Texas. Gov. Rick Perry is a...

Well you fill in the blank. Words honestly fail me after reading this story.

DALLAS (AP) — More than 12,000 illegal immigrants, non-permanent residents or non-U.S. citizens paid in-state tuition or received other such financial aid at public colleges and universities across Texas during late 2009, the Dallas Morning News reported Monday.

The figures from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board show about 1 percent of all Texas college students, in the fall semester, benefited from a 2001 law granting such in-state tuition.

The law says students who are not U.S. citizens and want to seek the assistance must have attended school in the state for at least three years before they graduate from a Texas high school. Students also must file an affidavit saying they plan to seek permanent residency.

During the fall semester, 12,138 students benefited from the law. Texas awarded about $33.6 million in state and institutional financial aid to those students between fall 2004 and summer 2008, according to the newspaper.

$33.6 million that did not benefit American citizens, although they were all taxed to raise it.

Gov. Rick Perry, who earlier this month won the GOP primary, supports the law aiding illegal immigrant students. Perry, in a recent debate, said the students are on the path to citizenship.

Huh? Back the truck up, Bubba. They aren't "law-abiding". Our laws say that people need to stay OUT of America unless they apply properly and are granted permission to enter. If they are in our country in defiance of our laws, the only path that they need to be on is a path back across the border, either on their own or in an ICE bus with barred windows.

The Immigration Reform Coalition of Texas filed a challenge to the law in December.

"It's not like we're swimming in budget surpluses," said coalition attorney David Rogers, who maintains that taxpayers suffer because of the law. "It's the responsibility of the government of Mexico to educate Mexican citizens."

Wow--someone gets it. Let's hear that line again:

"It's the responsibility of the government of Mexico to educate Mexican citizens."

Fantastic! HE should be Governor of Texas.

University of Houston law professor Michael A. Olivas said federal law allows states to draft their own policies. "It is a matter for states to determine," said Olivas. "In-state status is a state issue."

Former legislator Rick Noriega, who sponsored the in-state tuition law, said that educating the students is an economic development issue.

"This is about access to higher education," said Noriega, now the president of Avance, a nonprofit organization that educates Hispanic parents on preparing children for school.

"The alternative is to slam the door on any hopes and dreams. How are they going to perform in high school if they don't even have a chance at higher education?" he said.

Again, the question isn't "how are they going to perform in [American] high schools...it's "why are they even in American high schools? Every kid there illegally and improperly dilutes the quality of education that our kids get...especially when the schools have to start repeating half of the lesson in Spanish every day. And someone please tell me why we should spend dollar one on giving Mexican or OTM kids any sort of advanced degree when they cannot even legally get jobs in America? And it's especially ludicrous when you consider that 17% of American workers today are unemployed or under employed, and here we are, trying to make outsiders competitive with those Americans in our own tight labor market!!!
Rick Perry is contemptible and a sell-out. WHY did Rick Perry's primary opponent have to be one of those nut-job 9/11 truther types?

Screw it--I'm moving to Texas and running for Governor. Then I plan to invade Mexico and set up a 100-mile wide buffer zone south of the Rio Grande which will separate my state and the rest of Mexico.

Maybe then at least, we'll have education money and classroom space sufficient for our own kids, and we won't have to put up with this or this on a continual basis.

Oh--and Mexico? Fly one more of those Mexican military helicopters over my border and see if you get it back.

It's times like this that I really miss President Eisenhower.

America...where'd your spine go?

There was a time when Americans could justifiably take pride in their Presidents, because America has had, at times, some serious bad-ass Presidents who stood tall, spoke their mind and meant what they said. These were men who made the world spin just a little differently on it's axis, and no one wanted to mess with us when they were in the White House.

President Andrew Jackson was such a man. He began his career as a militia officer who excelled at solving "Indian problems" in the American South. Basically, when Indians got out of line and killed settlers, Jackson went down and whipped their asses until the survivors had enough and promised to behave or move west. Then he led a volunteer band from Tennessee and Kentucky down to New Orleans, assembled a pick-up crew that included farmers, shopkeepers, riverboatmen, naval sailors whose ships were sunk, freed blacks, and even pirates, and he cleaned the clocks of a professional British invasion force at Chalmette, Louisiana, killing over 2,000 of them for a loss of about 12-14 Americans.

When not killing Indians or the British, Jackson fought duels with pistols, suffering two serious gunshot wounds himself as a result of these fights but also killing one his opponents in return. He was also the subject of the first assassination attempt against a US President with a crazy house painter by the name of Richard Lawrence ran up and tried to shoot him with two pistols, both of which misfired. Jackson then proceeded to beat Lawrence near to death with his hickory cane before others intervened. How do you not admire a man like that? Even his inauguration was such a rowdy affair when his former soldiers and other frontier supporters showed up at the White House that the White House was nearly destroyed after the free booze caused things to get out of hand. Old Hickory was a President that no one here or abroad ever wanted to mess with.

A bit later, we had Theodore Roosevelt. He was an accomplished big-game hunter, a boxer, and a military man who, among other things, assembled a volunteer cavalry unit made up of cowboys and the upper-crust of Yale and Harvard's sports teams, and led them to Cuba where they kicked Spanish butt all the way up San Juan Hill and back down the other side. "Speak softly but carry a big stick," he said. And America did just that. He brought a lot of Central America under control and got the Panama Canal built. He was a man's man and no one wanted to mess with him. Like Jackson before him, he was the subject of an assassination attempt while campaigning in 1912. A man named John Schrank shot him on the chest, but Roosevelt decided that he was not in any danger of dying from the wound since he wasn't coughing up blood, so he went on to deliver his campaign speech, speaking for 90 minutes while bleeding.

Following World War Two, America elected it's former Supreme Commander in Europe, Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the Presidency. Again, this man knew how to take care of business. Graduating West Point in 1911, he rose to the General Staff by the time that the US entered the Second World War and his decisions helped bring it to a successful conclusion. He went on to become the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and as President, he was responsible for the development of both our nuclear weapons program and our rise to the challenges of the Space race. He gave is the interstate highway system that we all know and use today (Originally intended to help move military traffic across the country quickly) and he implemented the Eisenhower Doctrine, under which the US would be prepared to respond with force against any aggression committed by a communist country. And the world understood that he wasn't playing.




And then there was President Ronald Reagan. He started out playing tough guys in the movies, and he ended up a real tough guy on the world stage, serving two terms as President. His credentials, like those before him, were not questioned by America's enemies. The Iranians had been punking America's prior president, Jimmy Carter, by holding our embassy staff hostage for 444 days. But they released them on the day that Reagan took office, because they knew that Reagan, unlike Carter, was a man who would have rolled up his sleeves and settled that Iranian problem with military muscle.

The eight years of the Reagan Presidency were bad years for communists and assorted bad guys everywhere.

He suppressed a communist-launched coup in Grenada, he called on Russia to tear down the Berlin Wall (and they did), he authorized US combat aircraft to intercept terrorists who had hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered US citizen Leon Klinghoffer, and he sent other combat aircraft to bomb targets in Libya in retaliation for Libyan President Khadaffi's support of other terrorist acts in Europe and the Middle East. Reagan's policies brought the Cold War with Russia to a stunning end as the Soviet economy collapsed, and he also brought about the fall of the Nicaraguan Communist government despite the best efforts of the Communists and the Democrats in Congress to stop him. Because of President Reagan, millions of people around the world knew freedom by the end of 1988.

America lost her way for a bit, as demonstrated by the election of Bill Clinton. Under Clinton, terrorists and dictators like Iraq's Saddam Hussein felt free to constantly kick our country in the nuts abroad and even here at home. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, and when nothing was done about it by the Clinton Administration, Osama bin Laden came back for another whack at it on September 11, 2001.

But he erred grievously, because America had just elected another President who was cut from better cloth. George W. Bush, a former military fighter pilot, took decisive action like a real man would. Afghanistan's terrorist-supporting Taliban was hit hard and Saddam Hussein was removed from power, brought to trial, and executed by the new democratically-elected government of Iraq.

I may not have cared for much of what President Bush did domestically during his time in office, but as Commander-in-Chief, he rocked.


So what do we have in office now, during a time when real leadership is required and our military is fighting two wars? Do we have a Jackson, a Roosevelt, an Eisenhower, a Reagan or even a Bush to make the tough decisions and support our troops? Do we have a man with a backbone, a firm jaw, and the first-hand understanding of what it means to fight?

No, we don't. We just have Obi Wan Ke-dopey:
















God help us.

Eisenhower dealt with illegals successfully. Bush needs to take note.

How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico
By John Dillin
The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – George W. Bush isn’t the first Republican president to face a full-blown immigration crisis on the US-Mexican border.

Fifty-three years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, America’s southern frontier was as porous as a spaghetti sieve. As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas, and points beyond.

President Eisenhower cut off this illegal traffic. He did it quickly and decisively with only 1,075 United States Border Patrol agents - less than one-tenth of today’s force. The operation is still highly praised among veterans of the Border Patrol.

Although there is little to no record of this operation in Ike’s official papers, one piece of historic evidence indicates how he felt. In 1951, Ike wrote a letter to Sen. William Fulbright (D) of Arkansas. The senator had just proposed that a special commission be created by Congress to examine unethical conduct by government officials who accepted gifts and favors in exchange for special treatment of private individuals.

General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the presidency, said "Amen" to Senator Fulbright’s proposal. He then quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican ‘wetbacks’ to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."

Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower’s first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.

America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint."

Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3 million, mostly Mexican, laborers.

According to the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association, this illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working Americans. The Handbook Online reports that a study by the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were "approximately half" the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.

Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials overseeing immigration enforcement "had friends among the ranchers," and agents "did not dare" arrest their illegal workers.

Walt Edwards, who joined the Border Patrol in 1951, tells a similar story. He says: "When we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain [to officials in El Paso]. And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. That is how we got into this mess we are in now."

Bill Chambers, who worked for a combined 33 years for the Border Patrol and the then-called US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), says politically powerful people are still fueling the flow of illegals.

During the 1950s, however, this "Good Old Boy" system changed under Eisenhower - if only for about 10 years.

In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph "Jumpin’ Joe" Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.

Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General Swing’s close connections to the president shielded him - and the Border Patrol - from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.

One of Swing’s first decisive acts was to transfer certain entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson would have no effect.

Then on June 17, 1954, what was called "Operation Wetback" began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.

By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.

By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.

Unlike today, Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free.

Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.

The sea voyage was "a rough trip, and they did not like it," says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.

Mr. Coppock says he "cannot understand why [President] Bush let [today’s] problem get away from him as it has. I guess it was his compassionate conservatism, and trying to please [Mexican President] Vincente Fox."

There are now said to be 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the US. Of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are here illegally.