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July 28, 2007

Does Illegal Immigration Equal Breaking and Entering?

From eyeranian.netDanacasso wrote this in response to a forwarded email that claimed it was a letter written by a woman and was published in an editorial column.  The forward compared immigrants entering American from Mexico without legal permission to someone breaking into an American's house.  It said in both cases the person entered illegally, but said because they were helping (cleaning and such), they must be allowed to stay.  My own thoughts are that entering public America (which Mexican citizens can do legally--they just can't stay for years without permission) and breaking into a private residence are not all the same thing.  But Danacasso brings out some excellent points that go well beyond the breakdown of an analogy. 

-- Alden Loveshade

 

Just some thoughts.

So, now an analogy of breaking and entering is being used. It could have been clever but this particular author simply isn't.

But, let's look at a few things.

Whose house was broken into in the first place?

Last I recall, much of the Americas were already well populated before we whites got here. We're pretty much the original illegal immigrants to America.

Of course, there used to be this thing that humans used to do for thousands of years, before the first civilizations. They wandered into new lands. Sometimes someone else was already there. Other times not.

After the civilizations began to grow, so did this practice. Nations would send masses of their own citizens with the government's blessing or curse to new lands and they would call it "colonization" or "empire-building." After the founding of the United States, a new term was coined in their place: "Manifest Destiny." Others use more direct words, like "invasion" and "conquest". In fact, you could say that Iraq is such a case.

Today, the country that usually draws the most flack for illegal immigration is Mexico, a country that existed before the United States, but how soon we forget that Mexico once included Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California until we forcibly took those lands in the 1846-8 Mexican War, a war that General and President Ulysses S. Grant himself called "unjust" and he fought in that war.

After the U.S. annexed Texas from Mexico in 1845, Mexico felt that it had to go to war.

And there's plenty of documentation that President James Polk, having failed to buy the other parts of Mexico so that he could expand our territory, engineered the war by goading the Mexicans into attacking us in so that we could "retaliate" and go to war to achieve his goals.

Think about it. Is it any surprise that the highest concentrations of Hispanics in our country live in areas that were once originally and properly part of Mexico?

Interesting. On the night of August 31-September 1, 1939, German convicts, disguised as Polish soldiers, attacked a German radio station on the Polish-German border and killed the station manager, making it look like Polish aggression against Germany. Then, German soldiers arrived and killed the convicts. When the daylight came, World War Two was underway.

And what about the Native Americans? We "broke into their houses." In fact, in many cases, we drove them right out. We even took away their languages and forced them to learn ours. (Listen to the song "Indian Reservation"-Took away our native tongue/And taught their English to our young.) We rounded them up and put them on reservations to that they could "continue to live their traditional way of life."

But the lands that we set aside for reservations usually were piss-poor for hunting, fishing, farming, etc. Did we force them to give us some of their wealth? Yes, we most certainly did. Usually after we killed large numbers of them off. What if they asked us to leave? Didn't work. What if they put up a fight and tried to drive us off the land? Well, they pretty much did try and failed.

Interestingly, there was one man who admired America for the way it disposed of the Native American tribes. He wrote a book which very briefly mentions it in glowing praise. The book was originally a flop but is now globally notorious.

Incredibly, this man appears to have written a second manuscript as a sequel but it has never been published. It doesn't even appear to have a title. It's sitting in an archive in another country, virtually unheard of and almost totally forgotten. But, in it, this man changed his views of the U.S. He foresaw a war with America because it had many immigrants and a powerful industrial capacity that he felt his nation would eventually have to compete with for resources.

In this second, "lost" manuscript, he details out what he felt he needed to do and, in the end, he made much of it really happen.

What was the name of the original book?  Mein Kampf.  What was the name of this man who so admired America's racial and immigration policies and then turned against us? Adolf Hitler.

But then, this is a Web forward, so anyone could have written it, not some civic-minded housewife who wrote to her paper. I wonder if she really exists.

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July 14, 2007

Will Georgia Kill an Innocent Man?

Troy Davis, convicted of killing a police officer, said Monday, July 9, 2007, that if the state puts him to death next week as scheduled it will be executing an innocent man.  (AP Photo/Georgia Department of Corrections) "The pending execution of Troy Anthony Davis, scheduled to take place on July 17, is raising serious questions about his guilt - and about the Newt Gingrich-era federal law that has limited his appeals options and prevented him, say his supporters, from getting a fair shake...."

"Seven of the nine main witnesses whose testimony led to his conviction have since recanted. The murder weapon has never been found, and there is no physical evidence linking the crime to Davis, who has asserted his innocence throughout."

Brendan Lowe's article examines this case, and shows that a 1996 law may have made it much more difficult for the innocent to get justice, and easier for them to get executed.  The legislature may have put a higher priority on reducing the court load than in saving the lives of innocent people.

See the article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20070713/us_time/willgeorgiakillaninnocentman

Also see Matthew Bigg's article on a move to stop or at least postpone the execution at http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070713/us_nm/usa_execution_dc_1;_ylt=Ao4tn69FzkIc61zBHksYLoHBF4l4

To see all blog entries dealing with Troy Anthony Davis, click on http://www.loveshade.org/blog-mt/mt-search.fcgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=troy+anthony+davis. To see other news related to this case, see below:

The Georgia Supreme Court agreed to hear Davis' discretionary appeal, and put it on it's November calendar.

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/metro/stories/2007/08/03/davis_0804_web.html

Previous Updates: 

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles suspended the hearing that was scheduled for this Thursday, August 9th.

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A second hearing had been scheduled for August 9, 2007.

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"Board of Pardons and Paroles issues up to 90 Day Stay of Execution -- July 16, 2007

"This Stay could be terminated at any time that the BPP feels they have sufficient evidence to make a decision. Even if they commute Troy's death sentence their only choice will be to commute it to Life Without Parole.

"The only chance to have Troy released is to succeed with the appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. Please take action now and send this online letter to the Board of Pardons and Parole."

See more at the website this is taken from: http://www.troyanthonydavis.org/

See Representative John Lewis statement at http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/07/16/lewis_0716_web.html

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Happy 60th Roswell--but Arnold was first

A visitor takes a picture of an alien on a gurney at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M., May 23, 2007. (AP Photo/Jake Schoellkopf) Well, well, well. Happy 60th, Roswell, New Mexico. For true believers, yours was the definitive UFO incident.

Yet, if it weren't for another state you might not have made into the national lexicon in the first place.

The state to which I refer is the Evergreen State; Washington. You see, Roswell's "incident" was July 8, 1947. But in Washington on the previous June 24, a lone pilot was flying east over the Cascade mountains in his small plane. Suddenly, Kenneth Arnold looked out to the north and saw nine silver objects flying at what he estimated to be around 1200 mph. At that time, the fastest jets did about 660 mph.

When Arnold got back on the ground, he described the objects as being crescent-shaped, but said they flew like "a saucer skipped across water." The press took that quote and created a new term from it: flying saucer.

Now, 60 years later, the Roswell Incident had overtaken the public mind, and public debate rages. But it wasn't always that way.

The Arnold story dominated through the '40's, '50's, '60's, and most of the '70's. But then Ufologist Stanton Friedman wrote the first book on Roswell, and the floodgates were opened. After Friedman's brief chats with just a few witnesses, the other witnesses came out of the woodwork. And so did new accounts. And a lot of them conflicted. And of course the people who said they were there then are getting or are quite elderly or they've passed on.

Even when the Air Force released its files from that time, including 1997's Case Closed, the believers weren't buying it.

Now, you're everywhere. Not just in the town of Roswell, N.M. but in our minds, too. You're in our pop culture. Books, magazines, TV, the World Wide Web. Even the British had fun with it. In the first season (or series, as the British call them) of the revived "Doctor Who," there was one episode that mentioned Roswell twice.

If a UFO really did crash at Roswell, then maybe Arnold isn't important, other than giving your late press officer Walter Haut a term to feed the press (although Haut said "flying disc").

But if you're really nothing more than a bunch of materials retrieved from a crashed spy balloon, well, pardon the pun, but you're just full of hot air.

The fact remains that Arnold was the first to make a modern UFO report and that is why, to this day, he is still called, "The Man Who Started it All." But all he could provide was his eyewitness account and some sketches. So who knows if he was telling truth; he'll never tell, now. He died more than twenty years ago.

So Happy Anniversary, Roswell. Maybe you deserve it, maybe you don't. But, you were not the first. For that matter, maybe Arnold wasn't, either.

See article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070708/ap_on_fe_st/alien_anniversary

(Danacasso actually wrote this on the anniversary)

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