Archive for January 2010

Mickey Arthur

Cape Town: Mickey Arthur, among the most successful international cricket coaches of modern times, quit mentoring the South African cricket team because of the pressure that was being put on him to include more black players.

South African cricket is in turmoil again because of racial issues in selection. Arthur left the job he has filled with distinction for nearly five years only four days before his team leaves for an important tour of India.

Suggestions in South Africa that his going was prompted by differences with captain Graeme Smith, can be discounted. Arthur and Smith forged a vibrant team.

According to The Independent, Arthur appears to have been persuaded to walk because he has been worn down by the requirements of selection policy.

Although 18 years have passed since South Africa re-entered the international fold, transformation has never been fully effected.

The coach who helped to engineer seminal away Test series wins in both Australia and England has been under constant scrutiny bordering on instruction to ensure South Africa’s team is racially mixed.
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TUCSON — The unforgiving terrain of the Sonoran Desert, south of here, whose searing summers and frigid winters claim hundreds of lives each year, has long been a favored avenue of entry for illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. But in the last year, the authorities say, smugglers have increasingly capitalized on a much more lucrative business — trafficking Chinese citizens into the United States.

The number of Chinese immigrants arrested while illegally crossing the border into Arizona through the busiest smuggling corridor in the United States increased tenfold in the last fiscal year, according to the United States Border Patrol in Tucson.

In fiscal 2009, 332 Chinese immigrants were caught in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, up from 30 the previous year, Border Patrol figures showed. And in what could be a sign of a record-breaking pace for this year, agents in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector arrested 281 Chinese immigrants from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, the first quarter of the current fiscal year.

The reason is simple: dollars and cents.

As record quantities of illegal drugs are being intercepted in Arizona, those involved in taking people and drugs across the border are increasingly concentrating on the more rewarding smuggling of Chinese immigrants, said David Jimarez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol.
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Rep. Frank Kratovil, D-Md

WASHINGTON — A group of 22 congressmen called on Congress on Thursday to reject amnesty for illegal immigrants and enforce employment restrictions on non-citizens.

The Bipartisan Reform of Immigration through Defining Good Enforcement Resolution, HR 1026, or BRIDGE resolution, outlines the key principles of immigration reform, the lawmakers said.

Reps. Frank Kratovil, D-Md, Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah., Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and Glenn Nye, D-Va., and 10 other Republican and eight other Democratic were co-sponsors in introducing the legislation.

“Marylanders, including immigrants who have come here legally to live and work in our state, are tired of the drain that illegal immigration has put on our economy,” Kratovil said through his communications director. “This resolution reflects my belief that we should honor the contributions of those who have come here legally and continue to play by the rules while punishing those that knowingly break our laws.”

The resolution calls for all employers to adopt E-Verify, a federally operated, Internet-based program that confirms the status of workers.
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Lloyd Woodson

Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne Forrest said Lloyd R. Woodson, 43, of Reston, Va., also had maps of a U.S. military facility and a town in another state.

The federal government says the map was of the U.S. Army’s Fort Drum base in upstate New York.

Court papers do not say whether he was believed to be planning an attack on Fort Drum or anywhere else.

Woodson served for a time in the Navy in the 1980s or 90s, but it’s not immediately clear whether he has any connection to the fort.

Forrest said Woodson was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle concealed under his green, military-style jacket when officers encountered him at a Quick Chek store in Branchburg shortly before 4 a.m. Monday.

As officers started to question him, Woodson fled on foot toward a nearby trailer park, Forrest said. Officers found him hiding in some bushes and tackled him when he tried to run away again. The officers used pepper spray to subdue him.
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Jose Diaz Ruiz, a 76-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, wipes away tears Thursday as he receives dialysis treatment at University Medical Center.

There are now four more of them regularly making their way to the emergency room at University Medical Center. And doctors say the illegal immigrants coming in for dialysis treatment at University Medical Center are sicker than they were before, making their care even more expensive.

Six months after the Review-Journal revealed that 80 illegal immigrants with failing kidneys were running up about $2 million a month in bills for dialysis and other medical treatment at the only publicly supported hospital in Las Vegas, the situation for both patients and taxpayers only continues to worsen.

And despite promises by elected officials to look into the issue, there are few signs it will get better.

Federal laws that require hospitals to give emergency treatment to patients regardless of citizenship, combined with a lack of enforcement of immigration laws, make the problem insoluble right now, hospital and elected officials say.

Unable to receive the dialysis treatments that all American citizens qualify for under Medicare, illegal immigrants who need such treatment across the nation have increasingly turned to emergency rooms.
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The Republican Party has officially denounced the notion of utilizing affirmative action in the business world, under the assumption that hiring should be based on merit, not the color of one’s skin. Ironically, the GOP is facing turmoil in the leadership ranks, because party elders elected a party chairman based on the candidate’s ethnic background. Now, they can’t fire the bumbling Michael S. Steele over fears that moderates, Democrats and the mainstream media will accuse the GOP of having “racist” motives.

According to Politico, “among top GOP operatives in Washington, there is overwhelming majority sentiment that the Republican National Committee blundered a year ago when it tapped Michael S. Steele as its chairman. There is equally strong sentiment among members of the RNC about what Republicans can do about it now: nothing.”

As a high-profile African-American politician, Steele gained strong status in the Republican Party that faces serious obstacles due to the party’s weakness among non-white voters. Hence, Steele was chosen as the RNC chairman to appeal to more African-American voters. Yet the decision had made Steele an ‘untouchable’ force within the Republican Party and he can’t be fired even though he has already earned notoriety as an “unfocused and gaffe-prone leader,” whose ethical behavior has been deemed questionable at best.
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Marilyn Musser holds the door for Marlene Thornton as she carries a food box from St. Luke’s Community House in West Nashville.

Marilyn Musser cleaned house for a psychiatrist until a few weeks ago, when the psychiatrist lost her own job and couldn’t afford Musser anymore.

So, Musser showed up Friday at St. Luke’s Community House in Nashville, where emergency free food boxes are delivered to local residents. “There are no jobs,” she said. “People get laid off and they can’t find work, and the pay rates went down.”

A study released last week by the nonprofit Brookings Institution says that while times are tough all over, Nashville has fared worse than the suburbs that surround it. The city of Nashville added about 32,110 people living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2008, a gain of 4.2 percentage points, reaching 17.5 percent of the city’s population.

The suburbs as a group, which comprises 12 surrounding counties, saw an increase of 22,129 people living in poverty, a rise of less than one percentage point. Fewer than 1 in 10 people in the suburbs live below the poverty line, Brookings said.
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Sunday: U.S. Army soldiers patrol inside Pech Valley, Kunar province, in northeastern Afghanistan. Private consultants Checchi & Company won a no-bid contract from the Obama administration to ‘train the next generation of legal professionals’ in Afghanistan.

Despite President Obama’s long history of criticizing the Bush administration for “sweetheart deals” with favored contractors, the Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids, Fox News has learned.

The contract, awarded on Jan. 4 to Checchi & Company Consulting, Inc., a Washington-based firm owned by economist and Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi, will pay the firm $24,673,427 to provide “rule of law stabilization services” in war-torn Afghanistan.

A synopsis of the contract published on the USAID Web site says Checchi & Company will “train the next generation of legal professionals” throughout the Afghan provinces and thereby “develop the capacity of Afghanistan’s justice system to be accessible, reliable, and fair.”

The legality of the arrangement as a “sole source,” or no-bid, contract was made possible by virtue of a waiver signed by the USAID administrator. “They cancelled the open bid on this when they came to power earlier this year,” a source familiar with the federal contracting process told Fox News.
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Barack Hussein Obama made a lot of promises during his two-year long campaign, and attempted to solidify these pledges in his inaugural address. True, these promises took a softer form (some might call it pap) in his inaugural speech, but those who supported him and voted for him in 2008 understood what he was meant to do on their behalf. This was, of course, before most of us, both on the left and on the right, knew what his real agenda was.

Well, has he delivered?

On his first day on the job, Barack Hussein Obama said about his administration:

“We will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth:”

Unemployment, which Obama promised during the campaign would not rise over 8.5%, is now 10+%, and in certain urban areas and states, it is over 14%. Among urban youth, it is above 17%, and these percentages get worse in every successive jobs report. Actually, I should correct myself, it seems that some new jobs were created in the Obama Administration, just not anywhere in the non-virtual United States of America. These jobs were created in quite large numbers in the imaginary Congressional districts and made-up zip code areas created by certain highly imaginative members of the Obama Administration. Promised growth in the American economy, more than a year later, has not only not occurred, but actually the opposite has happened; the economy, in fact, continues to plummet . And this is after an almost $1 trillion stimulus plan, enacted on the heels of the over $700 billion TARP plan, with a stunning lack of information provided to the American people on where their money went. This ‘transparency’ was, of course, promised by Obama as he sought support in passing these measures. It would seem that the Obama Administration has decided that numerous other ‘crises,’ other than that involving our economy, are much more important; e.g., the health care non-crisis, the climate change hoax; a second stimulus after the first one didn’t work and, of course, golf. Our President’s response to the economic needs of the American people will occur in the order to which it has been relegated, which, one imagines, will be shortly before November of this year.
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