A SMALL PERSONAL NOTE

As I think I have mentioned here before, I get a lot of email where the sender's address ends in "mil" -- indicating that the sender is either enlisted in the U.S. armed forces or works as a civilian for the U.S. armed forces. And some of those emails do come from servicemen in Iraq. A frequent feature of those emails is that the sender thanks me for what I write in my postings both here and on other blogs. I always feel most unworthy of such thanks. I feel that it is I who should be thanking the men concerned who voluntarily put their lives at risk to serve the welfare of us all. Perhaps I am biased because of my own small service in the Australian army but I think the profession of arms is the noblest profession of all. In what other profession does one consciously volunteer to put one's own life at risk as an integral part of the job? I am therefore pleased that my latest post on Tongue-Tied may be of some help to the men and women serving in Iraq.

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NO RACIAL DIFFERENCES HERE OF COURSE

Blacks are streaming back to New Orleans to take advantage of the well-paid work available there .... Whoops! ... I got it wrong:

"Much of New Orleans lies abandoned and destroyed after Hurricane Katrina struck nearly four months ago, but for Latin American immigrants the storm-ravaged city has become a land of opportunity. While New Orleans residents are slow to return, the immigrants, most of them illegally in the United States, have swarmed in to do the hard work of cleaning up and rebuilding that others so far have shunned. They are not here because of altruism -- New Orleans is just another place in a strange land to them -- but because there is a huge unfulfilled demand for labor and, as a result, high wages they cannot get in their homeland or in other U.S. cities. In a sight common in the southwestern U.S., but new to New Orleans, they crowd street corners starting at daybreak, offering themselves as day laborers to anyone who needs them.

Most days, Delgado and his colleagues -- sometimes as many as 200 on this corner parking lot near the New Orleans central business district -- get hired quickly by contractors in passing pickup trucks, who whisk them off to whatever project is pending. "Baby, we couldn't do it without them," one of the employers shouted through his truck window.

There is so much work to be done, the immigrants say, that often they finish, return to the corner and get hired the same day for another job. The pay is good -- "$10, $12, $15 an hour," said Jose Del Rio, 38, from Chihuahua, Mexico -- and there are few problems....

The city was mostly abandoned after Katrina flooded 80 percent of it on Aug. 29 and most of it still sits empty and in ruins, waiting to be rebuilt. Mayor Ray Nagin said this week studies showed that as many as 150,000 of the pre-storm 462,000 residents have returned, but many doubt the figure is that high..... When asked where the American workers were, Del Rio shook his head and said, "Who knows? It just seems like the Latin race likes to work more.""

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ANOTHER LEFTIST FRAUD

The following note concerns Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the patrician socialist President F.D. Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt's fake "anti-racist" reputation: "The incident that most famously led to Eleanor Roosevelt's reputation as a foe of segregation and discrimination was her defense of the famous opera singer Marian Anderson. In 1937, Anderson was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race. Roosevelt protested by resigning her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution which owned the hall. She also was instrumental in arranging for Anderson to perform at a special integrated out door concert on the Washington Mall. It was inspiring event that did much to show the follies of segregation. Yet, as black author, Zora Neale Hurston observed, there was more to the story. In 1951, Hurston noted that Anderson's manager...

"had originally applied to two places-Constitution Hall, the property of the D.A.R., and the auditorium of the White High School, the property of the District of Columbia.... The D.A.R. refused their hall to Mrs. Anderson..The school board likewise refused the auditorium of the high school.Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, et al., rushed into the fray and gave with a howl against narrow-minded racial discrimination that could be heard in Addis Ababa..But it was all directed against the D.A.R. No loud screaming against the school authorities. And as far as the high-school auditorium is concerned, to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by the congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the D.A.R. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither.

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ELSEWHERE

The Australian Left is different: "Tax cuts for high-income earners and families will form the bedrock of a federal Labor tax plan designed to make Australia more competitive in the global labour market. Labor Treasury spokesman Wayne Swan has called for urgent reform to create a "flatter" tax system by cutting the number of marginal tax rates from four to three. In his most comprehensive blueprint yet for a redesign of the tax system, Mr Swan has also proposed stripping high-income earners of the tax-free allowance in return for lower marginal rates. His plans would also have more low-income earners pay no tax. In an essay, The Cutting Edge of Competitiveness, Mr Swan said his proposals would simplify the system and make Australia more competitive internationally".

Our friends, the Saudis: "The lawyer for an Indian migrant worker sentenced to have his eye gouged out as punishment by a Saudi Arabian court said he has launched a new appeal against the verdict.... Noushad, 32, had been working at a petrol pump in Dammam on the Saudi east coast since 1995. He had a fight with a Saudi customer over payment in April 2003 that put him in jail. The Saudi man later lost his eyesight, but the Indian said it was not because of the injuries he inflicted, and that he had acted in self-defence".

Jeff Jacoby has a very good post pointing out why the Jewish Hanukkah celebrations are significant for Christians.

For Americans there is a very sobering article just up on Strange Justice

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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