St. Louis CofCC Blog

The Australian:

Our ‘hidden’ migrants

AUSTRALIA is undergoing an unparalleled movement of people and ethnic change through “hidden immigration”, but lacks a comprehensive policy to deal with it, according to an eminent demographer.

Monash University professor Andrew Markus said raw immigration numbers masked the magnitude of a demographic revolution that had produced a population where one in four residents was born overseas.

At 24 per cent, the overseas-born proportion of the population is twice that of the US at 12per cent, and three times that of England and Wales at 8 per cent, where racial tensions have flared again.

“Opinion polls in England in July 2007 and March 2008 indicated that immigration and race issues are the main concern of electors,” Professor Markus said.

He said that while Australians had been tolerant and migrants committed to their new home, strong political leadership was required to convince the nation of the benefits to all of high immigration to avoid a backlash.

It is not surprising that Australia’s white population is declining rapidly.  There are perhaps 19 million white people, staring up at hundreds of millions of Indonesians, more than a billion Chinese, more than a billion Indians, and several hundred million Indochinese.  One non-white immigrant, therefore, impacts the racial makeup of Australia more than it does the U.S.A.  And assuming that nearly all of that 24% foreign born is non-white, and that some of its native born population is, counting the Abos, Australia and the U.S.A. are probably down to around two-thirds white.

As many of you know, the CofCC National Website was recently cracked.

The reason why I’m writing this post here is that the internet search engine Google still reports that CofCC.org contains malware that may harm your computer.  The problem was fixed several weeks ago, but Google’s interent bots have not yet passed by CofCC.org to see the current lack of a problem.  This is deterring traffic to CofCC.org, so I am posting this here on the St. Louis CofCC Blog, in order to place this on a source that Google isn’t scaring people from visiting.

Let me repeat this again.  CofCC.org is currently safe, and has been for a couple of weeks.  Do not hesitate to visit!

***

So, what happened?  I’ll give two different explanations.  The first version is a technobabble-free version that cuts to the chase, and the second version has all the technobabble.

***

Technobabble-Free Version:

Somebody cracked into CofCC.org’s photo gallery program, and inserted a program that gave six consecutive viruses to most people who visited CofCC.org.  Many other blogs that use WordPress software were also similarly hacked, so the CofCC.org Staff does not believe that we were politically targeted.  The viruses reportedly do everything from insert spyware, to turn a user’s computer into a mechanism to pump out e-mail spam, to giving the user cockroach-themed screensavers, to outright data destruction.

***

Technobabble Version:

One or more people were able to maniuplate PHP vulernabilities to crack into blogs that use the WordPress.org blogging system *and* the Coppermine photo gallery management system.  CofCC.org uses the former, and did use the latter until these attacks.  If you have a WordPress blog like the one you’re reading now, whose URL is (something).wordpress.com, you were never affected, because the wordpress.com’s servers are far more secure, and the WordPress.org that wordpress.com uses is more mature and less bleeding-edge than the WordPress.org scripts that one could download and install on the server hosting one’s own blog.  Remember, WordPress.org is the “software” (really, scripts), while wordpress.com is a blog hosting server.

The crackers inserted an ActiveX control whose purpose was to insert six consecutive viruses into the computers of people that used them to visit CofCC.org (et al).  Since Internet Explorer Version 6, by default, allows the running of ActiveX controls without user permission, those who used IE6 to visit CofCC.org and did not change that setting did run that script and get the viruses.  However, if you had a good anti-virus program that you kept updated on a daily basis, it very likely would have caught those viruses and either quarantined them, deleted them, or tried to heal them, even if you used IE6.  (Note:  IE 3.x, 4.x and 5.x also allow unattended ActiveX controls to run, so the same applies to those versions).

The newest IE, version 7, does not allow ActiveX controls to run without user permission by default.  If you run across a website that wants to install an ActiveX control, you will see a yellow horizontal bar across the top of your browser window that looks like this:

This is an example of a “non-malicious” ActiveX control, inasmuch as you want to believe that WGA is not malicious.  During the time when CofCC.org was attacked, you saw such a yellow bar once CofCC.org’s content was loaded.  It was from a supposedly reputable company asking you to install the “add-on” (ActiveX Control).  Hopefully, you knew that CofCC.org has no need or desire to force an ActiveX control upon its users, and you figured something was amiss, and rejected the request.  But if you did accept it, you got the six virsues just as much as users of older versions of IE did, anti-virus program notwithstanding.

As for the acuity of anti-virus programs to catch the viruses — AVG, the most popular freeware anti-virus, caught them.  Kaspersky, one of the more popular commercial packages, caught them.  Norton, probably the most popular anti-virus solution, had mixed results.  If you can supply me with reports about other anti-virus programs, please contact me (see “Contact Us” above).  In the time since this crack occurred, AVG updated its free AV to version 8.0, and when you install it, you also install an IE 6/7 add-on and a Firefox 1.5/2.0 extension called “AVG Safe Search,” that checks the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN searches for various malware.  At the time of this writing, it reports CofCC.org in Google as okay (note the star with the checkmark) even as Google itself does not:

Those who use any browser other than IE and IE shell apps (Deepnet Explorer, Maxthon, MyIE, and Avant are examples of browsers that use IE’s rendering engine but has its own GUI — they all require user permission for ActiveX controls to run, even when they were running on top of Pre-IE7 Trident), you had no problems.  Those who used Firefox and Opera never saw anything wrong.  If you use Mac OS, and any of its browsers (Safari, Firefox, Opera), you never had any problems.  If you used the recently-released Safari browser for Microsoft Windows, you never had any problems.  If you run Linux and use any of its browsers (Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Dillo, etc.), you never had any problems.  ActiveX is a Windows-only technology.

BUT WAIT — some Firefox users have e-mailed the CofCC National Website (this writer reads all e-mails that come into CofCC.org, and responds to those that need a response), and said that Firefox blocks them from accessing CofCC.org.  The reason for that is that Firefox 2.x and 3.x, by default, blocks malicious websites.  (Firefox 1.0.x and 1.5.0.x does not, so it never blocked CofCC.org by default, uesr-installed extensions notwithstanding).  And how does Firefox 2/3 know what is a malicious website?  It doesn’t by itself; it relies on Google’s databases to tell it which ones have problems.  (Google and the Mozilla Corporation/Foundation have a very close relationship; the latter derives most of its revenue from the former.)  Remember, as of the time of this writing, Google still reports that CofCC.org may harm your computer.  The irony of this is that Firefox users were never affected, because Firefox can’t run ActiveX scripts (save the few rare people who have installed a Mozilla non-supported extension to do that, or those who used the Mozilla-supported IETab or IEView extensions to view CofCC.org within Firefox using the IE rendering engine — in those instances, user permission is required to download and/or run the ActiveX controls).  Those who don’t use Windows were never affected.  Still, if you use Firefox on Mac, or Firefox on Linux, or Firefox on BSD, or Firefox on anything else, and do not disable the malicious website blocking, CofCC.org is blocked as of the time of this writing, even though those OSes are safe, and the crack neither depends on Firefox nor a non-Windows OS.  This writer turns that functionality off in Firefox, as he finds it redundant.

So, what did these viruses do?  There are conflicting reports, coming from those who e-mail CofCC.org, to those who visited the other WordPress/Coppermine websites and blogs so cracked, but they range from mere spyware that reads the user’s browser cookies and sends the results back to the cracker(s), to hijacking the user’s computer to turn it into a stealth SMTP server for the purpose of pumping out spam e-mails, to installing screensavers that show cockroaches eating the user’s desktop icons, to outright data destruction, and evisceration of the Master Boot Record, making the user’s computer unbootable.

This writer leans toward the spyware/smtp theories.  I did these things:  (1) Do a fresh install of Windows XP within a virtual machine with XP has the host.  In other words, XP under XP.  Install AVG 7.5.x anti-virus in the virtual machine, then update AVG virus definition files.  Start IE6 (XP installs 6, not 7, by default).  Go to CofCC.org.  Watch as AVG catches the six viruses.  Record the name of each one before healing it.  Put those six virus names aside.  (2)  Install IE6 under Wine in Linux.  Record the time when the installation was finished.  (B/C AVG for Windows won’t run very well in Wine.)  Start IE6, visit CofCC.org, wait until the site is loaded.  Then use a Linux file manager to search for newly installed files in the Wine directory that were created between the time IE6 was finished installing and the present time.  Write the filenames down.  (3) Using the lists generated in (1) and (2), Google each name to see what information exists about the viruses.  Since the viruses were all legit-looking Windows system DLLs (hence AVG wanted you to try to “heal” them first), they wanted to give the operating system and especially Internet Explorer some level of new functionality.  And that means spyware.  Doing these tests in the sandboxed environments of (1) a VM, and (2) a compatiability layer, means that anything nasty these viruses could do would only be done within the sandbox, just in case they had nasty intentions and, in the instance of (1), AVG didn’t catch them.

So why do other people report other bad results of these viruses?  I just so happened to get the exact same six virus attempts when I did (1) and (2) above, but it’s possible that the cracker(s) pumped different viruses out at different times.  Maybe it was more than one group of crackers who had different malicious goals.  Maybe the DLLs are “time bombs” of a sort, that do less malicious things at first then gradually do more malicious things.

Why doesn’t the CofCC.org staff think this was a political attack?  As I have mentioned, other websites were cracked similarly, and the thing they all have in common is that they use the WordPress.org blogging system AND the Coppermine photo gallery manager.  Political websites of all sorts were cracked, and many non-political websites were, also.  The CofCC.org Staff is aware that certain far-left websites are taking credit for the particular attack of CofCC.org, but there are a multitude of groups in the Middle East that take credit every time a sewer manhole pops open in New York City.  If you catch my drift.

So, to summarize, this was a WordPress.org/Coppermine/PHP/IE/Windows hole.  And to reiterate, CofCC.org IS SAFE NOW, and has been for several weeks.

Thank you for your concern and your patience.

WBAP-820-AM Fort Worth-Dallas:

The People Have Spoken

The two beacons of illegal immigrant exclusion laws won the mayor’s office yesterday in their respective cities. Farmer’s Branch voters elected Tim O’Hare over Gene Bledsoe by a wide margin, with Irving voters deciding to re-elect Herbert Gears to lead their city with 54% of the ballots.

Both O’Hare and Gears have spearheaded the fight to exclude illegal immigrants in their cities attracting the ire of Washington D.C., the focus of the national news media and the desperation of other American mayors who want to follow in their footsteps looking for a solution to the national issue of undocumented workers.

Remember that Irving isn’t some just dot on the map.  It is a major Metroplex suburb with over 200,000 residents, and, according to Wikipedia:

Several large businesses have headquarters in Irving, including Chuck E. Cheese’s, Commercial Metals, ExxonMobil, Gruma, Kimberly-Clark, Michaels Stores, National Care Network, Omni Hotels, Southern Star Concrete, Inc., Xero Hour, Zale Corporation, Fluor Corporation and LXI Enterprise Storage.  The city is also home to the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America.  The Dallas Cowboys play at Texas Stadium in Irving until a new stadium is finished in Arlington, Texas, in 2009.

Farmers Branch, which borders Irving to the east, has about 27,000 people, which makes it small in terms of the Metroplex, but it would be a major suburb in St. Louis.  Taken together, Irving and Farmers Branch have about 236,000 people, so yesterday’s elections in those two cities are the functional equivalent of a relatively major city electing an anti-invasion mayor.  Considering these cities were in a border state, the open borders lobby probably made a big ruckus.  But the voters had other ideas.

The New York Times profiles what may be a Missouri constitutional amendment that will require those who register to vote to submit proof of citizenship.  They go on and on like it’s such an extreme and drastic proposal, but they are virtually the same as Missouri’s driver’s license law enacted about three years ago.

Actually, I have never been a fan of merely registering to vote by filling out a postcard and sending it in the mail.  The method of registering to vote should be one where, with a few exceptions, one should show a little bit of ambition in order to register to vote.

Unlike California, it’s not yet the case in Missouri that there is a huge problem with illegal aliens voting.  The bigger problem is the voter fraud that revolves around the political machines of natural-born citizenry of a certain type.  These measures would not deter such fraud.

Also, I wish the General Assembly would submit the MCRI as a constitutional amendment up for the vote this fall, or better yet, enact it as a matter of legislation.  That way, the Ward Connerly organization wouldn’t have had to try to pound the pavement to gather signatures.

Taki’s got it.  It’s worth the time.

I’ll add that white college grads are even less likely to get jobs commensurate with their education, thanks to affirmative action, even though their debt is the same.  In fact, the jobs they get are ones they very well could have had without a college education.  Therefore, the Education-Industrial Complex actually reduces the standard of living of whites.

KSDK:

ATF Chief: Crime Rose as Cities’ Funding Dropped

Violent crime has increased in some cities in recent years in part because local police are too cash-strapped to fight it, the ATF chief said Monday.

The comments by Michael J. Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, echo pleas by mayors across the country for more federal dollars to combat crime.

Now the ATF cares about cities.  Usually, when they get involved with abusing firearms dealers and owners enforcing gun laws, it’s nowhere near protected racial minorities, even though they would make a far greater dent in serious violent crimes by focusing their enforcement in cities and their notorious citizens.  Later in this article, we find out that:

Whether the Senate will ever vote on Sullivan’s own confirmation. Sullivan, still the U.S. attorney in Boston, was nominated as ATF’s chief in March 2007. But Idaho’s Republican senators so far have blocked the nomination out of concern the ATF has become overly aggressive in enforcing gun laws.

Sullivan said the ATF last year did compliance checks on about 10,000 gun dealers and brokers, and suspended the licenses of 97 — fewer than 1 percent. He said the ATF is trying to balance regulating gun dealers equally across the country.

The ATF has been particulary abusive in Idaho.  For instance, it considers literally not dotting the lowercase “i” letters in people’s names, writing a two-digit (e.g. 07) as opposed to a four-digit (e.g. 2007) year on paperwork, and posting signs about required background checks inside gun stores that aren’t large enough or have a big enough typeface (font), as major transgressions worthy of trying to revoke the shop owner’s FLFD license.

So I think Sullivan is bloviating about cities and Federal money in order to grease the wheels among left-wing Senators to make his nomination official, so that he’ll be an “official” agency head and therefore be eligible for a Federal pension.

AFP:

US police deaths climb sharply: FBI

The number of US police officers killed criminally or accidentally last year climbed by around 20 percent compared with the previous year, preliminary data released Monday by the FBI showed.

Fifty-seven police officers were killed feloniously in the line of duty in 2007, up from 48 the previous year, the report said.

Most of the officers were shot; two were killed with vehicles.

(snip)

The report did not specify the causes of the accidental deaths.

And it’s not that Agence France Presse, which is even more left-wing than the American MSM, would tell us the reason even if this FBI report stated it.  As such, you can probably deduce that the reason is taboo and politically incorrect.

Brian Ross:

President Bush signed into law today an obscure but important measure which, its supporters say, will help reduce sex trafficking and exploitation of guest workers in a U.S. territory.

Although under U.S. control, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands has maintained lax immigration laws in contrast to the mainland. With help from Congressional Republicans and now-imprisoned superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, CNMI for years successfully fought off legislation proposed to tighten security and improve working conditions on the islands.

The bill Bush signed today extends U.S. immigration laws to CNMI and establishes a guest worker program there.

***

Laguna (Calif.) Journal:

In a recent drug bust at the San Diego State University Federal agents and SDSU police culminated a yearlong investigation into drug dealing around campus and found it to be more sophisticated, more pervasive and more dangerous and far reaching than they expected or have seen before. These arrests coincided with the first anniversary of a female student freshman’s cocaine-related death.

According to local newspaper reports ninety-six suspects, including 75 SDSU students, have been arrested on drug-related charges as a result of the undercover operation, launched after Jenny Poliakoff, 19, was found dead in her off-campus apartment after a night of celebration.

One of the main suspects in this international drug investigation is illegal alien Omar Castaneda, a gang member from Pomona with ties to the Mexican Tijuana drug cartels, officials said

Castaneda, 36, after his arrest he was arraigned in San Diego Superior Court on charges of possession of cocaine for sale. He is suspected of being a major link between drugs flowing into California from Tijuana and sales at SDSU and other California campuses.

Read the rest of the article. It’s worth the time.

Washington Times:

D.C. to arm police with assault rifles

The Metropolitan Police Department has joined other major U.S. cities in arming patrol officers with assault rifles to protect them against criminals with high-powered weapons, weeks after being released from a federal program that monitors the use of excessive force.

Shows you how well D.C.’s gun control laws are working.  They worked to make the thugs better armed than the cops until now.

And we’ll have to go through it again.

Agence France Presse:

US blacks jailed at higher rate for drugs than whites: report

African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned for drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than white offenders, even though whites commit more drug offenses in the United States, a rights group said.

A black man is 12 times more likely to be sent to prison for a drug offense than a white man, according to a Human Rights Watch report titled “Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States.”

A black woman is five times more likely to go to jail for a drug crime than a white counterpart, said the report, which is based on a review of statistics in 34 US states.

In 16 states, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, blacks are sentenced to prison for drug offenses at a rate 10 to 42 times higher than whies.

“Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black,” said the report’s author, Jamie Fellner, senior counsel in the US program at Human Rights Watch.

Not all “drug offenses” are the same. Possessing a gram of pot is a “drug offense,” and dealing crack cocaine is also a “drug offense.” It’s just that blacks are far more likely to commit the more serious kinds of “drug offenses,” and more likely to commit the ones that result in prison time.

If one would adjust for the specific drug offense, then one would probably find that whites are more likely to go to prison than blacks. Especially rural whites, where a “hanging jury” and/or a “hanging judge” (which there are a lot more of in white rural areas) would send a drug convict to prison for an offense that would not draw prison time for a black convict in the black/liberal cities with its black juries and black/white lib judges.

London Sunday Times:

BNP’s Richard Barnbrook calls for flying of Union Jack and a ban on burkas

The mainstream party candidates walked off the stage when Richard Barnbrook stepped up to speak after becoming, early on Saturday morning, the first member of the British National Party to win a seat on the London Assembly. Mr Barnbrook was unpeturbed.

He expects to be treated as a pariah for the next four years, but insists that he will not be cowed. “If I have to be a lone wolf I will be one,” he told The Times.

Mr Barnbrook, 47, said that he intends to become the voice of “true Londoners”, fighting against political correctness and preferential treatment for racial minorities. He will press for the Union Jack to be flown permanently over City Hall, for burkas to be banned from public buildings and for official celebrations to mark St George’s Day. He will resist the planned construction of a huge new mosque, the biggest place of worship in Britain, in Newham, East London.

Supporting the Union Jack, resisting the Islamification of England through burquas and mosques, and opposing affirmative action are things that are just too much to ask of Britain’s “mainstream” parties.

Seventeen years ago.

The Post-Dispatch dug deeper into the life of Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton. Among the highlights:

* The Meacham Park annexation that black residents were/are supposedly so upset about, that resulted in the Kirkwood Commons shopping center, the one that some would have us think resulted in the seething pot of resentment that sparked, the shootings, is one that Thornton supported.  He thought he would get some destruction and demolition business for this “construction company,” and would have had it if not for the fact that he couldn’t demonstrate that he could actually do the work.

* Ironically, the reason Thornton got those multitude of tickets is that the city tax money generated from Kirkwood Commons was used to fix up what remained of Meacham Park.  In that same spirit, the city started handing out tickets for code violations, many of those going to Thornton.

* But most of those tickets came before 2002.  The city gave up on trying to make him behave via citations.

* Generally, Thornton was always hustling to earn a quick fortune.  Because he had the Power of Attorney over his parents’ real estate, he took out as many mortgages and home equity loans as he could on them to finance his “construction business.”

The lesson remains the same.  Liberal Kirkwood was hoisted on the petard of its racial pandering.

Related:  Anthology of the Shooting at Kirkwood City Hall

Drawn by elementary school students in Brooklyn.  What’s more disturbing is that, in the several hundred words that the New York Daily News found in its heart to use for this story, that not one of them was “hate,” “enmity,” or anything alluding to that concept, and to the truth of this graffiti.  Much less any pontification from the member of the Paranoia-Industrial Complex based in New York City, or its competitor in Montgomery, Alabama.

Why couldn’t they be America’s gain?

Chrisitan Science Monitor:

White Zimbabweans bring change to Nigeria

Shonga, Nigeria - Musa Mogadi says he is better off since “the whites” came. He’s got a new job, learned new farming skills, and he can chat on a mobile phone while zipping around the countryside on a motorbike.

Three years ago, Mr. Mogadi got by as a subsistence farmer. But he now earns a regular wage as a supervisor on one of this town’s new commercial farms.

He’s applied skills he learned from some of the two dozen white Zimbabwean farmers who moved to Nigeria in 2005, after being kicked off their land by President Robert Mugabe and later attracted by large parcels of land on offer under 25-year leases and commitments of support from the Nigerian government.

Production on his farm is now up.

“We are starting to use fertilizers,” says Mogadi, explaining that he was encouraged to buy fertilizer after seeing yield benefits on the commercial farm. He’s also started planting his maize in a more compact formation, like the Zimbabweans, increasing production from each field planted.

Before the Zimbabweans arrived, there was no mobile phone network in the area and so no reason to have a mobile phone. Now he and most of the other workers have snazzy cellphones, and many have bought motorbikes imported from China, often with a loan from their employer.

In the future, when the national power network reaches the Shonga farms, Mogadi is looking forward to having electricity in his home and village for the first time.

Kenny Oyewo, who works as a farm manager, thinks the lessons being learned in Shonga should be exported across Nigeria.

The trouble is, even if it helps Nigerians, as the whites become more prosperous and influential, the racial hate and jealousy of them will also increase, which will lead to a Mugabe-like figure running Nigeria.

Time:

Australia’s Gun Laws: Little Effect

On the afternoon of April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant snapped. A striking figure with his long blond hair and milky skin, he had just eaten lunch at a cafÉ within the historic site of Port Arthur, a former prison in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Described later by his sentencing judge as a “pathetic social misfit,” the 28-year-old then reached into his sports bag and, in the manner that others might pull out a sweater, withdrew two military-style semi-automatic rifles, which he used over the next eight horrifying minutes to kill 35 people - men, women and children - in what remains Australia’s worst mass murder.

Sharing the shock of his people, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard - just two months into his 11-and-a-half years in power - seized the chance to overhaul Australia’s gun laws, trampling all opposition to make them among the strictest in the developed world. “I hate guns,” he said at the time. “One of the things I don’t admire about America is their slavish love of guns . . . We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.” Howard argued the tougher laws would make Australia safer. But 12 years on, new research suggests the government response to Port Arthur was a waste of public money and has made no difference to the country’s gun-related death rates.

Though he’d acquired them illegally, Bryant used guns at Port Arthur that were lawful in Tasmania at the time. Howard argued there was no reason civilians should be allowed to own assault weapons - and under the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) these were all but banned. At huge cost, the government bought from their owners some 650,000 of the newly prohibited guns, which police destroyed. It also implemented mandatory gun licenses and registration of all firearms, helping to restrict to 5% of the population the number of Australian adults who owned or used guns last year, down from 7% in 1996.

But these changes have done nothing to reduce gun-related deaths, according to Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic and coauthor of a soon-to-be-published paper that reviews a selection of previous studies on the effects of the 1996 legislation. The conclusions of these studies were “all over the place,” says McPhedran. But by pulling back and looking purely at the statistics, the answer “is there in black and white,” she says. “The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence.”

A big reason for this is that Australia, like America, is importing a lot of something else. And like their American counterparts, words on paper mean nothing to them.

As a matter of history, Australia has always been anti-gun as a matter of tendency, both before and after 1996.  The reason is that Australia started as a penal colony, and one would no sooner want prisoners living in a penal colony to have guns than prisoners in real prisons to have guns.  In contrast, British gun control enforcement, among many other things, sparked the American independence movement.  Also, Australia’s indigenous population never put up a fight, unlike America’s, so guns weren’t needed to subdue the continent.

Following on the heels of the U.S. State Department’s repudiation of the term “Jihad,” the Washington D.C. Police Department and other city officials will no longer use the term “gangs.” Way to make the gang problem disappear.  Of course, this is the same city that, last year, wanted to solve illegal immigration by making all the illegals legal.

MyWay:

CHICAGO - Thousands of immigrants and activists gathered in cities across the country Thursday to demand comprehensive immigration reform, including citizenship opportunities for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Turnout has fallen sharply since the first nationwide rallies in 2006, when more than 1 million people - at least 400,000 in Chicago alone - flooded streets and brought traffic to a standstill.

I don’t know how to react to this story. On the one hand, I want to think that the other side is giving up because they realize that neither this U.S. Senate nor the next one will have the votes to pass it. On the other hand, I fear that this means they realize that they’re assured of having an amnestyaire as the next President.

Ebay France, that is. The good news is that the bidding on the souped-up 1991 Peugeot is up to €10 million ($15.5 million) at the time of this writing — so somebody appreciates his career and accomplishments. The bad news is that he thinks he no longer needs a bullet-proof car, meaning the end of his political viability.

Time, on the London mayoral race:

Any enthusiasm for addressing this democratic deficit could be diminished if the May 1 elections see the British National Party pick up its first-ever Assembly seats. Promising to “stop immigration”, to give “British jobs to British workers” and to “House British people first,” the party is hoping its crude populist message will resonate with white Londoners. Some pollsters predict they’ll win one or two seats. It’s a timely reminder that politics isn’t always a laughing matter.

Yes, because stopping immigration, giving British jobs to British workers, and housing British people first would be such a crude tragedy, wouldn’t it?

The reason that Red Ken might lose and the BNP might gain seats is that a “city” in England and a “city” in America are defined differently. In British parlance, “London” doesn’t mean the core central city (which is actually small and doesn’t have a big population), it essentially means the metropolitan area. Imagine how different St. Louis City Hall would be if the whole metropolitan area could vote. Since Mayor Slay wants to make St. Louis City seem more crime-free than it actually is by manipulating metropolitan area crime statistics, it’s apropos.

Speaking of big city mayors, Gianni Alemanno will be the new mayor of Rome (actually, the Rome area). He was Silvio Berlusconi’s agriculture minister during his previous stint as PM. And he will be the first right-wing mayor of any majority-white city/area considered a “world city” in my conscious lifetime.  He promises to make crime and immigration his top-burner issues.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Nixon announces higher ed plan

On a campaign stop at the University of Missouri-St. Louis this morning, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon unveiled a plan to allow some Missouri students who start out at a community college to get a four-year degree without having to pay any tuition.

Nixon, a Democrat running for governor, said his Missouri Promise plan would ensure students don’t graduate saddled with large amounts of debt from paying “outrageous tuition rates.”

Under his plan, he would expand the state’s A+ program to all Missouri high schools — not just the half currently in the program. Under that program, students who meet certain academic, community service and financial need criteria can go to a Missouri community college or technical school for free.

Nixon’s plan would also mean that after those students get their two-year associate’s degree, they could transfer to a four-year public university in Missouri also tuition-free.

(snip)

“While other states have been making college more affordable and accessible, Missouri has moved backwards. The Missouri Promise will create a pathway to a four-year degree for those families struggling to afford college tuition during these difficult economic times. We must make the dream of a college education a reality for all Missouri families.”

Any plans to guarantee such college graduates jobs commensurate with their education? (Assuming they haven’t all been outsourced to Bangalore.)  Oh yeah, these are the Democrats we’re talking about.  So the answer is yes if you’re non-white.

Al Sharpton wants to “close NYC down” (good luck with that). Remember that two of the three cops were black, and that they waived a jury trial, in order to have their case heard and decided by a judge. Al Sharpton should blame the prosecutors, because they, as lawyers, couldn’t convince another lawyer beyond a reasonable doubt. Assuming that they ever could have.

WKMG-CBS-6 Orlando:

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Men dressed in black with covered faces are hunting and then slashing random strangers with razor blades as part of a gang initiation, police warned residents.

Investigators said a gang in Flagler County is sending its future members to Daytona Beach to seek out victims to cut.

Once a gang recruit slashes a stranger, he gains the respect of his peers and is inducted into their underground society, police told Local 6’s Tarik Minor.

We aren’t told much about the gang, but we do know something about one of its victims. If all of their victims share one obvious similarity with this victim, then this might tell us something about this gang.

And proud to be jacked by them, too?

Fox News:

Mexican Embassy: Official Fired After Getting Caught With White House BlackBerries

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attaché was caught on camera pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans and has since been fired, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the Mexican media around at the conference.

(snip)

Sources said Quintero Curiel made it all the way to the airport before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He initially denied taking the devices, but after agents showed him the DVD, Quintero Curiel said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.

He was in New Orleans to plan the formal integration of Canada, the USA and Mexico. That way, the next time something like this happens, it will simply be a “domestic theft” on the books.

And by the way, White House CrackBerries?  What did he think he would find on them?  All the real good top secret stuff is on Federal government laptops.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Civil rights groups sue state officials over voter registrations

Voting-rights activists filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against Missouri public aid officials and election authorities in St. Louis and Kansas City, saying that agencies have failed to help poor people stay active on the voter rolls.

The suit, filed in Kansas City by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, focuses on a 1993 federal law that requires voter registration to be offered at drivers license facilities and government assistance offices — those that offer aid such as food stamps, Medicaid and welfare. But although registering at drivers license offices is now commonplace, activists claim the Missouri Department of Social Services has shirked its obligations.

Because it’s so hard to register to vote otherwise, we have to make it even easier, by offering up the opportunity for people in the places where they will go to sign up to collect some of your tax money.  And which political party and philosophy do you think would these voters endorse?

Boston Globe:

Bill bars gangs from ’safety zones’

Gang members seen talking to one another or standing together on public property could be fined or jailed under a new bill being pushed in the Legislature and supported by some prosecutors and Boston police.
more stories like this

The bill would give broad authority to police and prosecutors to bring civil lawsuits against reputed gangs or their members, forbidding them to hang out together in the neighborhoods and parks that police say they terrorize.

(snip)

Under the bill, suspected gang members would be barred from parks, neighborhoods, and other areas designated as “safety zones,” and police could order groups of three or more gang members found there to leave. The restriction, which would not extend to church or school events, would also impose a 10 p.m. curfew on gang members.

Good luck with that, Boston.  You’re talking about people that have trouble obeying laws against murder, robbery, drug dealing, and so on.  What makes you think they’ll cede to curfews and safety zones?  Assuming that, and assuming that gang members are that easy in a legal sense to identify (gang laws often do not hold up in court, because of the nebulous and informal nature of black and Hispanic street gangs), why stop at a 10 PM curfew and only a few “safety zones?”  Why not make a 24-hour-a-day curfew and make all of Boston a “safety zone?”  Further, why not just round them up using RICO and state equivalents?

Similarly, I cringe whenever I hear one community activist or another calling for a moratorium on violent crime for a finite length of time.  If they have that much power to stop crime for a month, why not make it forever?

UK Telegraph:

Los Angeles ‘is a Third World city’

(snip)

Ernesto Cortes Jr, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a think-tank that specialises on social change, claimed Los Angeles was at a crossroads.

“The question is are we going to be a 21st century city with shared prosperity, or a Third World city with an elite group on top and most on near poverty wages?” he said.

The answer is yes.

McClatchy:

Kidnappings soar in Mexico as drug gangs seek new income

JUAREZ, Mexico — Daniel Escobedo was driving to school when he stopped for what he thought was a security check at a roadblock in the Mexican city of Juarez , across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Worried about being late for class, he hurriedly handed his driver’s license to the two uniformed men, who he thought were police officers.

Moments later, two dark SUVs screeched to a halt. Armed masked men jumped out and grabbed Escobedo, 21. He spent the next six weeks blindfolded, shuttled between safe houses while a drug-gang leader negotiated a ransom with his father, who’s a lawyer. He was beaten, shocked and burned until his rescue April 1 by Mexican soldiers who’d been tipped that drug dealers were using the house.

“For a month and a half, I thought I was going to die,” Escobedo said.

He’s one of a growing number of kidnapping victims here as Mexico’s drug gangs seek new business to replace lucrative drug smuggling, which has become more dangerous as Mexican authorities pursue the largest anti-drug-trafficking effort ever in the country.

In other words, the Mexican authorities have been a little successful in squelching the drug trade, but not rounding up the drug gangs. And what a surprise — they find a new crime aviendo.