As IF Times

Obama presses for immigration reform – latimes.com.

As if.  Someone should explain why it’s ok in our modern enlightened time to be subject to a virtual and literal strip search at the nation’s airports, suffer the inconvenience and annoyance of surly screeners and yet we are supposed to worry about the civil rights of people who aren’t even citizens of the country.  The opposition to the just passed immigration bill in Arizona is illogical and amounts to the usual liberal scaremongering.  The images offered are of women and children being terrorized by jack booted troopers ready to corral them into cattle trucks.  The reality is, violent criminals have become bolder in their activities in that state and the legitimate citizens are concerned that the blazing arizona sunsets so famous there, may actually be gunfire and burning buildings.

Let’s get a grip here; if you are a citizen and you are asked for identification, you show it, have a nice day.  If you fail to produce it, well then you should be worried.  You should not be breaking the laws of a sovereign country by being there illegally.  Have these people who are bleating about civil rights never been through a grilling at airport customs?  Unless you actually are a Muslim extremist, they treat you like one by lobbing probing questions probably derived from minutes of intense training.  After which, you then have the choice of being felt up from head to toe (without dinner first!) or to be x-rayed in the new video booths.   None of this seems to bother the ardent civil libertarians who would rather yelp about how the rights of possible non citizens are being trampled upon. 

If not obvious to observers of this little tempest, this is not about the rights of anyone.  History has shown that the people least interested in the rights of any particular victim group are the very liberals who complain most loudly about them.  If there were no advantage in courting the Hispanic vote in the U.S., liberals wouldn’t care if illegals were being rounded up by backhoes.  Politicians are keenly aware that to curry favour with the Hispanic voting block is key to winning many political ridings.  I’ll bet there are more civil indignities being committed against legitimate citizen air travellers every day in the U.S. through customs screening than a month of illegal “harassment” in Arizona.  The only trouble is, air travellers do not constitute an homogeneous voting group, so they get no sympathetic news coverage nor elicit any Presidential outrage. 

Here’s an idea, when the state police in Arizona manage to identify those that are illegal in their sweeps, why not send them to New York or Washington instead of turning them back to Mexico?  The illegals get to see the country and maybe get employment in the big cities.  New York and Washington DC get a huge pool of new and cheap labor.  Arizona becomes less overrun with illegals and liberals can go to work on some other useful cause such as fat kids or making holidays a basic human right.  Seems like a win win solution to me.

Center City race has candidate outed as straight | Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/22/2010.

At this very moment, Senator Lindsey Graham is being challenged to come out of the closet and admit like pop singer Ricky Martin, that he is a “fortunate homosexual man”.  If the events described in the linked article are any indication, Graham needn’t worry.  If anything, his admission, if he has one, will probably make him more popular than by keeping his lifestyle a secret.

Or perhaps that’s just the case if you happen to live in Philadelphia where this “Onionesque” set of circumstances is developing.  According to this article,

“…Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.  “I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant…”

To which the candidate in question responded, ” I swing both ways”, in order not to totally disenfranchise the straight vote.  Well, this IS the city of brotherly love.  As for me, I vote him politician of the year if not just the winner for Philly.  It may be amusing to have this guy in office if only for the comedy of his tenure.  You know he will be inclusive.  Gays, straights, bi’s, all will have equal representation in his government.  If you think about it, it’s a cost savings.

In our part of the world, Vancouver, it’s not uncommon for politicians to pander to ethnic votes by donning ritualistic headgear when attending cultural events.  The Americans put us to shame as far as pandering since it appears that their politicians will  adopt a whole  sexual persona to get votes.  The wearing of turbans in Sikh parades or cowboy hats at western events here are pretty lame in comparison to the lengths pursued by American politicians to get elected.  Maybe it’s just pragmatism, after all if you think about it, everywhere you look, gay is the way.  Being gay is so mainstream, even Archie comics are rumored to be introducing its first gay character.  Society has jumped from merely accepting the gay lifestyle to now requiring that as the ticket to entry. 

I’m unsure of why having that particular proclivity enriches anyone with any more ability to make political, economic and especially national security decisions than their sexually more boring counterparts.  You can see where all this is leading.  There are certain professions which are famously populated by gay people if only by reputation; florists, hairdressers, ice-dancers etc.   This actually puts pressure on these people.  If their work seems not up to snuff, they’d better be prepared for accusations of straightness and some proof of their gayness. 

You know it’s only a matter of time before all kinds of subsets of society put forth candidates that mirror their particular group as if that were a good measure of ability.  Soon we’ll see left handed candidates, red headed candidates, fat candidates, candidates that sing, people with walleye or perhaps people who have IQ’s lower than some arbitrary amount.  Oh wait, we have that already.