Month: May 2006

Lashing back

This lady on illegal-immigrant backlash in Wash Times makes good reading.  Diana West’s her name. 
 
However, interesting or not, her “immorally cheap labor force” reference is mysterious.  What moral dictum is being violated when people fight to work for low wages?  She apparently speaks of pricing non-illegals out of the market.  Oh?  What does she think of printing firms moving to Tennessee, where labor costs are lower?  Immoral?
 
Her reference to illegals constituting “more than 29 percent of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities,” on the other hand, is a stopper, though it leaves unsaid what percentage these are of illegals.
 
Never mind.  Herndon VA voters spoke this week, going almost entirely for opponents of an illegal-immigrant hiring facility.  Not to mention the record “463 immigration bills . . . introduced just this year in 43 states,” as reported by the National Conference of State Legislatures, most of them “designed to get tough on illegal immigrants, on employers who give them jobs and on state officials who give them benefits,” as says Wash Post.
 
Then, anecdotally, there’s the Arizona “Sheriff’s posse to patrol desert” headline.  And the Milford CT board of health’s making sure restaurants do not hire illegals in view of “the appearance of infectious diseases among” them.  (Power Line has this.)

Lashing back

This lady on illegal-immigrant backlash in Wash Times makes good reading.  Diana West’s her name. 
 
However, interesting or not, her “immorally cheap labor force” reference is mysterious.  What moral dictum is being violated when people fight to work for low wages?  She apparently speaks of pricing non-illegals out of the market.  Oh?  What does she think of printing firms moving to Tennessee, where labor costs are lower?  Immoral?
 
Her reference to illegals constituting “more than 29 percent of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities,” on the other hand, is a stopper, though it leaves unsaid what percentage these are of illegals.
 
Never mind.  Herndon VA voters spoke this week, going almost entirely for opponents of an illegal-immigrant hiring facility.  Not to mention the record “463 immigration bills . . . introduced just this year in 43 states,” as reported by the National Conference of State Legislatures, most of them “designed to get tough on illegal immigrants, on employers who give them jobs and on state officials who give them benefits,” as says Wash Post.
 
Then, anecdotally, there’s the Arizona “Sheriff’s posse to patrol desert” headline.  And the Milford CT board of health’s making sure restaurants do not hire illegals in view of “the appearance of infectious diseases among” them.  (Power Line has this.)

Cute but no cigar

Chi Trib’s page oner today, top left, is from Liz Sly out of Baghdad with help from Omar Salih, about “Omar” as the name “no Iraqi wants” because it’s a Sunni name and Shiite gunmen will kill you.  A story like this is a way to keep the civil-war argument in readers’ eye, Alinsky-style rubbing raw the sores of discontent with U.S. policy, or it’s just an easy-reading breezy piece to help people thank God it’s Friday.

As the number of sectarian killings in Iraq soars, and Iraqis on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide feel increasingly nervous about mingling with the opposite sect, name-changing is on the rise.

OK.  But deep in the story, we have:

[R]eports [counting] 24 Omars among the 700 or so Sunnis killed in recent weeks [is] hardly statistically significant. [boldface added]

. . . .

But the report has been widely disseminated, and now men named Omar are convinced they are being singled out by the Shiite militias and Interior Ministry forces suspected of carrying out the sinister killings of Sunni men whose bodies are found almost every day, dumped around town.

So. A story about the madness and panic of crowds, bolstered by misinformation and the words of one Omar saying:

“The only safe way is to leave the country. But if you can’t do that, you have to do something to survive.”

This is on-the-ground reporting?  Nothing from sources such as Brookings Institution’s Iraq Report that give an overview or grounds of comparison, even to use a Trib section title, perspective?  Not that I can see.

=====================

Add this, 5/7: 

Reader Jennifer: You’ve nailed it. Thanks. Ms. Sly’s name fits all too well.
Me: Someone in her position, however, can be the creation of editors (with whom she goes along to get along).  They say what they are looking for, or she gets it without their saying it, and they place it, deciding where on what day.  Either way, it’s bad; in fact, it’s worse when you think editors, on whom I place primary blame.

Cute but no cigar

Chi Trib’s page oner today, top left, is from Liz Sly out of Baghdad with help from Omar Salih, about “Omar” as the name “no Iraqi wants” because it’s a Sunni name and Shiite gunmen will kill you.  A story like this is a way to keep the civil-war argument in readers’ eye, Alinsky-style rubbing raw the sores of discontent with U.S. policy, or it’s just an easy-reading breezy piece to help people thank God it’s Friday.

As the number of sectarian killings in Iraq soars, and Iraqis on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide feel increasingly nervous about mingling with the opposite sect, name-changing is on the rise.

OK.  But deep in the story, we have:

[R]eports [counting] 24 Omars among the 700 or so Sunnis killed in recent weeks [is] hardly statistically significant. [boldface added]

. . . .

But the report has been widely disseminated, and now men named Omar are convinced they are being singled out by the Shiite militias and Interior Ministry forces suspected of carrying out the sinister killings of Sunni men whose bodies are found almost every day, dumped around town.

So. A story about the madness and panic of crowds, bolstered by misinformation and the words of one Omar saying:

“The only safe way is to leave the country. But if you can’t do that, you have to do something to survive.”

This is on-the-ground reporting?  Nothing from sources such as Brookings Institution’s Iraq Report that give an overview or grounds of comparison, even to use a Trib section title, perspective?  Not that I can see.

=====================

Add this, 5/7: 

Reader Jennifer: You’ve nailed it. Thanks. Ms. Sly’s name fits all too well.
Me: Someone in her position, however, can be the creation of editors (with whom she goes along to get along).  They say what they are looking for, or she gets it without their saying it, and they place it, deciding where on what day.  Either way, it’s bad; in fact, it’s worse when you think editors, on whom I place primary blame.

Secret proposals, payoffs, divisiveness, scorched earth? OP is hot: Today’s Wed Journal column

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS: Is it kosher for the village not to reveal development proposals (RFPs), as it did when Wednesday Journal asked for them in the matter of Colt building renovation? These are secret proposals? What about the soon-to-be-approved protocols of participation? Would the proposals be revealed to participants? One good thing: this refusal spares our village board any second-guessing by citizens with their own ideas. This is only right. Who are these citizens anyway? What trees do they plant?
 
PAYOFF: What about Whiteco paying off the village for honoring its agreement? It’s coughing up $400G for unnamed and so far nonexistent village housing programs, to say nothing of another $200G in environment-friendly additions to the already agreed-on building. That would be your cost of doing business in Oak Park, insofar as this village board is a very sensitive creature, and kid gloves are in order. It’s not under the table, anyhow.
 
TAKING OFFENSE: And hey, since when is it not kosher to ask about conflict of interest, as board President Pope asked a few weeks ago about who would plan the Baltimore Colt redo? You can’t even ask? Trustee Milstein was “offended … deeply offended … angered,” as if he’d been told his mother wore army boots. Trustee Baker found it “repugnant.” But what have board members got better to do than ask about conflict of interest? It’s what legislators do.
 
NAME GAME: These two are of the board majority, but that’s too tame a phrase for the poets among us. “Milstein majority,” in honor of its stormy-petrel spokesman, does have a ring to it, though editor-columnist Trainor has the fetching “fearsome foursome of Bob [Milstein], Baker, Brock and Brady (the killer Bs).” The poets love it. But Milstein’s the man, poetic or not, so we should go with the other one, MM.
 
Indeed, board meetings and local papers offer us no small array of Milstein moments. For instance, the opposition Village Manager Association (VMA) was part of Oak Park’s “growth machine,” until “swept out of power,” he said some months back. Yes!
 
When this paper’s doughty editor criticized the MM, Milstein said the editor had been “smoking something,” making a thinly veiled reference to hashish. Worse, this editor is a writer of “divisive columns,” he said.
 
This has to stop, any fair-minded person will agree. And while we’re on the subject, isn’t it grand that we have no divisive trustees?
 
Two months ago Milstein burst forth with 1,145 words in defense of his majority, taxing developer Taxman with putting out an “unprofessional, scorched-earth press release that debases the integrity of the board.” His sole VMA opposition on the board, Ray Johnson, he said “will milk every ounce of this [Colt controversy] for his re-election campaign.” Johnson, moreover, wants to be “the knight in shining armor.”
 
The tax appeal process—a county process?—favors businesses and apartment building owners; it’s “an onerous old-boys network.”
 
These are the words of a man with a mission. We need people like that in village government.
 
Wait. That’s not right. It should read, “We need people like that in village government?”
 
HOUSECLEANING: Meanwhile, on the school scene, District 97 Supt. Constance C. apparently was not born yesterday. When she hit the ground running last fall, fresh from Zion, she called for an audit of business and personnel operations and found dirt under the rug. Better to find it now than later, when she herself would have some explaining to do. Is this standard for a new super? I don’t think so. But what a good idea in this case, when she succeeded a super of many years tenure, under whom matters got sloppy.
 
FP CALLS: And then there’s the YMCA getting ready for its big move to Forest Park, where there will be room to roam and then some. The market had to be part of that decision. Sitting on expensive land with no room to roam is a nice incentive to sell and move.
 
It’s not expensive? So why is Time & Money restaurant—sorry, Thyme and Honey—also moving to FP? Because a big building is coming to take its place, something in line with that land’s market value. Oak Park is hot, you’d better believe it.

Big question

Is not this country built on the rule of law? asks NJT.  Why did many of the rally participants express beliefs that they were above the rule of law?  Did not many break the law by entering America through numerous illegal channels?
 
Comment: Rule of law is hard for many to understand.  It takes appreciation of an abstraction, which is beyond most, being a statement of what goes regardless of circumstance.  When a rule works badly for someone, he considers it unjust.  But rules always work out badly for someone.  Question is, are they good rules for the most part or not, and what if we didn’t have them, what then?
 

Big question

Is not this country built on the rule of law? asks NJT.  Why did many of the rally participants express beliefs that they were above the rule of law?  Did not many break the law by entering America through numerous illegal channels?
 
Comment: Rule of law is hard for many to understand.  It takes appreciation of an abstraction, which is beyond most, being a statement of what goes regardless of circumstance.  When a rule works badly for someone, he considers it unjust.  But rules always work out badly for someone.  Question is, are they good rules for the most part or not, and what if we didn’t have them, what then?
 

Immigrants

J. Peder Zane, in the Charlotte NC News & Observer, says, “If we’re lucky, the clash of civilizations will not end with a bang but a whimper, not with a mushroom cloud but the cry of the baby that brings a Muslim majority to Western Europe.”

It could happen by mid-century.  It “appears inevitable.”  We have our immigrants, always have had them, and have a formula for handling and absorbing them.  It’s called assimilation.  Europe has no comparable experience and no formula. 

Zane points to Bruce Bawer’s “indispensable” new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, $23.95, 247 pages), which I happen to be reading.  Bawer moved to Amsterdam to get away from a spoiled love affair — with his male partner.  It looked great to him, until he ran into immigrant Muslims.  His story starts with gay-bashing on the street with onlookers doing nothing. 

It continues with a devastating account of politically correct blindness to Europe’s enemy within, not just of gays like himself but of all Western values.  Women are 4th-class citizens in Muslim enclaves.  The enclaves are often left to themselves by government and become laws unto themselves.

It’s a tough book, full of warning.  It also offers stark contrast between a relatively open society, ours, and a relatively closed one, European.  Europe’s media are often subsidized by government or government-owned.  People much more reflexively approve what authorities do.  Public sentiments, however, are contradicted regularly in private conversation.