Texans Going To Pawn Shops To Get Extra Gas $$

Really, what can you expect when you have two oil men in the White House?

I still see people with W '04 stickers on the back of their SUVs filling up and they're still smiling. I guess they think it's all worth it because it's better to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here. But it cost me $46 to fill up my 4 cylinder Camry. I don't understand what they're smiling about.

There are people who are going to say that the Bush administration can't do much about high gas prices. It's a matter of supply and demand. But when Bush was campaigning in '00 he said that the president can help keep the cost of gas down by calling the OPEC cartel and telling them to open the spigot. Well, Bush is the Decider and I don't see him deciding to call his OPEC friends.

"Texans Going To Pawn Shops To Get Extra Gas $$

View the video

(CBS 11 News) DALLAS High gasoline prices are causing some people to take desperate measures.

Pawn shops say their business is increasing, with some customers saying they're selling things to buy gas.

Gas prices are climbing again, with most stations prices hovering at, or just below $3.00 a gallon. For some people the high fuel prices are overwhelming.

'We just have customers come in and have to tell us that they need money ‘till the end of the week, for gas to get back and forth to work,' said pawn shop owner, Gerald Costner.

Everything from high end jewelry, to name brand purses, and televisions… pawn shop owners say they are seeing it all come in. They say customers are frustrated and have no place to go to get extra cash for gas.

'Some of the construction people tell us they are having to pawn their tools to buy gas, but when they pawn their tools they can't go out and work in the construction business ‘cause their tools are in pawn. So it kind of a catch-22,” Costner said.

Mary Rodriguez has worked at the Casa View Pawn Shop for five years. She says she's seen people of all ages coming in looking for help.

“We've always had a clientele of the young kids, or middle age kids, and now we’re getting an older generation. Which, it just seems wrong that they have to pawn things just to get gas, or ya know, to make ends meet on things like that.'

As prices continue to rise at the pumps, many motorists say they don't see things getting better anytime soon, for the consumer.

“It is frustrating, but the thing is they know they can get away with it, because people need gas,” Rodriguez said.

At Casa View Pawn, the owner says they've seen the increase in numbers over the past couple months.

(CBS 11 News)"

On Torture and Being "Good Americans"

Via Tikkun

"To ask what it means to be a 'good American' is not to compare Bush to Hitler or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil, which Bush has.

Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil." Read more....

Dixie Chicks are #4 with a bullet

Despite the fact that the album doesn't come out for another month, the Dixie Chicks latest album is already #4 on the Amazon chart. You can listen to the song here. It's important for people to have the right to speak out without being blacklisted or put on "watch lists." If an individual wants to protest an artist's message by not buying that artist's product, that's fine. The danger is when there's an organized effort by federally licensed broadcasters to boycott the artist.

Workers opting for Canada

Via the Miami Herald

BY ALFREDO CORCHADO
El Universal


Some Mexicans are bypassing U.S. for Canada´s guest worker program.

SAN MARCOS DE ABAJO, Guanajuato - He´ll miss Dallas - a place he once worked - but not enough to return anytime soon. Migrant worker Reyes Suaste has discovered Canada.

This year he´ll head way north to pick chili and cucumbers. Dallas is much closer to his home in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, but there are other aspects of the U.S. immigrant experience he is happy to do without: "I won´t miss being treated like a criminal and not knowing when I can return home," he said.

Suaste, 27, his brothers, Alejandro, 30, and Eusebio, 25, and more than a dozen other men from Guanajuato are heading to Quebec - not with the help of ruthless, pricey smugglers known as coyotes, but on airplanes with assigned seating and iced drinks. The men will join more than 13,000 other Mexicans in Canada as part of a guest worker program for agricultural workers.

Proposals for a guest worker program have drawn fierce opposition in the United States, but proponents say the Canada program offers some big advantages: workers are treated better, and they return home at the end of their assigned stay.

Alejandro Suaste tries to grab a sick rooster at his home in Mexico. He and his two brothers will be going to Canada for seasonal agricultural jobs as guest workers. As U.S. President George W. Bush´s proposed guest worker program takes center stage in the congressional debate this week, authorities in Mexico insist their 32-year-old pact with Canada could serve as a model for a similar program with the United States.

"This program is about meeting supply and demand," said Miguel Gutiérrez Tinoco of Mexico´s Foreign Relations Secretariat, which helps oversee the program with Canada. In 32 years, Tinoco said, "I know of no one who has violated the agreement and stayed behind. ... We can do the same thing at a larger scale with the United States."

Others disagree, saying it is unrealistic to view the Canada-Mexico agricultural program as a possible model because of vastly different situations. While the Canadian agricultural worker program takes in a few thousand workers a year, the United States has as many as 6 million Mexican illegal immigrants.

Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Washington-based Farmworker Justice Fund, a farmworker advocacy group, said that any agreement between the U.S. and Mexico must "include an overall comprehensive component," referring to proposed legislation that would offer workers a path toward legal status.

"We´re a nation of immigrants, not a nation of guest workers," he said.

In Ottawa, Mario Rondeau, Canada´s acting director of the foreign worker program, called it "a considerable success."

"It´s hard in the summertime, it´s difficult to find Canadians to do these jobs," Rondeau said. "The program has been a success."

He declined to speculate on whether such a program would work between the United States and Mexico.

Meanwhile, on a bright spring day in San Marcos, Elías Martínez, 33, was telling the Suaste brothers about Canadian hospitality.

"You´ll find that Canadians will actually make you feel welcomed, like you belong there and you have a purpose," he said. "I once had car problems, and a Canadian couple stopped and offered help and even took me out for a sandwich."

Martínez has worked in Quebec for five years, picking cucumbers and melons for GIFAR Co., an agribusiness. He routinely works the planting and harvesting seasons, allowing him to go home to his family five or six months a year with his pockets stuffed with cash.

ONCE IN DALLAS

Before he started working in Canada, he used to pack a small plastic bag with some clothes, a water jug, his wife´s burritos, a baseball cap and comfortable running shoes and head for the yards and roofs of Dallas. He made good money, he said, but he hated the journey, filled with abusive smugglers and days of walking along the banks of the Rio Grande or in the desert, not knowing where he was or when he´d see his wife and three children again.

"As an illegal immigrant, you´re also always vulnerable," he said. "And in Dallas I was always looking over my shoulder to see if the migra [Border Patrol] was behind me. And then all the personal attacks against us."

The Suaste brothers nodded their heads in agreement. These men, at least, said they have no intention of ever abandoning their homeland. The three live on the same plot of family land with their parents, wives and children. Their three homes - built with money earned in Dallas and beyond - are clustered together.

"We don´t want to be anybody´s burden," said Alejandro. "We just want to work, help feed our families back home, and return again without the dangers of crossing the border."

Bush has said matching foreigners with U.S. jobs that Americans won´t do will help "bring people out of the shadows of American society so they don´t have to fear the life they live."

The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program allows Canadian farms to recruit foreign workers if they can´t find Canadians to harvest their crops. It began in 1974 with only a handful of foreign workers. These days, there were so many Mexican workers in Ontario alone - 7,200 - that last year the Mexican government set up a new consulate office to meet their needs.

In Canada, workers are provided with housing and transportation. Employers pay for the plane ticket and then deduct some of those costs from the employee´s paycheck. The workers return home at the end of the harvest season with a letter from their employer either inviting them to return next season or not. Officials say 75 percent to 80 percent of workers do return.

President Vicente Fox is calling on Canada to expand the program.

"We should move out from agriculture to other services and other kinds of jobs, and we are working on this with the Canadian government," Fox told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.

CANADA´S NEEDS

In Toronto, David Rosenblatt, managing director of Rosenblatt & Associates, a recruiting agency, said Canada´s birth rate of 1.5 children per female, an aging population and a brain drain of people leaving for the U.S. means that the country faces pressing challenges.

"We need skilled Mexican workers in the mining, steel, oil and gas exploration industries. We need waiters, nurses, cooks, construction workers, landscapers. Canada needs Mexican workers," he said. "The U.S. loss is our gain,"

Rosenblatt said he´s developing video resumés of Mexican workers to show to prospective employers in Canada.

"If you look at the world, Mexico makes the most sense for Canada," he said. "No. 1, if you´re a Mexican you don´t need a visa to come in. Second, Mexico is in North America. Third, many of the Mexicans we talk to speak English, and more importantly, they are extremely hardworking people."

To be sure, Canada isn´t for everybody. Martínez warns workers of the cold weather, even in April, and the winters that can begin in mid-September. Then there´s the double language barrier, with both French and English spoken, and cultural isolation. "I understand a little English from my days in Dallas," said Martínez. "But when they speak French, I´m lost. Sometimes you wish you were in Texas."

Workers on his crews work seven days a week and earn 650 Canadian dollars, which is worth about 6,250 pesos. On Sundays they work a short day, six hours, so they can wash clothes, buy groceries and maybe write a letter home. The Suaste brothers, two of whom have worked in Atlanta; Homestead, Florida.; and Waxahachie and Ennis, Texas; were unfazed by the demands.

"We´re not scared of hard work," Alejandro said. "We just want some respect for the sweat of our work."



© Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

You're doing a heck of a job Scotty. Crooks and Liars has Keith Olbermann's greatest McClellan moments video here.

With no announcement, McClellan appeared in the driveway of the South Lawn at 9:39 a.m. with the President as he prepared to board his Marine One chopper for Andrews Air Force Base and thence to a day trip in Tuskegee, Ala. McClellan smiled, but quickly got a catch in his voice. "Good morning, everybody. I am here to announce that I will be resigning as White House Press Secretary," he said. "The White House is going through a period of transition; change can be helpful, and this is a good time and good position to help bring about change."

The most telling word in Bush’s comments was "integrity," making it clear that he does not blame McClellan — and McClellan should not be blamed — for passing on incomplete or inaccurate information he had been given. "I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity," Bush said. "He really represents the best of his family, our state and our country. It's going to be hard to replace Scott. But, nevertheless, he's made the decision and I accept it." He then added an unusually intimate note: "One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the Press Secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, job well done."

Why wait for someday? I'd like to think that they'll be sitting in rocking chairs in Texas soon after a Democratic majority is elected in Congress this year.

Fighting all the Hitlers

Via Crooks and Liars:

As Bush followers gear up for another election year campaign to start a war, they are using exactly the same rhetorical tactics and are revealing precisely the same mindset to which we were subjected during the 2002 campaign for the Iraq War. What is starkly apparent from this repetition is that their awareness of history and knowledge of the world is sadly confined to one singular event, which is all they know and which, rather bizarrely, they have a need to live over and over and over again.

To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don't like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world and who can't be reasoned with. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany. From this it follows that every warmonger is the glorious reincarnation of the brave and resolute Winston Churchill.

And one who opposes or even questions any proposed war becomes the lowly and cowardly appeaser, Neville Chamberlain. For any and every conflict that arises, the U.S. is in the identical position of France and England in 1937- faced with an aggressive and militaristic Nazi Germany, will we shrink in appeasement and fear from the grand calling of history duties, or will we stand tall and firm and wage glorious war? Read more here....

Where's the outrage?

Via Crooks and Liars

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true....read on"