When A Hallmark Card Just Won’t Do, Cut Off Somebody's Head

Defending the Empire

Rattlesnakes Are Smarter Than 16% Of U.S. High-School Biology Teachers

It turns out that rattlesnakes in Arizona are starting to lose their rattles, apparently in reaction to human encroachment of their habitats. As people build houses in the desert, trample the earth to build golf courses, and roll their RVs into previously virgin territory, banging smack into wildlife, they – we - have a tendency to react badly to nature, which results in a lot of dead rattlesnakes. A handful of the rattlesnakes that haven’t ended up deceased are those that manage to keep quiet and slide on by – in other words, the rattlers that can’t rattle.

Spanish Spoken Here

The U.S. Census Bureau recently coughed up a bunch of fascinating statistics, and not only fascinating, but also depending on how your mind words, frightening, depressing, and/or mind-boggling.

And we’ll start with one little fact: Nearly three quarters of the 727,070 residents of El Paso, Texas speak Spanish at home, even if they are fluent in English. The numbers also show that 1 of every 5 living in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California, use Spanish, not English, at home.

Think about that.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah

John McCain will lose come November, and he will lose by a lot. That’s the way it has been for a long time now, and nothing’s going to change it. And when John McCain loses, he will fade from the national scene, and not long after, disappear from the Arizona political landscape as well. And that will be that.

And then we will be left with Sarah.

Dear God, Not Sarah Palin

Let us bow our heads, my friends, and make short work of Sarah Palin: I won’t bother to repeat the details of her “unusual” family history, which promises to dip into the truly bizarre and probably unpleasant before long. Nor will I raise her dubious political story, from her duplicitous tale about the Bridge to Nowhere, and her attempted banning of books, on and on; rest assured all that will be thoroughly vacuumed in short order.

No, my issue is simple enough, and it is this: The United States of America cannot have a vice president who believes in creationism, intelligent design, or anything other than basic science.

Hilary Clinton gave her speech at the convention and she said everybody should vote for Barack Obama. Okay, she said a little more than that, she said, I did this, I stand for that, I’m really terrific…and the other guy is okay, too – but that just about summed it up.

The reaction from the media was predictable. CNN loved it, MSNBC practically swooned, and Fox thought otherwise. (Actually, if Abraham Lincoln himself had been reanimated to say something nice, a Fox host would have dismissed him, claiming the Great Emancipator maybe wasn’t a real Republican, as he hadn’t been around to vote for Reagan.)

Syndicate

When A Hallmark Card Just Won’t Do, Cut Off Somebody's Head

Written by Len Sherman
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
The latest fad in Mexico’s drug war, meaning the war between drug cartels and the government, the public, and one another, is decapitating rivals and enemies to make the point. And if that seems too subtle, then messages accompanying the heads (or the bodies – whichever the killers prefer), so common that they have their own special name – “narco-messages” - provide undeniable emphasis. From the LA Times, in describing a poster that attended upon four severed heads, found by the side of a highway in the northern state of Durango: "This is a warning," it said, listing an alphabet soup of Mexican police agencies and the noms de guerre of several well-known drug figures. "You get what you deserve." The same day, police in neighboring Chihuahua state came upon five swaddled bodies accompanied by a hand- lettered placard. "This is what happens to stupid traitors who take sides with Chapo Guzman," said the message found in Ciudad Juarez, referring to Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the supposed leader of the main drug gang in adjacent Sinaloa state. The killers closed with incongruous propriety: "Yours truly," they signed off, "La Linea." A nice touch, the send-off line, though most narco-messages, regrettably enough, are rife with grammatical errors. In fact, many of these notes are part of an ongoing dialogue of insults and threats between cartels or others who offend them. Five days after police in Durango discovered the severed heads, they found another head, also with a message. It was an apparent answer to the earlier killings. "We too can respond," the note said, according to Mexican news reports. Analysts and law enforcement officials view the messages as a version of wartime psychological operations, lending medieval-style brutality a touch of 21st century media savvy. And we thought the boasting between rap artists was bad. In Sinaloa state, site of a violent conflict between Guzman and former allies led by Beltran, white cloth banners have been lashed to overpasses and billboards. The messages, lettered in black and red, are peppered with the nicknames of key players and frequently too arcane to follow. The narco-messages also go high-tech, with videos of executions posted on YouTube. And that’s not all. The drug cartels are not only declaring their threats and such, they are also publicly advertising. In the border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, in the state of Tamaulipas, neatly painted banners appeared this spring advertising jobs in the Zetas, one of the country's most fearsome crime groups. The banners, addressed to "soldiers or ex-soldiers," offered "good wages, food and help for your family." Los Zetas are about as scary a bunch as you can imagine. Starting with some 50 ex-army commandos, who had joined up to provide the enforcer wing to the Gulf Cartel, the organization has grown to some 2,000 members, and, in the process, has outgrown it initial sponsors. Instead, Los Zetas is a force operating on its own, murderous beyond belief, responsible for, at least, hundreds of deaths of both civilians and government officers, and perhaps the greatest threat to the stability of the Mexican state. Understand this: human smuggling, drug smuggling, murder, corruption, so on – in Mexico, and thus overflowing into the U.S., they are all under the control of the same people, the same cartels. Anybody who expects to get on top of illegal immigration, understand that you’re going into a fight with some of the nastiest people on the face of the earth. Most likely, it will be a fight to the death.
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 01 July 2008 )

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Border/Immigration

Mexico Finally Seals Border, Stops Americans From Buying Cheap Gas, Keeps Lanes Open For Drugs

Whoever said Mexicans couldn’t or wouldn’t control their border has just been proved wrong. Yes, our friends and allies to the south have finally stepped up and shut down traffic…traffic, that is, bearing U.S. plates and carrying containers fuel, looking to save a few bucks with cheap Mexican gas.
Read more...

Mexico Invades America – Again

Mexican soldiers on Arizona soil held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint Sunday night. The Mexicans retreated after backup agents responded.

This is far from the first time the Mexican military, and/or those wearing Mexican uniforms, most likely members of Los Zetas, have crossed over the border, in support of drug and illegal immigration operations. Though both governments have sought to downplay such incidents, the increasing number of these sometimes violent incursions – over 200 confirmed incursions since 1996 - makes the situation difficult to sweep under the rug.

Mexico is finding that dealing with the devil is not a deal without consequences. And those consequences are coming home to roost in a most horrific way.

Not long ago, the Mexican government maintained an “understanding” with the drug traffickers: Don’t cause problems in Mexico, and roll your drugs into the United States without too many hassles. Oh, and don’t forget the payoffs.

Whichever side you’re on in the immigration debate, the landmark raid at the Iowa meatpacking plant back in May, which rounded up 389 illegals, proves that this is an issue that demands action and resolution. The political void has resulted in a situation that is simply intolerable in a nation of laws and liberty.

To begin the abuses: More than 20 of those arrested were underage workers, some as young as 13, forced to work shifts of 12 hours or more in dangerous conditions, sometimes through the night, six nights a week, using razor-edged knives and saws to divide up freshly slaughtered beef.

The Fence Cuts Both Ways

The fence, any fence, hasa certain basic appeal: separate Us from Them, the latter consisting of the bogeymen of your choice. With the immigration crisis in full bloom, the idea ofa fence sounded as simple and as direct as a solution could be. Stop them from coming by stopping them from coming.

Ah, if reality was so black and white. Or, in the case, so American and Mexican.