Naming contest!

This Obama takeover of GM is comic gold, I have to say. Like, what's going to be the name of the first new car to come out of the new, improved Gubmint Motors?

I've seen "The Obama" at SDA.
How about :

The Unicorn.
The Hope'nChange.
The Barymobile.
Der Volksauto. (Volkswagen is taken, eh?)
The Wudth'fugissat?
The Bailoutmobile.
The Chapaquiddick, in honor of Big Ted (its water tight!)

Its a gold mine! We'll see what Leno makes of this, eh?

Car Nirvana

I'm no economist, but all the machinations lately regarding the Big Three seem pretty odd.

I look at it this way. All the car makers are selling vehicles that cost a year's pre-tax pay. At least. That's been the constant since forever. They design them that way.

Problem, real people can't save up a year's pre-tax pay in the life of a car anymore.

So, nobody can buy a car without credit. Pretty much the entice cost of the car is on credit. You start looking at total cost of ownership, a hefty chunk of your income is tied up in your wheels, leading to another reason for that difficulty with the saving, leading to more reliance on credit.

Now, under cover of the Cult of Safety and the Cult of the Environment, the Big Three managed to choke off all competition in North America. The Japanese manufacturers managed to bull their way in to the North American market because they got big enough back home, and thus they became part of the gang.

This was done in collusion with the US and Canadian governments, who basically wrote regulations nobody but the Big Three could meet. This accelerated in the 1980's to the fever pitch we see today, when cars have to be engineered to nearly aircraft-level tolerances.

Which is how they kept the price point so high. Its artificial.

I built a quite nice little race car for myself. Took me 6 months, learn by doing. Capable machine, hardy, good roll cage, good suspension etc. All off the shelf dune buggy stuff. I currently have about $6,000 in it, give or take a couple hundred bucks. If I went with brand-new everything, I could have still done it for under $20k.

That's one guy buying retail, hand assembled in the garage. A proper facility could crank them out for sale at under $10k all day long.

But nobody can, because of the regulations. Which is kinda fascism. Watery version, but still.

Comes the perfect storm of credit crunch, oil price and having the wrong cars tooled up. BANG, sales fall off a cliff, the Big Three can't crack their nut this year. Bush gives them a loan, to keep the scam intact. But its a big nut.

Now we have Bary, messiah of The West. He wants to run both sides of the scam at once. He wants to make the rules AND the cars, to his specifications, to please his supporters. Full on fascism.

So if I'm right about that, in the next little while we will see Government Motors shifting over to very expensive, very small hybrids and electrics to meet stringent new US EPA regulations and take advantage of brand new gas guzzler taxes. Add scrappage regulations to remove the backlog of used cars in the wrecking yards and dealerships, and you've got car Nirvana.

A government issue Volksmobile that extracts the maximum possible dollars from the populace, makes the big political donors happy, keeps the dinosaurian manufacturers stumbling along a heartbeat ahead of insolvency, and keeps those unions cowed and compliant.

Next up, household appliances and consumer staples.

And to keep it all sliding smoothly, John F'ing Kerry is out there yesterday keeping the assault rifle ban alive. Gotta protect the Mexicans, y'know. Well, the Mexican government anyway. Car plants down there to keep safe.

Whole thing seems kinda crooked to me, know what I mean?

Update! Courtesy of Kate at Small Dead Animals, this missive from The Corner. New regulations were already released, same day The One fired GM's CEO.

Why is the road to Hell paved with good intentions?

My friends, today we ask the question why. Why is it that the nice, cuddly, goody goody Left leaning bleeding hearted lovely granola crunchers of this world, with all their peace-love-dove intentions, inevitably bring with them corruption, theft and murder? Why is that? That this is so I support with the fact that wherever these people gain political power, crime flourishes. One need only look at Toronto to see it, but the world abounds with examples. The USSR, East Germany, China, Korea, Nazi Germany, etc. New York city. Los Angeles. Washington DC.

However, we are not here to bash the Lefties, we are here asking Why it is so. Once upon a time a good friend of mine, a sage in this sorry world of ours, told me the answer to the question "Why?" is always "Because!". In all due respect to this sagacious answer, I feel it does need fleshed out a bit.

Let us take an example from today. Spokane Washington seems to be filled with good intentioned Gaia worshipers. Nice people who love the furry animals, they decided that phosphated dishwasher soap was harmful to the little bunnies and birdies and seals etc, so it was banned from sale in Spokane. So what happened?

The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.

"Yes, I am a smuggler," she said. "I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with."

Patti Marcotte, peaceful, real estate agent and good person (presumably) is going to considerable effort and expense to circumvent this well intentioned Greenie initiative. Do the Greenies care? Hell no!

Supporters of the ban acknowledge it is not very popular.

"I'm not hearing a lot of positive feedback," conceded Shannon Brattebo of the Washington Lake Protection Association, a prime mover of the ban. "I think people are driving to Idaho."

What should people do instead of driving to Idaho?

The Washington Lake Protection Association has launched a campaign to encourage people to give the environmentally friendly brands a fair chance. The group suggests consumers experiment with different brands or install water softeners to help the green detergents work better.

"Clean lakes and clean dishes do not have to be mutually exclusive," said association president-elect Jacob McCann.

Yes friends, you should suck it up and remodel your plumbing to conform with our good idea. Its for the lake, you know. What are you, stupid? We're helping here!

And there you have it. One bunch thinks they know better, and so they make a rule. Other people don't like the rule, besides which they really don't like being pushed around, so they circumvent the rule. If the rules are drawn strictly enough, an opportunity to make money circumventing the rules is born. Smuggling, in other words. If the state of Washington makes it a crime to possess phosphate detergent, there will immediately spring up a black market in it. Money is a powerful thing. The black market will become large and self sustaining, self protecting.

This taken by itself would be no big deal (except to the Greenies). But unfortunately people willing to break rules for a living tend not to be particular about which rules they break. Along with smuggling comes bribery of officials, the corruption of the democratic process to get more bribes, and plain old crime like assault, theft, robbery, and if there's enough money involved, murder. Smugglers can be violent.

That's why.

Somebody agrees with The Phantom.

I'm fond of posting that with manufacturing machinery getting so small and so cheap, big factories are going to mostly disappear and little small ones making custom stuff all connected to the Internet are going to be the wave of the future.  I've said it many many times.

Here's a dude that agrees with me. 

This week's unveiling of the Nano automobile produced in India by the Tata Group is transportation's inflection point. Like Stephen Jobs, Raj Tata and his gigantic conglomerate have come up with a cost-effective game-changer that will flatten all rivals. Like Henry Ford, he has designed a product that the workers on the assembly line can afford to buy, thus creating a perpetual economic growth machine.

Most revolutionary, however, is the Nano business model. These vehicles will be sold from the factory door in local economies, not dealerships. Local manufacturing will reduce costs and enhance buzz, include local partners and help promote successful sales. 

The bottom line is that captive markets run by oligopolies -and cars made by people making $70 an hour -- are no longer sustainable economically.

The business model that will work for carmakers is the Dell Computer model. Vehicles must be sold online, the supply chain must be global and assembly plants used to put together all the components and options from colours to bumpers that buyers have selected digitally and fully paid for.

The auto industry will be customized manufacturing, which will eliminate the waste and expense of second-guessing market appetites, consumer biases or discounting and marketing expenses to move inventories.

There you have it folks. You want a 1969 Camaro with an aluminum engine block, a blower, zoomie pipes and 500 horesepower, send an e-mail.  They take Paypal.

The Phantom

Big Brother goes Infra Red.

Another bold step taken in Britain's long march into peonage.

Our movements are already tracked by CCTV, speed cameras and even spies in dustbins.

Now snooping on the public has reached new heights with local authorities putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy.

Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take.

Yes, a friendly little visit from your helpful local government enviroNazis, to hand out pamphlets on how to save energy with latex caulking around the window frames.  Lovely.  During which the helpful public servants will have their beady little eyes open for any other possible infractions, like unregistered kitchen knives, unsafe storage of tennis rackets and golf clubs, unapproved wallpaper, improper stacking of recycling containers, etc.

I hasten to add, this energy they are "wasting" wasn't given to these "offenders" by the government.  They bought it and paid for it, with after-tax money too.

Something similar was done in Ontario a few years ago by police forces looking to stem the tide of grow-ops in Toronto and vicinity.  They sent up aircraft with thermal imaging to see if they could spot any hot spots.  A grow-op in a standard house will light up like a Christmas tree on thermal at night.

The result?  Inadmissible in court.  Caught red handed with 30 zillion dope plants, and they walk.  Same story in Britain probably, not admissible in court due to excess logic and practicality.

But use the technology to harass law abiding home owners busy minding their own affairs and not bothering anyone?  AWESOME!!!

The Phantom

Fairness Doctrine part one.

Part one is where the DemocRats save their friends:  the Mainstream Media.

With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

Remember that name, folks.  Senator Benjamin Cardin.  He's the point guy on the job of saving the Dem friendly propaganda mills.  Keep him in mind for next election.

Fairness Doctrine part two coming up soon, is where the DemocRats silence their enemies.

Buy gold and ammunition.  Come to think of it, never mind the gold.  Buy food.

.50 BMG: Reach out and touch someone...

...Once.   Even when he's bunkered in behind a 1" thick steel road plate.

.50 BMG tungsten frangible.

The Fragmenting High Velocity (FHVL) Round is a lead-free replacement that offers far superior tactical capability over the lead core bullet. The FHVL has the same range and accuracy as a lead bullet of similar weight. Long range, reduced ricochet, controlled penetration, and exceptional accuracy make the FHVL the most technically advanced tactical round available today. The FHVL grants the operator enhanced tactical capability, such as controlled penetration (NO EXIT) and increased ability to eliminate threats instantly, all while eliminating ricochet and over-penetration hazards.

That's some impressive technology.

They have movies!    Don't tell PETA.  They think ballistics gelatin has a soul.

H/T The Firearm Blog

The Phantom Gelatin Blaster.

TV worth watching.

Here's Ezra Levant talking about his new book on BNN's Squeeze Play. Seven minutes of intelligent conversation about your freedom to have intelligent conversations. Good stuff!

H/T FFofF!

Liberal hypocrites.

One of the main things that irritates me about the political Left is their propensity for lying. They don't dare tell anyone what they are really working toward, because no one would vote for them. You have to wait for one of them to screw up before you can tell what they are really about.

Case in point, racism. Everybody knows the Left is anti-racist. That's their big claim to fame, their big deal. They're the ones who keep making us change the language we use to identify people.

Like the mentally challenged. I mean the Special people. Er, the developmentaly retarded? Um, cretins? Morons? That's a partial listing of the verbal gymnastics the PC Left has forced on the medical community for puropses I can only describe as... moronic. But they are deadly serious! Use the wrong phrase in a description or a joke, and the PC Rage Brigade will fall upon you. People lose jobs over stuff like this all the time.

Here in the People's Republic of Kanada we have a whole government commission to take care of these things. The Canadian Human Rights Commission, and its provincial counterparts. They can take your house, and have done, over a few ill considered remarks in print.

Except once in a while one of -their- guys does it. And from the PC Rage Brigade you hear... nothing. Crickets chirping.

Most famously last week we have Barry "The Messiah" Obama making his "special olympics" crack on Jay Leno, to the tune of pretty much zero MSM coverage.

Bill Clinton? Free ride from American feminists on the Monica BJ-gate affair.

Here at home we have a certain cat lover who's overly fond of lawsuits. Big wheel in the Liberal Party of Canada to hear him tell it. Made a joke about the source of the meat in Chinese barbecue. Zero outrage on the Left, zero response from the Liberal Party.


And my final example, this dork who makes jokes about long beards on Orthodox Jews, and who also thinks Israel Apartheid Week is a fine idea.

My problem is not that they say these things. I don't care. I couldn't possibly care less. If Obama makes a retard joke, or some tool of the Liberal Party slimes Chinese food, so what?. Its a free country. They can say whatever idiot thing comes to their tiny incompetent minds. My approval or disapproval is not consequential.

My problem is that had George Bush said that, it would have gone down in history as the most vile thing ever. My problem is that if an obscure Conservative Party functionary made some crack about cat meat in Chinese food, he'd have been forced out of the party the next day on the winds of a shitstorm of recrimination and outrage. No apology would assuage, no punishment would suffice. If I made a joke about Orthodox facial hair on this blog, its entirely possible I could get a knock on the door from the HRC. They don't care about women's rights, cripples, cultural diversity, the environment, equal rights, none of it. Its all bullshit.

They're liars.

That's my problem. I'm forced to worry about what the code words for homosexual are this week, or what the accepted convolution is for congenital brain damaged adult, because of a bunch of racist, Jew hating, fag bashing, misogynist LIARS.


Here endeth the rant.

Update: Welcome Big City Lib readers. If you behave yourselves in the comments I may even leave yours up. If not... [click] -poof!-

Immigration update: Pelosi speaks!

More news about the DemocRats and their love of illegal immigration.  First, Nancy Pelosi is the mouth that roared:

"Who in this country would not want to change a policy of kicking in doors in the middle of the night and sending a parent away from their families?" Pelosi told a mostly Hispanic gathering at St. Anthony's Church in San Francisco.

"It must be stopped....What value system is that? I think it's un-American. I think it's un-American."

...

Referring to work site enforcement actions by ICE agents, Pelosi said, "We have to have a change in policy and practice and again ... I can't say enough, the raids must end. The raids must end.

Ok, so that's pretty clear, yes?  No more arresting illegal immigrants, because its mean.  Got it, thanks Nancy.

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are standing up behind Joe Arpaio, Sherriff of Maricopa County (Phoenix).

Ten Republican congressmen argue that a civil rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office could have a chilling effect on other state and local police agencies that seek to crack down on illegal immigration.

The congressmen, responding to a Department of Justice probe into allegations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures by the sheriff's office, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to voice support for vigorous immigration enforcement and assure police agencies that they won't face similar investigations.

"It is important that state and local law enforcement officers and the public are reassured that the investigation is proceeding in a judicious and fair manner, and not for the purpose of politicizing or chilling immigration efforts," the 10 congressmen said in a letter to Holder on Wednesday.

 Well, at least voters are being given a clear choice, eh?

The Phantom

Leftist censorship award of the year goes to...

... Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for their absolute bollocks decision on the trailer for "WANTED".

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled the advert gave the overall impression "that using guns was sexy and glamorous" and breached the code for television.

"We concluded the ad could be seen to condone violence by glorifying or glamorising the use of guns," its adjudication said.

Yes, GUNS are the new porn my friends.  Angelina Jolie's naked and tattooed ass is perfectly fine for TV, its the GUNS that are too eeeeevile for TV.  Here's the absolute clincher, for me anyway:

The ASA received just one complaint about the advert.

One guy complains, ONE person picks up the phone, and that is sufficient to have the ASA of Britain pull a multi-million dollar advertisement?  When every -other- sex & guns movie ever before has had their trailer passed no sweat?  Sure.  I believe that.

I've seen this movie.  I've seen that trailer too, they have it at the link I listed above.  This movie is absolutely no different than every other formula sex 'n violence film that's come out of Hollywood in the last 20 years.  The good guys are bad, the bad guys are bad, there's lots and lots of guns, slow-mo bullets doing things bullets can't actually do, and AJ flashing her wherewithall.  Its a 100% TYPICAL. crap Hollywood flick.

So what, the ASA just now woke up to the fact that Hollywood sells socially corrosive movies featuring pointless violence tarted up with Angelina Jolie's tits?  Or is it more likely the British Left is starting on a full-blown censorship campaign and this is the thin edge of the wedge?  I guess we'll know for sure if guns disappear off the Brit TV completely.  Logical next step in their crusade to destroy the country, after all.  You know, right after the kitchen knife registry and GPS tracking chip campaigns.

Next time a Lefty says to you they believe in free speech and personal expression and all that, laugh.  I'd say something else, but then some nanny would come along and ruin me financially.

The Phantom

Are people stupid or are they not?

Courtesy of Kathy Shaidle,  Five Feet of Fury we have a little book review. The book is William Julius Wilson's "More Than Just Race".

The review itself is interesting, in that it contrasts Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial paper from 1965, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" with this new book.

The so-called "Moynihan Report" brought about a new language for understanding race and poverty: Now-familiar terms like pathology, blame the victim, and culture of poverty entered American thought as people debated whether Moynihan was courageously pointing out the causes of social ills or simply finger-pointing. Moynihan forced a nation to ask, "Is the culture of poor blacks at the core of their problems?"

The answer to this statement of the problem by Moynihan was the multi-trillion dollar War on Poverty, which just like the War on Drugs has been an abject, horrible, expensive failure.

In this way, a deep American schism was born. Liberals believed that black poverty was caused by systemic racism, such as workplace discrimination and residential segregation, and that focusing on the family was a form of "blaming the victim." Conservatives pointed to individual failure to embrace mainstream cultural values like hard work and sobriety, and intact (read: nuclear) families.

I describe this a little more bluntly.  Liberals think people are stupid and must be controlled.  Conservatives think people are merely ignorant and must be educated.

Comes now the insight of the book, which I find rather compelling.

Wilson wants to explain inner-city behavior—such as young black males' disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children—without pointing simplistically to discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that many years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.

Consider a young man who works in the drug economy. Doing so doesn't mean he places little if any value on legitimate work. Employment opportunities are limited in the man's racially segregated neighborhood. There are few neighbors and friends who have social connections to employers, and most of the good jobs are far away. To complicate matters, many of his friends and neighbors are probably connected to the drug trade. Survival and peer pressure dictate that the man will seek out the dangerous, illegal jobs that are nearby, even while he may prefer a stable, mainstream job. Delinquent behavior? Certainly, but more than likely a comprehensible response to lack of opportunity.

Delinquent behavior is seen by Wilson as the solution to a PROBLEM, not the result of some kind of inherent stupidity or culture of ignorance.

It kills me that such a statement could be considered controversial, but that's a whinge for a different day.

Allow me to inject a little something from the gun control debate.  My favorite bit of research, Brandon Centerwall's crowding based analysis of murders in US cities.  To wit,
Brandon S. Centerwall, MD, MPH, "Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Domestic Homicide." JAMA 1995; 273: 1755-1758 and
Centerwall, Brandon S. "Homicide and the Prevalence of Handguns: Canada and the United States, 1976 to 198O" Am J Epidemiol 1991;134:1245-60.

Centerwall's discovery applicable to the argument here is that murder rates do not vary between blacks and whites once you control for socioeconomic status.  So there is no "black culture of failure", there is no "systemic racism", there is no instrumentality effect from guns or living in cities or any of that.

Human beings are (among other things) problem solving machines.  You present them with a problem and they will come up with a solution.  What there is, obviously, is a set of conditions that some people solve with violence and "degenerate" behavior.  Currently we have problems confined to the urban poor that they tend to solve with single parenthood, welfare dependence, crime, drugs, and etc.

I contend a lot of those problems are created and held in place by government.  You take a look at Indian reservations in norther Canada, the social and physical situation in those places is 100% constructed by government.  Food, fuel, vehicles, money, drugs, guns, ammunition, clothing, housing, EVERYTHING is flown in to a remote location at great expense and pretty much dumped on the people who live there.  In return they produce pretty much nothing other than misery and self destruction.  Maybe some soapstone carvings.

So you can look at that a couple-three different ways.  Well meaning liberals assume the Indians can't be expected to rise above the lowest possible behavioral level without intervention because they're being victimized by systemic racism, so the answer is to give them stuff.  That's got us to where we are now.
Previously, well meaning people assumed that the Indians were merely ignorant, and tried to educate them out of their cultural bondage so they could become productive citizens like everybody else.  That was the systemic racism to which the liberals efforts became the "solution".

Both these views clearly don't encompass the reality, because nothing changed under either regime.  The misery and self destruction continue.

A different way of looking at it, as per Mr. Wilson, is to assume that the "problem behaviors" are not the problem.  They are rational solutions to the problem.  When one considers drug use and indiscriminate sex as solutions to the problem of living in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, where everything is delivered to you for free, they seem pretty rational.

In other words, if you pull your head out of your ass and start looking at people in a fucked-up situation with some respect, maybe you'll see something other than your own pre-judgments.

People are smart.  Crime is the logical response to a set of pressures and opportunities.  You need money, there's no real retribution against you, logically you're going to steal it.  And you're going to keep stealing it until the risk/benefit ratio changes.

"This presidency is going to be an act of retribution."

That's the money quote from this article, "The Obama Rosetta Stone".  Author Daniel Henninger thoughtfully translates the double-talk, bafflegab and disinformation of the new American presidency into terms we can all understand.

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

Bottom line, rich people are eeeeevile and will be made poor.  Saving the world one rich person's soul at a time, so to speak.  Seems Obama was listening in all those Rev. Wright sermons eh?

Meanwhile gun sales continue to be brisk, and people are hoarding ammunition.  This may be the time that the Founders of the Republic had in mind when they penned the Second Amendment, when the people fall back to the ammo box to fix the gawd-awful mistake they made at the ballot box.  I sincerely hope not.

I'd suggest to all and sundry that you exhaust all other options first.  Take it from me, writing e-mails and making phone calls is a hell of a lot easier than crawling up the side of a hill in the rain trying to escape the O-brownshirts.

The Phantom

Democrats investigate sheriff... for enforcing the law.

You American types will want to perk right up about this one.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched an investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona following requests by congressional Democrats and allegations by liberal activists that the department has violated the civil rights of illegal aliens.

Ok, down to business, "congressional Democrats means these guys:  Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Robert Scott (D-Va.) Liberal activists means  National Day Laborer Organizer Network and ACORN.  This is why ACORN needed all that money they got in the Porkulus Maximus bill, to harass cops for doing their jobs.

Here's what's been done in Maricopa County, which is basically Phoenix area.  Emphasis mine.

Concerning the DOJ's investigation, Arpaio told CNSNews.com:  "I will not back down. What I am doing is upholding the laws of the state of Arizona, and I will not be persuaded to turn my back on my oath of office as sheriff of this county."

In an August 2008 press release, Arpaio's office detailed those results.

"While the Sheriff's illegal immigration and human smuggling operations conducted on the streets and roadways here have netted nearly 2,300 arrests, another very successful effort to locate illegal aliens has been quietly happening inside Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails," the release said.

It continues: "Despite the growing criticism of the Sheriff's illegal immigration fight by some valley politicians and activists, Sheriff Arpaio says 60 detention officers trained by ICE officials have conducted over 106,000 interviews and investigations of inmates booked into jail since April of 2007.

"In those 18 months, 16,000 inmates were determined to be illegal aliens. Either they have already been deported or will be deported after being tried and/or serving their sentences for crimes committed in the valley. The work being done be Arpaio's detention staff is a likely contributor to the recent reduction in crime in the valley," the press release added.

"That number of 16,000 represents a full one-third (1/3) of all inmates in the United States who have had holds placed on them after being identified by jail or prison officials as illegal aliens."

The press release goes on to say that 20 percent of inmates in the Maricopa County Jail are illegal aliens and that of those, 2,000 illegal aliens - 70 percent - were arrested for felony crimes.

Let me make clear at this time that Sheriff Joe and the boys did not arrest 16,000 illegals off the street.  They found that 16,000 people who were arrested for doing a variety of crimes were also illegal immigrants.  The number of people arrested off the street for being illegally in the USA was 2,300.  That's just in the last year and a half.

My friends, bottom line here is the crime rate for the state of Arizona could be cut by 20% just by closing the border to illegals. Not to mention the costs incurred by cops, courts and social services.  As in, by building a fence and encouraging the Minutemen to sit in their lawn chairs on hilltops, calling in the fence jumpers for free.

The fine men and women of the Democrat Party do not want that.  They want these people to stay in your country, to keep committing crimes and keep  collecting social services paid for by your tax dollars. This is the only conclusion I can come to.

You might want to have a word with your congress critters about this.  Today, I think.

No, you are not paranoid enough.

Well, today we have not one but two shooting rampages to feed the gun control ghouls, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about the logical progression of it: knife control.

No, really. Knife control. I kid you not, the British government has just announced a brand spanking new initiative to "get knives off our streets".

Obviously the way to do that is to tax video games. I couldn't make this up.

...Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is set to announce fresh Government plans this morning [wed] to cut the number of knife crimes.

The Tackling Knives Action Plan is a £2million programme aimed at reducing deaths and serious violence among teenagers due to knives.

Violent games are "too cheap" and taxes on them should be "very high", Mr Taylor told MPs.

He told the Home Affairs Committee: "I have young people who I mentor and I see them go up and buy the games and it saddens me that they are being able to have such a negative impact."

Mr Taylor declined to say how much tax should be levied on the video games however.

Apparently losing a child makes you an expert on reducing violence.

Mr Taylor became Mr Brown's special envoy on youth violence and knife crime last month.

Part of his role is to offer new ideas to the Premier on how to change young people's behaviour.

Britain has already drunk the gun control koolaid, and I use that metaphor advisedly, mindful of the results it had in Jim Jones' personal abattoir there in Guyana. Gordon Brown is following the Jonestown glide path, trotting out Mr. Taylor to tug on the nation's heart strings with his tale of woe so as to get more, better and different restrictions on the populace.

Just to be exquisitely clear here, I say this not to mock Mr. Taylor's loss, nor to mock Mr. Taylor himself. He's being used by unscrupulous assholes in the British Labour Party as a bloody shirt, to be waved above the bastions for the betterment of the Party and its innumerable damn fool policy decisions. Gordon Brown now, him I'm mocking the hell out of.

Gun control in Britain has been a deadly failure. There are more gun crimes now than there were when the law was introduced. Like, a lot more. This new push on knives is taking place to distract the public from the failure of the gun law. The inevitable knife ban will fail as well. This is a no brainer.

Ultimately the glide path moves into banning video games, then censoring all "violence" from the media (violence being defined as anything Labour doesn't like) and finally they will ban the consumption of alcohol. Which will work exactly as well as the gun ban. Which is to say it will be far worse than useless. This assumes they don't skip over all that and go straight to the forced labor camps.

People in Britain will wake up right about the time Labour prohibits the sale of alcohol. Brits seem willing to dodge bullets on the way to the pub, but I very much doubt they'll be willing to forgo drinking. This is my prophecy.

The Phantom

US bishops find a pair.

Predictably, Obama's DemocRats are moving to increase government interference in health care.  Well known asshole and socialist Jerry Nadler is going to table a bill.

FOCA, as the bill is known, would make federal law out of the abortion protections established in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade ruling.

Long story short, hospitals and physicians will be required by law to perform abortions and other reproductive services on demand.

Now, the part where Jerry Nadler and the DemocRats are planning fascist-style religious persecution laws is not new or particularly news worthy.  What's new and newsy is this:

The legislation has some Roman Catholic bishops threatening to shutter the country's 624 Catholic hospitals — including 11 in the Archdiocese of St. Louis — rather than comply.

Speaking in Baltimore in November at the bishops' fall meeting, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Chicago auxiliary bishop, took up the issue of what to do with Catholic hospitals if FOCA became law. "It would not be sufficient to withdraw our sponsorship or to sell them to someone who would perform abortions," he said. "That would be a morally unacceptable cooperation in evil."

But even within the Catholic community, there is disagreement about the effects FOCA might have on hospitals, with some health care professionals and bishops saying a strategy of ignoring the law, if it passes, would be more effective than closing hospitals.

THIS is the proper and indeed only response appropriate for the likes of Jerald Nadler and Barry Obama. Either shut the hospital or ignore the law.  "We're not doing it.  Piss off."

Honda and Toyota motor companies could learn a thing or two here for use in dealing with California.

The Phantom