Below, you’ll see the cover of this week’s TIME magazine.

I’m sure everyone pictured on the cover are decent, hardworking folks who only want the best for themselves and their families.

But they are NOT Americans, unless they mean they are Central Americans or South Americans.

They are not undocumented workers. They are not economic refugees.

They are criminal aliens who have no respect for American law.

The cover, of course, is TIME’s response to Our Dear Leader’s proclamation that effectively offers amnesty to a million or more illegals who were brought here as children. It is a slap in the face to every young American and to every young person who is here legally. With the economy still swirling around the toilet, Obama just effectively told young Americans and legal immigrants, “Sucks to be you, but my political future is far more important than your economic or social stability. You’ll just have to get used to all the criminal invaders driving down wages and taking jobs that should have been yours.”

Honestly, I do feel badly for the young illegals. They were burdened with parents who put them in a terrible position by bringing them illegally to a place they should not be. But my feelings do not change the facts.

Criminal invaders calling themselves Americans is an insult to every immigrant who waited their turn and came here legally, my father included.

If  TIME is willing to accept that those people on the cover are Americans, *Just not legally, then surely they’ll support me in my contention that I’m a retired billionaire, *Just not legally, and cut me a check to make it true.

Hey, if the scam works for them, why can’t it work for me?

So…what are you, *Just not legally?

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Congratulations to this week’s Comment Contest winner – Gina Jackson.

***

Today, I’m happy to offer a story with the potential to be an economic game changer for many cities.

Homesteading plan to offer abandoned homes to refugees

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Within the collection of abandoned houses haunting the region stand some unpolished gems, sturdy structures that lack only a caring family to again become a home. Where will those families come from?

The county land bank is teaming up with the International Services Center to offer abandoned homes such as this one on Hopkins Avenue in Lakewood to refugee families that agree to fix them up and move in. (Scott Shaw, The Plain Dealer)

They’re already here.

That’s what the International Services Center told leaders of the Cuyahoga County land bank, sparking a novel program that will attack blight with immigrant might. On Wednesday, the new partners will announce an effort to match vacant houses with refugees who agree to fix them up and make them homes.

By offering struggling immigrants a fresh start in an empty space, organizers hope to inject new life and economic vitality into distressed neighborhoods. The strategy, believed to be one of the first of its kind in the nation, attacks an obvious problem with a little-known strength.

About 15,000 vacant and abandoned houses pockmark Cuyahoga County, most of them awaiting costly demolition. The region no longer attracts immigrant waves of a size that built ethnic neighborhoods. But it does draw a small and steady stream of refugees, people forced to flee their homelands because of war or persecution.

Many refugees arrive as two-parent families, often after languishing for years in refugee camps. They’re anxious to start new lives and that starts with a place to live.

“We have all these empty houses. These people need homes,” said Karin Wishner, executive director of the International Services Center, the region’s oldest resettlement agency. “This seems to be a good answer to both problems.”

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

Matching homeless families with vacant homes seems to be so much of a no-brainer I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it. It’s a great idea though its success hinges on a third, most important element — jobs.

I have no doubt that folks who waited years in refugee camps for a visa to come here legally will work hard to make their new homes places about which they and their neighbors can be proud. But if they are to move beyond renting and assistance to become happy homeowners at some point in the future, they will need a steady source of income. That means jobs and in most parts of America, jobs are hard to come by these days and I expect that goes double or triple for the unskilled with language barriers.

Still, the idea is sound. But rather than limiting it to refugees, I think it should be expanded to include all homeless families of American citizens and legal immigrants.

What do you think?

Is this idea workable nationwide?

What potential pitfalls do you see?

And how involved should local, state, or even the federal government be in the process?

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Following is a local story, but I suspect it is being repeated nationwide.

Immigrants cautious as possible reprieves loom
Advocates see signs of prioritizing cases

Some 100 protesters came to Government Center this week, waving signs and chanting slogans for Denis Lemos and his friend Vinny Quirino, both 25-year-olds who had been fighting deportation to Brazil. The protesters wanted a reprieve.

But then Lemos stood before the crowd and delivered the news.

“I got my call,’’ he said as applause broke out. “I am no longer in removal proceedings. My case is going to be closed.’’

Denis Lemos, 25, who came to the United States from Brazil as a teenager, received a stay of deportation. Lemos is an engineering student at UMass Lowell.

Quirino’s stay of deportation followed soon afterward. Some immigrants and their advocatessay those decisions may be a sign that the Obama administration is finally acting on a federal directive issued five months ago to consider setting aside the deportations of students, the elderly, and other immigrants in order to more quickly deport convicted criminals and other high-priority cases.

The shift was heralded in June, when the director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memo urging federal immigration officials to “regularly’’ use their discretion to keep low-priority cases from clogging up the immigration courts.

But advocates for immigrants complained that many federal agents were not following the memo, and that students such as Lemos, an engineering major at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, remained in deportation proceedings.

Then, last week, Homeland Security officials said that by Jan. 13, immigration agents and prosecutors nationwide would undergo training in prosecutorial discretion, a longstanding tool that lets them consider a variety of special circumstances when deciding whether to pursue deportation. Officials also said they would screen immigration court cases in stages to ensure that they match the department’s priorities.

Immigrant groups want the government to more consistently stay the cases of people who have not committed a crime. But federal officials warned that they cannot rush the decision of whether to grant a stay or deport someone. Each case is decided on its merits, and immigrants must be scrutinized for possible risks to public safety and national security.

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

If I understand correctly, prosecutors are supposed to determine if illegal aliens are a risk to public safety and national security before shipping them home? And the lackeys who serve Our Dear Leader issued a directive five weeks ago telling Immigration officials to NOT pursue anyone but convicted criminals and “other high-priority cases” which one assumes means illegals who illegally vote for non-Democrats.

And how is it that immigration hearings take more than two minutes each?

Judge to suspect: “Are you a US citizen?”

Suspect: “No.”

Judge: “Do you have a green card or some other proof you are in this country legally?”

Suspect: “No, but…”

Judge: “No buts allowed. Officer, escort the prisoner to the appropriate bus or plane. Next.”

Why is it any more complicated than that?

I do feel bad for those, like the guys in the story, who were probably brought here by their parents. But their parent’s bad decision does not make them any more legal and does not create any obligation on the part of the United States or any of its citizens. And since we likely know who the parents are, INS should have them and any other siblings standing next to the criminal so they can all go home together.

I’m sure Denis, the person in the photo, is a nice guy. But why is he taking a seat in school that should be occupied by an American citizen? Why did we have to commit tax dollars to educate him though high school?

I expect Denis is just the kind of studious and hard-working person we want in America except for one thing, he’s a criminal.

Here is the kind of amnesty I can support. Any illegal who, in the next six months, turns him- or herself in and has no criminal history other than their illegal status, will go to the top of the list of people qualified to emigrate from their country to ours as quotas and national needs permit.

And after six months, all federal, state, and local benefits and payments and whatevers to illegals end. Businesses caught with illegals on the payroll will be fined $10,000 per.

Harsh? Yes. Heartless? No. One can only be heartless with someone deserving of sympathy and criminals do not fall into that category.

I am the son of immigrants who waited their turn and became citizens. And I believe America should welcome all who are willing to do the same. But we should never tolerate criminals or countenance criminal behavior no matter how desperately certain political parties need new voters.

By the way, if you read the entire article, did you notice how many times the word ‘illegal’ was, or should I say wasn’t used in reference to immigration status? That’s what you get when your local paper is so far to the left they actually believe themselves when they deny bias.

What do you folks think about this issue?

Are you for or against amnesty?

What do you think of my off-the-cuff solution?

Do you have an alternate solution?

And is it really racist and heartless and mean and all the other pejoratives of us to expect everyone to follow the law in a nation of laws?

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Those of you who’ve read this blog for awhile know Jeff Jacoby is one of my favorite columnists. He’s long been the token conservative at The Boston Globe (Democrat) and is often the lone voice of reason amid the rhetoric and spin usually featured on the editorial pages.

Normally, I’d quote a few paragraphs and post a continuation link to the column but I thought today’s column so good, his message so relevant and important to what is wrong with 21st-century America, that I’m shamelessly reprinting the whole thing, complete with all the  links and graphics, for those who normally don’t follow the continuation link.

***

Making Americans
By Jeff Jacoby

WITH OUR MUSIC TEACHER, Mrs. Feigenbaum, at the piano playing the melody – the Toreador’s Song from the opera Carmen – and the lyrics handed out to us on mimeographed pages, my 4^th-grade classmates and I practiced one of the songs we were learning for our school’s Thanksgiving assembly:

Thanksgiving Day comes once each year
Our president proclaims it far and near.
Thankful for the bounty of our land,
The harvest that makes this nation grand,
Bestowed us from above,
God bless this land,
This precious land we love.

I was a student at the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, a Jewish day school where half of the curriculum was devoted to religious studies and the school year conformed to the Jewish calendar. Most of the kids in my class came from Orthodox Jewish homes, and many of us were the children of Eastern European immigrants who spoke Yiddish more fluently than they spoke English.

Yet there we were, kids whose parents may have gotten off the boat only 10 or 15 years earlier and whose family life bore little resemblance to The Patty Duke Show, singing songs about the Mayflower and turkey dinners without a hint of irony. The inculcation of Jewish values and learning was the Hebrew Academy’s chief priority, but it was understood that raising kids to be good Jews went hand-in-hand with raising them to be good Americans. Parents and teachers alike took it for granted that the story and traditions of Thanksgiving (or Columbus Day or Washington’s Birthday) should be as familiar a part of our cultural identity as the Passover story and its traditions.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what my classmates and I were experiencing was the classic model of American assimilation: the process by which immigrants and ethnic minorities, and the children of those immigrants and minorities, had for decades been successfully turned into Americans. In a world filled with ethnic antagonism and religious violence, the United States had found a paradigm for unifying the most ethnically, racially, and religiously varied population on the planet into a relatively tolerant and unified culture.

We rarely reflect on what an astonishing achievement this was. But how many other societies have managed to maintain national cultural unity in the midst of ethnic diversity? Cyprus? Rwanda? Sri Lanka? The former Yugoslavia?

The key to what Peter Salins, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, calls “assimilation, American style” was a balancing act. On the one hand, newcomers streaming to the United States found out quickly that they were expected to become honest-to-God Americans. That meant learning English, getting a useful job, embracing America’s democratic values and institutions, and eventually taking the oath as new citizens.

On the other hand, immigrants weren’t obliged to shed their ethnic pride, or to drop the foods and customs and festivals they brought with them from their native land. They were free to be “as ethnic as they pleased,” writes Salins. The goal of assimilation was not to make all Americans alike; it was to get newcomers, however dissimilar their backgrounds and cultures, to believe that they were “irrevocably part of the same national family.”

There was one other key ingredient, which we too easily overlook. Immigrants understood that the country they had come to was in some indispensable way better than the one they had left. They might retain a soft spot for the scenery or clothing or rhythms of life in the old country, they might always prefer their mother tongue to English, they might even pay tuition at a private or parochial school so that the religious or linguistic values they had grown up with would be passed on to their kids.

But underlying everything would be the awareness that they had chosen to be Americans. America was better than their native land — perhaps because its rulers were corrupt, or because it was riven by war, or because economic opportunities were limited. Perhaps, as in my father’s case, because totalitarian tyrants – first Nazis, then Communists – had made life there a hell on earth. Perhaps because, like the Pilgrims, they sought a peaceable society where they could worship as they saw fit without being “hunted and persecuted on every side.”

As my fellow 4^th-graders and I belted out the lyrics to another song — “P-I-L-grim fathers landed here on Plymouth Bay” — we probably assumed that Mrs. Feigenbaum was just getting us ready for the Thanksgiving assembly. She knew, of course, that she was doing something far more important. She was getting us ready to be Americans.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

***

“She was getting us ready to be Americans.”

I had never before thought of school like that. But now it makes me wonder why we’ve stopped.

Can you imagine what our nation might be like today if, for the past thirty or forty years or so, our public and private schools actually had been preparing all the students, not just recent immigrants, to be Americans in addition to reading and writing and arithmetic; if, instead of preparing students to be good little worker bees loaded down with college tuition debt, they taught them how to think and reason and taught them about the American ideals of individualism and freedom, opportunity and entrepreneurship; if, instead of celebrating the myriad differences in the backgrounds of students, they focused on the similarities.

We sorely need to get over this misguided, insane idea that every culture, every country, is just as good as every other. It’s simply not true. For evidence, compare the numbers of people today who will sacrifice everything to come to America with the numbers of Americans who would sacrifice even a cup of coffee to go anywhere else. And if you think the humongously lopsided results are due to all the welfare we hand out, compare those same numbers fifty years ago and a century ago.

I’m not saying newcomers must leave their heritage behind. But I am saying that if they aspire to become Americans, they must be Americans first and whatever they used to be has to come second.

I’m proud of my Italian heritage but I am an American, first. My father, who was born in Italy and who legally immigrated with his parents at age seven, never again spoke Italian after his mother died when I was about ten.  Decades later, it occurred to me to ask him why, since I thought it would have been nice to grow up bi-lingual. He said, “Because I’m an American. And we speak English here.”

I’ve never forgotten that, even though so many millions of others apparently have in their quest to turn the American melting post into some kind of bizarre stew where each ingredient fights for supremacy.

United we stand, divided we fall.

Has that sentiment ever been more relevant, more important, than it is today?

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Congratulations to this week’s Comment Contest winner, Mike.

***

Should American citizenship be for sale?

It was the first question that crossed my mind this morning as I read the following story.

Green cards for job creators
Program gets push even as critics question its fairness

Click here to read the rest of the story.

First, I don’t understand what critics mean by calling it a questionable business practice.

People invest because they want a return on their investment. Traditionally, the return is more money. But many folks “invest” in things like land and houses and collectibles not because they seek a monetary gain,  but because they want isolation or status or the joy of collecting. They may profit monetarily some day, but profit is not the prime motivation.

Given that, how is seeking citizenship as a return on an investment any different? They face the same risk of loss as any investor. If they invest and the new jobs do not materialize within two years, their green cards are revoked and they’re sent home on top of losing their investment.

Then there is the question of what kind of new citizens do we want?

Some would say the words Emma Lazarus penned in 1883 still apply: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

A century ago, even half a century ago, when America and the world were far different places, it was easy to embrace the sentiment behind those words. Were it not for that sentiment, I’d not be writing this post today because my father and my mother’s grandparents might never have emigrated here. But after decades of allowing illegals to pour across our borders unchecked, America no longer needs masses of unskilled labor. We have plenty of home-grown unskilled collecting welfare checks who could use a job. What we really need are new citizens with assets we can tax to help fund those welfare checks and these millionaire investors certainly fit that bill. Plus, their investments create new jobs, new opportunities for others to invest, and create even more jobs.

I say we should not only welcome these foreign investors and reward them with citizenship if they and their investments come through for us, we should be actively promoting the offer worldwide.

If we can induce ten thousand new investors here each year, the current visa limit, that translates into between five and ten billion dollars of new investment in America each year, plus millions or billions more spent here as these families set up housekeeping and go about their lives, plus at least one hundred thousand new jobs and probably many more.

I’d say that’s a damn sight better deal for America than we’ve seen from the trillions Washington has wasted on non-stimulus programs and bailouts over the past few years.

What do you think?

Good program or bad? And why?

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Taxes

Obama Budget Plan

The Skies Just Ain’t Friendly Anymore

Come to the USA

Jeremiah Peabody’s pills

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The headline on page three of today’s newspaper was impossible to miss:

Norway attack suspect ‘insane,’ his lawyer says

Click Here to read the rest of the article.

The whole case indicates he’s insane? If so, then there are lots more insane people just like him.

He’s not like anyone? On the contrary, he’s exactly like the “insane” people I just mentioned. Can you guess who I mean?

Breivik killed as many people as he could because he was a true believer. He apparently believed socialism and multiculturalism would destroy the Norwegian culture he loved and was willing to kill and die, if necessary, for his beliefs.

If that makes him insane, then every Muslim terrorist is insane, as must be every Muslim who supports what they do. And if that is the case, should we not have arrested, rather than killed Osama bin Laden, and confined him to an institution for the criminally insane? Instead of sending soldiers to kill al-Qaeda members, shouldn’t we be sending social workers to find and treat them with Prozac and lithium and group therapy?

I believe Breivik sees himself as a soldier in a battle against social policies he believes will fundamentally change the Norwegian culture and way of life. If he is insane, then it is his beliefs that make him so, not the actions he undertook to call attention to the problems he perceived. So, too, it must be the beliefs of Muslim terrorists that make them insane, not the wanton slaughter they undertake. After all, killing innocents is a time-honored tradition among humans.

If Breivik’s beliefs make him insane, then there are many tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of similarly insane people here in America and around the world who are also seriously concerned about the spread of Islam and socialism and the slow, but relentless transformation of their cultures. Should they all be rounded up for treatment?

It is always dangerous to label as insane the beliefs of others. There was a time when the Soviets and the Chinese used that tactic to justify the imprisonment of those who opposed them. Such oppression is likely still happening around the globe.

Here in America, we’re living with our own form of insanity. Here, on the Federal, state, and local levels, we routinely spend more money than we take in. We mortgage the future of our children to buy votes today. We elect people who believe we can borrow our way into prosperity. And worst of all, we continue to elect and reelect the people who turn such insanity into law. Doesn’t that make all those who vote for such people insane, too?

What do you folks think? Is Breivik insane?

Are Muslim terrorists insane?

Are most of our politicians insane?

And are we, the voters, insane for reelecting them?

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OPS buys 8,000 diversity manuals

The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive.

The book by Virginia education consultants could raise some eyebrows with its viewpoints.

The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.”

The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.

The authors argue that public school teachers must raise their cultural awareness to better serve minority students and improve academic achievement.

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

Here’s what I don’t understand.

Back in the days before political correctness, before we celebrated diversity, and before we were told that all belief systems are equally good (except those with actual standards, of course), folks came to America because they wanted a better life than they could achieve where they were currently living. They came here knowing that if they worked hard, they could provide a comfortable life for themselves and their families. And if they were really talented, persistent and lucky, they might even make it big, really big, something that would be  virtually impossible had they remained where they were born. In short, they came here to join the American culture.

That simple system worked amazingly well for the better part of two centuries. Yes, there were injustices, and inequalities, and problems. But despite all that, millions of the world’s poor were able to lift themselves from poverty and, somehow, they managed to do it without any assistance from anyone except, perhaps, family and friends.

Compare that with what we have today. Yes, some groups are less oppressed than they were in the past. That’s a good thing.  But in the process of lifting burdens from some folks, we’ve managed to impose more burdens on others. We’ve allowed ourselves to be stripped of one right after another, to the point were what freedom we retain is no longer a matter of right, but a matter of indulgence of our out-of-control government.

We don’t need teachers who are culturally sensitive to every idiosyncrasy of every racial, ethnic, and social group. We need teachers who understand the values and customs that turned a continent from a revolutionary backwater to the land of opportunity for millions. And we need them to teach that to the young minds we entrust to them.

Anyone who wants to celebrate their heritage has always been able to do so within their family and social group. But in public school classrooms, there is only one heritage that needs to be taught, the American heritage, in all it’s glory, and with all it’s warts. And then they can spend the rest of the day leaning how to read and write and do math and science.

What do you think?

Did the Omaha schools do good? Waste money?

And what about my little rant?  Good? Bad? What would you add?

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You have to be impressed when ostensibly intelligent people manage to pen entire columns on a subject and manage to not only completely avoid the truth, but rephrase said truth in such a way as to misdirect the reader.

Take the piece by senior Atlantic Monthly editor Joshua Green that appears in today’s issue of my local Democratic newsletter. Titled The issue Washington ignores, but voters don’t, he manages to demonstrate either a complete lack of understanding about a huge, vocal segment of the population or his willingness to say whatever is necessary to advance an agenda.

Please take two minutes to follow the link above and read his opinion piece so the quotes and my comments, below, will make sense.

And yet Americans are troubled by the growing number of minorities. For many Americans, the old division between blacks and whites has been replaced by a new division between native-born citizens and immigrants. This is most apparent in the stark difference in economic outlook between whites and minorities (particularly Asians and Hispanics).

No, Josh. Americans are not troubled by minorities. We are troubled by the growing numbers of illegals, be they minority or not. It was a nice try, though, particularly when you tossed in Asians with Hispanics to make it seem like you weren’t talking about the criminal hoards streaming across our southern border.

Asked what they thought was causing the minority boom, 53 percent of whites said illegal immigration, 29 percent said higher birth rates, and 11 percent said legal immigration. “That has it almost exactly backward,’’ said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Since 2000, Passel says, there have been 19.3 million minority births, 8.4 million legal immigrants, and 5.6 million undocumented immigrants.

I have to wonder, Josh, how many of those 19.3 million births were to illegals? Perhaps if we added that number to the 5.6 million who entered uninvited or overstayed their welcome, we’d find the total far exceeds the 8.4 million legal immigrants, a group, by the way, that causes we Americans no trouble at all despite the nations of their birth or the colors of their skin.

Really, Josh, all we care about is that folks come here legally, get a job or start a business, pay their taxes, and work toward becoming Americans, just like the rest of us. I know that’s hard for some folks to understand. They think that because they are consumed by race issues, everyone else is. Sorry, Josh. We’re really too busy living our lives to obsess over trivialities like skin color.

By the way, when are you folks going to stop with the Newspeak. They are not undocumented immigrants, they are criminal invaders. They are illegals. And the Americans you disparage will welcome them to our country only after they return, with their families, to their own counties, get documented, as they should, and then emigrate  legally, as many of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did in decades past.

This widespread misconception stems from a lack of information that’s largely due to both the Democratic and Republican parties’ unwillingness to pursue immigration reform, after years of failed attempts.

Apparently, the only misconception is yours. Americans, particularly those of us who work and pay taxes, understand that “immigration reform” is Newspeak for an amnesty designed to add tens of millions of new leftist voters to the Democratic party.

Claire Wolfe has been blogging recently about a few ‘producers” shrugging (here and here). If the left manages to grant amnesty to millions of criminals, get ready for a whole lot more taxpayers, large and small alike, shrugging as they come to the realization that paying ever increasing amounts of protection money to the states and feds is no longer worth the effort. I sure hope all those former criminals will be happy ponying up the difference in tax revenues.

These numbers appear to be driven by two things, said Brent McGoldrick of Financial Dynamics, which conducted the poll. The aftershocks of the immigration debate, which was never really resolved, but still permeates how people look at the economy and the future of the country; and the bad economy, which has made whites feel particularly pessimistic and sharpened these attitudes.

Aftershocks of the immigration debate? What aftershocks? Do you mean all that hand wringing, hair wrenching, cloth rending, and panty twisting by the Obama cabal and their Obots in the media at the very idea that actual Americans – you know, like the ones in all those flyover states – don’t want millions of criminals to be rewarded for their crimes?

And it’s not just whites that are pessimistic. All thinking Americans, regardless or race, are pessimistic. You might want to get out of your office and spend some time talking to real people instead of pollsters.

You see, despite what you may have heard, we do understand basic economics. We understand supply and demand.

We understand that if you print trillions of new dollars, the ones we have are suddenly worth less.

We understand that if you allow millions of criminals to remain here and work, that’s millions of jobs that can’t be filled by actual citizens.

We understand that allowing criminals to work depresses wages, not only for the criminals, who are frequently exploited since they cannot complain, but also for legal immigrants and citizens, who may have to work two or three jobs to support their families because the criminals have driven the cost of labor down to the minimum wage — and sometimes below — in many areas.

We understand a whole lot more than you think, Josh.

I’d go on with the list, but I have to go to work so I can pay my taxes and health care and grocery bill and fees and utility bills and  gasoline bill and on and on.

Readers, would you kindly help Josh by detailing some of the other things we Americans understand about the economy, and immigration, and government, and, well, you know.

Thanks.

I’m going to work now.

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The trouble with most politicians is that they think the future is going to last forever. But it never does.

Sooner or later, despite all their speeches, maneuvering, interim and patchwork bills, and everything else they do to try to prevent it, tomorrow becomes today and brings with it all the problems they refused to face in the past. No one can predict when that will happen, but sooner or later, it will happen.

And that’ll be the day the S really does HTF.

***

Evidently, Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie has been working overtime trying to find proof Our Dear Leader really was born in Hawaii. Now, Abercrombie has said the definitive document, the long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate, may not exist in the state’s archives.

All the controversy over the past four years could have been settled in a minute had O and his Bots simply produced the document. That they have not done so lends credence to the claims of those who maintain Obama is foreign-born and thus ineligible to be president. And now, perhaps, we know why.

Then again, some might say the long delay can be attributed to the difficulty in creating and aging such a document so it will pass for something actually issued nearly fifty years ago when it is miraculously discovered in the months leading up to the 2012 elections. But that’s just crazy thinking.

Isn’t it?

***

In If we build it, they will come – Why aren’t more people moving to Massachusetts?, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser cites some statistics that would seem to make The People’s Republic an attractive place to live, including high  average per capita income, below average unemployment, and a relatively strong economy. He wonders if it might be the weather but settles on the lack of new housing, neatly managing  to miss the obvious answer.

Ask the thousands who flee Massachusetts each year and you’ll hear things like high taxes, taxes disguised as fees, fund-raising by fines, burdensome and intrusive regulations, stealth cops in unmarked cars on the highways, astronomical health care costs thanks to Romneycare, an aloof, corrupt government that rewards its friends from the public coffers, and more.

From the heights of the Ivory Towers over at Harvard, it’s difficult to see, much less understand the issues that bedevil the little folk, so perhaps Glaeser can be excused for not realizing that word gets around. Folks considering a move here talk to people who’ve left. They read the area newspapers online. Through eyes unblinded by ideology, they see the miasma of socialism that is slowly, but surely suffocating the state and its residents and they decide they want  no part of it.

Really, can you blame them?

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