It's a gas

About the only good thing I can think of to say about the price of gas is at least we don't have to wait in line to buy it.
Back in 1973, when OPEC, annoyed by U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, closed the spigot -- not only did the price of gas shoot up, but there were times and places where gas was doggone hard to get.
Within weeks of the October 19 announcement of the OPEC embargo, Americans found themselves waiting in line to buy gasoline and worrying about where the price hikes would end -- if, as some rumors had it, gas might go as high as a buck a gallon.
Looking back, prices have an air of unreality about them. Before the embargo, oil was trading for under $3 a barrel -- the price shock then was seeing that price quadruple to $12 before the producing nations boosted production.
Meantime, the question was how to make the gas we had take us as far as it could and where to find more when the gauge nudged empty. Stations started flying flags to indicate if they had gas to sell -- green for plenty of gas, yellow for restricted sales, red for no gas, but stop in for a cup of coffee. Drivers were restricted to gassing up on even or odd numbered calendar days corresponding to the last digit on your license plate. Schools and factories went to shortened weeks to save on fuel oil and Congress passed a national 55 m.p.h. speed limit -- the notorious "double nickel" to force fuel savings on the nation's drivers. Year-round Daylight Saving Time was instituted. The Strategic Oil Reserve was established and the Department of Energy was founded.
Meanwhile, the price of gas crept up, from 38.5 cents in October 1973 to 55.1 cents in June 1974 -- numbers that sound pretty enviable today, but as a percentage were no less of a shock to the wallet than the jumps we're currently experiencing. The friendly service station attendant was replaced by the self-serve pump.
In March of 1974, OPEC officially ended the embargo, but things never quite returned to the "way they used to be." We'd taken cheap gas for granted and that confidence was shaken -- at leas for a while. It took the long run of relatively low cost gas starting in the late 80s to lull us all back into a 1950s-stlye complacency and now - with roads full of vans, pickup trucks and SUVs we're taking it in the shorts every time we need to fill up. Only this time, no matter how much Dubya begs the King, there's no spare oil for the Saudis to pump. The taps are wide open and the latest word to folks saying we need to pump more at home is that if ANWAR were exploited to the max it would only bring down the price of crude by 75 cents a barrel.
But, if there is a bright side, consider the plight of your Dutch uncle --according to U.S. Dept. of Energy data, gas in Holland was at $9.52 last week -- and the rest of Europe isn't far behind. (For more cold comfort go to http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/gas1.html)

Capital for a Day -- We did good

There isn't a doubt in my mind as to who should be credited with getting the Minnesota Legislature and T-Paw to come to terms just under the wire -- it's you and me, folks; the good (and not so good) people of Winona. I'd dare anyone to dispute that it wasn't our stellar example of organization, good will and high calorie cuisine that inspired the Guv and the chief legislative talking heads that screwing up big-time was no way to celebrate Minnesota's 150th birthday. So they headed back to the capital for the other 364 days, knuckled down, buckled down and got the job done.
So everybody who helped organize Winona's Capital for a Day events should feel free dislocate a shoulder patting themselves on the back. From before dawn to well after nightfall, they kept things popping along no matter what -- be it folks oversleeping the sunrise to lightning bolts in competition with the fireworks. A good time was had by all.
I can hardly wait for the party we'll throw for the bicentennial ... free beer for everybody!

Dept. of Credit Where Credit is Due: President Bush is right -- seriously

Dubya's got it right this time. On Tuesday, all but one of our illustrious Senators (only Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado was the sole dissenter) voted to quit filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in another classic pander-play centered on the high price of gas.
As you may or may not recall, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in the 1970s to stockpile crude oil to give us a cushion in case our foreign suppliers get the notion to shut off the tap. The stockpile has a maximum capapcity of 727 million barrels -- about two months worth of imports -- and is currently 97 percent full -- 701 million barrels.
Our senators want to say, "close enough," arguing that not buying the oil to finish filling the reserve will bring down the price of gas.
Like heck it will, the president is telling them and has promised to put the kibosh on the plan when it hits his desk.
Like I said -- President Bush is right.
Look we burn up 21 million barrels worth of oil in this country every day -- the government is buying 70,000 barrels a day to put away for the day the folks we're buying from won't sell us any more. That might not be spit in the ocean, but it comes pretty darn close. Not buying it sure isn't going to make filling up that Durango noticeably less painful.
But does send a pretty damn clear message that Congress -- on both sides of the aisle -- is more interested in pandering for a pre-election day advantage than it is in doing anything serious about this country's energy situation.
At the present rate, it will take us 300 days to stockpile enough oil to last us one day -- and the Congress can't even see that far into the future.
With leaders like that -- I'm afraid we deserve $4 gas ... if there's gas to buy at all.

Compulsory patriotism

It looks like a few junior high kids out in Dilworth, Minn., have the adult world all tied up in knots. It appears that their principal caught them sitting down when the rule book said they should be standing up, and because that standing up time was to coincide with the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance we've got lawyers, reporters and all manner of the Extremely Concerned weighing in. Meantime, I'm guessing the kids are getting quite a kick out of all the fuss they've managed to cause. Few things are more fun for a 14-year-old than making adults act like fools.
The fact is, those kids were breaking a rule that never should have been written, and once written, never should have been enforced. The Supereme court settled the whole question of kids saying the pledge long ago -- they don't have to. Which is good for the Constitution, good for the pledge and good for patriotism in general.
I've never held public professions of love for God and/or Country in particularly high regard. Every time I see somebody proclaiming loud and long on either topic, the parable relating the prayer of the Pharisee and the publican comes to mind -- that God and country are most sincerely honored in the quiet recesses of mind and soul.
Oh, I have nothing against saying the Pledge before a public meeting or offering grace before a meal -- they are pleasant rituals that remind us that we are community, bound by certain traditions and common understandings -- but merely standing to say the Pledge no more makes a person a patriot than recitation of the words of the Apostles' Creed makes a Christian.
There is no way to make patriotism compulsory -- going through the motions under threat of reprisal is as alien to the spirit of "liberty and justice for all" as the auto-de-fe is to John 3:16.
The kids in dilworth may be catching on to this, but it appears we adults still have a lot to learn.

Well -- duh!

Here's one more for the "well, duh!" file -- Monday headline in the Strib -- "Teens use E-nudity to get noticed." As a former teenage boy, if it's teenage girls who are E-nude, I'd have to say that is something that I would have noticed ... and noticed with enthusiasm.
But to the disappointment of randy young fellows everywhere, reading down into the story, it turns out it was just one young lady in one small Wisconsin town and everybody involved is deep in dutch. Another case of dumb kids doing dumb things ... so it goes.
Except some folks just can't leave well enough alone. So now it looks like there's one more thing for The Extremely Concerned to be extremely concerned about: high school kids putting nekkid pictures of themselves up on their Face Book pages for all the world to see. The Strib spent a lot of time with a U of M prof who's paid to study such things (a job a lot of guys would really like to have) waxed earnest about how unwise it is for teens to post booty shots online and the need for parents to patiently explain this to them.
Methinks she frets too much.
Yeah you never know might want to be the next Jenna Jamison or John Holmes when they grow up, but there's no question that most of our kids do a pretty good job of keeping their privates private -- for all the good and righteous reasons they've learned from Mom, Dad and all the other folks who've passed along wise counsel in the course of their lives -- that and the fact that they're not pea-brain stupid.
I can almost imagine the reaction when earnest parents sit their kids down for a serious talk about keeping their pants on when the cameras come out. Those kids will unscrew and optic nerve rolling their eyes. I would suggest any parent attempting such a conversation begin it with the phrase, "Since you are unfathomably stupid and obviously devoid of any smidgin of self respect, I have something I need to talk to you about. You see, I read in the newspaper..."

Failing the test

By Jerome Christenson

Winona Daily News

The sky isn’t falling.

Our children aren’t slack-jawed sub-literates, our schools aren’t fluff-factories staffed by money-grubbing careerists, our future is not about to be seized by hordes of Third World Einsteins bent on reducing us to burger-flipping Wal-Mart shoppers.

No matter what some folks claim the test scores say.

It’s time for the great annual wailing and gnashing of teeth engendered by the release of the results of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment tests in math and reading – and the resulting judgment levied on each and every Minnesota public school as to its success in making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) based on standards laid down in Washington by folks who’ve never met your child, your child’s teacher or visited your child’s school.

Let me venture the humble opinion that, as far as any individual child’s future is concerned – and ought it not be the future of the individual child that concerns us – those numbers are less important than the average number of peas put on his lunch tray on test day. The kid didn’t have to swallow the peas –we don’t have to swallow the assumptions behind those numbers.

Let’s for a minute remember what that data is based upon … a lot of kids sitting down and spitting back random tidbits of information tucked away in their little punkin-heads – the kid with the most tids wins – and so does her school.

Now, just to get this far in writing this little essay I’ve checked the spelling and definition of the word “engendered” in my desk dictionary, emailed the communications director at the Minnesota Department of Education to find out what MCA-II stands for (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment – but they leave that tidbit off their website), and looked up a story I’d reported five years ago just to be sure I remembered it right. Had I sat down to a test made up of those three items I would have scored 66 percent – probably not enough to be considered Adequate Yearly Progress by the state, certainly not enough to be considered Adequate Daily Accuracy by my editor.

The fact is, unless you’re lucky enough to be chosen to appear on Jeopardy, taking quizzes is just not a particularly important lifetime skill.

And isn’t it really lifetimes we’re talking about here? During the Watergate hearings, the question put to the nation was “what did the president know and when?” That’s the same question we’re putting to our kids, but what was critical in discerning guilt for the commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the most these test scores can tell us is that little Billy hasn’t learned all there is to know about compound fractions – yet. And figure, if the test was on Monday and the lesson on compound fractions was scheduled for Wednesday, what’s the big deal if Billy doesn’t know the answer – yet? Do we really have to fire his teacher, bulldoze his school and consign him to a lifetime of plucking for Gold’n Plump?

And before we join the hyperventilating over “rigor” and “standards” and “preparation for life in the global economy” it might be appropriate to let a bit of reality intervene. I’d offer that I am now approaching the 40^th anniversary of my last attempt at solving a quadratic equation – a feat that was, at one time, seemingly critical to my life. In fact, I spent three years of my youth studying algebra, geometry and other kinds of elevated mathematics – knowledge of which has proven as valuable in my day-to-day life as an understanding of the chemical composition of the earth’s core. However, each and every April since I was no more than 15 I’ve been confronted with Form 1040 or a derivative, but never in my high school career was so much as a class hour devoted to depreciation schedules or amortization tables.

So much for rigorous preparation for life.

Life is long. Despite the impression given by educrats and helicopter parents, life doesn’t end with the senior class trip nor is resurrection ordained in a college admissions office. Each day, each hour presents new chances, new opportunities, new challenges. There is a rhetorical nod given to “lifetime learning” whenever there is a grant to be written or a referendum pursued, but all the fussing about which answer sheet ovals were blackened on a given day gives the appearance that each of our brains is locked up and sealed about eight weeks prior to the end of 11^th grade – forever after to be baffled by whatever may be new, different and novel.

Not so.

Celia Werner passed away a few days ago. She was 107 years old. At 101 she was at the Winona Senior Center, emailing friends and acquaintances, exchanging digital photos with family. She didn’t have the opportunity to master the personal computer until she was well into her eighth decade simply because there were no PCs to master before she was in her eighth decade. “If you've got your mind, you can be 150 and still learn,” she said, when she was well on her way to proving it.

There’s no way to tell if Celia’s class would have scored well on the MCA-II; no way to tell if her school made Adequate Yearly Progress. In the course of 107 years, it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. What the kids don’t learn today, they can learn tomorrow – or whenever it becomes important enough to need to know. Life is more than a quiz bowl and that’s what our kids need to be prepared for. Life is long and the only test worth worrying about comes at the end of it. Let’s see to it they all pass.

Dumb

A 15-year-old boy is about the dumbest thing on God’s earth ... he’s so dumb that he figure’s he knows just about everything there is to be know and it’s his duty to make everybody he encounters aware of that fact. I was about that age and intelligence level when, at the outset of a fairly long auto trip alone with my father, I made some archly witty observation concerning “dumb farmers…” forgetting for the moment the occupation followed by my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather, uncles, aunts, cousins … not to mention a pretty much duplicate genealogy on my mother’s side. His reaction was pretty straightforward … the longest and least successful game of 20 Questions I can recall … What’s a good average yield for second-crop hay? How do you tell when a heifer is going into heat? What’s the best treatment for white scours in week-old pigs? …

I wasn’t as dumb getting out of the car as I was going in. Neither were farmers.

Achy

My feel-bad's been hurting for the last couple of days. A slight case of the achy-nasties, I fear. Nothing serious, I assume, but it take the zing of the day and sure makes it seem like a long time until quitting time. Oh well.

Gerbils -- for no reason

Ahhh, the joys of parenthood…

When ours were about 7 and 9 they adopted a couple of gerbils. Now, a gerbil is one of the most underendowed creatures the Lord ever made, and though Gayle and I checked, rechecked and checked again to assure ourselves that the pair had identical primary and secondary sex characteristics – we apparently missed a very small, but very potent package (I suppose this would disqualify us from careers with the TSA), which led to – in order – pregnancy, birth, maturing and exponential proliferation. By spring, our juvenile rodent population had entered three figures – and since gerbils really have very little to do but eat and make new gerbils, the situation was reaching critical – they were about to run me out of house and Habitrail … a situation even the youngsters were beginning to acknowledge, though they were resolved that none of their babies would go for a long swim down the Mississippi … my instinctive solution to the dilemma.

Fortunately, the weather was growing warmer, the grass greener and the world more inviting. A little nudging brought both kids (and their mother) around to the view that young gerbils would be much happier with their freedom – and with the help of a World Book entry documenting that the species was native to the cold, harsh environs of the Gobi Desert, they would live long and prosper in the relatively mild and lush climate of southern Minnesota.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning in May, Erin, Erick and took three ice cream pails of gerbils to a remote corner of Prairie Island and gave them their freedom.

I notice the owls were unusually fat that summer…

So, why is it that they hate us?

Americans in Denial about 9/11

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on September 14, 2006, Printed on September 15, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41635/

So, why did they hate us after all?

We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice, callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness, and partisan ignorance.

We dealt with 9/11 in many ways. We instantly dubbed everyone who died in the accident a hero and commissioned many millions (billions?) in mawkish elegiac art. We created a whole therapy industry to deal with our 9/11 -- related grief, made a few claustrophobic two-star Hollywood movies about the bombings, read Lisa Beamer's book and bought that DVD narrated by Rudy, watched Law and Order entertainments about sensational murders committed that morning and left for Jerry Orbach to solve, made bushels of quasi-religious references to "hallowed ground." We made many careers out of assigning blame for the attacks, with the right blaming Bill Clinton, Michael Moore blaming George Bush, and the clinically insane blaming those mysterious demolition experts who allegedly wired the bottoms of the towers with the explosives that "really" caused the tragedy. And we talked about 9/11 -- to death. We blathered on so much about the attacks and whined so hard about our "lost innocence" that the rest of the world, initially sympathetic, ended up staring at us in suicidally impatient agony, a can of kerosene overturned above its head, like the old lady sitting next to Robert Hays in Airplane!

We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell really happened, and why.

That process of self-examination was flawed from the start. We were screwed the moment Fareed Zakaria wrote his infamous "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?" essay for Newsweek a few weeks after the attacks. The question -- why do they hate us? -- was maybe the right question, but that was only if everyone could have agreed on what it meant. For what do we mean by they, and what do we mean by us? I for one am not entirely sure we're clear on these points, even now.

That we couldn't agree on who they were should be obvious by now. To the Bush administration the answers to the they/us questions were, respectively, "Foreigners" and "America." From the outset the Bush crew showed that they were both unwilling and unable to budge from the post-WWII political paradigm they'd all grown up under, and viewed the 9/11 events purely as an attack on the American nation-state by a belligerent foreign power. Their solution to the terrorism problem revolved entirely around a strategy for dealing with those foreign nation-states that were the "sponsors" of terrorism -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea. It was characteristic of the fourth-rate minds in this White House that they not only immediately got lost in the wrong political paradigm in response to the bombing, but picked the wrong country, Iraq, to punish for the crime. If we give them another ten years at it they'll probably end up introducing market reform to Antarctica as a backup plan.

Bush and his buddies grew up in the Cold War, an era where two countries dominated the world and even the scraggliest warlord in the central African jungle was usually a client of one or the other. It was a fun time for the overgrown Risk-playing nerds inhabiting America's think-tanks, who spent half a century describing all human life as an ongoing chess match between life-affirming American capitalism on the one hand and, on the other, the bloodsucking communist religion cruelly foisted upon the world by a conspiratorial bund of grubby German Jews (Hitler was eighty years too late!) and French homosexuals. That was what it came down to: world politics for half a century was a pissing match between two warring factions in the sociology department of the international University of Well-Fed White People. Things were so simple, even George Bush could understand them.

Well, things have changed since then. The operating conflict on earth now is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but one pitting organization vs. anarchy. All over the world, the borders of nation-states are blurring and becoming more and more meaningless. From the north Indian subcontinent, to the jungles of the Amazon basin, to the Middle East, and especially to west and central Africa, nations are fast losing their integrity while local warlords and gangs are taking over.

In some places in the world, authority changes more from block to block than nation to nation. In countries like Pakistan, which last week was forced to sign a humiliating peace accord with belligerents on its own territory of Waziristan, a tribal leader can twist the nipples of a nuclear power and not only keep his neck but come out ahead of the game afterward. In the late '80s and early '90s the Risk nerds squealed with delight over the supposedly unipolar world created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but actually the change was from bipolar to apolar. There was anarchy and a crisis of international identity on the other side of that wall. Our pole, one might say, turned out to be a lot smaller than we thought it was.

So what happened? We never got that far in our reasoning. The farthest we ventured, before returning to our regularly scheduled programming, was a vague concession that the world was now "different." "All of this was brought upon us in a single day -- and night fell on a different world,' said George Bush in his "Churchillian" State of the Union address that next January. "The United States confronts a very different world today," opined the 9/11 commission report. It was "After 9/11, A Different World," as CBS News put it. Different how? Well, that's the part we haven't really figured out yet.

For the most part, America looks pretty much like it looked before 9/11. We spend most of our time pounding Ding-Dongs and Sonic burgers, watching ESPN, and surfing porn sites, while transnational corporations -- the silent allies of drug cartels and warlords in the dismantling of the traditional nation-state -- install turnstiles in congress and steadily move our entire manufacturing economy overseas. Our culture is a parade of idiot reality shows where ordinary citizens eat caterpillars for money and southern jocks drive moving billboards in a circle at 200 mph in front of euphoric crowds of a hundred thousand. In the intellectual north, our braver political dissidents dress in t-shirts with the face of George Bush morphed onto a pig's body and watch documentaries in which other intellectuals brag about being tricked by the Republicans into voting to invade the wrong country.

So what's changed? Well, we now hang our heads when we remember that dark day, kneel before the appropriate icons (Pat Tillman, firefighters, the flight 93 passengers) at the appropriate times, and periodically make sure to remember the Big Lesson, AKA Anything Can Happen, Even To Those Such As Us. The Monday Night Footballcrew this week commemorated 9/11 by bringing a firefighter named Tim Buckley into the booth; when asked what was different now, the humbled Buckley said that after 9/11, you have to think about things more when you go out on a call. "You don't know what to expect, after something like that," he sighed, shaking his head.

Somber nods all around to that in the booth, and then, with the snap of a finger; back to the field --- 3rd and 16 for the struggling Raiders...

In this light one could almost view our response to 9/11 as a triumph of the American system. If 20 knife-wielding lunatics blowing a hole in the middle of Manhattan on international television can't even temporarily knock us out of "What, me worry?" mode, you have to feel pretty good about our future chances for remaining just as cheerfully numb through even a more serious disruption of our fantasy existence.

America's response to 9/11 was basically to blow off the entire question of why it happened, change the set-design behind the same old us-vs.-evil commies cowboy-movie worldview, and to patch the hole blown in our self-esteem with a crude mix of stage-managed self-congratulation and sentimental claptrap. Our failure to actually win our subsequent self-declared war on the evildoers we explained away by using a modern innovation, i.e. taking a New-Agey approach to our shortcomings and forgiving ourselves for our little imperfections. In the Dr. Phil age, actual achievement isn't important, so long as you're comfortable with yourself! Make a list every morning, think about the good things in life! Living in Madison Avenue's irony age helps also -- when even Tony Sopranos pours his heart out to a shrink every week, it's not hard to convince Americans that they're still tough, even though Osama bin Laden is still doing bong hits on Al Jazeera five years after we boldly promised to kick his ass.

Whatever happened to actually being tough? What happened to speaking softly while we carry that big stick? Of staring problems bravely in the face, of taking the world seriously? History long ago washed that generation of "us" away, along with the world we still think we live in.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/41635/

No time for such nonsense

Published in the Winona Daily News, June 7, 2006

C’mon Mr. President, we don’t have time for this nonsense.
We have a country that’s slipping into the red at the rate of $1.75 billion a day, that’s importing 11 million barrels of oil a day and losing our young men and women to Iraqi bombs and snipers every day and you’re telling us to pay attention to who might want to marry whom.
With Iraq, the deficit, spiraling energy costs, health care, melting ice caps and the price of tea (and everything else we buy there) in China — amending the Constitution to deal with something that hasn’t happened yet is worthy of Congressional debate and special presidential attention?
We don’t think so.
Do we think it’s a cheap political ploy to distract citizens from their country’s real problems?
Yes we do.
It’s a case of the president crying “Wolf! Wolf!” while pointing to a snoozing Chihuahua.
Whether an individual believes the right to marry should be limited to heterosexual couples or not, the Marriage Protection Amendment before the Senate this week is an ill-considered un-needed politically-driven legislative sideshow.
From the nation’s beginning, setting standards for marriage has been a state, not a federal prerogative. How old, how closely related, how long to wait — marriage laws all change significantly as a prospective couple crosses state lines. Fifty years ago, in some states, race entered the equation. Nowadays, in some states, gender no longer does.
The Republic has survived.
Specifically, when it comes to same-sex marriages, 18 states have amended their constitutions to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” Other states, Minnesota among them, have the same definition written into statutory law.
Furthermore, in 1996, the federal Defense of Marriage Act became law which specifies that, under federal law, “a marriage is the legal union of a man and a woman as husband and wife” and absolves any state from the obligation to recognize a same-sex marriage performed elsewhere.
What most people believe the proposed Constitutional amendment is intended to do has already been done.
So what is the president all worked up about?
Well, he insists, someday, somehow, some court might decide all those laws and all those amendments are so much ink on paper and only a Constitutional amendment can protect us against that.
It’s a pre-emptive amendment — a lot like the invasion of Iraq was a pre-emptive war.
We suggest a conservative approach. If the Supreme Court rules that heterosexual exclusivity is an unconstitutional encumbrance on Americans’ civil and marital rights, then let the Congress take up the issue and, if in their wisdom they see it necessary to overrule the court, send such an amendment to the states for consideration and ratification. But first, let’s let the idea get past Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy and their somewhat less strict-constructionist colleagues. Until then, it’s just the president and his partisans waving a political red shirt — the 21st century equivalent of segregationist race-baiting in the Old South.
We don’t have time for this nonsense, Mr. President. Neither should you.

By Jerome Christenson on behalf of the Winona Daily News editorial board, which also includes publisher Rusty Cunningham, editor Darrell Ehrlick, photo editor James A. Bowey and sales and marketing manager Tom Best. To comment, call 453-3522 or send e-mail to letters@winonadailynews.com

George C. and George W. "Never be outniggered again"

Amazing how we've suddenly discovered Mexicans.
Mexicans all over the place. Cutting the grass. Washing the dishes. Killing the pigs. Pulling the beets. Mexicans everywhere -- to hear the Republicans tell it, anyway.
Funny how all these Mexicans showed up just as GOP Congressmen and their lobbyist buddies are heading to court like a bunch of Enron executives. How the folks from South of the Border changed from lettuce pickers, gardeners and garbage collectors to petential terrorists and inplacable threats to the Ameican Way of Life about the time Iraq turned to pus, the NSA got caught with their ears to the national keyhole, middle income people realized rich folks were getting more in tax cuts than they'd be taking home next year and a guy driving a cowboy Cadillac needed a hundred dollar bill and a fistful of singles to fill up.
Yeah, our kids are getting blown up, our constitution is getting ripped up and our oil supply is drying up and we're supposed to be worried there are too many Mexicans cleaning our hotel bathrooms, fixing our roofs and watching our kids.
Somehow it reminds me of what George Corley Wallace said after he lost his first run for governor of Alabama way back in 1958 -- "I'll never be outniggered again."
Well, Condi won't let George Bush say exactly that, but that's what he's doing -- the only difference is the skins are a lighter shade of brown and the accent is different.
When will we start hearing about the administration's "Final Solution to the Illegal Problem?"

It's the principal of the thing I can't stand

I don't know principal Tom Barth over at Central High in La Crosse, and I don't want to.
This is the guy who had one of his students - Carter Broer of Coon Valley, arrested -- yes, arrested -- for putting his administrative mug shot on a parody of a Captain Morgan's Rum ad. The kid may be charged with defamation for his PhotoShop exploits. The principal out to have his no-funski likeness and petty-ass action spread from sea-to-shining-sea and beyond.
When high school seniors go to court for making fun of the principal, our country is in deep, deep trouble.