Jim Gilmore is GOP nominee for Senate (Updated)

Jason Kenney liveblogging the RPV Convention reports in 15 minutes ago: Jim Gilmore has won the nomination for Senate for the Republican Party of Virginia.

Update: In a bit of an upset, Jeff Frederick has also defeated John Hager for Chairman of the RPV.

VA GOP Convention is today

The Virginia State GOP Convention is being held today in Richmond. While my schedule didn’t permit attendance, I’m awaiting updates from those whose schedule did. Virginia Virtucon is hoping to provide live coverage via their contributor Jason Kenney. Jason’s best bet is via Twitter, he says, considering that the WiFi access in the convention hall appears to be minimal. (They really need to do something about that for next year.)

Although no one’s said so specifically, you can usually count on Too Conservative for updates on the political happenings that affect Loudoun. Check in there a couple of times today and see what’s what.

If I hear more, I’ll pass it along.

Disgrace to the collar

When the story started breaking about yet another religious “leader” spewing forth bile at the Trinity United Church (Obama’s church) in Chicago it barely registered with me. Obama’s knee-jerk defense of Rev. Wright’s fantasies delivered as “sermons” that morphed into a “I barely knew the man” excuse pretty much sealed for me that Obama’s either a clueless idiot or a scheming liar. I hardly need yet another example of the same old song from the same old church.

But then, a detail about this latest preacher surfaced: this is a Catholic priest. Father Michael Pfleger is the pastor at Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago. (Go ahead and Google it, but as of this morning, they’ve exceeded their hosting service’s bandwidth allocation.) That a Catholic priest would engage in this sort of despicable palaver to begin with is bad enough. While riding to work this morning, they played a portion of the audio recording of the “sermon” in question and what I heard was hysterical, racist ranting completely at odds with Church’s teachings. The mind recoils at the thought that a man spewing such vile rhetoric wears the collar of a Roman Catholic priest.

Senator Obama’s campaign – no doubt having learned the lesson that stalling on such matters is a Bad Campaign Move™ – issued a statement that Obama was “deeply disappointed” by Father Pfleger’s comments. Quick as a flash, Father Pfleger issued an “apology” saying that he “regret[ed] the words [he] chose Sunday.” He might have also mentioned a regret for his delivery which is completely inconsistent with any depiction of the message of Jesus Christ that I’ve known my whole life. One wonders if he simply let his theatrics go over the top – in which case one would also wonder if he really believed any of it – or if his real regret is that his true nature got displayed to a far wider audience than he’s used to controlling. In any case, and speaking as a son of the Catholic Church, he’s a disgrace to the priesthood and should be removed.

Oh, that liberal bias!

Ed Morrissey from Hot Air:

Hillary Clinton has accused the media of being in the tank for Barack Obama, but according to a new study by Pew Research, she received a fairly positive reception during the primaries, at least through Texas and Ohio. Both campaigns received much better treatment than John McCain got as he clinched the nomination. The study shows that the two Democrats got positive treatment in the American media over two-thirds of the time, while the majority of McCain’s coverage was negative:

If you’ve been reading blogs, you’re not surprised. If you’re getting your news from the MSM, here’s a wake-up.

Virginia’s unemployment rate, already low, drops lower

Looks like those summer jobs are still coming available and our fellow Virginians are taking employers up on them. Virginia’s unemployment rate for April was 3.9%, well below the national average of 4.8%. NoVA’s rate, by the way, is 2.6% for the same period making ours one of the lowest unemployment rates for metro areas.

USS Kitty Hawk makes final departure from Yokosuka, Japan

The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk has the dual distinction of being both the oldest active ship in the US Navy and the last conventionally-powered aircraft carrier in the inventory. She set sail from her home port of Yokosuka, Japan today, headed for her eventual decommissioning.

The Kitty Hawk, the last conventionally powered aircraft carrier in the Navy, is to be replaced later this summer by the USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered carrier.

The decommissioning date for the ship is set for Jan. 31.

After leaving Japan, the Kitty Hawk will make a stop at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, then to former homeport San Diego for a welcome-home party, and then the ship will travel on to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, to be decommissioned, Stars and Stripes reported.

The USS Kitty Hawk was the only “forward deployed” carrier in the fleet, calling her home a port in a foreign country. She was commissioned in 1961 and has served her country and her crews long and well. I’m no military man – a fact I regret more as I age – but this story gives me a feeling of pride and sadness all the same. To all things there is a season, they say, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier when the time comes to say goodbye.

I’ll post on her more when we know where she’ll end up.

AP shills for open borders crowd; bemoans immigration enforcement working as intended

The story is titled, “No. Va. county sees signs of change amid crackdown“, which is a benign enough headline. What it hides is reporting designed not to inform the public but slanted to pulling at heartstrings.

Business at Pedro Vargas’ store, Club Video Mexico, has slid so steeply that only eight people walked through the door one day last month.

One thing he has been selling, however, are one-way bus tickets from northern Virginia to Texas and Mexico. Soon he’ll be getting his own ticket out of town — seeking a friendlier and more lucrative place to do business.

“The last few months have been very, very bad for us,” said Vargas, who plans to move this summer from Prince William County, about 25 miles southwest of Washington, to Utah, where he recently opened another store.

Many say Prince William’s new crackdown on illegal immigrants has created an environment so unfriendly that Hispanic people are leaving the county of more than 350,000, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau was nearly 15 percent Hispanic in 2006.

A crackdown which enforces immigration laws by locating, arresting, and deporting illegal aliens is supposed to make things “unfriendly” for those people who are in violation of the law. Those people who are here legally do not need to fear the enforcement, unless they’re covering for people who do. This is the same old song and dance from supposed news agencies who are crafting their stories specifically to conflate in the minds of their readership those immigrants who came here in accordance with our laws and aliens who did their best to evade the consequences of breaking them. They even went out of their way to find people to quote who make inane comments like this:

“That’s like a smack in the face to me,” said Vargas, a 24-year-old Mexican immigrant who is living in the U.S. legally. “I’ve been living here my whole life, and now they pass this law?”

Now, how would this be a “smack in the face” if the law doesn’t apply to you, Vargas? Skipping lightly past the notion that a Mexican immigrant cannot possibly have been living here his whole life (you immigrated, which means you were born elsewhere, right?) if you’re here legally then the crackdown isn’t aimed at you.

Unless you mean that the crackdown has reduced the customer base you’ve been serving? And if you’ve been basing your business on providing services to people who are in violation of immigration laws, then that’s probably not the brightest business plan, is it?

PWC’s ordinance and enforcement efforts are having precisely the desired effect, just as the crackdown efforts in Arizona are doing. People who are here illegally are self-deporting (they’re selling bus tickets to Mexico, remember?) which removes illegal aliens while not requiring the actions of our law enforcement officers, freeing them to work on other cases where they aren’t self-deporting. That’s good from 2 angles.

It would be nice if the AP would tell the tale from that perspective, but they’re beyond help in this regard.

Memorial Day 2008: Honor the Memory

This Memorial Day I’m stopping to call to mind the men and women in uniform who have gone before us, securing the blessings of liberty for myself and my family. I encourage you to do the same.

And, after you’ve paid a moment of two of silence to honor their memory, do what will really honor them: enjoy the day with family, friends, and community as a member of the most free, most wonderous nation on earth. Grill a burger, hoist a beer, and breath the air. Keep in your mind those who have passed as well as those who stand in those uniforms today, continuing to secure those blessings. Keep those wonderful Memorial Day traditions in bond so that when those boys and girls come home again, they’ll come home to the America they serve, the America they love, and an America that loves them in return.

Happy Memorial Day, folks. Now, quit reading blogs and get out there to that grill.

ICE getting serious in CA

Over 3 weeks in California, ICE raids have seen the arrests of over 900 people.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says agents have arrested more than 900 people in California on immigration violations during a three-week sting targeting people who ignored deportation orders.

The agency said Friday that 495 of the 905 people arrested were targeted in the operation. The other 410 just happened to be on the scene when agents arrived.

Sounds like an excellent start, folks. Kudos, seriously. A follow up to that raid in Iowa I mentioned a couple of weeks ago shows that ICE is not playing the catch-and-release game I was concerned about. According to this NY Times story, about 270 illegals nabbed in that raid aren’t going to be deported just yet. First stop, prison.

In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

From the looks of things, it would appear that a case is being readied against the employer of those illegals, Agriprocessors, as it should be. Go, ICE, go.

(Hat tips: Michelle Malkin)

“The constitutional rights inside school are not the same as out in the street.”

The title of this post is a verbatim quote from Manatee County (FL) School Board Attorney John Bowen when asked for a comment on the school district’s permission granted to their teachers to summarily search the cell phone memories of any student they think is “up to no good.” This attorney feels that the US Constitution – the highest law of our land – somehow does not apply inside the walls of his district’s schools.

What arrogant presumption! What a wonderful lesson to teach the kids in that school – when he can be bothered to stop teaching them about vile white Americans have been these last 230 years. Demonstrate that the whim of someone who has allowed his position to go to his head trumps the Framers’ explicit instructions to the government of our land.

I think Mr. Bowen should expound on his premise. By all means, Attorney Bowen, do tell us what parts of the Constitution you’ve decided to revoke in school that would stand tall “out in the street.” Do tell, indeed.

The school has the absolute right to deny permission to any student to carry a phone into the school in the first place, but they do not have the right to demand the divestiture of private property not so prohibited and then to execute a search of that property without due process. Mr. Bowen is suggesting that school officials can and will grab cell phones at random (with an obvious nod and wink that it “looked like they were up to no good”) and dump their memories. There are ways to go about this but such a glib and arrogant statement as his sure isn’t it.