Those of us who dwell in large cities know that when we climb into a taxi cab, the odds are better than 90% that the driver will be a Muslim (American born cab drivers seem to be either retiring, being beamed up by Scotty or moving to the suburbs for one reason and another while few others enter the cabbie business) or at least someone from a Muslim country. North and Central Africans and Southwest Asians have been gradually taking over the front end of that industry.

One thing I’ve observed is that the vast majority of these cabbies seem to spend their entire shifts gabbling away in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Berber or whatever on cell phones. Of course, most now wear those things you hang from your ear to conduct hands-free conversations (while I own a cell phone, I only do so for emergencies and for when I travel — I hate talking on the damn thing, and Verizon gets no OT from me, I use at most about 30-40 of the 400 minutes I pay for per month — I would never walk around with one of those headsets on, they make people look like mobile high tech communications centers or the evil mastermind in last year’s season of ‘24′. Some even make them look like they’re about to start singing “Like A Virgin”).

So the other day I was in a cab and in the mood for some amusement, and I interrupted one such driver’s never-ending conversation to ask him, “Do you know about assimilation?”

“Asseemeelation, what eez dees?” He inquired.

“You know, when you move to a new country, adopting its way of life as your own, that kind of thing.”

“I leev like American.” He said.

“That’s why I’m curious.” I told him. “I’ve always been told that manhood is important to guys from your part of the world, yet you seem to spend all day talking on your cell phones. Here in America, real men don’t spend hours and hours on the phone unless it’s part of their job. Here in America, only women do this.”

Which ticked him off to some extent, as he didn’t talk to me again.

He also stayed off the phone for the duration of the trip…

…criminals who are really good at getting away with stuff. Nothing big, you understand, just small things like Whitewater, treason, perjury, you know, just your run-of-the-mill offenses.

Today I received an email invite to check out a website called Wonkosphere.com, which is an extensive reference to affairs concerning the 2008 election.

I followed their link and right off the bat, ran into this:

While the press gyrates in unison over the over-exaggerated scandal of Senator Larry Craig the media pretty much ignores the fact that one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest fundraisers has been a fugitive from justice for 15 years.

“Wow,” I exclaimed, “what’s up with this?”

California authorities have sought businessman Norman Hsu for 15 years. Since 2004, he has carved out a place of honor raising cash for such candidates as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And then the kicker,

The teaser however is just a small part of the story. The man pleaded guilty to grand theft in a stock swindle before disappearing from the sight of everyone but Democrat politicians who gladly welcomed the man in. I guess he was too busy working for Democrats to serve his time in jail.

Read the rest here.

I suppose that to Bubba and the missus, money from a fellow criminal simply keeps the lucre “in house”.

…the North American Union agenda.

Remember, the “consultants” privileged to attend the closed door SPP (Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America) meetings represent corporate interests by virtue of being the corporate interests (the North American Competitiveness Council, or NACC).

Of late, in my own industry, there has been much activity in certain places: Basically, government law enforcement has been responding to budgetary and manpower considerations by assigning exceedingly more investigative and enforcement responsibility to corporate security departments. In North Carolina, they’re providing police training to private security officers and issuing them full police arrest authority.

In my own “era” of hands-on security work and, later, security supervision, the best we could do was a citizen’s arrest. We would fill out all the police paperwork and when they arrived, we would hand them the entire package, right down to witness statements, polaroids or videotape. They would call in for a case number, swap handcuffs and transport the prisoner. As a casino security shift supervisor, I had open door access to the city attorney and other prosecutors (we had as many professional dealings with the local criminal community as the PD, and the same insights), and often during short conferences I briefed a city, state or federal prosecutor on the details not coverable in a report that is a legal document — conclusions, recommendations, gut feelings, etc. Sometimes, we would discuss the penalties the prosecution would ask for, and my opinion counted.

But we were not cops, we were private sector employees charged with protecting the assets and interests of the company we worked for.

Before and since going into the consulting biz, I’ve attended armloads of classes, courses, seminars and workshops across the security spectrum and read scores of books and reports as they came out, keeping abreast of my industry. Networking has brought me into friendships and exchanges of information with dozens of fellow security professionals.

A British colleague, one of a few colleagues who spent the past Christmas and New Year’s as my house guests, told me back then about the trend in Britain of granting police responsibilities to private security departments and firms, and more recently, in Protection Industry reports, I’ve read about the same trend beginning to take hold here, in parts of the U.S.A.

There are even private contractors building and running prisons!

END NECESSARY DIGRESSION.

Almost. If you have lots of time to read a highly informative report re just how big outsourced military and security assets have become on the world stage, read this report.

What will happen over the next few, short years is that both proprietary and contract security forces will evolve into better trained concerns that possess police authority, and we will see commensurate downsizing in public law enforcement agencies.

Basically, the government will largely be saying to businesses and gated community type venues, “police yourselves”, and gradually, law enforcement will become the purview of corporate security people, as will incarceration become a province of the private sector.

When I worked in the casino, we had an instant communications network established between the surveillance departments of all the casinos in town, and all security supervisors shared a radio frequency connected to the network. It was a natural progression as ever-advancing technology afforded us those options, and it was profoundly useful.

Who’s to think that the same sort of arrangement won’t be implemented among the security departments of the various corporations involved? Or the larger contract firms? This would place a hell of a lot of power in the hands of those business concerns.

While I’m a strong advocate of limited government, I think we ought to leave things like law enforcement and incarceration right where they belong — under taxpayer supervision. Putting them in the hands of “corporate interests” just ain’t gonna cut it.

But mark my words, it will happen soon. We will outsource our protective venues.

We will suffer for it, but it will become part & parcel of our existence should we permit the NAU agenda to reach fruition.

Credit where credit is due:

I actually had a bit of trouble composing this post, and it spent considerable time in “save” mode, but then I read a post over at Shoprat’s place that provided insight I needed to better define my point of view.

This is absurd, to say the least, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard about this kind of boneheadedness on the part of the Justice Department…

The Justice Department is co-sponsoring a convention held by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) — an unindicted co-conspirator in an ongoing federal terrorist funding case — a move that is raising concerns among the Justice’s rank and file.

I can just imagine all the jihadis and jihad supporters out there grinning gleefully and wringing their hands at the stupidity of their infidel enemy. I imagine quite a few of them are somewhat confused — I mean, why doesn’t our government simply submit to Islam already, instead of dragging it out?

I can certainly see where they’re coming from, I mean,

According to an e-mail from Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, acting deputy chief of the Voting Rights Division, the sponsorship will involve sending government lawyers to man a booth for the Labor Day weekend event in Illinois.

“This is an important outreach opportunity, and a chance to reach a community that is at once very much discriminated against, and very wary of the national government and its willingness to protect them,” Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Times.

“It would be a great step forward to break through those barriers. And Chicago is lovely this time of year,” Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere said.

And Chicago is lovely this time of year.

Indeed, an expensive outing in the Windy City (I still haven’t figured out why they call it that, since I’ve been here we haven’t gone very far beyond gentle breezes) is a fine way to spend the taxpayers’ money, while stroking terrorism sponsoring, murderous, America hating, fanatical Muslim “activists” at the same time.

The Justice Department declined to say how much the sponsorship will cost.

“This is just staggering, it’s outrageous,” the lawyer said. “Lawyers from the Civil Rights Division traveling to Chicago on the federal dime. This will cost thousands of dollars.”

A second lawyer responded to Mrs. Lorenzo-Giguere’s e-mail questioning the participation and said it “seems like an odd time for one part of DOJ to lend credence and visible support to ISNA at the same time DOJ prosecutors will be called on to defend their decision to name ISNA as a conspirator.”

There’s a word for that, um, it will come to me…

The convention features book signings, musical entertainment and seminars on family, community service and political activism.

And political activism. Hmmm, I thought they held most Islamic “political activism” classes in mosques and desert compounds in places like Syria, Libya and Iran, as well as Wahhabi mosques all over the western world.

Now they have an official convention, and it’s sponsored by The Justice Department! Can things get more bizarre than that?

But the first lawyer also pointed to a morning session on “the threat and reality of U.S.-sponsored torture” as contrary to the department’s mission. The Justice Department was responsible for signing off on the legality and constitutionality of interrogation techniques.

“The extensive news coverage by the U.S. and international media sources makes it all too clear that the grim abuses in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the sending of detainees to secret prisons around the world that are known to torture during interrogations, are not isolated incidents, but rather constitute policy of the U.S. government,” the schedule of events said.

“This session will describe the nature of U.S.-sponsored torture, the effects of torture on its victims, the efforts of the U.S. religious community, and what you can do to help end U.S.-sponsored torture,” the schedule said.

That must be what they mean by seminars on “family” and “community service”.

And as usual, we’re paying for it with our tax dollars.

Link H/T CNS News

…that I didn’t like.

Well in time for Labor Day, he gives us the true history of the holiday, whom it was intended to honor and what it has become.

Spot-on column!

Okay, I know that we all have our personal tastes in music, and some of my fellow bloggers, like me, like to link to or YouTube samples in our blogs.

I occasionally refer to my own preferences (I am a major Classical Music listener, but I’m also into music in everything from Zydeco to Folk to Jazz to Blues to Country to Techna-Rock), but this afternoon I have decided to share some specific examples of my “tastes”.

I figure it’s the weekend, and those who enjoy music performed by serious musicians might find the time to watch some YouTube concert/studio video of my two all-time favorite rock bands (caution, they’re not what you might expect under the label of “Rock”).

Keep in mind, quality-wise, that these videos are more than two (count ‘em 2) decades old.

My Number One all-time group is Renaissance.

Something a little better known by Renaissance is here.

Frontwoman Annie Haslam can sing in a handful of octaves without much thought.

And then, there is Focus.

Jan Akkerman is easily among the best five guitarists in the history of Rock. The guy on the keyboards, Thijs Van Leer, also yodels, plays the flute and whistles with instrument precision.

Focus’ best known compositions are Sylvia (you’ll notice that the people who made the video have the band interposed between early and later) and Hocus Pocus.

And there we have…The two Rock groups I like to listen to the most.

…”If you’ve got something good, stick with it.” I can’t for the life of me remember whether it was a paper towel commercial or Allison the Plumber in a Comet ad or whatever.

This expression flitted through my mind for some reason when I saw this article.

The U.S. military will move its secure command center from deep inside Cheyenne Mountain even as Russia revives military maneuvers that led America to burrow under the rock almost 50 years ago.

Construction on a new command center 12 miles away at Peterson Air Force Base is well under way despite security concerns that have driven some lawmakers to consider halting funding for the transition.

The move will shift more than 100 people responsible for detecting attacks on North America from a facility that sits under 2,000 feet of granite to a basement in an office building on the base that officials concede offers lower protection.

Having our ultimate military command and control center inside Cheyenne Mountain rather than in a more exposed location is very sensible, but who says bureaucrats, military or civilian, are sensible people? Why, one wonders, can’t they leave what would amount to an enemy’s number one target in its present secure location and just work around it?

Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, the U.S. commander responsible for homeland defense and protecting North American air space, says the switch is worth the risk of leaving a facility built to withstand the indirect effects of a multi-megaton nuclear blast.

It will combine operations now divided between Cheyenne and Peterson, helping the commander to receive information and respond to crises or attacks more quickly, Renuart said. It will not, however, save money as the military promised, congressional investigators have shown.
Renuart said the plan was the best way to make the most of resources currently split between the two Colorado locations.

“We can’t accommodate all of that integrated command and control capability in the mountain,” he said. “And so it makes sense to have that put in place where we can get the best unity of all of that effort, and that really is down here at Peterson.”

He said using communications technologies to link the two centers was no substitute for having everyone in one place.

Now me, I’d rather they dealt with the communications technology and kept the folks who might one day be running the defense of our country against an enemy country as far out of harm’s way as possible, lest our defense structure be decapitated at a highly inconvenient time.

We hear all this yelling from the portside about certain government agencies retaining a “Cold War mentality” when the Cold War is long over. Tell that to the Russian government, who would appear to be stepping back in time to the point of borderline saber rattling in an Americanly direction, or to the Chinese, who are using profits from their relatively recent emergence as a superstar in the global marketplace to build up their military, buy up megabucks’ worth of U.S. Treasuries (an abrupt selloff of which could have immediate and negative consequences for the international buying power of the U.S. dollar) and stockpile Mideast and Southwest Asia oil like water before a drought.

Like I just said…

But those arguments, offered repeatedly by defense officials for more than a year, come against a backdrop of tension between Washington and Moscow and Russia’s decision to resume long-range bomber missions common during the Cold War.

Russia, angered by U.S. plans to place missile defense assets in Eastern Europe, said the flights were resumed on a permanent basis due to security threats. In recent weeks, those flights have come near Alaska and Guam, a U.S. territory.

Those actions, coupled with China’s increasing military capabilities and concerns about the intentions of North Korea and Iran, have led some officials at Cheyenne to oppose the move out of the mountain.

Prior to 19 April, 1985, U.S. federal buildings were built purely on the basis’ of ascetics and bureaucratic convenience. No real attention was payed to any kind of blast resistance. A lesson was learned the hard way, and now structural security is incorporated in the plans for new federal buildings.

That lesson was extremely expensive in terms of lives needlessly lost — the transfer girder system, which essentially placed structural support on top of the first floor (to lend “an air of spaciousness” to the lobby by eliminating any support columns) rather than on the foundation, was directly responsible for the collapse of all the floors above. Assisting the tragedy, well, to a 5,000 F.P.S. explosion, the granite exterior on the ground floor was indistinguishable from flimsy glass.

But as I said, a lesson was learned and we have moved on — learning the same kind of lesson in the heat of, say, a nuclear attack by a hostile nation and having our military command suddenly vaporize might render any prospective lesson completely moot.

Ah, here are some anonymous folks on the inside weighing in:

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of harm to their careers, they say the new command center at Peterson cannot be protected from nuclear, chemical or biological attack and its systems will not be sufficiently hardened against an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear blast overhead.

This all sounds very Democrat, if you ask me. Okay, Cold War’s over, folks. No need for any more defensive stuff, let’s just expose the ol’ jugular…

Article link Hat Tip: James Taranto

…the Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) conference is underway, as reported here by World Net Daily.

Leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico have begun their discussions of the Security and Prosperity Partnership behind closed doors here at the five-star Fairmont Le Chateau resort in Montebello, Quebec.

For me, the three words that jump right out of that opening paragraph are behind closed doors, this because:

The only “civilians” actually scheduled to attend the SPP closed-door sessions were representatives of the 30 multi-national corporations appointed by the Chambers of Commerce of the three nations to constitute the North American Competitiveness Council, or NACC.

Today’s confidential sessions are scheduled to involve top-level trilateral working group bureaucrats meeting with NACC business members.

The NACC’s representation consists not of congressional or parliamentary officials who are answerable to the citizens of their respective countries, but of, solely, financial/business elites who stand to gain the most from a unionized continent, in terms of both expanded fortunes and power under an umbrella of corporate say-so in how the people of The United States, Mexico and Canada are governed…

The U.S. Department of Commerce has set up the NACC to serve as the chief policy adviser to the 20 SPP trilateral working groups that have been “integrating” and “harmonizing” North American administrative laws and regulations across a wide spectrum of public policy issues.

…and the authority vested in them as a group places them in the position to tailor the North American Union agenda to their specifications under the approving eyes of the leaders of the three countries involved.

It would seem that our very sovereignty as an independent republic is being “integrated” and “harmonized” away by a bunch of individuals who hold their policy making sessions in private, out of earshot of the media, the people and those the people have elected to fulfill responsibilities that the NACC, as part of the SPP organization, has now usurped.

As WND previously reported, the NACC is expected to dominate the SPP agenda.
“The SPP is pursuing an agenda to integrate Mexico and Canada in closed doors sessions that are getting underway today in Montebello,” Howard Phillips, the chairman of the Coalition to Block the North American Union, told a press conference in Ottawa.

“We are here to register our protest,” Phillips added, “along with the protests of thousands of Americans who agree with us that the SPP is a globalist agenda driven by the multi-national corporate interests and intellectual elite who together have launched an attack upon the national sovereignty of the United States, Canada and Mexico.”

Connie Fogel, head of the Canadian Action Party, agreed with Phillips.

“Canadians are complaining that the SPP process lacks transparency,” Fogel told the press conference. “Transparency is a major issue, but even if the SPP working groups were open to the public, we would still object to their goal to advance the North American integration agenda at the expense of Canadian sovereignty.”

SPP = NAU (North American Union). The term “Security and Prosperity” is nothing more than sugar coating.

As I’ve written before, while some fellow conservatives whose opinions I respect and mostly agree with have said that We, the People would never let an NAU happen, what we are looking at here defies every concept upon which our own government, that of the United States of America, is based. Here we have two presidents and a prime minister presiding over a board staffed by heads of corporations from their three countries, whose intention is to create policies for all three that should rightfully be created by the elected policy makers of these countries for application in their respective countries only.

This is unprecedented on this continent, and we have already seen the results of a unionized Europe, so…

Where are the strong, concerted, bilateral protests from the Senate and the House of Representatives, whose members are not even included in these SPP conferences?

Sure, only a relative handful of citizens here and in Canada (I haven’t read anywhere of any Mexicans protesting, but why should they? Inclusion in a continental union would merely be another form of welfare, at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and Americans’ jobs, for Mexico) seem to see the SPP agenda for what it really is, while the rest can one day soon read “While America Slept II”.

MORE FROM CNS, and Washington Times Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden weighs in.

These “states of affairs” are both elements of or pathways to Bush’s trilateral agenda for a North American Union (NAU) that is being “stealthed” behind the guise of the Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), micro-components of “the big picture”. The first shows how liberals, wittingly or unwittingly, are supporting that agenda.

Mexico’s biggest export to the United States is illegal immigrants. According to statistical research by Ken over at The Liberal Lie, The Conservative Truth, American military casualties in both Vietnam and Iraq are dwarfed by American civilian deaths, on both a daily and annual basis, right here in the United States, these figures ignored by both our government and the liberal media.

That said, Gayle of The Dragon Lady’s My Republican Blog fame details the menace we face from NAFTA’s (North American Free Trade Agreement, a precurser to the NAU agenda) inclusion of Mexico’s trucking industry enjoying uninhibited access to U.S. highways (this is a one way street, American truckers can’t drive into Mexico).

Gayle lives in the right part of Texas to have a first-hand view of the Mexican segment of the NAU in its formative stages, and her linked post is right on the money. The same Mexican politicians that allow what she describes are the ones who will have a vote in U.S. affairs should we permit the North American Union to become a reality.

If it was me, I’d read her post and watch the included video very carefully…

will be arriving here in Chicago on 11 September, a date that holds major significance for all of us. For liberals (and Democrats in general), it’s an anniversary of the day we “got what we deserved”. For patriotic Americans, it’s a reminder of the tragic day that Islam consummated its declaration of war against America in no uncertain terms.

I missed their last Washington, DC rally due to concerns beyond my control, but there’s no way I’ll miss this one, they’ll be in town and while I tend to travel a lot, so will I, no matter what.

The itinerary listed at their website doesn’t indicate where they will hold their local rally, but I will be keeping on top of that.

One of their radio spots promoting the tour is here.