I guess they were doing the job Americans won't

"Six undocumented Mexican immigrants were arrested today by U.S. Border Patrol agents at Qualcomm Stadium, after a report that they were stealing food and water meant for evacuees, according to spokesman Damon Foreman." -- Los Angeles Times

"The six thieves admitted that they were indeed illegal immigrants from Mexico taking advantage of a devastating situation." -- Corruption Chronicles

"What they were doing was taking those supplies and selling them.. . ." -- KPBS

Sweet Revenge

Da Kid heard it growing up but Hubby and I knew it never sank in. We usually began, "Kids ain't cheap," and often finished with something along the lines of, "but this is insane!"

A good example is the pants Da Kid had to wear as part of his high school uniform. Navy blue Dockers of a specific style. On sale at the beginning of the school year, $45 a pair and he needed five to get through the week. Then after he got out of school and before I could pick him up after work, he'd go play basketball and rip the shit out of 'em.

Once? No, constantly and NOTHING his father or I said would make him stop. Add to it the year he REALLY shot up. What he didn't manage to destroy he outgrew.

Outgrew, four times.

That's only one example. Through it all, as most parents I'm sure do, the only think that kept us from killing him was the knowledge that one day if he became a parent, he'd find himself in the same situation.

Hubby's not here, but I'm sure he knows it's begun. Revenge is ours!

If all goes well, "Bump" will arrive in the late Spring and will, of course, need "stuff." Like a place to sleep.

Da Kid had it all figured out. Walmart! Until I happened to mention he'd better be careful to make sure none of what they carried had been recalled.

"How do you recall a crib?" he asked certain I didn't know what I was talking about.

It's been all over the news, I said quite casually, about the latest round of recalls. Strangled babies. Maybe, I suggested, he'd better start paying more attention to the news.

A few days later Da Kid, Herself and I went on an exploratory run looking at baby furniture at several stores. Which is when, seeing the price tags, Da Kid's eyes began to project about four inches from his face.

(And no help from me or Herself's parents allowed, they insist. Like everything else, they'd do it themselves.)

Manly man that he is (and obviously, desperately wanting to get the hell away from the high-priced nightmare he'd found himself in) Da Kid expansively told Herself to pick out whatever she wanted. He'd work extra shifts to pay for it.

Which has worked out great!

Since he's been working extra shifts at every opportunity to pay for the furniture, Herself and I have gone on our own exploratory runs without having to take him with us.

Today, finally, I looked at Herself and she looked at me. Between us, no words were needed.

"Yep!"

Not five or six hundred dollars like others, and not $350 if we'd ordered it online. But $199 because it's a floor model and has a scratch way down on one of its legs.

Are you nuts, Doyle? You think $199 is a good deal on a crib?

Not exactly.

It also converts to a toddler bed, then a youth bed and finally, a real bed-bed.

The price of the separate, matching changing table / dresser -- last one in stock and also a floor model -- had been slashed, too.

Da Kid can come home now. Instead of the couple thousand he was figuring . . . just over $500. Including tax.

No delivery, though. That would be an additional charge and I strongly suspect -- since he has a big truck -- Da Kid would prefer saving a few more bucks and pick it all up himself.

Especially since before he left, he noticed the price on a package of disposable diapers.

30 years ago this morning

Thiry years ago this morning I bolted out of bed when the blasted alarm . . . blasted.

Nothing new there. Working full time for the city plus a part-time job, if I didn't have the radio's volume set on BLAST I probably would have slept through it.

My response with automatic. Conditioning like Pavlov's dogs, I guess. I fell in bed at night, exhausted, and the next thing I knew, I was in the shower the next morning, a cup of coffee on the counter from the pot I'd fixed . . . but I never remembered any of it.

I still can't recall any of those mornings, except just one. Something on the blasted, blasting radio stopping me in my tracks before I even got through the bedroom door:

Thirty years ago today, a rented plane took off from Greenville, S.C., headed for Baton Rouge, La. Just before dark, just before it reached the Louisiana line, the plane ran out of fuel and sank toward the Mississippi landscape below.

Not that there were any details. Just the DJ reporting, and later breaking in repeatedly, to say that the plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd had crashed.

It's not that I was that familiar with their music. I didn't have the time to listen to much of anything, or do anything except go to work, work, go to the part-time job, work there, get home, fall in bed and then find myself standing in the shower the next morning. To somehow do it all over again.

I knew their name, though. Knew it well.

"It was like we had a dream," said guitarist Gary Rossington, who broke both arms, both legs and other bones in the crash. "Myself, Allen [Collins] and Ronnie, we had a dream to make it as big as we could. We saw The Ed Sullivan Show. We saw the British bands, and we just wanted to make it.

"And there we were, after seven, eight years of doing everything we had to do, playing clubs up and down the coast and not making any money. Playing high school dances.

"Now we were selling millions of albums, we were making money. It was a gas to sell out everywhere we played. It was a dream come true." -- [Source]

Theirs was a "local boys make good" story. It still is.

It was how hard they'd worked before achieving success I'd connected with back then. Maybe even was leaning on harder than I knew, until the blasted radio went off, 30 years ago this morning.

More here

Word for the day:

Ecochondriacs

Honor thy father

October 9 was the first anniversary of Hubby's death.

That afternoon, Da Kid came in and showed me the tatoo he'd had done on his shoulder a few hours before.

In passing

Al Oerter, four-time Olympic gold medalist.

FYI

"I'm Jim Broussard," he said, "and I took this flag down in honor of my country with … a knife from the United States Army. I'm a veteran, I'm not going to see this done to my country. If they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us. But I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back." -- WorldNetDaily

The flag Broussard is holding, the one he's daring "somebody" to try to take away from him, is the American Flag.

He also cut down and left on the ground the Mexican flag a shop owner in Reno, Nevada, was flying over it.

The American Crazy Lawyers Union has issued a statement that contrary to media reports covering this story that flying another country's flag over our own is NOT illegal.

Newsbusters disagrees with the ACLU and even provides the citation to back it up.

Not surprisingly, Hispanic leaders in Reno are trying to get the bar's Mexican owner to file charges against Broussard.

I don't think Broussard has anything to worry about, since I just saw him interviewed by Neil Cavuto, with an attorney already at his side, who seems to agree with Newsbusters.

~~~~~
Correction (10-05-07): The person appearing with Broussard was talk radio host Bill Manders.

The Downward Spiral

A federal court in San Francisco began hearing arguments today on a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO, the Chamber of Commerce and the ACLU on behalf of companies that employ illegal aliens.

The Chamber, okay. And the American Crazy Lawyers Union? Both are understandable. But the ALF-CIO?

Why would the biggest union in the country take the side of illegal aliens? Since they'll work for so much less than union labor is paid, isn't the union betraying its membership by helping to driving down wages and making it harder if not impossible for them to find work?

[The roofing company is] having a rough go of it because they're constantly being underbid (on both their commercial and residential sides) by companies whose employees don't speak Redneck.

And can't speak English, either. -- Doyle

From the The Wall Street Journal:

The impending crackdown generates everything "from concern to utter panic among roofing contractors," says Craig Silvertooth, director of federal affairs for the National Roofing Association, based in Chicago, representing 4,300 businesses. "There is no way to run your business if this goes forward."

(Please read the whole thing.)

The "impending crackdown" is part of what we've demanded the Federal government do to begin enforcing our immigration laws.

The Social Security Administration long has mailed out routine letters that inform employers if an employee's name and Social Security number don't match up. Homeland Security wants to insert notices in those mailings warning employers that they must fire any employee who doesn't clear up a no-match situation in 90 days -- or face prosecution. -- The Sacramento Bee

So why, I'm sure you're still wondering, is the AFL-CIO siding with the illegal aliens instead of its members who have and are using their own Social Security numbers? You know, American-born or immigrants who are working here legally?

Again from the Sacramento Bee:

Only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce is unionized today, and while the number of U.S.-born union workers declined 9 percent in the last decade, the number of immigrants in unions grew 30 percent, according to a new study by the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-immigrant research group in Washington, D.C.

Robert Balgenorth, president of the California chapter of the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department, pointed out that union strength in the housing-construction industry has waned dramatically as undocumented workers arrived not just from Latin America but also from places such as Ireland, Russia and Scotland.

Allowing workers to earn legal status, and be bolder, Balgenorth said, would help unions replenish their ranks.

The unions provide support to the politicians who are trying every way they can to "regularize" illegal aliens, so that they can then become dues-paying union members, and then the politician get more campaign contributions ...

And then with the DREAM Act and Hilliary Health and her "Baby-Bond," they ALL get to keep living high off the hog, and WE get to pick up even more of the tab than we already are.