Fausta's blog

Monday, May 22, 2006

News from NOLA, and today's articles from Maria

Jay posts about Rep. William Jefferson, D-La, videotaped taking a $100,000 bribe

Wasn’t Jefferson the one that used the National Guard to remove items from his home during the flooding? Don’t you remember, he had them back the truck up to the door and the truck got stuck. Then they had to call in another truck to pull them out. And the Congressman, had to be evacuated by the Coast Guard while the National Guard was waiting on the second truck to pull the first truck out of the Congressman’s waterlogged front lawn.

And yes, Nagin got reelected. Newton comments on a detail.
Update: Frozen assets, indeed. I'd check the mattresses, too.

Via Maria, Social Security for illegals OK'd: Senate blocks effort to limit benefits for those who become legal residents. Mark Steyn writes in the NY Sun, ‘Call It a Banana'

From The Washington Times:

"The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment."

Well, I think that's the kind of moderate compromise "comprehensive immigration reform" package all Americans can support, don't you?

Some mean-spirited extremist House Republicans had proposed that illegal aliens should only receive 75% of the benefits to which they're illegally entitled for having broken the law.
. . .
Meanwhile, Senator John McCain, in a quintessentialy McCainiac contribution to the debate, angrily denied that the Senate legislation was an "amnesty." "Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history. Whether or not, as Senator McCain says, we should call it a singular banana, it's certainly plural bananas.
. . .
But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to five per cent of the US population is now "undocumented". Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried.