konane's Blog

Thanks to Powerlineblog.com for the heads up on this story.

You have to be a subscriber to access the rest of it so should you wish, click the lower link to see if you can find a suitable sign in.

This is the site of a storm chaser who has some excellent stills of midwest supercells, of tornados forming, also some great animal pictures.  Amazing.

 http://www.extremeinstability.com/imagesbyyear.htm

Taxes slow growth, by lessening purchasing power, lowering our standard of living because there is less money to spend on things that make our lives better. 

Hatred of the rich is Marxist thinking which has been a core philosophy of US leftist (themselves very rich, well insulated, tax sheltered by the best tax attorneys their well protected $$$$$ can buy) politicians for years.  Anything for votes including creating class warfare which is a tactic lifted directly from the communist playbook.

As I said in a comment on Todd's blog socialism and communism are fraternal twins. 

We can learn much by the best socialist model going .... or better yet sputtering ..... the European Union and compare its economy to our own bustling, growing economy.  No wonder they and our own leftist politicians want us to follow lock step behind the EU ............... to slow our economy into non-competition with theirs.

Seems what we need to do is close the border except for leaving, enforce our current immigration laws while mandating a chipped ID for any guest workers.  Not too much to ask after 9-11.

For beginners there's the "Send A Brick" movement to send a brick to Washington to start building the wall....  Perhaps even the slow ones will get the message.      http://www.send-a-brick.com/ 

Good for them!! 

"Immediately after he pulled off his '72 coup against President Oboto in Uganda, strongman Idi Amin -- full title: His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular (and also, curiously, King of Scotland) --decreed Africa should be for Africans. One of his first decisions as lord of beasts and fishes was to eject all the Asians -- some 40,000 or so, who were third generation descendants of Indians who had come to work for the British colonial administration during the days of Empire and who, when the British Empire was dissolved, created commercial enterprises.

Not for nothing had Amin been mentioned in a dispatch, when he was on the British side during the Mau-Mau uprising, as "virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter."

Having decided to eject the country's wealth-creators, he further ruled that these people, uprooted from their country of birth, could take with them only what they could carry. They had 90 days to get out.

The crisis this provoked in Britain at the time has been softened with the passing of the years, but because they were Commonwealth citizens with British passports, the government, in the face of almost universal opposition at home, did the right thing and decided to give them refuge. So 40,000 ethnic Asians arrived in an alien, monocultural group of islands in the clothes they stood up in and the one suitcase holding the meager possessions they had managed to carry with them. Their confusion and distress at having had to leave their country of birth and all their possessions to come to a cold, damp, hostile island must have been almost unendurable.

Back home Idi Amin distributed the property they'd been forced to leave behind among his friends and presided noisily over the decline of Uganda. The Asians, meanwhile, were billeted in drab refugee centers until they found their feet, and they displayed a resilience that still astounds.

What a difference two generations can make.

The British high-circulation Asian newspaper Eastern Eye, in conjunction with The Daily Telegraph of London, has just published its annual list of Britain's richest Asians. In all, six from East African refugee families made it into the top 10.

Number one is Mike Jatani, one of four brothers who started the Lornamead Group (beauty products) in 1978, eight years after the Amin explusion. Today, their company, started from scratch, is worth £650 million ($1.2 billion).

According to The Daily Telegraph, the pharmacy sector is the biggest, with the Mehta brothers (8^th) and husband and wife team Navin and Varsha Engineer (12^th) between them accounting for £300 million -- over half a billion dollars.

In the fashion segment, one of Britain's best loved women's clothing chains, offering outstanding fashion value for money, is New Look, owned by one Tom Singh, whose Indian parents brought him to England when he was one year old and set themselves the task of peddling goods from door to door. Tom Singh and his wife opened their first store in 1968. By the mid-1990s they had 200 stores. In 1998, they sold the chain to a venture capitalist for £156 million and Singh took a role as non-executive director. In 2004, New Look returned to the private sector and Singh rejoined as managing director. Sikh Tom Singh's in the No 6 slot. Also in fashion, Shami Ahmed, who created Bloggs jeans, comes in at No. 13.

Another Sikh, Jasminder Singh, born in Dar-es-Salaam, with his Radisson Edwardian Hotel chain, comes in at No 5.

The only new entry to the top 20 this year is an entrepreneurial travel boss at no. 18 with £95 million, displacing the fetchingly described "curry magnate", Sir Gulam Noon. Last year, Noon was 16^th on the Asian rich list with £100 million, but now with just £85 million doesn't merit a place at the Asian top table. (The displaced Noon has been otherwise engaged in the traditional British rich man's sport of trying to buy a peerage under the table -- the second such Asian businessman caught in Tony Blair's latest wheeze to raise money for the Labour Party -- an encouraging demonstration of just how integrated Britain's Indians have become.)

Steel parts tycoon and cricket-enthusiast Lord Swraj Paul (he rather sweetly lists his membership of the MCC -- the world famous Marylebone Cricket Club -- on his resumé and contributes time and money to helping disadvantaged boys take up the game), is No 3 and worth £450 million. He and his wife recently managed to get Non-Resident Indian status from the Indian government, which means they will have the right to settle in India one day. Who comes around goes around.

Those expelled from East Africa were third generation immigrants to Africa, and had created assets and wealth. Which is why Idi Amin was so interested in them. Now, those families are again third generation immigrants, this time to Britain, and again they are rolling in wealth. How was this extraordinary feat accomplished twice?

How does one account for a group of people who came from the Third World to the First World with nothing but a suitcase, within three generations, overtook around 99.5 percent of the natives in terms of wealth?

Like the Chinese, ethnic south Asians have a reputation for possessing shrewd commercial instincts and a willingness to sacrifice short term advantage (i.e. going to work for someone else in return for a regular salary) in the service of a long-term goal. The entire family stays focused.

Those families in the 1970s were indeed strangers in a strange land. They didn't waste time on regrets. They hunkered down and got to work. The parents of Tom Singh traipsed around neighbourhoods peddling goods from door to door for years. As did others. They were thrifty. They worked long hours. They saved their money and reinvested it in themselves. Indians keep it all in the family and the mates of their children marry into the business also. Tom Singh's parents amassed some money from their door-to-door peddling, but it was their son Tom and his wife who opened the family's first store, and subsequently 200 more.

Another key to ethnic Indians' success is, they do not look to banks for money. If money is needed, they look within the family or extended family, offering a part of the business by way of repayment.

The three richest British Asians were excluded from the Eastern Eye/Daily Telegraph list because their business interests lie primarily outside the United Kingdom. Numbers two and three would be the notorious Hinduja brothers, whose fortune is estimated at around $8 billion.

Finally, not only the richest British Indian, but Britain's richest-ever individual come together in the person of international steel panjandrum 54-year old Lakshmi Mittal, born in Rajastan and whose £14.8 billion fortune puts him third in the world after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain is worth $818 million.  "

Val MacQueen is a TCS contributing writer.  "

From Powerlineblog.com.  Good news from Iraq totally ignored by Democrats and MSM per usual .... the truth is not on their agenda. 

......"So, put it all together: al Qaeda in Iraq is failing. It has little military strength, and the Iraqi people "do not support its cause." It has succeeded in one arena only: the American media. Yet, despite the despair manifested by the authors of the captured documents, that one success may be all that al Qaeda needs. Because the perverse negativity of the American press is the only view that most Americans get of the conflict's progress. And, because of their shoddy coverage of the war, our reporters and editors provide the terrorists with their only gleam of hope."

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014021.php 

By Dave Montgomery

KNIGHT RIDDER

WASHINGTON - Forgers are making tens of millions, and possibly billions, of dollars selling counterfeit Social Security cards, driver's licenses, immigrant registration cards and other papers to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

The dominant forgery-and-distribution network in the United States allegedly is controlled by the Castorena family, say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Its members emigrated from Mexico in the late 1980s and have used their printing skills and business acumen to capture a big piece of the booming industry.

Only trained experts can distinguish its fake identity documents from real ones, and the Castorena Family Organization, or CFO, as immigration officials call it, has spread to at least 50 cities in 33 states.

At a sentencing hearing for one family member in December, U.S. District Judge Lewis Bab of Denver said that the CFO's criminal reach is "simply breathtaking" and strikes "at the heart of the sovereignty of the United States of America."

The threat of terrorism has made document forgers even more menacing since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers used fraudulent notarized forms to obtain valid Virginia ID cards, which enabled them to board the two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center.

Julie Myers, assistant secretary for ICE, calls document forging an "epidemic."

Her agency, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, is waging a nationwide crackdown on forgery rings and has formed multiagency task forces in 10 cities, including Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minn. ".....

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/14527391.htm

A couple of roses before the rain got them.  They're nothing fancy but in my opinon pretty.  Photoshopped picture frame only, flowers unaltered.  Enjoy!!

"Oil Shortage Cause"
http://www.sacredcowburgers.com/fresh/showpics.cgi?cause_of_the_oil_shortage

Heartfelt thanks to all readers who take the time to read my blog posts!!  I'm not a writer so can't entertain ... but have always been an information gatherer.  Probably inherited that trait from my grandmother who read and listened to what was network news not agenda, well up into her 80's and was one of the most "with it" persons I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

To anyone who does not like the content or frequency of my blog posts, I simply invite you to be an adult and skip over it.  I care more about this nation than opinion about me.

Some of the posted immigration articles are redundant but I believe those that are do sufficiently contain a kernel of different thought worthy of posting.

It appears that this issue is not going to start and end in Washington but is becoming a groundswell at the ballot box felt all the way from local through national offices as has already begun.  I personally believe the immigration issue is going to be a uniting force for America, much to the chagrin of leftists who have worked diligently for the past 40 years to divide us as a nation.

Again, thank you very much for taking time to read!!

"Amnesty is not the solution to problem of illegal immigration
Leo Sears

"Let's cut past all the hype and spin of Monday's hoopla. Illegal aliens are just that, so let's call them what they really are -- illegal aliens. They have no right to work in this country -- they have no right to even be here.

Under current federal law, any person, business or organization is subject to civil penalties up to $10,000 and 10 years in prison if they:

* Assist aliens whom they should reasonably know are illegal or who lack employment authorization,

* encourage those aliens to remain in the United States, by transporting, sheltering, or assisting them to obtain employment, or

* knowingly assist illegal aliens due to personal convictions.

Illegals do not make a net contribution to our economy. The National Academy of Sciences found that the taxes they paid do not cover the cost of services they received. We are footing huge costs so that large companies can profit by employing illegals in low-wage positions. While we struggle to provide the high quality education, health care, and retirement security that our citizens deserve and carry the burden of illegal immigration, Mexican national policy promotes it, because the billions of dollars in remittances supports their failing economy.

Businesses are eager to hire cheap, compliant labor -- ever actively recruiting illegals. This serves as an irresistible attraction to the flow of illegals that are willing to work at substandard wages and working conditions and depress the wages for all workers. The U.S. Council of Economic Advisors says, the effect of immigration on low-skilled Americans is profound and widens the gap between rich and poor. Our fiscal well-being and the health of our labor market are in jeopardy.

Amnesty isn't the answer. In 1986, amnesty was granted to all illegal aliens who had evaded deportation for four years, or were illegally working in agriculture. Instead of stemming the flow of illegal aliens, the numbers have swollen upwards of 12 billion.

We also became fully responsible for the welfare of the 2.8 million illegals granted amnesty -- plus the family members they brought in later. A study by the Center for Immigration Studies of the first 10 years shows the net costs of the 1986 amnesty (direct and indirect costs of services and benefits to the ex-illegal aliens, minus their tax contributions) at over $78 billion. The costs of a new amnesty would be astronomical, and it would do nothing to stem the debilitating flow of illegal aliens.

By simply enforcing our current laws, deportation of our illegal population would become a non-issue. If illegal aliens were denied employment, public assistance benefits, public education, public housing, or other taxpayer-funded benefits there would be no reason for them to come -- or stay. There would also be no need for the billions we are spending at the border to keep them out. For those already here, we should provide any assistance they need -- to leave. It's the only rational solution. As long as we reward illegals they will continue to come.

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the editorial viewpoint of the Times-Standard. "

http://www.times-standard.com/opinion/ci_3793163

Click the image for Mr. Dyson's commentary.

Laying it out in simple terms this article states current laws illegal aliens are violating. 

"We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reform

by Bob Parks

Source TheRealityCheck.Org

"  Well, those wacky illegals are at it again, and our politicians are taking the bait. Although our laws are quite clear on how to legally enter the United States, apply for work, as well as what's expected of immigrants once they get here, hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers have once again been allowed to protest en masse in our streets demanding we change those laws in order to forgive their transgressions.

I wish it were that easy.

What exactly are our lawmakers going to reform? It would seem as a starting point, that they should enforce the law already written, because as I've read them, they are reasonable, there are no gray areas, and they debunk the slogans carried by illegals that they are not criminals.

Yes, they are.

Let's take a look at the laws on the books, as documented by the Department of Justice....

This appears to be fairly cut-and-dry. Section 1325 clearly reads that coming into the country without the proper paperwork, thus permission, is a crime. So, if you cross our border illegally, hide out as to avoid arrest, detention, and removal from the U.S., you are breaking the law.

It doesn't make exceptions for those wanting a better life for their families. Lots of people around the world want a better life for their families. Bank robbers want to buy a new home for their mother. No one is going to forgive their breaking of the law. What makes these illegals think their special?

Section 1325 also covers people who get married just to get into the country. Network news magazines cover this issue periodically, but unfortunately it becomes more of a love lost issue than that of law enforcement. The section also covers those who profit from the importation of illegals into the United States. "Coyotes" are breaking the law, not providing a service. Lawyers providing "Immigration Assistance" are finding ways around the law. That, too, is wrong.

What needs to be "reformed" as far as the present law is concerned? Most of the people who've immigrated to this country had to play by those rules. Nothing in this section need be "reformed."

Let's be clear on this. It's illegal to hire a person you know is an illegal alien. That also means that any illegal who asks you for work doesn't give a damn about you or your business, as they are putting you in legal jeopardy. I'll take it for granted these illegals are intelligent.

This means whether you employ illegal aliens to work in a factory or trim your hedges, employing these people puts the person(s) who hire them at further risk as false documents are sometimes accepted to verify employment eligibility.

What needs to be "reformed" as far as this present law is concerned? Most of the people who've immigrated to this country had to play by these rules. Nothing in this section need be "reformed."

Now while I can understand how easily one can be fooled by a false document nowadays, especially if you are in a border state, care should be taken and checks should be conducted to assure that the person you are hiring is not only an illegal, but whom he/she says they are. The current concerns on national security dictate additional vigilance regarding the verification of documents.

What needs to be "reformed" as far as this law on false documents? Most of the people who've immigrated to this country had to play by these rules. Nothing in this section need be "reformed."

Heads up for the criminal free-lance enterprises going on around Alvarado Street in Los Angeles. Making or using a forged passport, no matter what country is on the cover, is illegal. The only possible use of such a forged document is for deception of one's identity. It doesn't matter what immigrant rights groups or the clergy says. When you make or use a false passport to obtain anything, you are trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes. You are attempting to bamboozle someone. You are attempting to make someone think you are someone else. You are being dishonest from the very first time someone meets you.

There is nothing in Section 1543 that needs to be reformed, that is unless you wish to make all persons who provide passports suspect as to their true identity. Also, the financial ramifications of such deception is obvious.

Federal, state, and local social service benefits can be improperly obtained using such documents. That, by all definitions, could be considered fraud. And who usually ends up paying for fraud, waste, and abuse...?

Simply stated, Section 1541 makes it illegal to "issue" a United States passport for the purpose of misleading an employer or government entity as to the false identity of a bearer. Section 1541 says nothing about use of such a false document to provide for anyone's family. Giving out a passport is clearly done to make someone appear as someone else.

There is nothing in Section 1541 that needs to be reformed. Distribution of a false document for the purpose of creating a false identity is not a humane act. It is deception, pure and simple.

As I mentioned above, the only reason one would obtain falsified passports or other documents of identification, is for receiving employment or social benefits while being in the country illegally. There is no social good that can be had for allowing anyone to use a bootleg visa or Social Security card. In essence, those using false documents are also stealing.

They are stealing jobs from someone who is legally eligible to obtain one in America. They are stealing food stamps, WIC benefits, Section 8 housing, thus they are stealing taxpayer money from every citizen in the United States. For every activist who claims that illegals pay taxes, the amount we have to pay in services for those who deem themselves victims, thus worthy of our charity, dwarfs whatever taxes they "pay."

The bottom line is this:

The laws currently on the books are straightforward, non-discriminatory, and fair. They clearly define what is bad behavior. There are no exceptions to ignoring these laws so people can provide better lives for their loved ones. In every case, a person who violates these rules does no service to the United States or her citizens. The violators are attempting to deceive others and extract benefits from taxpayers. They are thieves; they are criminals. They are not undocumented, especially when they use false ones.

The only thing reforming the current laws will do is invite more to break them because it will be easier. Reforming our current immigration procedures will provide a victory to the millions who came here illegally and the millions who are coming to take advantage of reforms, should they occur.

I say should, because I believe this is not a done deal. I hope that the politicians in Washington understand that they are trying to make 11 million or so people who have broken many of the laws stated above legit, at the expense of the 300-plus million of us who pay all the bills. Hopefully, they'll get their minds right and realize that it's not the United States and her immigration laws that need reforming. It's the behavior of those who have no problem breaking our laws and soaking us all in the process.

Reform? We don't need no stinkin' reform.  "