In the next few days and weeks, I strongly suspect that the growing political consensus will be that the “Day without an Immigrant” march/boycott backfired. I list the reasons why, in no particular order:

1. Americans will not appreciate the association with May Day, communism, ANSWER, other left-wing groups like MECHA, and groups that go around shouting, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

2. It’s one thing to wave your country’s flag at the World Cup or on Cinco de Mayo; it’s quite another to wave the Mexican flag when you’re marching to demand citizenship in America.

3. Americans are turned off by the entitlement mentality these marchers were exhibiting; most Americans’ ancestors came here humbly and doing everything they could to be in good graces with the law and to secure a better future for their children. In contrast, these illegal immigrants were boycotting work, pulling their kids out of school, and demanding they be handed a piece of the citizenship pie after cutting in line ahead of all the legal immigrants. Americans do not appreciate feeling like they must “appease”, although certain politicians are more than glad to offer promises of government largesse in exchange for political support and votes (this is typical of liberals, but increasingly Republicans like Bush are engaging in this mentality as well).

4. Americans don’t respond positively to protests and boycotts. The Civil Rights movement led by Dr. MLK Jr. was an exception: although the majority of white Americans did not support ending segregation and granting equal rights to blacks at first, they were forced to see the brutal evil of Jim Crow in the South on TV. MLK Jr. said all the right things and asked for opportunity and equality, couching his demands in religion and appeals to our nation’s highest ideals. No other major movement has followed that tactic, and thus no other major movement has gained the implicit support of “the silent majority”. The silent majority were turned off by the Vietnam protesters and and reelected Nixon in a landslide; the silent majority defiantly crushed the anti-globalization movement in the 1990s; the silent majority only gave more support to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and rallied behind President Bush when protesters filled the streets; and the silent majority will now turn against yesterday’s protesters and deal a fatal blow to their goals. Solid public support will now swing in favor of strong border enforcement, more employer crackdowns, and a strict path to citizenship (if any form of amnesty is accepted at all).

5. The boycott failed in its stated purpose: To show that “a day without an immigrant” would hurt the U.S. economy. Not only were the economic effects slight, the areas hardest hit were the ethnic immigrant enclaves, as many stores that serve and hire members of those communities were closed and/or lost money. As for the rest of society, Americans saw traffic ease, commutes shorten, 911 calls decrease, emergency rooms empty, and gang activities quiet down. For American educators in the inner cities, class sizes were advantageously smaller for the day, and the students who came to school were disproportionately more eager to succeed and learn than their peers whose parents pulled them from class. For most average Americans, yesterday had precisely the opposite effect of that intended by the organizers.

Republicans have an excellent chance here to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and pass immigration reform that heightens our nation’s security, severely cracks down on the incentives to come here illegally by going after employers, and bring 10-20 million people out of the shadows in a way that pays for itself by making illegal immigrants not only earn their citizenship, but pay monetarily for the right to live here, receive government services, and/or remit income to their families abroad. The path to citizenship is key: Make the process difficult enough and bound with enough strings, and you’ll separate the wheat from the chaff. Simultaneously though, Republicans would be doing this nation a great disservice if they did not overhaul completely the process by which we let in immigrants legally. A great deal of face can be saved if Republicans do these two key steps:

1. Show their pro-immigration bonafides by making legal immigration much easier, smoother, fair, and better designed to help strengthen America; and

2. Make the path to citizenship for illegals sufficiently difficult that only true Americans will take that path, humbly and willingly paying restitution for coming here illegally for the right to be a part of our great nation.

Anything short of those two options risks ceding the middle to Democrats who would gladly offer amnesty to illegals and change the Pledge of Allegiance to Spanish to pick up a quick 10 million votes nationwide. Republicans are also at risk of alienating their base, and when the base doesn’t show up to the polls, GOP victories like we saw in 2002 and 2004 simply will not continue in 2006 and 2008. Doing the first step will satisfy the concerns of the American middle, while the latter will craft a balance between the sympathetic Center with the angry anti-illegal immigration base of the GOP.

Buffalo has taken a 5-0 lead on Philadelphia, less than eight minutes into the second period. So, barring an epic comeback by the Flyers, the Sabres will win the series in six games, 4-2, on the road — the first road win for either team. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time a Buffalo sports team has lost in utterly heartbreaking fashion, so let’s all knock on wood repeatedly now, shall we?

The Flyers just pulled goalie Robert Esche out of the game. I was impressed that the Philly fans, obviously realizing that their season is almost certainly over, cheered him when he left the ice — recognizing his success during the season instead of booing him for his poor performance tonight.

Go Sabres!

UPDATE: Sabres win, 7-1! Bring on Ottawa!

UPDATE 2: Here’s Bfloblog’s wrap-up of the game.

Also tonight, the Carolina Hurricanes — or, as I like to call them, the Hartford Whalers of Raleigh — clinched their first-round series in six games as well. If the Whalers Hurricanes beat the Devils and the Sabres beat the Senators, Buffalo would play Hartford Carolina in the Eastern Conference finals. I would root for Buffalo, but with a slightly heavy heart. LET’S GO WHALE! :)

…but apparently there is, because Martin’s is worried about people going to the polls drunk:

Heh. Blue laws are silly.

UPDATE: Meijer had a similar sign… though theirs had one major flaw:

Apparently those “higher standards” don’t apply to spelling. :)

More than eight months after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin outlined an evacuation plan for his city on Tuesday.

Heh.

You’d think this development might remind Nagin’s constituents, who will decide on May 20 whether to re-elect him, that he didn’t seem to have an evacuation plan in place last August. I repeat: this is a guy whose lawyers were literally researching the legal ramifications of mandatory evacuations 36 hours before Katrina hit, even though the threat of a catastrophic, city-destroying hurricane had been anticipated for years. This is a guy who had to be interrupted during dinner and urged to call the National Hurricane Center on the Saturday night before the storm, apparently because he wasn’t in constant communication with them all along (?!?). This is a guy who, against all reason and logic (and contemporaneous urging on this blog), waited until 24 hours before landfall to order an evacuation, despite reams of studies showing that it would take 72 hours to empty his city. This is a guy who had no apparent strategy for helping people without private transportation get out of the city, even though everyone knew that thousands of such people existed, and even though his city had hundreds of school buses at its disposal that could have been used to carry those people out of the danger zone. (It’s useful at this point to remember that, in the true worst-case scenario, nearly all of those homes in the Ninth Ward would have been entirely underwater, and nearly all of those people who took shelter in their attics would have drowned long before they had a chance to take shelter at the Convention Center and blame the feds for taking so long to bring them aid.)

Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that Nagin had “no apparent streategy”; his strategy was to tell those people: “Go to the Superdome, which we think can withstand the winds, but we’re not really sure. There won’t be electricity, running water, a functional sewage system, or adequate food or water, but you’ll probably be better off there than in your homes. Probably.”

As I said before, it’s absolutely unbelieveable to me that the residents of New Orleans are seriously considering re-electing the mayor who fiddled while their city drowned. If Nagin wins, I think we will officially be able to declare, once and for all, that accountability is dead in this country.

All that said, it’s truly excellent that New Orleans now has a better plan in place, especially with the official start of hurricane season less than a month away. In particular, I’m happy to see that Mayor Nagin has learned from his mistake in not getting help from Amtrak. Under the new plan:

“Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we’re really excited about,” Nagin said.

The new plan “relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters.” Good. Another excellent and important development: “In the future, evacuees will be allowed to bring pets with them [on evacuation buses] as long as they have some type of cage to safely put them in.” That won’t just save animal lives, it will save human lives, because some people simply will not leave their pets behind, no matter the danger.

But although this new plan sounds great (assuming they actually implement it when the time comes, unlike their previous plan, such as it was), it’s truly a tragedy that they didn’t have an adequate plan last August — and it’s not forgivable on the basis that “hindsight is 20/20.” As I said, the threat of a storm like Katrina (or far worse) was long anticipated and feared, and New Orleans’s previous “plan” was self-evidently inadequate. Its inadequacy didn’t just become apparent because it didn’t work; the plan, as implemented, obviously didn’t deal with the serious problems that everyone knew existed. If the plan’s flaws only became apparent to the general public in retrospect, that’s because officials lied about the plan to hide its flaws. City officials get credit for doing a good job with the traffic problems — the contraflow worked very well — but they did absolutely nothing of significance to help those without private transportation.

I realize that my harping on this point, more than eight months later, may rub some people the wrong way, seeing as how New Orleans has seemingly learned from its mistakes, and the “blame game” is out of fashion these days. But I’m sorry, I believe in accountability, and I just can’t forgive that easily when the mistakes manifestly should never have been made in the first place, and those mistakes had very serious consequences, including the deaths of scores — maybe hundreds — of people.

P.S. Bayou View has a good post about the new evacuation plan and the future of the Gulf Coast.

(more…)

George Wallace, 1963: “I say: segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Kwame Kilpatrick, 2006: “There will be affirmative action here today. There will be affirmative action here tomorrow and there will be affirmative action in our state forever.”

First of all, isn’t the whole point of affirmative action to move our society to the point where affirmation action is no longer necessary? Even strong supporters of affirmative action shouldn’t want it to be around “forever,” should they? And anyway, if you’re going to defend a policy which is supposed to fight discrimination, but which is perceived by many as perpetuating discrimination, channeling George Wallace doesn’t seem like the best idea. Indeed, defending affirmative action by echoing a famous pro-segregation speech is about as effective as defending Joe Lieberman by calling him an elephant.

Ah, well, maybe Kilpatrick’s judgment is off because he’s upset about the Red Wings.

(Hat tip: Opinion Journal.)

Aww.

Heh.

The Detroit Red Wings, the #1 seed in the Western Conference* and hockey’s best team during the regular season, were eliminated from the playoffs last night by the #8 seed Edmonton Oilers. The Red Wings led the series 2-0, but lost four straight games to fall in 6. They also led last night’s game, 2-0 at the start of the third period and 3-2 with four minutes left… but still managed to lose, 4-3. The Oilers are the seventh #8 seed to pull a first-round stunner in the NHL, and the first since 2002.
Kevin at Bfloblog writes: “I like Edmonton, and they seem like the kind of city that Buffalo would get along with.” Heh. Them crazy Albertans probably spent all night oot at the bars celebrating, eh? :)

Tonight: the Eastern Conference’s #4-seeded Buffalo Sabres try to eliminate the Philadelphia Flyers in Game 6 of that series. In anticipation of which, Becky offers the Top Ten reasons Philly is going down. Gametime is 7pm.

Meanwhile, in the NBA, the #6 seed L.A. Clippers beat Carmelo Anthony and the #3 seed Denver Nuggets, 101-83, to win the series in 5 games — the Clippers’ first playoff series victory in 30 years. (They were the Buffalo Braves back then.) If the #7 seed Lakers, who lead the #2 seed Phoenix Suns 3-1 thanks to Kobe Bryant’s heroics, can win that series, the Clippers will face the Lakers in a Battle of L.A. in the second round. Heh!

*Since when is Detroit in the “west”?

Apple has released a series of new ads touting the advantages of Mac’s over PC’s. Although some are more subjective than others, one points out that last year there were 114,000 known PC viruses. The reason I point this out? Because an article released by the AP today claims that viruses have caught up to the Mac. Their evidence? Apparently two users have confimed that by clicking on series of links that their computer obtained a Mac virus.

1 virus.

MacOS X was initially released to the public in 2000 in the form of a public beta, however the core of the operating system is based on BSD Unix and the OpenStep/NeXTStep operating system which was released by NeXT computer in 1989.

Prior to MacOS X the original MacOS had about 50 known viruses over its life span, starting in 1984.

In addition the article cites the move from a PowerPC to an Intel as a vulnerabilty, an erroneous statement as vulnerabilities are due to weaknesses in the operating system software, the hardware it runs on seldom if ever factors in to the equation.

In addition the article fails to explain if the virus actually did anything, or how it worked in general.