Good to be home…

…just wish the a/c hadn’t taken a dive while I was gone. Gonna be an uncomfy evening and a warm tomorrow. Let’s just home the repairman wasn’t kidding when he said he’d be here as scheduled.

Lay dies of heart attack

A heart attack? Yeaaahhhhhh…. Right. Funny how that happened right after he was convicted of massive fraud and was due to be sentenced for his crimes. Wonder what his life insurance payout will be?

More pro-illegal alien bullcrap assertions

Sitting in the airport headed for home I’m treated to this headline on Fox News.com: “Bloomberg: New York City Will Collapse Without Illegal Immigrants.” Mayor Bloomberg thinks we poor, stupid, dainty Americans would fall into the stone age without those noble illegal “immigrants” to keep our way of life afloat:

The economy of the country’s largest city and the entire nation would collapse if illegal immigrants were deported en masse, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.

New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, and a half-million of them came to this country illegally, Bloomberg testified.

“Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders … our city’s economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported,” he said. “The same holds true for the nation.”

Bovine excrement. The pro-illegal alien crowd – of which Bloomberg is a charter member – wants to have it both ways. The number of illegals amounts to less than 5% of the workforce even giving them the wide benefit of the doubt, and yet their loss would cause the rest of us to “collapse”? Their presense creates no significant drag on our public health, education, and welfare systems and yet they alone keep our entire economy from fizzling out?

This is yet another example of the kind of weak thinking we can all expect from this sector of the public debate. It’s hysteria dressed up as an argument and it’s completely uncompelling. The fact that the mayor of one of America’s major cities thinks this way and implies that he’s completely aware of massive amounts of illegals in his midst and yet does nothing is just sad. Glad I’m not from the Big Apple.

NY Times’ reporter apparently didn’t know the secret of the not-secret secret program he disclosed

John Hinderaker at Power Line posts a revelation that the NY Times reporter who wrote the report revealing the US’s secret terror-funding tracking program did not, himself, know about the program as recently as last November. Eric Lichtblau’s boss, Bill Keller, has tried to wave off criticism using some supremely poor logic and, along with Lichtblau, has tried to advance the notion that the secret program that was so newsworthy wasn’t really a secret after all.

As Power Line (attributing to Patterico) shows, neither Lichtblau nor his sources knew about the program in a story he wrote in November of 2005:

Apparently those “experts in the field” didn’t know about the SWIFT program either, even though it had been going on for years, as Lichtblau later reported, nor did they evidently know about its role in capturing the most wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia, Hambali.

So much for the “everybody knew about it” defense. Note, too, what it says about the editorial policies of the Times: if the administration allegedly lacks a strategy, it should be criticized for that. If it turns out that it had a strategy all along, and the strategy was a successful one, then the administration should be criticized for keeping it a secret.

Excellent point. A true “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation. The Times was one of the loudest voices screaming how the administration hadn’t “connected the dots” ahead of 9/11 but they’re sure going to town to make sure they can’t connect the dots after, either. There’s no other rational explanation for reporting and publishing like this. The NY Times and their western sister, the LA Times, are in fact “out to get Bush” regardless of what they say. They’ve got Watergate fever and nothing less than bringing down a President will do for them. As for those of us citizens who get put into some terrorist scumbag’s crosshairs – oh, well.