• Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for May 5th on 14:00

    These are my links for May 5th from 14:00 to 14:17:

    • California Bill allowing college aid for illegal immigrants passes Assembly – The Assembly passed legislation Thursday to allow illegal immigrants to receive college scholarships, setting the stage for new fighting over an explosive social issue whose prospects were buoyed last year by the election of Gov. Jerry Brown.

      The Assembly approved the first of two "Dream Act" bills, Assembly Bill 130, which would allow a small segment of undocumented immigrants who currently qualify for in-state tuition to apply for scholarships from private donations. Majority Democrats passed the bill on a 51-21 party-line vote.

      Assemblyman Gilbert Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, proposed both AB 130 and a pending companion measure — Assembly Bill 131 — that would open the financial aid door even wider by allowing those illegal immigrants to qualify for Cal Grants and other publicly funded aid.

      "We cannot afford, our economy cannot afford, to deny educational opportunities to anyone who has the strength of character, the personal discipline, the intelligence, to make it" through California's college or university system," Cedillo said in a statement.

      Cedillo's bills would apply to students who have attended a California high school for three years or more, graduated from a high school or attained an equivalent degree — and, if they are illegal immigrants, commit to legalizing their status if given the chance.

      The group targeted by AB 130 represent only a tiny fraction of college enrollment — 1,941 at the University of California, 3,633 at California State University and 38,202 at community colleges. Of those totals, illegal immigrants comprise about 32 percent of UC's figure and an unknown but perhaps higher percentage of those from state and community colleges, according to a legislative analysis of AB 130.

      ======

      Of course, California has a massive budget deficit but the Democrats want to reward their constituency for their political support.

      The taxpayers be damned.

      It doesn't matter if you are in this country legally or not, California will help you get the subsidized college education.

      How much of an illegal immigrant magnet is this?

    • “Getting to Denmark” – By Mark Steyn – The Muslim world is certainly “getting to Denmark.” It’s also getting to the Netherlands, to Austria, to France, and beyond. In Scandinavia and in other advanced Western societies, the state grows ever bolder in constraining freedom of expression and other core Western liberties. In the interests of enforcing the state religion of a hollow and delusional “multiculturalism,” basic tenets of Fukuyama’s “rule of law” — including due process, the truth as defense, and equality before the law — are tossed aside in the multiculti version of heresy trials. As recent decisions in Michigan suggest, America is not immune to this trend.

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      Read it all.

      Hope we don't go the way of Denmark

  • Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for March 13th on 17:53

    These are my links for March 13th from 17:53 to 17:59:

    • Mark Steyn: Now even cowboys dependent on Washington – How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Tuesday, Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain't big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

      "The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts," said Sen. Reid. "These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist."

      "Tens of thousands" would "not exist"? There can't be that many cowboy poets, can there? Oh, c'mon, don't be naïve. Where there are taxpayer-funded cowboy poets, there must surely be cowboy poetry festival administrators, and a Bureau of Cowboy Poetry Festival Licensing, and cowboy poetry festival administration grant-writers, and a Department of Cowboy Poetry Festival Administration Grant Application Processing, and Professors of Cowboy Poetry Festival Educational Workshop Management at dozens of American colleges credentialing thousands of cowboy poetry festival workshop co-coordinating majors every year. It all adds up. In Western railroad halts where the Last Chance Saloon shuttered in 1893, dusty one-horse towns are now glittering one-grant towns, where elderly hoochie-koochie dancers are being retrained to lead rewarding lives as inspectors from the Agency of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Handicapped-Access Compliance. Used to be a man could ride the range for days on end under lonesome skies with nuthin' on the horizon 'cept a withered mesquite and a clump of sagebrush, but now all you see are clouds of dust and all you hear's the mighty roar of thundering hooves as every gnarled ol' wrangler in the territory races for the last hitching post outside creative-writing class.

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      Read it all

    • Hugh Hewitt: Obama’s oil production protest fails fact-checking – "So any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn't match up with reality." So declared President Obama Friday with the practiced firmness of voice and direct look into the teleprompter that signals to veterans of the Obama watch that the chief executive has strayed far from the truth.
      In May of 2010, Obama's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, issued a six-month moratorium order for drilling on the outer continental shelf. When the courts struck down that illegal order, Team Obama switched to a slow-roll strategy, demanding new permits for exploration, and accomplished the same thing as a moratorium.

      Jonathan Tilove, the New Orleans' Times-Picayune's Washington correspondent, set a standard that few met national reporters met when he collected the statements of Louisiana legislators in response to the president's whopper:

      "The gap continues to widen between what President Obama claims to be true about domestic energy production and what Louisianans know is true," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

      "With prices at the pump climbing toward $4 per gallon, the president is asking us to believe that his administration supports expanded drilling off the Gulf Coast," Vitter continued. "I guess that's true only if you don't actually need a permit."

      "Someone should tell the president that April Fool's Day is still weeks away," said Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., told Tilove. "Today's news conference is another example of the president misleading the American people regarding his energy policy.

      Tilove got similar quotes from Louisiana Republican Reps. Charles Boustany (the "president's remarks … are wholly untrue"), Rodney Alexander, Bill Cassidy and Steve Scalise. They all provide variations on the same theme: The president isn't telling the truth about oil production and his administration's war on new supplies.

      =======

      Obama has NO energy policy and is frankly voting present.

    • General Electric-designed reactors in Fukushima have 23 sisters in U.S. – The General Electric-designed nuclear reactors involved in the Japanese emergency are very similar to 23 reactors in use in the United States, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission records.

      The NRC database of nuclear power plants shows that 23 of the 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. are GE boiling-water reactors with GE's Mark I systems for containing radioactivity, the same containment system used by the reactors in trouble at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The U.S. reactors are in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

      In addition, 12 reactors in the U.S. have the later Mark II or Mark III containment system from GE. These 12 are in Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state.

      =======

      Time to re-examine the entire nuclear power industry through Congressional hearings.

      Past time for the Obama Administration to develop a national energy plan.

  • Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for February 28th from 15:42 to 16:54

    These are my links for February 28th from 15:42 to 16:54:

    • Obama flies workout trainer out to D.C. often, increases carbon footprint – Washington may be the nation’s capital — and one of America’s fittest cities — but its trainers apparently don’t cut it for President Barack Obama, who frequently flies his personal fitness instructor from Chicago to D.C., reports the New York Times.

      Cited as the mastermind behind first lady Michelle Obama’s “famously toned arms,” trainer Cornell McClellan has managed the Obamas’ workout routines for more than a decade. The owner of Naturally Fit, a Chicago-based personal training and wellness center, McClellan spends part of his week in D.C. at the president’s request.

      “It was an easy sell for me, because I thought of it as kind of a duty, to serve the president,” McClellan said.

      McClellan usually works with the Obamas in early morning sessions at the White House gym. The first lady and president both attempt to work out for at least an hour each day, and Mr. McClellan says he typically sees them two to four times a week, depending on their other duties.

      ++++++

      Obama may be just a little hypocritical here?

      You betcha.

    • Is the U.S. Immigration Debate Going in the Right Direction? – New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican who became the state’s first Latina governor after the November elections, rescinded an executive order by former Gov. Bill Richardson that prohibited law enforcement officials from asking people about their immigration status for the sole purpose of determining if the individual had violated immigration laws. Opponents have likened the bill to Arizona’s SB1070 and claim the order will lead to racial profiling. Will other states follow suit and enact similar legislation? Is comprehensive immigration reform likely to be addressed this year and, if so, what would that consist of?

      +++++++

      Read it all

      There will be NO comprehensive immigration reform unless Obama is re-elected and the Democrats win 60 plus members of the U.S. Senate.

      This means there will be none in the foreseeable future.

    • Mark Steyn: STATES OF THE UNIONS – You don’t have to go to Athens to find “public servants” happy to take it out on the public. In Madison, politicized doctors provide fake sick notes for politicized teachers to skip class. In New York’s Christmas snowstorm, Sanitation Department plough drivers are unable to clear the streets, with fatal consequences for some residents. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Dept head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged. Three hundred Sanitation Department workers have salaries of over $100,000 per year. In retirement, you get a pension of 66 grand per annum plus excellent health benefits, all inflation proofed.

      That’s what “collective bargaining” is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

      Big Unions fund Big Government. The union slices off two per cent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic Party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of two-per-cent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic Party, which thereby grows government… Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

      In his pithiest maxim, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century social-democratic state and the patron saint of “stimulus”, offered a characteristically offhand dismissal of any obligation to the future: “In the long run we are all dead.” The Greek and Wisconsin bullies are Keynesians to a man: The mob is demanding the right to carry on suspending reality until they’re all dead. After that, who cares?

      If the new class war is between “public servants” and the rest of us, some countries no longer have enough of “the rest of us” even to put up a fight. That’s why you can’t wait to fight in the last ditch. The longer you wait to stand up against the “public service” unions, the less your chance of winning.

      ++++++++

      Read it all

      There is a class war between public servants and the rest of the taxpaying public.

      Mark Steyn illuminates the conflict in this piece.

    • Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels Is Tough On Budgets : NPR’s Interview – n 2005 on his first day in office, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed an order ending collective bargaining with public employee unions. He said it freed him to turn over some state jobs to private contractors.

      Daniels was able to put his state’s finances in order just as other states headed for trouble. Now, that’s a big part of his reputation, and some Republicans are promoting him as a possible presidential candidate.

      Yet as he looks back on that budget-cutting moment with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Daniels says that he also added government jobs in the child welfare system.

      Mitch Daniels is a former budget director to President Bush. He won re-election as governor at the same time Indiana was carried by President Obama. Currently, he’s pushing contentious conservative plans. Just last week, Democrats walked out of the Indiana state Legislature protesting a range of Daniels’ plans, including government vouchers for private schools.

      Read the full transcript of Steve Inskeep’s interview with Gov. Mitch Daniels below.

      +++++++

      Read it all

  • Mark Steyn

    Audio: Mark Steyn Mocks Black Eyed Peas Super Bowl Political Punditry

    Mark Steyn on yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh Show – note the photo of Steyn

    I was running through the blogs and this piece caught my eye.

    If you were paying attention during the Super Bowl halftime show last night, you would have heard the Black Eyed Peas deviate from their lyrics to send a political message: “Obama, let’s get these kids educated, create jobs so the country stays stimulated.”

    That message struck a nerve with Mark Steyn, the fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh on Monday. Steyn expressed his disapproval by mocking the Black Eyed Peas for inserting that not-so-subtle message.
    If you were paying attention during the Super Bowl halftime show last night, you would have heard the Black Eyed Peas deviate from their lyrics to send a political message: “Obama, let’s get these kids educated, create jobs so the country stays stimulated.”

    That message struck a nerve with Mark Steyn, the fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh on Monday. Steyn expressed his disapproval by mocking the Black Eyed Peas for inserting that not-so-subtle message.

    “The Black Eyed Peas were there last night and they amended their song to insert the words, ‘Obama,’ to insert a little bit of a political message, a searing political insight you get from the Black Eyed Peas, ‘Obama let’s get these kids educated to create jobs so the country stays stimulated.’ I’m Mr. Squaresville, so I don’t know what the Black Eyed Peas – how that tune normally goes. I think that’s their song, ‘Where is the Love.’”

    Why?

    The photo of Mark Steyn on the YouTube audio above is one I snapped about five years ago. Here is the piece, I wrote in October 2006: Mark Steyn Watch: America Alone – A FLAP Surprise.

    After all of these years Mark Steyn has not slowed down – one bit.

    Enjoy the audio/YouTube.

    Previous:

    Mark Steyn @ The Claremont Institute Dinner: The Bear Flag League

    Mark Steyn @ The Claremont Institute Dinner: The Dinner

    Mark Steyn @ The Claremont Institute Dinner: The Reception

    Mark Steyn @ The Claremont Institute Dinner: The Departure

    Mark Steyn Honored at The Claremont Institute’s Sir Winston Churchill Dinner