Alberto Gonzales says today in the Washington Post:

Most recently, some politicians and concerned citizens have expressed a desire to amend the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which says in Section 1, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Proponents want to discourage undocumented mothers from crossing our borders to give birth to children derogatorily referred to as "anchor babies," who by law are American citizens. Such a change is difficult to carry out, as it should be, requiring a new amendment ratified by three-quarters of the states.

I do not support such an amendment. Based on principles from my tenure as a judge, I think constitutional amendments should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances that we cannot address effectively through legislation or regulation. Because most undocumented workers come here to provide for themselves and their families, a constitutional amendment will not solve our immigration crisis. People will certainly continue to cross our borders to find a better life, irrespective of the possibilities of U.S. citizenship.

If we change the 14th Amendment, we will not change one whit the entitlement to birthright citizenship by those already here -- unless we also change the nature of our Constitutional protections against ex post facto law -- something I suspect a few will want, but most (including myself) will not.

I'm a rather rabid right winger, and the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "change the Constitution" or "make a law" is a question of whether such a change expands or contracts individual rights. Obviously, as a rabid right winger, I'm in favor of laws which enhance individual rights over those laws which enhance group rights.

Alberto Gonzales might not know why these people come here, but I do -- they want to be some part of what we are -- maybe not all, initially, but some part. When the Chinese first came here to the Gold Mountain, they came expecting not to stay but to go back to China as very wealthy men. As more and more of them came and didn't go back, the more backward looking of our countrymen decried this "invasion" of "lesser folk" and passed first the Chinese Exclusion Acts and then the more powerful Alien Exclusion Acts.

Those thoughts are what created illegal immigrants in the first place, and the echoes of those thoughts are what are pushing the less-American among us to want to change birthright citizenship -- a heritage of whitefolk since the founding of our nation, and a heritage inclusive of all others since our Republican forebears enacted the 14th Amendment in 1866.

Abraham Lincoln was endorsed by the Know Nothing Party as their candidate for President in the run-up to the 1860 election. Lincoln rejected the endorsement by the nativist party. His feelings about the Know Nothings were unchanged from those evident in this 1855 paragraph from a letter to Joshua Speed: "I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]."

When Abraham Lincoln walked this land, there were no immigration laws other than ones which required a landing tax and for the newly arrived immigrant to stay out of trouble and prove themselves able to earn their own livelihood while waiting for the necessary proof time to pass before obtaining naturalization. I'm all for going back to that era. If Mexicans arrive in this country and all they can speak is Spanish, well -- wait, and know that their great grandchildren will be indistinguishable from us. As for the trouble-makers -- send them back and never allow them to return.

My grandparents came from Sicily, at a time when Italians were not well thought of here. They worked hard, assured that their children spoke English better than Italian, and things worked out well for us grandchildren. Sadly, the liberals in our midst have lost track of how the melting pot was supposed to work in favor of some mythical diversity, and the conservatives in our midst have lost track of why America exists and how it came to exist.

Hopefully, our generation will do better than to pass some even more onerous form of Alien Exclusion Act coupled, to the other extreme, with state-funded schools that teach base 20 math to the exclusion of the base 10 math everyone else uses in their daily lives.

If Ronald Reagan was the classic Teflon president, Barack Obama is made of Velcro.

Through two terms, Reagan eluded much of the responsibility for recession and foreign policy scandal. In less than two years, Obama has become ensnared in blame.

Hoping to better insulate Obama, White House aides have sought to give other Cabinet officials a higher profile and additional public exposure. They are also crafting new ways to explain the president's policies to a skeptical public....

A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of the population rated unemployment and the economy as the nation's most important problem. By contrast, only 7% cited healthcare — a single-minded focus of the White House for a full year.

At every turn, Obama makes the argument that he has improved lives in concrete ways.

Without the steps he took, he says, the economy would be in worse shape and more people would be out of work.

"I don’t go tanning anymore because Obama put a 10% tax on tanning. McCain would never put a 10% tax on tanning. Because he’s pale and would probably want to be tan," she said.

Snooki was referring to a provision in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act that mandates tanning salons impose a 10 percent tax on UV-ray sessions.

Clearly, Obama can't relate to Snooki's problems, she added, commenting on Obama's skin color.

Maybe Snooki should use concrete. It's the Chicago way.

Maureen Dowd of the NY Times thinks this:

...But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it....The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.

Talk about a double-slam! Mr. Obama, African-American President, is not descended from the "central African-American experience" and needs someone else to do "Black Outreach". According to Dowd, the racially-insensitive Obama has surrounded himself with people, who don't understand "the slave thing":

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong. Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s.

As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the N.A.A.C.P.

“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Lewis said.

That would be the same John Lewis who successfully walked through, without harm or incident, a crowd of Tea Partiers shouting "Kill the Bill", and then, in a segue back to his SNCC days, later claimed to have heard the N-word -- in spite of the fact that the sound track of the one video recording of the entire passage indicates that no such words were spoken. This would be the same John Lewis whose unsubstantiated complaint led to the NAACP branding the Tea Party as racist, and which led to Breitbart posting his clip of an NAACP audience applauding vengeful behavior by Sherrod against a white.

I bet he's happy he's fuelled a race war.

There might not be a racist bone in Shirley Sherrod's body now, but when she said "When I made that commitment, it was to black people, and to black people only" there certainly was a racist hair on Sherrod's body. The acts she described are certainly racist -- she views the farmer's self-promotion through a racist lens, she doesn't do all she can do up front to help him, and it's only when his farm is nearly lost does her basic empathy kick in and overcome her racism. Below is the full clip -- the NAACP one -- and the interesting stuff starts happening around the 15:30 mark:



Some of us "white guys" understand what racism is, and saw it fully in the NAACP audience's laughing response to the portion of the Sherrod speech that Breitbart aired -- as did the NAACP itself when it condemned the same audience response. That response was before Sherrod made redemptive statements later in the speech.

Had a white audience made the same response to a white official's claim that he didn't do all he could to help a black farmer, and instead referred the farmer to a black attorney on the premise that the attorney would "help his own", I would be equally disgusted. Sherrod, for dramatic reasons, was stoking the racial animus of her audience (view the entire speech, and notice how she leads up with a description of the unprosecuted death of her father at the hands of a white, and how dangerous it was for her during the civil rights days), and it all comes to a head at the point where Breitbart's clip occurs:


Sherrod is redeemed, but what about her audience?

Those sweet Bell retirements may cost you too: A pension reform activist says that since Bell is pooled with 140 similar-size California towns and public entities, their taxes will help support the three high-priced officials who have resigned. Steve Lopez, July 25, 2010

The LA Times has been at the front of those who vilify the Tea Party as overwhelmingly comprised of racists and rich people. Now they seem to understand the prime tenet of the Tea Party -- that an individual is far more capable of spending their money wisely than any government entity.

If Steve were smarter, he'd realize that the issue isn't just Bell, or its 90% Latino population -- it's the overarching question of how much, and for what purposes, the government may take in taxes from its citizens.

Those of us in the Tea Party think that the only reasons the Government should take money is to fulfill its obligations to us under the Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson said in his First Inaugural Address:

...with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Are we a happy and prosperous people? No. Could it have been the Government and its social engineering programs engendered within Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae which have made us unhappy? What relationship do Freddie and Fannie have with the situation currently present in Bell?

Steve, as you ponder these questions, consider the Tea Party, and furthermore, welcome to it!

One council member, Lorenzo Velez, said he was "in shock" when he learned of his colleagues' pay. He said he has been getting a salary of $8,076 a year — $90,000 less than his colleagues.

Salaries:

Name	Position	Amount
Lorenzo Velez	Councilman	$8076
Robert Rizzo	City Manager	$787687
Randy Adams	Chief of Police	$457000
Angela Spaccia	Assistant City Manager	$376288
Victor Bello	Food Bank Director	$96600

The average city council member in Bell (of which Mr. Velez isn't one) serves on at least one "authority".

The council has increased its compensation by paying members for serving on a variety of city agencies, including the Community Redevelopment Agency, the Community Housing Authority, the Planning Commission, the Public Financing Authority, the Surplus Property Authority and the Solid Waste and Recycling Authority.

Demerjian said city records show each council member receives $7,873.25 per month for sitting on those boards.

Councilman Luis Artiga, who was appointed to the council 15 months ago to fill an unexpired term, said he had no idea how much he would be paid. When he received his first check, he thought it was "a miracle from God."

Artiga, who is pastor of Bell Community Church, said he uses about half his salary to pay the church's mortgage.

A pastor should know what stealing looks like.

In times like these it is immature -- and, incidentally, untrue -- for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world. No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion -- or even good business. Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are soft-hearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed. We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the ism of appeasement. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests. I have recently pointed out how quickly the tempo of modern warfare could bring into our very midst the physical attack which we must eventually expect if the dictator nation win this war.

Consider the above both in the international and domestic spheres.

The president's determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America's history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.