Nom de plume: Rivrdog

You have the Guidon, Mr. Romney

...and, in case you don't know it, the Guidon Bearer is supposed to stay out in front of the formation. You are now leading the Republican Party race for President, so let's look at the battle streamers on that Guidon, and how they may differ from your past performance.

Second Amendment: You were a big gun controller in your stint as Governor in MA. There is a battle streamer on your Guidon that says the Second Amendment MEANS WHAT IT SAYS, so you NEED to tell us that you will NEVER sign any kind of gun control legislation restricting the right of US citizens to keep AND bear arms. You did that in Taxachusetts. Your apologists say you yielded to avoid even more drastic gun control, but a Guidon Bearer never yields, never falls back, always stays in front. Tell us you WILL be a Second Amendment absolutist. Tell us you will have your DOJ go after all the Gunwalker people (if Obama doesn't pardon them all on his last day in office). Tell us that you will have your people bear down on the DeeCee Administration to move them off their position of resistance to Heller implementation. Tell us that you will put the DOJ into an aggressive posture to hammer places like NYC, Chicago, etc to get them to recognize that they can't disarm their citizens. You could start by cutting off Law Enforcement funding to any jurisdiction which does not meet a basic test of complying with the Second Amendment. Your predecessors did that for civil rights violations in the past, so just look at 2A compliance as a Civil Rights process.

ObamaCare: You started this ball rolling with your "RomneyCare" in MA. It will be your job, if elected, to erase ObamaCare, and that will take some work, because like an invasive weed, it has spread it's roots everywhere: into the tax system, into continuing funding laws, into the Pharma industry, into the very Emergency Rooms at all local hospitals. It's complete re-write of the way medicine is provided has and will screw up delivery of medical services for decades, even if you rip it all out, and do it quickly. Don't even think about leaving it partially in place, rip it ALL out and THEN make any necessary reforms, starting with draconian tort reform for malpractice, and a total cut-off of free ER care for illegals. You DO realize, don't you Mr. Romney, that the reason most states can't balance their budgets is that the cost of providing medical care to illegals has overwhelmed state budgets? In my State of Oregon, it is estimated that almost a third of education funding goes to illegals and over a third of Medicaid.

Immigration: See above paragraph, AND, Close the farging borders! Keep out all further illegals, use the military for that, THEN get to work on deporting the ones who are here. If you want to accelerate the right of naturalization for some, do that, but make sure that those individuals who are illegal now start their naturalization process by returning to their native country, waiting a determined period, then applying for a visa to return, and then they return via normal entry, just like I do whenever I leave the country and come back. Make sure all naturalization candidates declare their previous illegal stay in this country, and pay up all their back taxes they avoided by working under the table. They need to pay for any medical care they walked out of paying, too. This stuff CAN be tracked, so track it and start collecting those back taxes. If every illegal owes just $5K in back taxes, and there are 20 million of them here, that's 100 billion dollars, not exactly chump change and definitely NOT forgivable. Maybe some of them can work it off, but COLLECT what they owe, dammit!

Control the Economy: This may not sit well with most of my conservative buds, but there has to be some central control over the economy. This isn't "morning in America" like it was for Ronnie Reagan. The Global Economy had barely gotten started then, but now, we have robber barons controlling vital companies all over the globe. You can't just give them their head and let them run with our economy. They will continue to rob us blind and it will get even worse under your Administration. How about a basic principle of Everybody Pays Some Tax for starters? No business baron should be able to have his company pay no taxes. A small minimum tax will not cripple any business, and with all the regulatory burdens you are going to lift off these global businesses, they can afford to pay some taxes. Likewise, no individual gets off without taxes, either. Establish a minimum income tax of at least 5%. That will mean that the welfare-dependent might have to forgo a few cans of malt liquor per month, or keep that 42" flat-screen instead of upping their lifestyle to a 60", but DO IT.

Carry that Guidon, sir, and carry it proudly. If you do, the troops will follow you, and that's all you need to begin to turn this Nation around.

Calling all legal beagles

I have a question for you:

Can the US Supreme Court ever take up any case "on their own motion"? Some lower courts can and do take up matters, even political matters, on their own motion, and issue rulings as a result of argument that Court hears.

Just wondering, because it seems that a thorough investigation in Keyna turned up not only eyewitnesses who have direct knowledge that Mrs Soetoro had her child Barack in a hospital there, but seem to have turned up a Kenyan birth certificate for him as well. That birth certificate contains the usual footprint on it, and has been certified by a British official as genuine. It seems, according to the eyewitnesses, that Mrs. Soetoro flew to Hawaii three days after giving birth, then registered Barack as having been born in Hawaii.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio's recent look at the HA "birth certificate" did not include this information from east Africa.

So, the question devolves to the SCOTUS then, which Court would have to decide the issue anyway, and decide it before the election, hopefully. The only way I see that happening is if the Court took the matter under advisement on it's own motion. From a forensic point of view, if the Court found that the Keynan birth certificate was believeable as a registered document, it could order Barack Obama to provide a copy of his footprint, and that would settle everything. If the footprint on the document matched that on the Keynan birth certificate, then the course is clear, and President Biden takes over immediately (and probably pardons Obama immediately). Of course, the SCOTUS would then have to decide what happens to all the legislation and Executive Orders that bear Obama's signature, and THAT mess could take some time to sort out.

Oh, and if you haven't guessed, no, in fact I DO NOT consider the appellations of "Birther" to be a pejorative as the Left wants you to believe. The cop in me see this as a mater of forensic science and law, nothing more. As a matter of science and law, impartial findings are expected, even if the matter is highly charged, politically.

Strange Christmas Eve dream

Put in a loooong day yestiddy, getting ready for the opening of Schloss Rivrdog to the whole fandamily for the big feast tonight. So, I went to bed about 2330 and slept well.

I woke up at 0330 from one of the strangest dreams I've had in a while. It had REALLY strange, almost apocryphal, overtones.

I was at some sort of way stop, evidently run by a militia, somewhere, in the warm season, and I was there with my M35A2, from which all the goodies to run a major field kitchen had been unloaded. There was a large gang of geezer-ish people there running the field messing station, and what's even stranger, no fireams were visible. I was in charge of the field kitchen, and we had set up long tables, a mess-tray washing station, and had huge kettles of hot food coming off of old white-gas-burning field stoves (REALLY old stoves, the Army hasn't used that kind since the 60's). A long line of Latin-looking men was moving steadily through the chow line, getting their meal (some sort of stew, overcooked veggies, a roll or two) and sitting down at 6-foot folding tables WITH TABLECLOTHS to eat. They spoke quietly to each other in Spanish while they ate. After they ate, they got up, returned their trays and utensils in a military manner, and walked down the road, a narrow two-lane country road. There were a LOT of them walking down that road.

I'm fairly sure I wasn't in Mexico in this scene, it was somewhere in the SouthWest, maybe Texas. The Latinos were moving towards the border, and there was no traffic of any kind coming from that direction.

I got up from bed and whizzed, but when I returned to bed the dream didn't return with me, as they occasionally do.

The political implications of the dream boggle my mind, but enough of this whimsy.

Cooking day today.

Up and at it, MY "field kitchen" is about set to turn out the Big Meal.

Merry Christmas to all.

Dick Lamm on Immigration

Lamm was the last of the Hubert Humphrey Liberals, the last of the Democrats to actually emprace American values.

I find his treatise on Immigration compelling. It's given here as an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

Lamm does not address the solution of expulsion, or ex-migration of the illegals, but I see that as his only major fault here.

He touches on many subjects with the Immigration debate that liberals have placed off-limits, such as the "anchor-baby" issue.

His article is a good read.

Oh, the hypocrisy!

So, the latest conservative to be "outed" for allegedly employing illegal aliens is Lou Dobbs.

Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!

No, it isn't Lou Dobbs, or Meg Whitman, or any other "outed" person who is the hypocrite, it's the "out-ers" who are the hypocrites.

Look at their stand:

1. We must have unlimited immigration, our borders are not to be closed.
2. We must tolerate and accommodate immigrants who don't speak our language, it's wrong to criticize them for not learning English.
3. We have to be tolerant of their cultural resistance towards assimilating into OUR culture.

Given THAT mindset, just how the HELL are we supposed to figure out which of the many applicants for maintenance jobs are legal and which are illegals?

Given the fact that the Federal Government itself has REFUSED to allow any lesser Government or group of private citizens to help it perform it's Constitutional duty of securing the borders, and it CONTINUES to insist that no one may ask for proof of citizenship of illegal-appearing persons (for example, speak Spanish only, have no knowledge of US custom, etc), then how the HELL is Lou Dobbs or anyone else, including this blogger, supposed to tell if workers have documentation?

The simple fact is that we CAN'T tell who is legal and who isn't, we are not PERMITTED TO KNOW who is illegal and who isn't.

So, for all the liberal (or conservative) hypocrites who want to "out" folks for employing illegals, consider that:

1. The illegals will find work (or crime!) regardless. They have taken the cue from the liberals (and a few "conservatives" like GW Bush) as well as their own Government, and they KNOW that we can't ask, and the Social Security number check is ineffectual, because when it discovers discrepancies, no agent arrives to seize and deport them.
2. If I'm charitable (damn hard to be with this hypocrisy getting crammed down my craw and up my hoo-hoo at every turn), I ascribe nothing but a strong work ethic to these people, and figure that if they want to work, more power to them, they are as good or better than our own lazy citizens who won't work and just want Uncle to provide for them.
3. If I'm NOT charitable, I have to admit that there is NOTHING I can do about it anyway, and in the meanwhile, I have a house to get painted, yard work to be done, child to be nannied, crops to be planted then gathered, etc, so I act on MY legitimate needs, and I hire, and the devil take the hindmost.

So, go have another triple-shot frou-frou coffee drink, all you hypocrites, and gab with false pride that you've "outed" yet another staunch restricted-immigration advocate. Just don't look in a mirror. All that dope you smoke and all that caffeine you guzzle can't hide the ugly truth you will be clobbered with when you see your own image:

You're a hypocrite.

You are a culture-destroyer (of both the illegals' culture AND ours).

You are an asshole.

Dog Days

The "dog days" of Summer are finally here in the Northwest. We're faced with a week of 90's, no rain in sight. In my somewhat-weakened state, brought on by the dieting, I wouldn't do well living out of doors now, so I have to cancel plans to go cruising with my Yacht Club this weekend.

The diet goes apace, and I have lost about 14# so far, almost half my initial goal. The first 30 days is up next Wednesday, and it looks like I am on pace to conclude the weight-loss part of this diet by October. Following the weight loss will come the basic life-re-adjustment to keep the weight off, and restore myself to proper conditioning. It all works out, because conditioning is better left to the Fall, than tried in the middle of Summer.

Diets make one introspective, though, so I become more critical and less tolerant of errors around me. I have to be careful to not let this changed viewpoint sully my relationship with the gudwife. So far, I'm doing well there...

I CAN become less tolerant of politicians, so when Janet Reno took the stage in the morning Robert Gibbs Theater of the Absurd, aka, the morning White House Briefing, I listened with a critical ear. She spouted some stats that were generated to make us believe that the Obama Administration has a handle on the invasion at the southern border. I believe the Sheriffs, who are actually there, not the Gauleiter trying to snow us with her propaganda. The Administration won't get away with this, the first of a barrage of lies about immigration to try to snow the voters. Most of those voters live in communities with ever-expanding Latino ghettos, and are VERY familiar with the problems some in those ghettos cause.

Is it just me, or have the daily comics in the paper ceased even TRYING to be funny? I can't remember when I last had a good belly laugh while reading the comic section. I have kept track of funny strips in my paper. There used to be three, Hagar the Horrible, Calvin and Hobbes and the Wizard of Id. Calvin got the boot from my fishwrapper several years ago for political incorrectness, while Hagar and the Wiz have held sway, but are, at best, just humorous, not capable of generating belly laughs. The others are just eye-fillers. Of the strips in that category, some get nauseous, such as today's (7-13-2010) Mutts which pimps the anti-whaling pinheads, "Sea Shepherd" (no linx for pinheads). Two classic comics have "rolled over", or re-started. "Peanuts" is almost timeless enough to get away with it, but "For Better or Worse" isn't, and doesn't, especially since the drawing of the panels took a HUGE dive into the dumpster with the roll-over.

In political strips, "Doonesbury" went mostly a-political long ago, and became less funny as a result (yes, I CAN laugh at liberal humor), and "Day by Day" (of course, not in my daily blatt, I have to read it online) is pointed only occasionally, not almost always like it used to be.

So, readers, help your Rivrdog out: do you have a toon that is a daily read, even an obscure one (geeky or soft porn) that YOU want to extoll as lifting YOUR spirits on a daily basis?

Immigration vs. Agribusiness

It doesn't have to be a conflict. For every farmer who wails, "but if you stop the illegals, I won't have any source of labor to pick my crops", I have a solution.

First, we close the border. Then we establish 100% prosecution for illegal entry or over-staying a visa (NO grace period or amnesties). As the illegals begin to self-deport, the farmers will feel the pinch, so:

The solution: Short-term visas which permit entry ONLY for the laborers, and ONLY for the farming season. In CA, most fruit/vegetable crops are harvested April-July, then some citrus in the winter. With this idea, a farmer's labor broker signs up pickers ON THE MEXICAN SIDE OF THE BORDER, they get a visa good for no more than 4 months, and the visa is good ONLY for the listed laborers, not their families. The visa ends, and the pickers must return WITH the labor broker to the border for repatriation. The brokers get to charge the farmers reasonable fees for these services. The broker is fined for every laborer who does not make it back with him to the border.

What will happen is that the labor brokers will have bounty hunters who will go into the migrant areas and locate these footloose laborers, and those bounty hunters will get paid by the brokers AND get paid a bounty by ICE when they bring them in.

Maybe it's time to get back to the notion that seasonal farm labor is honorable work. My wife picked berries and beans at local farms during her youth. When I first moved to Oregon during the early 60's, the kids (and some retired folks who were spry enough) stood out on the streets before dawn during the picking seasons, and the farmer's buses picked them up and took them to the fields near the city. This was how almost ALL crops were picked back then, by city dwellers who worked in the fields. For my wife, descended from Japanese immigrant farmers, it was how she got ALL her spending money as a youth.

In my father's day, some 100 years ago, those same city dwellers MOVED to the farms during the hop-picking season (hops were a HUGE cash crop in Oregon then), and lived for weeks in tent cities out in the country. My grandpa would rent a large tent, and his wagon driver would take it to the depot, and the family and the 400-pound tent would ride the Oregon Electric Railway or the Southern Pacific up the Willamette Valley for a couple of hours. The local interurban train would stop next to a farm on grandpa's request, and the farmer's helpers would board the baggage combination car and get the tent, put it into a wagon and all would go off to the farmstead.

The men would pick hops for 10-14 hours, tough work on ladders, with meal breaks, and the women cooked and served in communal dining tents to feed them. Older kids babysat younger ones while the parents worked. In the evenings, there would be music, for singing and dancing, but not too much celebration since another workday awaited. There were NO illegals doing this work, which was MUCH MORE labor-intensive then. Wages depended on productivity only, and only the pickers earned wages. The farmer provided the food at his cost, and kept the supply of it coming to the labor camp. My grandpa continued this work as a family tradition even after he succeeded in business and had money rolling into his real-estate development empire.

As a side note, I still shop at a meat market, now Voget's in Hubbard, OR, where my grandpa bought meat when it was his turn to be on the logistics crew for the camp. The place is just over an hour by freeway from my house now, but back in the day, it was an adventure to get there. Note on that link: there are TWO meat markets now in the small town of Hubbard, and one is a "carniceria"....

Our country grew to greatness on the backs of city folk working the fields, but now we have to import our labor, and we have it set up so that we import crime and huge welfare expense along with them.

Very interesting.........

...but not funny, as Arte Johnson's Sgt. Schultz character would say on Rowan & Martin's "Laugh-In". 

It seems that an astute lawyer familiar with the US Constitution (which USAG Holder apparently isn't) thinks that Holder should have filed his lawsuit directly in the US Supreme Court, and that Federal courts of lower jurisdiction cannot hear it, making last week's rejection of AZ Senate Bill 1070 in Judge Susan Bolton's US District Court improper and illegal on it's face.

In this barrister's second statement, it is claimed that the State of Arizona could legally declare war on Mexico.

Wouldn't Arizona need a REALLY BIG militia to do that?

These are startling developments, if true. Not being a Constitutional lawyer, I couldn't verify it one way or another.

If true, certainly Eric Holder must have had at least one staff lawyer point this issue out. Maybe some congresscritter up to his or her oath might just inquire? If Holder ignored internal memos saying that his lawsuit against Arizona was illegal, he should, at the very least, be fired summarily by the President, and maybe prosecuted for sworn falsification.

At what point do we did we become a dictatorship?

Judge Bolton's whacky ruling - updated

See the news clip. Probably more in-depth legal analysis coming. I'll update the links as better detail surfaces, but preliminary analysis by Fox News reveals what seems to be a horrible legal blunder by the Judge.

It's simply this: by the language she used in her ruling, NO authority other than the ICE (and presumably other Feds with whom ICE is formally linked) may inquire about immigration status. This not only stops enactment of AZ SB 1070, it immediately dumps all State regs about employers inquiring about employees' or prospective employees' immigration status.

*******************************************************************************

UPDATE: 072910 1218 PDT: Since the ruling, some legal pundits have said that it didn't change as much as it first seemed, and local law enforcement officers are (still?) welcome to inquire about an arrestee's immigration status after they are booked. That's what AZ SB 1070 was all about: getting more of the illegals off the streets by being able to inquire about their status BEFORE an arrest, but doing that obviously doesn't suit the Feds.

Also, it appears that this blog-post has turned over a few rocks, and seems to have attracted the sort of critters that hide under rocks. Enjoy the comments, they'll stay open until they lose their civility, which they haven't, so far.

Also2, don't you love the demonstrators in Phoenix? They went there hoping to have an angry underclass support them while they created some mischief after the ruling. The ruling went their way, so now, instead of saying "thanks, Phoenix District", they are trying to stir up trouble with Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. Sheriff Joe, as you suspected he might, announced that any of the demonstrators who blocked access to Federal buildings downtown would be invited to inspect his jail from the inside. Hopefully, those arrested will get to inspect the CANVAS part of the jail. It's probably 110 in Phoenix today, and the monsoon has started...

******************************************************************************  The Judge just completely muddied the waters of immigration control by going farther than even the most ardent "let them all in" people would have asked for.

But, this wouldn't be the Rivrdog Blog without a positive end to a disaster, eh?

 I propose that LEOs in AZ immediately begin using the "Cookie Monster Solution"....

Years ago, I worked alongside a patrol officer who found a way around the requirement to have a Probable Cause listed on the arrest report for every arrest, even a warrant arrest. That was a requirement, long since overturned, that some Federal judge here in Portland saddled us with 35 years ago.

The patrol deputy, street-named "Cookie Monster" because of his proclivity for that type of treat, went to the Bureau of Identification, and proceeded to compile a thick loose-leaf notebook filled with mug shots of various wanted folks, making sure that he had a wide assortment of facial types and features represented in the pages of his notebook.

The Cookie Monster, a Second Night (graveyard) patrolman, then proceeded to stop whoever he wanted without having to "build probable cause" (follow the chump around until he broke a traffic law). There is a huge cop's tactical advantage in being able to make a traffic stop when and where the cop wants to, instead of having to wait until maybe the person to be stopped has the tactical advantage on YOU.

The Cookie Monster System stood the test of time and the scrutiny of all the local courts.

I see no reason why some version of this system couldn't be applied to the situation down in AZ. Were I re-inventing it for that jurisdiction, I would take every identity theft convict and put their info into a computer folder and have it available to all the cops via their Mobile Data Terminals (in-car computers).

There are SO many identity theft suspect with warrants, and SO many have been convicted of that crime, that I'm sure every physical attribute of facial structure is represented on that list. Naturally, when you bust someone you think might be an identity theft suspect, they are going to have fake ID, so you can hold them until they are properly identified, and until the Feds have had a chance to check their immigration status.

Partial solution to the Judge Bolton lunacy.

Lack of standing to sue

...the 'Ol Rivrdog is not a lawyer, but does know when there's a "lack of standing to sue". No foreign nation may intervene in US affairs by filing a lawsuit requiring a government to do one thing or another, or, as in this case, not do something (enforce immigration law).

Legal Mexican immigrants already are required by law to carry their immigration papers with them whenever they are in public, and illegal Mexican immigrants have no right to be in the country at all, so just who is the Mexican government suing in favor of here? Mexican zombies? The ghost of Pancho Villa, a notorious invader of the past century?

The Federal court would be well advised to so advise the Mexican government to take their lawsuit to a court which they could legally file such process in.

There's an avenue for this: it's called diplomatic relations, and we have those with our neighbor. This is a case of the correct thing being a diplomatic letter of concern. I'm sure Hillary will know what to do with that letter, when and if she gets one.

If this lawsuit actually gets heard, I hope that the Court takes Judicial Notice of the fact that the USA has failed in it's duty to control the border, and therein lies the crux of the problem. After making such a Judicial Finding, perhaps the Court, in dismissing the Mexican lawsuit, will refer it to the correct place, the Executive Branch, which alone is responsible for enforcing immigration law. The Court might also suggest to the Mexicans that THEY could cease and desist from encouraging illegal migration to the US, and perhaps make SOME effort to stop it on their side of the border. 

The other thing which could be done is for the Court to find that money earned by illegal immigrants is an actual illegal gain, and instruct the US Marshals Service to seize such money as it is collected by various "envios de dinero" here. A simple order to the Federal Reserve to cease making electronic transfers to Mexico would do the trick. Since that money is up to a third of the Mexican GDP, such a cut-off would require immediate action on the part of Mexico to save their economy. THAT is how you get results in this sort of quagmire.