BartBlog

June 4, 2007

Do not be hoodwinked by the $5,000 fine in the Immigration Bill!

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 12:23 am

This was sent to me by a conservative:

Every illegal alien in the US is already subject to a $5,000 fine.

The $5,000 fine for entering the country illegally is already in existence under Title 19, USC 1459. The $5,000 fine is for a first offense. Each subsequent offense carries a fine of $10,000. There is also a criminal penalty of up to one year in prison for violation of this code. There are signs posted on the US/Mexico border in both English and Spanish that clearly state the following. (See photo below):

WARNING
ALL PERSONS AND VEHICLES MUST ENTER THE UNITED STATES AT A DESIGNATED PORT OF ENTRY ONLY. THIS IS NOT A DESIGNATED PORT OF ENTRY. ANY PERSON OR VEHICLE ENTERING AT THIS POINT IS IN VIOLATION OF TITLE 19 USC 1459 AND OR 19 USC 1433 AND IS SUBJECT TO A $5,000 PENALTY.

Here is the text of Title 19, USC 1459

FEDERAL LAWS:

Title 19, USC § 1459 Section (f) and (g). Reporting requirements for individuals

(f) Civil penalty. Any individual who violates any provision of subsection (e) of this section is liable for a civil penalty of $5,000 for the first violation, and $10,000 for each subsequent violation.

(g) Criminal penalty. In addition to being liable for a civil penalty under subsection (f) of this section, any individual who intentionally violates any provision of subsection (e) of this section is, upon conviction, liable for a fine of not more than $5,000, or imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or both.

See Title 19 USC 1459 here: http://www.members. aol.com/borderra ven/laws2. txt

Illegal aliens that are apprehended are returned to their homeland under the Department of Homeland Security’s “Catch and Return” policy with no payment of the $5,000 fine.

Many will make the journey back across the border at a later date which means they are subject to the initial $5,000 fine plus a $10,000 fine for each additional crossing. Some are caught and return on numerous occasions until they make it through. Every illegal alien apprehension, to include multiple apprehensions of the same individual, are on record.

Let’s assume that an illegal alien has made 3 trips across the border. That individual’s fines would total $25,000 ($5,000 first offense, $10,000 each for the 2nd and 3rd.). Under this bill, the individual will only be required to pay the initial fine of $5,000. This bill actually provides an amnesty for the individual’s 2nd and 3rd fines!

See Catch and Return Policy here: http://www.ccis- ucsd.org/ news/WSJ02- 21-06.pdf

The $5,000 fine for the first offense and $10,000 fine for subsequent offenses have not been enforced. The additional $1500 is a processing fee. The cost for citizenship to those who violate our immigration laws is a fine of $5,000 and processing fee of $1500.

Had enough? Let’s kill this bill and secure our borders. Let’s demand that the border fence be built as required per the Secure Fence Act.
See: http://frwebgate. access.gpo. gov/cgi-bin/ getdoc.cgi? dbname=109_ cong_bills &docid=f:h6061enr. txt.pdf

June 3, 2007

A Study in the Rhetoric of George W. Bush

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 6:20 pm

Mark Danner, TomDispatch, June 2, 2007

This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007

When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I’m afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxietythe suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.

Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world – and I use “get on in the world” in the very broadest sense – well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.

Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed … intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war – and what a very strange wartime it has been.

When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq war had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the president, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today – “Words in a Time of War” – surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the president uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The president has lost control of those words, as of so much else.

Read More Here

Scarlett O’Bush in ‘Gone With the Windy Congress’

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 8:43 am

Frank Rich: Failed Presidents Ain’t What They Used to Be

Filed under: Uncategorized — Volt @ 8:38 am

Frank Rich, The New York Times, June 3, 2007

A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.

That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).

This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.

The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.

Read More Here

June 2, 2007

Bart, sorry for this post – I couldn’t help it.

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 5:17 pm

From a column by syndicated writer, Jason Love.

I was picking lint from my collar when my editor called with a dangerous mission: to get a Brazilian bikini wax and report back to you. Apparently, men are ripping hair from the shyest parts of their body, and no one knows why. They needed someone on the inside.
I arrived at the day spa without a reconnaissance. Lauren the hostess guided me through the cutting and curling and dyeing to a waiting room. Scratch that. Any room so fancy should technically be called a foyer. The chandelier tinkled to the sounds of Beethoven, and cinnamon candles warmed the room. I sat on a couch with entirely too many pillows and tried not to touch anything. Lauren hurried away to do hostess things.
Odd place for a man condemned to wax.
Men are not cut out for hair removal. A man can eat nails, drive a Harley, become a Navy Seal, and still snivel before a pair of tweezers (or as I like to call them, Devil’s Chopsticks). It is baffling that women endure this pain — repeatedly — for any cause, including their own salvation.
Lauren circled back for me and soon I lay in the waxing chamber, where everything was fresh and folded and blindingly white. Was I in for surgery or hair removal? As instructed, I removed my clothes and assumed the position. It was like lying on a chiropractor’s table, only face up with legs spread in gynecologic uncertainty and, on second thought, nothing like the chiropractor at all.
A cheery voice interrupted my willies: “You muss be the lucky man.”
And in she walked, a stout Argentine woman whom you liked instantly even if she was about to rain terror on your netherparts. Her name was Blanca, but she answered to anything that sounded like cries for mercy. Blanca was an older woman, better for the wear, and had an accent straight out of Evita. Her voice soothed like a lullaby, but you sensed that she could beat you silly if she had to.
For some reason, it only now occurred to me that Blanca would see me naked. I felt like we should get to know each other, have a drink or something, but she went right to work like a mother changing a diaper. She had seen every size, shape, and color, and mine did not bear mention. So it goes.
Blanca showed me the instruments of destruction: liquid wax, cloth strips, and a box of Kleenex (for my eyes). Her arms were brawny as if from subduing previous customers. I asked Blanca what made a wax Brazilian. Despite my hopes, it had nothing to do with live samba dancers.
“The Brazilian es when everything goes, even where the sun no shine. The French, however, es when you leave a leetle strip…” She demonstrated.
I asked her if we could start with a colder, more conservative country, say, Poland.
Blanca laughed as she dipped her rag in hot — extremely hot — wax…
click here for the rest

Ye Olde Scribe Presents: A Stupid Joke and Idiotic People

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ye Olde Scribe @ 12:37 pm

This edition of Ye Old Scribe is more potluck than column. Just bits and pieces of humor or human behavior Scribe has found either amusing or infuriating over the past few weeks…

You Call that A JOKE???
“Mixing some laughter with an occasional ‘HUH???’”

What do you call a sexually confused part fish, part human?

Ethel Mer-Man.

Ok, all you youngsters… bet you were the “huh,” right?

Damn kids…

Links to Oblivion and Other FUN Places
“Surfing the net at the speed of intellect.”

Bushworld goes out on a limb again…

Well, IS She or ISN’T She?
“Pointing out the obvious.”

If she had simply been a desk jockey, or she was of little use to the War on Freedom… uh, “Terror,” then what’s all the hubbub about bubs?

And, finally…

A Worse than Dukakis in the Tank Moment
“Some people just shouldn’t wear helmets.”

Joe is absurd enough. Take a look-see at the pic. Is that Lieberman or a very old and stupid looking elf?

Note what so many soldiers ASKED him, then note what he SAID. Please, PLEASE, Mr. No-Momentum… volunteer? Perhaps you might save a REAL American when you waste your worthless hide. Considering your opinions and how you think things should be run, you’d be an EASY target.

June 1, 2007

This should make you libbies happy – Grimgold

Filed under: Uncategorized — grimgold @ 8:19 pm

Greetings from the Dark Side!
Enjoy!

GOP BASE DRYING UP THE CASH

“The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned. Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions…Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.

“Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans. ‘Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue,’ said a fired phone bank employee.

“The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) both report having trouble raising money from the small donors who are the backbone of all the fundraising committees for both major parties.”

- Washington Times, 6/1/07

REVEALED: Carl Bernstein’s “Hillary” book reveals Sen. Clinton to be… a loyal and protective wife!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Centristdem @ 12:12 pm

Carl Bernstein says his new book “A Woman In Charge” shows Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton as someone who “camouflages” her real self for political gain. But the ultimate pettiness of the excerpts released so far only proves Mr. Bernstein is the latest writer to go to the Clinton well for a bucket of cash and that Senator Clinton may be more like average people than Bernstein wants to admit.

The following are “revelations” from an interview Bernstein did with TODAY host Matt Lauer on Friday, as written in an MSNBC article.

To tell the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s journey from a humble childhood marked by abuse at home to the White House, and later the U.S. Senate, Bernstein talked to about 200 close friends and advisers to the Clintons. Bernstein said he learned a lot about Hillary Clinton, including steps she took to try to silence the various women linked to her husband throughout his political career.

Translation: Hillary Clinton, like many women throughout history, attempted to protect her philandering husband’s career by pressuring various women to not kiss and tell. GASP!!!

“There’s not a sex act mentioned in this book,” he added. “What is important is Hillary savaging the women he was with, forgiving Bill repeatedly throughout their married life, but not forgiving the women he was with.”

Translation: Hillary Clinton is a terrible person for doing what many people do in cases of adultery – forgiving the spouse and blaming the extramarital partner – sometimes repeatedly. If you’ve never been in such a situation, you really can’t judge. Again, GASP!!

The author goes on to disclose, among other things, that Bill Clinton fell in love with another woman while becoming a rising political star in Arkansas, and quotes insiders who say Hillary Clinton wouldn’t give him a divorce.

Translation: Oh… my… God! You mean Hillary actually didn’t want a divorce??? GASP!!

Bernstein said “A Woman in Charge” offers readers numerous revelations, including the fact that Hillary Rodham shocked her friends when she failed the Washington, D.C., bar exam.

TRANSLATION: Hillary Clinton joins a long list of people, including JFK, Jr. and Kathleen Sullivan, Stanford Law School’s former dean and a renowned attorney, who have failed the bar exam. It’s been estimated that almost half of the country’s bar examinees fail their state’s bar exam each year.

Further, the fact Clinton failed her bar exam the first time is not a revelation.

Philippe Reines, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman, dismissed the relevance of Bernstein’s work, saying the book is intended to make the Clintons look bad for profit, yet again. Lauer said Reines told TODAY: “Is it possible to be quoted yawning? This is an author’s agenda to take an old story and rehash for cash.”

Translation: Same old shit.

There are many legitimate beefs people can have with Senator Hillary Clinton on matters of politics and policy. But a respectable writer’s
90s style rightwing slash and burn smear tactics, and the left’s embrace of them, really do nothing to further his reputation or cause. In fact, this book may just tarnish them.

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