Mangos that Glow in the Dark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgukFLIzOCw

If anyone has any doubt that President Bush doesn't care about you or your family, view this video. Bush's own choice of words and tone of voice tell us plainly that "I'm the hanging judge" on the issues of jobs and the economy. 

What's amazing is that our President's insensitivity to the plight to the displaced worker is only overshadowed by his lack of of finesse in delivering his message. How did we get saddled with this ridiculous airhead? Bush is so disrespectful of working folks that he can't even "bull" his way through a speech defending outsourcing of American jobs to India without showing his contempt for the very people he is supposed to be representing.  

That this airhead has the pretense to compare himself to Ronald Reagan makes us laugh.  To paraphrase Loyd Benson in the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate..."George Bush, you're no Ronald Reagan."  "The Great Communicator" would have NEVER made a speech this arrogant and insensitive.

"GOP Senators facing the voters in their state voted largely against this bill. GOP Senators who want to be President voted largely in favor of this bill. That suggests a rather different balance of power between interests in the race for President as compared with the race for a Senate seat."  Gideon's Blog, Friday, May 26, 2006 http://www.gideonsblog.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_gideonsblog_archive.html#114865938788512648

Another interesting analysis of the breakdown of the vote on the Senate Immigration Amnesty bill shows a lopsided vote AGAINST by anyone seeking re-election this fall. 

 It's not surprising since the polls show that by overwhelming majorities, the public is against amnesty and for slowing immigration. That's why the House is holding fast to any sort of amnesty provision.

Perhaps the House will be able to put some sense into the Senate bill, but don't count on it.  Like so much that happens in DC, the will of the people is not as important as the special interests who benefit from speciall interest legislation. Immigration is driven by the greed of the CEO classes and the moral arrogance of cosmopolitan liberals.  Both of these groups care little for anyone but themselves. Traitors, I call them.  

Can immigration restrictionists make any headway against the open-borders ideology without addressing the ethno-religious components of the support for that ideology? For example, let’s say we find ourselves, as I found myself recently, in a meeting where the immigration of Muslims or Mexicans is being discussed, and it turns out that the people at the table who vociferously object to any immigration restrictions, who indeed say that the very idea of excluding any group is immoral and illiberal, are all Catholics and Jews. Could one civilly point this fact out? Could one say that the Catholics and Jews in that discussion are pro-open borders because they think they are religiously obligated to support open borders, or because they still identify too much with their families’ immigration background, or because Catholics want to bring in lots of Catholic Hispanics? Could one legitimately say that this shows that they are thinking too much in terms of their own group and not of the well-being of the society as whole?

I think the answer is yes. If Catholics and Jews are resting on their Catholicism or Jewishness to support policies ruinous to our society, while using highly emotional and moralistic arguments to silence disagreement, then that ought to be discussed.

Religious breakdown of the vote on S.2611 /Politically Incorrect Right http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005735.html

There has been some talk in the past about the "Balkanization" of America, the increasing divisions by race, religion and ethnicity.  Interesting analysis of the Senate amnesty bill shows the lopsided support for unrestrained immigration by Catholics and Jews. Jewish Senators voted YES 11-O, Catholic Senators voted YES 19-4. Vote among protestant Senators was evenly divided.

It's a very old strategy of autocrats and elites to divide the majority against itself using the false issues of race, ethnicity, and religion. How long the American Republic can stand when society is divided by race and ethnicity, and everyone values the needs of the group they belong to against the over the interests of the society.

This is indeed the purpose of "multi-culturalism"---to breakup the old Nixon "Silent Majority" and divide the working and middle classes from their economic interests by distractions about moral issues like changing the defination of traditional marriage, or race based quotas like affirmative action that unfairly discriminate against working class white folks.

Now, immigration is the new issue that is dividing the middle against itself. Notice how the pro-immigration argument depended so much on appeals to race and culture war. Even George Bush was implying that opposition to unrestrained immigration was rooted in racism.  

The Catholic Church's support for unrestrained immigration from Mexico disingenuous. If Catholic Church cared about the economic desperation of the immigrants, you'd think they'd speak out against the Mexican government that pursues economic policies that cause this desperation.  Instead, the Catholic Church protects the status quo in Mexico while they spout platitudes about the poor, just as they have done throughout history.  

Jews are also vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy on this issue.  Notice that Jews generally don't work in the low-paying jobs that immigrants take?  Jews are disproportionately employed in the professionals: doctors, lawyers, college professors---jobs that are protected from competition by low wage immigrants. Jews like to think that they support unrestrained immigration because of some sort of romantic notion that THEIR immigration to America has something to do with the flood of Mexican immigrants coming in today. 

It's easy for the well-to-do to tickle their egos with the pretense that their support of unrestrained immigration makes them morally superior to working class folks who oppose it.  After all, well-to-do don't bear the consequenses of unrestrained immigration, such as the decline of wages among formerly low status jobs like janitor or meat packing worker, which used to pay a living wage. The CEO classes don't bear the overcrowding of the public school system, the increasing crime in their neighborhoods, or the rising rents among what's left of their community's affordable housing. 

Obviously, George Bush and the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party have as little empathy for the working and middle class American as the well-to-white white liberals who dominate the Democrat Party. But it's a sad day when the Catholic Church and the Jewish Community unite around a bill that puts the interests of illegal immigrants over the welfare of American citizens.

Harvest of Shame, produced by David Lowe, was the final documentary in the career of broadcasting news legend Edward R. Murrow. Originally aired on CBS Reports in 1960, this controversial documentary about the plight of farm laborers in rural Florida, some of whom worked for as little as a dollar a day, shocked viewers with its stark images of desperate poverty and the callous greed of big growers. Its stridently nonobjective point of view was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate and even upset network head honcho William S. Paley, but it also prompted thousands of calls and letters from a sympathetic public. Harvest of Shame forever changed the nature of TV news and set the tone for a generation of investigative journalists....

.....Even in 1960, the exploitation of farm workers in America wasn't a secret, though most Americans outside rural areas probably didn't know about it. Newspaper reporter Van Smith of the Miami News won a Pulitzer prize in 1959 for an expose of "Shacktown," a squalid camp in Immokalee, Fla., where out-of-work migrant families were starving to death. Smith's reports were so shocking that $100,000 in private donations flowed in to feed the migrants, and government officials were shamed into forcing growers to install plumbing and improve conditions. In the spring of 1960, Friendly heard a radio commentary on the plight of migrants, and was intrigued. He assigned Lowe to go to Florida for a month and see if he could develop some contacts with the migrants....

...The documentary got rave reviews from the New York Times and Time magazine, which called it a "muckraking masterpiece." CBS got thousands of calls and letters from viewers, all but a handful positive, according to Miraldi and Johnpoll. But conversely, some hated the documentary. The American Farm Federation Bureau began to attack Harvest of Shame even before its broadcast, questioning even its figures about the number of migrant laborers. It also was denounced by Congress members from farm states, including Democratic Sen. Spessard L. Holland of Florida, who had ties to citrus growers. But critics' rebuttals of the film — such as their assertion that if laborer Aileen King only earned $1 a day picking crops, she must be a bad worker — tended only to make them appear hardhearted. But the film's strongest defense was that it was accurate. In the end, the only factual error CBS had to correct was Murrow's minor misstatement that no child of migrants had ever graduated from college. CBS Network chief William S. Paley, oddly, was among the film's detractors. He told Friendly that he didn't like Murrow's passionate speech at the end, which disobeyed his own edict about maintaining objectivity....

 ...As a result of the documentary, did the plight of migrant farm workers improve?

Somewhat, probably, though unfortunately not as much as Lowe and Murrow would have liked to see happen. In Harvest of Shame, hungry workers are seen waiting in line for handouts after freezing weather had deprived them of a chance to earn money for food. In 1990, a PBS follow-up contained a virtually identical scene, except that it was shot in color. In 2003, the Palm Beach Post reported that immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, who have supplanted some of the African-American workers seen in the 1960 documentary, often are forced to live in virtual slavery by employers who steal their pay, force them to sleep in overcrowded trailers, and sometimes sexually assault them. The newspaper also interviewed Jerome King, who was seen as a 9-year-old boy in the original documentary, living in a house where rats gnawed at his mattress. More than four decades later, the 52-year-old King was working as a migrant laborer, just as his mother had. King had higher aspirations for his two teenage sons, whom he proudly noted were excellent students.

Excerpts from review of Ed R. Murrow documentary, "Harvest of Shame" originally aired on CBS Reports in 1960.  http://times.discovery.com/convergence/harvestofshame/harvestofshame.html

Note that despite the powerful documentary, little changed for migrant farm workers.  The Senate Immigration Bill has powerful lobbies behind it.  America's corporate elite cares little for American workers, and is more interested in a middle management who has no ties or alliegance or even sympathy for American culture or workers.  This new "multi-cultural" management wants foreign workers, workers who will do what they are told, and work for what is offered, and not complain. 

The shameful disingenous speech by George W. Bush pretty much shows the deterioration of the morality of America's elite. Animal House meets Globalization.

Bush's immigration proposals are disingenous and wrong-headed.  The blog-o-sphere has said it all, and I've got nothing to add really. 

Except the observation that why should we believe that the guy who was wrong about Saddam's WMD, wrong about the Iraqi resistance, lied about the NSA's domestic spying activities is right on immigration reform.  With a record like Bush2, the only thing about Bush that we can conclude is that he can't be trusted.

Bankers are likely to be less concerned about a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate than autoworkers, sales clerks, or custodians. It is unlikely that many bankers, or their friends and family members, will lose their jobs if the unemployment rate were to increase by this amount. Nor are their wages likely to suffer substantially from higher unemployment...On the other hand, bankers may be very concerned about modest increases in the rate of inflation. They lend money at fixed interest rates. If the inflation rate rises above the rate they anticipated when they made loans, then the bankers will be repaid in money that is worth less than the money they lent....

...In other words, higher than expected inflation rates cut directly into bank profits....The fact that the people with the most say in determining Fed policy are associated with the financial sector lends a strong anti-inflation bias to Fed policy. The financial sector is willing to force workers to endure the costs of higher unemployment in order to minimize the risks of inflation. If the Fed were run by people who more closely represented the interests of the public as a whole, it would likely be willing to tolerate greater risks of inflation in order to lower the unemployment rate....

....This Fed generated unemployment is a big source of downward pressure on the wages of tens of millions of workers in the modern economy. The wages of CEOs, doctors, and lawyers do not suffer much when the Fed pushes up interest rates; the wages and employment prospects of autoworkers, store clerks, and dishwashers do suffer when the Fed raises rates.   

From Chapter 2: The Workers Are Getting Uppity Call In the Fed!,  The Conservative Nanny State, by Dean Baker at www.conservativenannystate.org

The role of the National Bank---which is what the FED is---has been a subject of political struggle between producers (workers) and speculators (Wall Street) since the beginning of the republic. Debates over monetary policy are not at the center of most political discussion today, although they should be.

A lot of voter apathy might be explained by the fact that most working folks realize that most of the decisions that affect the trade balances, the cost of imports, the relative value of their wages, as well as their chances of scoring a decent job are out of the hands of our elected representatives.  Instead, like Soviet Communism, these decisions are being made behind closed doors by unelected bureacrats at the FED, the WTO, and the World Bank. 

Interesting online book, The Conservative Nanny State,  bursts the fantasy that the Republican Party is the party of  "free markets"....usually when someone is talking about the virtues of the "free market", it's all hypocrisy.  The Republican Party is interested in "free markets" when it's about privatizing public assets and socializing private risk.

Republican love to endlessly rap about the virtues of the "free market" when it comes to privatizing public programs like Social Security, or public assets like the mineral resources in our National Forests, or letting big Drug companies make huge profits on products that were developed by government funded medical research.  But when it comes to the use of state power to safeguard the wealth and power of the CEO classes, then they are pretty much socialists...in the sense that support laws that make the state responsible for underwriting the risks that businessmen take.

Dean Baker's blog site is worth a regular read as well.

http://www.conservativenannystate.org/

http://beatthepress.blogspot.com/

Tomorrow's America is today's Latin America.  Interesting prediction of tomorrow's America, based on changing demographics...what's left of the old FDR-Nixon Welfare State will be bankrupt, the disappearance of a middle class, an increasing divide between rich and poor, rise of religious conservativism...and finally and ironically, the end of the influence of the secular humanism, and thewhite liberal, replaced by corrupt ethnic politicans. In other words, the "Latin Americanization" of America.  

See: The Demographics of the Future at http://theopinionator.com/Politics/futuredemographics1.html

"A jumbled, joyless affair that neither entertains or enlightens" - "Every time Langdon starts to educate Sophie, the urge to tune out is overwhelming." - "[A] wishy-washiness and its general tonal flatness betray a clock-punching mentality the cast and crew seem to have adopted for its production." - "As for the film's entertainment virtues, forget it. This is one of the most talky and pretentious major films in memory." - "You know a movie's a dud when even its self-flagellating albino killer monk isn't any fun. " - "Way too long and duller than watching Da Vinci's paint dry...takes away the book's little credibility and makes the flaws more obvious." - "Who knew controversy could be so dull?" - "For people who insist that the movie is never as good as the book, your case just got stronger." - "... it's not very good -- long (2hr.32min.) and mostly inert."

Excerpts from Rotten Tomatoes synopsis of movie reviews on the Da Vinci Code http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/da_vinci_code/

God does work in mysterious ways. Rotten Tomatoes has given the controversal movie, The Da Vinci Code, an overwhelming  "Rotten" rating...83% of the reviews coming in say the movie is a stinker.

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I'm as suspicious as anyone at the motives behind the media storm over the Duke LaCrosse players. The urbane liberals LOVE to parade their moral superiority to other white people, and some Southern, white college athletes represent the perfect target for their latest campaign to impose political correctness on the rest of us. Let's not mention that the statistics on white on black rape are so low, that they are virtually non-existant.  Or that in the last couple of weeks, 2 black college athletes have been accused of rape of white co-eds without a mention on the front pages of the liberal press, or daily reports in the local television media!

 No, save your sympathy for the Duke LaCrosse Players. They are learning a lesson in Life that their parents and society should have taught them...if you get involved with prostitutes, strippers and other unsavory characters, chances are you are going to get into trouble. This is an incident that would have been unheard of 20 years ago.  And what were they doing having a party during training, and just prior to a big game anyway?

I hope they get jail time!