In his home state of Pennsylvania, he has rivals including Octorara Orphie of the Slumbering Groundhog Lodge in Quarryville, and Sammi II of Monroe County, who was pressed into service after Sammi I died of heatstroke after riding in a parade. Last year, Mel, a groundhog in Milltown, N.J., got into the act. His owner, Jerry Guthlein, is predicting a crowd of 200 in the parking lot of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
“We call them all impostors,” says Bill Deeley, who owns a funeral home and is president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle, the name given to a group of businessmen from western Pennsylvania who have been using a groundhog to predict the weather since 1887. “We are the real McCoy.”
At sunup on Tuesday Mr. Deeley, in top hat and tails, will tell the world whether there will be six more weeks of winter (if Phil sees his shadow) or an early spring (if he doesn’t). As many as 35,000 visitors have come to the town of 6,700 to watch. People from out of state arrive to get married in the local chapel. This year, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development is texting Phil’s forecast to 15,000 people who signed up for it.
It’s unclear how many less-celebrated groundhogs appear in local festivities. Mr. Deeley thinks there are more than a dozen. Many are in Pennsylvania, and for good reason. German immigrants to the state began using groundhogs to forecast the weather in the 18th century, following the tradition in Europe where the badger was used.
Photo courtesy of Kevin who’s friend REALLLLY likes Groundhog Day.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday offered yet another way California can save on incarcerating illegal immigrants: pay to build prisons in Mexico.
“We can do so much better, in the prison system alone, if we can go and take inmates – for instance, the 20,000 inmates that are illegal immigrants that are here – and get them to Mexico,” Schwarzenegger said.
“We pay them to build a prison down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in the prison,” he added. “Half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons. That is money, again, a billion dollars right there that can go into higher education. That is an example of one of the things we do that is unnecessary spending.”
Swiss to vote on mosque minarets ban – Guardian — Racist? Stupid IMHO. Some of the most beautiful architecture on the planet is Islamic. How can there not be a Christian vs. Muslim aspect to this?
The Swiss are to decide this weekend whether to ban minarets on mosques, in what is in effect the first direct vote in a European country on Islam and the practices of Muslims.
The controversial referendum on Sunday, accompanied by a prohibition campaign denounced as racist and in violation of human rights, is the latest tussle in Europe over the limits of multiculturalism and immigrant lifestyles.
Pushed by anti-immigrant rightwing populists, it has triggered months of debate in a country that uses direct democracy for single-issue politics. The referendum has turned into much more than a vote on architecture and urban planning.
“The minaret has got nothing to do with religion. It’s a symbol of political power, a prelude to the introduction of sharia law,” argued Ulrich Schlüer, of the rightwing Swiss People’s party, an architect of the campaign.
[...]
The rightwing anti-immigrant lobby has led the campaign, but it has been joined by some secularist leftists and liberals fiercely critical of Islam. Julia Onken, a prominent feminist and psychologist and bestselling author of self-help books, last week called on women to vote for the ban. “Mosques are male houses, minarets are male power symbols,” she declared. “The building of minarets is also a visible signal of the state’s acceptance of the oppression of women.”
There are about 400,000 Muslims in Switzerland, 5% of the population. Most are immigrants from the Balkan regions of Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia and are not practising Muslims.
Ok. It appears that this video and The Raw Story article are a tad manipulative and that the baggers may have caught on before the end. Clearly they have a semblance of intelligence. Still pretty funny as a prank, even if the speakers argument is undercooked.
A speaker at an anti-immigration rally in Minneapolis this past weekend got the crowd to support more than just the deportation of all illegal immigrants — he got them cheering for the eviction of all European-descended immigrants to America who “stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
[...]
“In Minneapolis where I’m from, we have a huge immigrant population that has been causing a number of problems,” Erickson began. “With the economy in recession and so many people laid off and unable to find work, immigrants should not be competing for the few jobs that are open. It’s just not fair to the folks who have a claim to this country and have a right to be here.”
[...]
“Let’s send these European immigrants back where they came from,” he said to wild cheers. “We need to send every one of them back home. … They stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
[...]
“Erickson” walked off the stage leading the crowd in a loud chant of “Columbus go home! Columbus go home!”
Denmark is offering immigrants from “non-Western” countries 100,000 Danish kroners (US$20,000) if they volunteer to give up their legal residency and move “home”. This is just one of many creative initiatives spearheaded by the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party to make foreigners – and especially Muslims – feel unwelcome in this small European country of 5.5 million inhabitants.
According to the Danish People’s Party, a coalition partner of the two ruling right-wing parties of the Danish government, paying immigrants to leave Denmark will save the state money on social services and “problems” [da] in the long run. “It costs quite a lot to have maladjusted immigrants in Danish society,” said financial spokesperson of the party, Kristian Thulesen Dahl. Funds have also been set aside for campaigns by local authorities who wish to encourage immigrants to leave the country. The government have not yet calculated how many people can be expected to accept the offer.
Around 10% of the population in Denmark are immigrants or descendants of immigrants including from neighboring countries, as well as the rest of the world. The primary issue in politics and the media for the past many years has been the “integration” of Muslim and other non-western immigrants and the tension arising from a perceived clash of cultures. Danish politicians have created some of the most stringent immigration laws in all of Europe, and continue to score high for it in polls.
Acting on anonymous tips from within the Hispanic-American community, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials on Wednesday deported Luis Miguel Salvador Aguila Dominguez, who for the last 48 years had been living illegally in the United States under the name Lou Dobbs.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, federal agents stormed the undocumented immigrant’s home in an evening raid just hours after the 64-year-old newscaster suddenly announced that he was resigning from CNN, and immediately placed him on an Aeromexico flight departing from Newark Liberty Airport.
“Mr. Dominguez did not come quietly, but in the end he came,” said Sam Whitlock of the U.S. Border Patrol, who was injured during the arrest. “He pulled a knife on me, like they will, and swore a bunch in Spanish and spit on us when we finally managed to grab him by the serape and throw him against a wall. But the important thing is that he’s now back where he belongs…”
“This is a battle for the soul of our country,” Agent Jared Burns, 23, said as he helped the 17 Dominguez children board the bus that would take them to a detention facility where their legal status will eventually be determined. “Today is a proud day for any true American.”
FLORENCE, Ariz. — It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates such as Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal-justice world, the state’s death-row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company. State officials soon will seek bids from private companies for nine of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 on death row. It is the first attempt by a state to put its entire prison system under private control. The privatization effort, in its breadth and aggressive financial goals, demonstrates what states — broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Andy Biggs, a Republican in the state Legislature who supports private prisons. “If we were not in this economic environment, I don’t think we’d be talking about this with the same sense of urgency.”
Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state and charge per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million upfront to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the firm. The privatization move has raised questions about the ability of the private sector to handle the state’s most hardened criminals. While executions would be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
The federal government, with a surge of new immigrant inmates, also contracts with firms. The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the U.S. has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.
We are one step closer to a Death Row Reality Show.
Strap yourself in: We’re in for the return of Cold War politics, the rise of new dominant powers, and a full-blown space war, according to a new book. What are the chances his dire predictions will come true?
Written in 20 year increments, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman looks out over our coming century, with an eye towards geopolitics and international power. In the next twenty years, Friedman predicts that the global war on terror, which he terms the US-Jihadist war, will be winding down, a smaller conflict that will have little consequence after all is said and done.
Instead, numerous problems will crop up in the former Soviet bloc as Russia works to regain its former power by reclaiming older territories through economic growth and outright bullying.
[... A] major point of conflict in the next century, especially in the next fifty years as populations begin to drop, won’t be over immigrants illegally entering countries, it will be over which countries can lure in the most new workers to help prop up their own economies and lagging workforces.
While the major powers around the world such as the United States and Russia will have economic slowdowns during this stretch, smaller nations will use this opportunity to rise on their own.
Lots, lots more, if you read the full review. Or the book.
A class act he is not, but South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s boorish behavior during President Obama’s speech on health reform more than earned him his 15 minutes of infamy.
It is understandable that he chose – or as some suggested, was told – to bellow “You lie!” when the President was explaining for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants would not be covered under health care legislation. After all, Wilson’s extreme anti-immigrant positions are well known.
His outburst, for which he has half-heartedly apologized, not only exposed Wilson for the uncouth nativist he is, but made clear that immigration is still very much one of the Republican Party’s war horses.
“Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst is not only a massive breach of decorum,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, “but the latest example of how race-baiting and immigrant bashing have become standard fare for hard-right elements of the Republican Party.”
One has to wonder if Wilson and his ilk are intent on committing political suicide – and in the process taking down with them the entire GOP – or if their prejudices are so deep that they just cannot help themselves.
Ironically, after all is said and done, Joe (You lie!) Wilson’s outburst could go down in history as the death knell for the most reactionary and extremist wing of the Republican Party.
The recession has caused some people to take jobs they could never have imagined working in. But in ‘normal’ times, what does this study mean for the immigration reform movement?
Most illegal workers in the US are Mexicans who mow lawns, clean motel sheets, butcher hogs, pick strawberries, and otherwise toil away at tasks that, as George W. Bush once said, “Americans won’t do.” And they often are paid less than the minimum wage.
A widely held assumption in Washington’s debate about immigration is that native-born Americans avoid menial and dirty work. Laid-off autoworkers wouldn’t really wash dishes at a Denny’s or milk cows on a dairy farm, would they? Such a notion has long helped justify a flow of foreign workers into the US – or possibly an amnesty for those hiding from the law.
[...]
With people desperate for income, downward mobility may be on the way up.
[...]
Maybe it’s a myth that Americans won’t take certain jobs. In fact, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies used 2005-07 data to look at 465 occupations. Only four had a majority of immigrants in them.
If a child, even if they are illegal immigrant, shows up in an emergency room with tuberculosis and nobody is giving them treatment and then they are going back to the playground and playing next to our kids.
So, I think there is a basic standard of decency where if somebody is in a death situation or a severe illness that we are going to provide them emergency care. But nobody has talked about providing health insurance to illegal immigrants, I want to make that absolutely clear.
Obama basically contradicts himself — care for severe illnesses or life-threatening situations is what health insurance is for! Every time you go to the hospital, you are arguably in a life-threatening situation.
The best part is that one second later he says that his plan does not provide health care to illegal immigrants.
I want to point out that I am not particularly opposed to universal health care, I’m just what the President said.
U.S. citizens wrongly detained, deported by ICE — It’s not that hard to find illegals. I can do it. But apparently these guys cannot. And I wonder what sort of lawsuits ensue over this sort of incompetence?
The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father’s birth certificate and his own, his parents’ marriage certificate, his father’s school, military and Social Security records.
After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped.
While most in the US were celebrating the 4th of July, a Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was being held on federal charges of stealing top-secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution—that sources say is none other than Goldman Sachs.
The allegations, if true, are big news because the codes the accused man, Sergey Aleynikov, tried to steal is the secret code to unlocking Goldman’s automated stocks and commodities trading businesses. Federal authorities allege the computer codes and related-trading files that Aleynikov uploaded to a German-based website help this major “financial institution” generate millions of dollars in profits each year.
The platform is one of the things that apparently gives Goldman a leg-up over the competition when it comes to rapid-fire trading of stocks and commodities. Federal authorities say the platform quickly processes rapid developments in the markets and uses top secret mathematical formulas to allow the firm to make highly-profitable automated trades.
The criminal case has the potential to shed a light on the inner workings of an important profit center for Goldman and other Wall Street firms. The federal charges also raise serious questions about the safeguards Wall Street firms deploy to protect their proprietary trading systems.
On his ride back to Indiantown from a landscaping job one afternoon nearly a decade ago, Luis Alberto Jimenez’s destiny collided with the front end of a stolen van. The impact killed two passengers in the car he was in and landed the van’s drunken driver, Donald Flewellen, in prison for nearly 10 years on a DUI manslaughter charge.
The crash also left Jimenez, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant, with debilitating injuries and the cognitive ability of a fourth-grader.
Jimenez has become the center of a legal battle between the hospital that flew him back to Guatemala after spending more than $1 million on his care and Jimenez’s family members who say the hospital falsely imprisoned him and deported him so it would no longer have to pay to treat him. The case is at the forefront of national debates on health care and immigration…
Against objections from Montejo (Jimenez’ cousin) and his attorney – after two years – a judge eventually sided with Martin Memorial. Montejo filed an appeal, but less than a day later hospital officials took Jimenez to Guatemala on a chartered jet…
An appeals court in 2004 overturned Judge Fennelly’s decision, saying he had no jurisdiction to authorize the return…
Martin Memorial officials declined last week to comment on the specifics of the case. They said their situation reflects those of hospitals across the country.
“Unfortunately, the cost of providing that care is rising and the burden of paying the health care bill for many undocumented immigrants is falling on hospitals and health systems that simply cannot afford to pay it,” hospital communications director Ronda Wilburn said in an e-mail.
I don’t know of another country that spends so much time feeling guilty over the plight of those who enter the country illegally. Should we just pick up the tab for everything?
People on the government’s terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.
In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.
The new statistics, compiled in a report from the Government Accountability Office that is scheduled for public release next week, draw attention to an odd divergence in federal law: people placed on the government’s terrorist watch list can be stopped from getting on a plane or getting a visa, but they cannot be stopped from buying a gun.
Gun purchases must be approved unless federal officials can find some other disqualification of the would-be buyer, like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict.
“This is a glaring omission, and it’s a security issue,” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who requested the study, said in an interview.
Mr. Lautenberg plans to introduce legislation on Monday that would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists.
Homeland Insecurity will fight to stop anyone who ever uttered a syllable of dissent from climbing aboard one of our overpriced airborne cattle cars. But, the NRA and the nutball Right will battle tooth and claw to protect their heaven-ordained right to kill and maim their fellows. As long as it’s done with firearms.
25% off eHarmony subscription with code EHTECH 12-percent discount forever with code TECH 10-percent discount and free month using TECH10 10-percent or 30 dollars off weekly car rental!
Get 10-percent discount on car rental!
Get 10% off rental cars!
Get 10% off Dollar rentals!
Discounts on domain names!
More critters are challenging Punxsutawney Phil for the crown of Groundhog Day prognosticator.
Strap yourself in: 
