The Alabama Anti-Illegal Immigration Law

I was watching the ABC News last night and they had a segment on the strong anti-illegal immigration law passed in Alabama, and much of which has been upheld by the Court.

So far.

The most interesting part of that law, to my mind, is the part that requires that schools determine the legal status of the students. Under the Supreme Court they must provide them education, but there is no ruling that the schools cannot determine their legal status.

That has caused many parents to fear that they may now be discovered through their children’s school – and one parent tearfully said she and her family had to leave Alabama, and move to CALIFORNIA!

Illegal aliens are not stupid, and so our California financial burden will continue to increase as other states learn what methods of increasing pressure on illegal aliens works and are legal.

The AP is reporting that Alabama schools are losing students, today. Our schools will gain them next week.

The ACLU is Insane! (Surprised? I’m Not.)

The killing of two American citizens in Yemen who are Al-Queda leaders is being objected to by the ACLU who claim they were due their day in Court before being summarily executed.

Could there be any better definition of insanity?

 

“Up We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder…”

I see that the currently under construction San Diego Downtown Library is still $25.5 million underfunded.

This is the old Air Force trick.

The Navy takes its appropriations and buys ships, the Army buys tanks, and the Marines buy machine guns.

The Air Force takes its appropriations and buys Officers Clubs, Enlisted Clubs, golf courses, and an exchange and commissary – then they go back to Congress and say, “We don’t have enough money for a runway. We must have a runway…and oh, by the way, we need planes – so we must have a supplementary appropriation.”

Someone at City Hall served in the Air Force!

Chris Christie

I like him.

Apparently, Rush does not because Rush keeps pushing Bachmann, Cain and Perry — none of whom will win the nomination and none of whom can be elected — but it is fine to push for them. They drive the message to the right, but all carry too much Christian fundamentalist values for me, personally.

I like Christie because he is a straight talker, and he has had terrific success in New Jersey so he has management skills. He lacks foreign policy expertise, but when you get

“Vote Early, and Vote Often”

Ohio is the next state to consider requiring photo ID for voting. Democrats call this “Rolling back voting rights.”

Democrats contend that many people, particularly their constituents do not have photo ID, and they even objected to states offering, for free, to send people to their homes to take photos and give ID cards.

It is certainly a very few people in the US who do not have a photo ID. You can’t cash a check, or use a credit card, or drive a car, or fly in a plane…and I suspect there are a few, very poor people who do none of these things.

But you also then can’t apply for welfare, or food stamps without such identification, so even if you are poor you are likely to starve if you have no identification, so the number of people without an ID is desperately small.

There must be some reason the Democrats don’t want photo ID for voting, some reason they have made this such an important  issue that they are willing to die on this hill.

I’ll admit that shouting that Republicans are such Meannies that they want to stop people from voting, and it makes sense to everyone that voting should be easy, but there are various levels of easy – and I have to show my ID about five times a day so I think showing an ID is pretty damn easy.

I actually doubt that there are many people who, in the vernacular of the old Chicago Pols, actually “Vote early, and vote often”  — but the Democrats are in such miserable shape for the next election that they will fight for every vote.

Quick Hits

It is getting to crunch time for Greece. Greece is scheduled to get an $11 billion injection, and Greece has scheduled a 30,000 government employee layoff to sweeten the issue, but…

Germany is still balking, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is saying that it needs more funds if it is to continue to participate in bailing out European nations.

The Europeans are in deep trouble and we are in no shape to help out. In fact the EU mess  will drag us down even further if we let it..

——————————————————-

There are demonstrations on Wall Street, with scruffy young people — you know the left Anarchy crowd — and there is pepper spray in the air, with arrests daily.

it is the usual “hate the rich” crowd, now on steroids since they have the president they want, and they had hoped for an Arab Spring sort of weekend of several thousand riotous leftists, but only hundreds appeared.

One of the Wall Street workers remarked at the proliferation of iPODS, iPHONES and iPADS among the demonstrators and wondered if the leftists knew that Apple was the richest of the rich corporations and that no one had made more jobs — in Asia!

Bouncing From Crises to Crises In Sunny California

Willie Brown, former Speaker of the California Assembly and former Mayor of San Fran notes in his column for the S. F. Chronicle that the State of California will run out of money by Thanksgiving.

Brown says he fears that Governor Brown may not recognize the problem the state is facing because the governor vastly overestimated the revenues coming into the coffers, and planned on stealing a lot more money from local government redevelopment agencies — which as thwarted by courts.

The results are, ahhhh, not good….we are talking  serious cuts coming to education, the largest money pot in the state.

The Governors’ good ratings will suffer.

So will California.

This is one hell of a pickle that took a lot of mis-management to achieve.

Rogue Cop In Jail, Still Being Paid

Manuel Ramos is a Fullerton City policeman sitting in jail charged with Second Degree murder for the videotaped (and audio taped) killing of a homeless schizophrenic, Kelley Thomas. It was an act participated in by six policemen, of which two were charged

Manny may be in jail, but he is still being paid and will be until the city finishes it’s investigation. So how long does it take to investigate an audio and videotaped beating that was witnessed by about 50 people — all of whom have been interviewed?

Obviously, longer than you think. A lot longer than I think…I mean if the city has done enough investigation to charge two policemen, and one is held in jail, how much more do you need to be sure of before you stop his salary?  It took more than 60 days to charge the rogue cop even with audio/video and witnesses.

One of the problems is a law passed in the good old Gray Davis days called the “Police Officers Bill of Rights.” That bill urges investigations to be completed within a YEAR, and investigations that are completed much earlier than that can be challenged by the police officers union. (Yes, I know, police officers are not permitted to have a union…they have “associations,” that are otherwise indistinguishable from a “union.”)

Some of the other parts of the police officers bill of rights says that if a police officer is not charged with a crime but his actions are such as to warrant disciplinary action, that disciplinary action must be kept secret from the public.

How’s that for a lack of transparency? The taxpayers who pay his or her salaries are not permitted to know if we have a serially rogue cop on the beat!

Quick Hits

Chris Matthews in discussing the presidents “tax the rich” plan, jokingly asked his panel if the president came up with his plan to get on the side of the poor while he, the president was vacationing in ultra-rich Martha’s Vineyard?   Good question, and frames the issue.

—————————————————-

The liberals I read on blogs are continually railing against the right as racist and homophobic, without expelling why Cain won the Florida straw poll, and the entire right including Roger Hedgecock — who once tried to enter a “Straight” Float in the Gay pride Parade — is backing Carl DeMaio in the San Diego Mayoral race!

—————————————————-

Pakistan has moved from Frenemy to pure enemy, and Turkey is working hard to become a Frenemy. Nothing in the Middle East is ever easy and with our increased involvement it is much worse because western thinking is foreign to them, and eastern thinking is also. Middle Eastern thinking combines the worst parts of both eastern and western rationality.

——————————————————–

I continue to believe that there is nothing on the presidents plan that will sufficiently help the economy, except on the margins. We are in a new norm, with15 million unemployed, and three million jobs going unfilled because none of the 15 million are either technically qualified for the job, or unwilling to relocate to where the job is. Gingrich is right, we need a retraining program, or no unemployment payments past 26 weeks.

There is a program called Georgia Works, which pays participants their unemployment while they train at a company. The hiring rate of the program runs between 60% and 70%. Needless to say, the activists for the unemployed don’t like the program, saying that the trainees should be paid by company training them, and besides, the program does nothing to increase the number of jobs available.

But, like activists for welfare, nothing will ever satisfy them.

“Parent Trigger” Holds the Key

There is a law in California (called “Parent Trigger”), and several other states that gives parents a useful tool in the education reform fight, but few parents know about it and fewer still take the active steps to do anything about it.

Basically, the existing law says that if 51% of parents in a school agree, they can turn the school into a Charter school, cause its reorganization, or close it down if the school meets a few failing criteria as determined by state standards.

A state-wide group called the Parent Revolution was organized to assist parents in understanding the law, and helping them organize. About a dozen states have introduced Parent Trigger bills, and Texas and Mississippi have joined California in passing such bills.

Of course it isn’t that easy. the school districts and particularly the teacher unions HATE the idea, and will throw every legal and emotional tool at their disposal.

Just to give you some idea, a Los Angeles Democrat who was the LA leader of Parent Revolution and a member of the California Board of Education  was replaced by Governor Jerry Brown on Brown’s first day in office. The two most powerful unions in the state were in the top three donors to the Brown campaign.

Parent Revolution is not without support — The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation for money and Michelle Rhee for experience in education, but it is hard to overcome the political muscle of 330,000 teachers.

Take the fight currently going on in Compton, California, which is currently being covered by the New York Times. (The Compton Unified graduation rate is 46.8%).

In a primarily Latino Compton neighborhood, Latino parents were warned that if they signed the petition they might be investigated by the Immigration Service, and needless to say recent immigrants from Mexico are reluctant to sign their name on any paper opposed by their teachers.

After more than enough signatures were collected the petition was challenged by the teacher union, and the Court threw it out because some of the signatures were not dated, and some of the signers had subsequently moved out of the District.

The group proposing the Charter, Parent Revolution admits that as a “newbie” it was Ill-prepared for the organized opposition fielded by the Teachers Union and that Parent Revolt was new and just getting it’s act together. it will have to because the Teachers Union is known to play hardball in the State of California.

As for Compton, the school district and teachers union eventually beat the parents, but the Charter school who was going to take over the Compton school, instead opened a Charter school right down the street —  and immediately filled up!