Answer: be a Democrat House member who’s in a swing district.

Mark Schauer (D-MI 7th) called attention to illegal immigrants hired to help clean up the recent Michigan oil spill.

That led to the detention of 42 illegal immigrants in Texas a day later, who had just arrived by bus back from Michigan.

A day later.

That’s an unheard-of reaction time for the Obama administration.  They’ve made it plain that immigration enforcement is not their priority.

But Schauer is in a competitive House race in Michigan, which has close to the nation’s highest unemployment rate.  It turns out “hire American” beats “protect the illegals” in the Wolverine State as far as Democrats are concerned–and if a little selective law enforcement helps keep a House vote in the “D” column, that couldn’t hurt, could it?

Especially since the national media can be counted on not to even report on the story, much less connect the dots to expose blatant political favoritism via immigration enforcement.

Brett – can I call you Brett?

Ok. Mr. Favre – look, dude, you’re FORTY FREAKIN’ YEARS OLD. Get the hell out before one of these bull-like young tackles rips off your leg and strangles you with it.

Yannow?

Ed Stein, political cartoonist, published this gem today:

I commented on his page (some typos fixed here):

The churches, one on either side of the OKC Memorial, one Catholic, and one Methodist, have been there since well before the bombing. Before, even, the Murrah Building was constructed. First Methodist was built in 1889, and St. Joseph’s I know less about, but it’s from at least the 1930’s.

The analogy here, isn’t to the proposed mosque. Rather it is to the Greek Orthodox church that is currently being denied permission to rebuild. It predated the events of 2001 and had been there since 1922, predating the construction of the WTC. In which case this cartoon would be genius, but you missed the mark, Mr. Stein.

Since then I’ve learned that St Joseph’s Old Cathedral was built in the same year as First Methodist.
I was gratified that Mr. Stein felt the need to reply to me:

Let me explain something about cartoons–they aren’t meant to be taken literally; if they were they’d be photographs. Their purpose is often to present hypothetical situations, like building a NEW church in OKC after the bombing, or to be read metaphorically, is in building a church being a metaphor for building a mosque. As such, they take some small amount of imagination to decipher, which, unfortunately, some readers simply do not possess.

Rather than a lack of imagination on my part, I think the problem here is that Mr. Stein wasn’t aware of the two, real, churches that flank the OKC Memorial to the East and West.  Perhaps he can be forgiven for that ignorance of the geography of flyover country.
 
Nevertheless, there are further problems with the metaphor.  Tim McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in the name of politics, not religion.  While raised Catholic, he claimed to be agnostic and no connection to either the 1898 erection of the Cathedral, or to the post-bombing renovation can be drawn between McVeigh and the Roman Catholic Church.
 
Mr. Stein wants you to believe that those who oppose the construction of Cordoba House are doing so on the basis of religion, or put more succinctly, that we are intolerant and bigoted.  The truth is that the only sensibility at play here is one of good taste.
 
While I may wonder, I have no reason to believe that the motives of the Cordoba House developers are anything but pure, but the point is that that doesn’t matter.  The elements within Islam with which we are at war don’t share those views with them any more than they do that of the proper role of resistance and violence in social discourse,a nd they will view and use that facility, if built, as a monument to their blow against the Great Satan.
 
Building a fertilizer plant near the OKC Memorial would be a good analogy.  Nothing wrong with fertilizer plants, but the location makes a poor choice.  Thought, admittedly, it’s hard to visualize gloating neo-milita members viewing it as a monument, so perhaps, Mr. Stein has a point regarding my imagination, but, like the message conveyed by his cartoon, not the one he intended.

P.S. The song can be heard and downloaded from this site:

http://www.reverbnation.com/gunzip

The URL to download the MP3 file is:

http://www.reverbnation.com/controller/audio_player/download_song/4764537

(P.S. I’m planning on eliminating the Weebly site.)

I know this sucks, and I can’t sing, etc. etc. I am releasing this song under a Creative Commons license so that real musicians with actual talent can improve it. Go for it, Interweb!

Oh, and this is NOT about President Obama specifically. It is about all politicians like him.

Just Another Clown

You told us all a tale you would turn the tide.

You sang a pretty song, said you’re on our side.

It took you little time to betray our trust.

You joined the frikking jokers and the joke’s on us!

Hey hey hey hey hey it’s another clown!

Just another clown for the clown show!

I see you shoving money into the machine.

I see a string of zeroes running off the screen.

The Ministry of Plenty still demanding more,

The freaking same old folly that has failed before!

Hey hey hey hey hey it’s another clown!

Just another clown for the clown show!

And so the mask has slipped, you are just the same:

A carbon-copy con man with a different name.

To listen to your lameness should we laugh or cry?

In debt inside your dreamworld ’til the day we die!

Hey hey hey hey hey it’s another clown!

Just another clown for the clown show!

Accused of trying to simultaneously be a populist with his “I would sooner be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard” quote while also stating disapproval of the 20% of potential voters who didn’t know what the United Nations was, Buckley responded to the “populist” but “elitist” hypocrisy accusations against him as follows:

…among academics there is a syndrome, identifiable even if it isn’t easy to describe. I remember the straw poll taken in Princeton some years ago which revealed that the faculty was divided as among McGovern (George), Nixon (Richard), and Gregory (Dick) for president. My recollection may be slightly inexact, but the poll came out approximately 65 McGovern, 8 Nixon, and 8 Gregory.

This may be dismissed as academic humor, in which case the obvious commentary is that one would be uneasy being governed by such folk as are given to academic humor. But one readily sees that 20 percent anomalies subtracted from both bodies leave you safer with the telephone directory than with the faculty directory. Raw ignorance, provided it is blended with something less than that, is less dangerous than raw hubris, all but unadulterated.

<a href=”http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2010/07/gop-dumps-on-tea-party-rightblogs.html”>GOP Dumps On Tea Party, Right-Blogs</a>

They’re still worried that the Democrats won’t like them.  If they get a majority this time they won’t hold it and we’ll have an Obama second term.   If your GOP guy doesn’t have a chance, stay home or vote for the libertarian.   If the donks stay in the majority it’ll put pressure on the GOP to get serious about reforming their candidate pool to actually reflect  the rank and file, it’ll also give the donks enough rope to hang themselves.

Burn it all down baby, burn it all down.

They gave him a nuclear-powered heart! Now he’s completely invulnerable!

Next: laser-beam eyes!

Comment on the Hot Air Palin thread of the other day:

Democrats in Alaska have said don’t underestimate Palin … I hope no one was listening.

Sarah Palin: Miss Underestimated.
(See what I did there?)

Saw a very interesting article on signs of the coming totalitarianism, linked by a commenter at Neo-neocon.  PW-channeling quotes:

Words once used to attack racism, apartheid, torture, and genocide, are routinely appropriated to level against Empire, or the United States, or Israel.  The converse tactic is to minimize, disguise, or hide actual apartheid, as that against women in Saudi Arabia; actual genocides such as that in the Sudan; tortures daily practiced in Iranian and North Korean prisons; and a war quietly killing millions in the Congo.

And, especially:

This then is the fourth warning sign: the ideologically-induced corruption of language, such that humanitarian terms become weapons by which to attack the flaws of liberal democracies, while self-professed humanitarians excuse the pervasive crimes of despots.

(emphasis mine – Yackums)

As they say, Read the Whole Effin’ Thang.  I think he nails it.