Michael Savage’s idea ever came to pass, that there would be an easy way to outsource the U.S. Congress, then the matter would be settled in an instant and in our favor.

America, This Is Your Future

Reuters (one word censored):

It’s the de rigueur stop off for caring foreign dignitaries. It reached a worldwide audience as a backdrop to the British blockbuster “The Constant Gardener.”

Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya’s Kibera slum, one of Africa’s largest.

“People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wildlife. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I’ve come up with a new thing — slum tours,” enthused James Asudi, general manager of Kenyan-based Victoria Safaris.

But not everyone in Kenya is waxing so lyrical about the trail of one-day visitors treading the rubbish-strewn paths, sampling the sewage smell, and photographing the tin-roof shacks that house 800,000 of the nation’s poorest in a Nairobi valley.

(snip)

They raise awareness, and he hands his tourists back a percentage of their payment to donate to a cause they have seen on their walkabout, he says, such as a health or school project.

His publicity, however, has ruffled feathers. “After lunch, proceed to the Korokocho slum where you will be amazed with the number of roaming children,” reads a typical paragraph.

Nairobi’s chattering-classes are not amused.

“Kibera is the rave spot in Kenya,” wrote one columnist sarcastically. “For where else can one see it all in one simple stop? The AIDS victims dying slowly on a cold, cardboard bed. The breastless teenager. … Plastic-eating goats fighting small children … and — ah yes — the famous ’s**t-rolls-downhill-flying-toilets’. It is unbeatable.”

Also, because they want to see what most residential sections in the geography known as the “United States of America” will look like and be like at the end of this century, after the former government of that geography ravaged it with mass non-white immigration going in and mass deindustrialization and outsourcing going out.

State of the Union 2007

The only reason I watched the SOTU tonight is to see what Bush would say on immigration, and to hear Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) give the Democrats’ response. Interestingly, this is the second year in a row when a Virginian has given the Democratic response; last year that duty went to Gov. Tim Kaine, who was then, like Sen. Webb now, in the first month of his term. NBC’s Bio of Webb shows that he and rapper Eminem have something in common: They are both natives of St. Joseph, Missouri.

Jack Bauer Might Fill Up Here

And if we had a Federal government that was serious about the War on Terror, all gas stations would have terror-free oil.

Duh

Business Week via Schlafly:

No matter which party you belong to, or which Big Idea or school of economic policy you subscribe to, one thing is clear: Globalization has overwhelmed Washington’s ability to control the economy.

In other words, globalism is a big flop, which erodes national sovereignty.  The rest of the article proves the thesis.

Schlafly notes the Democrats’ high profile victories in November were a result of the economic nationalist banners they raised.  I have been saying since the elections that Iraq wasn’t that big an issue; now I know what was.

The Giant Sucking Sound Went The Other Way

Remember when Ross Perot used the famous phrase “Giant Sucking Sound” in regards to American jobs and NAFTA?  He was right.

He was also right in another sense of the “Giant Sucking Sound” and NAFTA, which makes what a certain prominent national talk radio host with roots in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, said about NAFTA in 1993 totally wrong.

Behold:

Think immigration from Mexico is a crisis? You might want to blame the lawmakers who voted for NAFTA.

Mexican immigration was flat or on the decline in the years leading up to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a speaker at a Janesville school said Monday.

But immigration skyrocketed in the late 1990s after NAFTA’s “free-trade” rules pushed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans into poverty, said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch.

The part of his brain not tied behind his back said that NAFTA would cure illegal immigration.  Maybe he ought to untie the half that is tied up.

The White Elephant’s Manure in the Living Room

Most left-wing Democrats who (rightly) complain about the increasing gap between rich and poor and the crustification (more like Brazilification) of the American economic culture into a few, rigid and impenetrable classes, won’t talk about the real reasons why it’s happening.

Not Sen.-Elect Jim Webb (D-VA), who is anything but left-wing.  He not only points out that the living room is full of manure, but he also points out the white elephant that left the waste:  Open borders and free trade.  He says these things in the Wall Street Journal, which is a notorious advocate for both.

Ramesh Ponnuru Vs The Pondering American

The latter says that the Dobbs/Buchanan mentality lost on election day.  Ramesh Ponnuru, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos this morning on ABC, said that the Dobbs/Buchanan wing of the Republican party gained strength and influence.

I agree with Ponnuru that the Dobbs/Buchanan mentality gained influence, but I disagree that there is a “Dobbs/Buchanan wing of the Republican Party.”  There are populist/nationalist voters, and I think that, in a given election, the majority of white people will vote for the legitimate candidate (i.e. usually Democrat or Republican) that is more populist/nationalist than the other(s).

Those kind of voters tend to lean Republican these days, simply because of the Democrats’ left-wing extremism on racial and cultural issues.  However, they are not Republican goosesteppers, (and apparently, goosestepping for the Republican Party is the only principle that matters among a few bloggers I know of), and will vote for Democrats or stay home if they don’t think they have a populist/nationalist dog in the fight.  We saw that about two weeks ago.

I Don’t Mind If He Goes

President Bush is in Vietnam, but he isn’t able to go there bearing free trade gifts.  Senate Republicans, who are fuming at the President over the midterm election fallout, rejected Vietnam-US trade proposals.

The irony of Bush travelling to Vietnam is doubly delicious.  On the one hand, you have the comparison to Iraq, and the half-a**ed politically correct way this country “fought” in both venues, and on the other hand, President Bush didn’t need to worry about the Texas Air National Guard vis-a-vis a trip to Vietnam in 2006, like he did more than a generation ago.

On one of the cable talking head shows, the commentator remarked about how Vietnam is becoming more prosperous because of its growing manufacturing base.  This is probably the first admission on cable news TV by a host not named Dobbs or Buchanan that manufacturing and national prosperity are co-dependent; those same free-trade motormouths wouldn’t dare suggest that the decreasing American manufacturing base was making Americans less prosperous.  Second, they fail to tell you where Vietnam got this manufacturing base:  From Uncle Sap and his multinational corporations.  Third, they also fail to tell you about Vietnam’s relatively low wage scale.

I don’t mind if President Bush goes to Vietnam; I’ll only get upset if he comes back.

That’s Not The Real Reason

Microsoft is thinking about pulling out of the Chinese market. The official excuse is that Microsoft is weary of Chinese censorship and repression, though that never stopped “Do No Evil” Google. And it’s a lame excuse, because any bottom-line-minded firm salivates over the 1.3-billion population and fast-growing Chinese economy.

I think the reason reason is that piracy of Microsoft products in China is pandemic in the literal sense of the word. The Chinese Government unofficially supports this piracy, loath to see foreign racial aliens make profits off of their people, and officially supports open source software solutions.

Microsoft tolerates piracy of its products in developing economies, because the piracy creates a “network effect” where people internalize MS Windows and Office as the must-have “standards,” in the hopes that when the developing economies and its people become more prosperous, and Microsoft is able to influence that country’s government to crack down on the piracy, that more people would buy Windows/Office legitimately. Also, Microsoft hopes that the “network effect” would crowd out open source alternatives.

This has happened in Vietnam. Piracy rates are still high there, but to the extent that it is lower than totally pandemic, it has catapulted Microsoft to the status of the #1 software company in Vietnam.

I think Microsoft somehow feels that the Chinese government will never crack down on piracy, meaning that, even if the Chinese people become prosperous enough, they will have no need to buy legit copies. If there’s no profit potential there, there’s no reason to set up legitimate shop there.

Where Did I Put That Box Of Bandages?

McCaskill has a new set of media buys, criticizing Talent for voting for tax breaks for companies that outsource and shift employment to lower wage countries.  She promises to rescind those tax breaks should she get elected to the Senate.

It would be a bandage on a hemorrhage.  In my mind, talking about that is a cop-out, similar to advocating unmanned aerial drones as a method of border security or crime deterrence.  If her solution came to pass, it would be like losing a cup of water from Lake Michigan — what corporate America makes from cheap labor is far more than the extra tax burden that Claire McCaskill wants to restore for them.

The solution is Buchananite economic nationalism, including, but not limited to, that taboo seven-letter word that begins with a T.

I take McCaskill’s reliance on cop-out solutions and her not saying the dreaded T-word as evidence that she would be as maniacally pro-free trade as Talent.

Chevy: A Mexican Revolution

World Series ad tonight:  Thankfully, nothing to do with stem cells.  It appears that the spot was a national one, so if you were watching the World Series at all, you probably witnessed it.

Chevy is running an ad extolling the virtues of Hispanic Americans, and part of the ad is in Spanish.

It’s just as well, as many Chevys are assembled in Mexico.