When she leaves the scene and is looking down (or would it be up?) at the events in Washington, maybe it will finally dawn on her that her mark on American history is really not all that good.
Humiliating Hillary Cause Of Two Thirds Of Impeachments
“Ethan? In the Christmas pageant? He’s already two! He can’t be the Baby Jesus, can he?”
The church’s early grades activities coordinator assured Lauren that wasn’t what she had in mind. Nor the part of a shepherd. She doubted, for good reason, that Ethan could keep a straight face around the children crawling on all fours dressed as sheep.
“And anyway, giving Ethan and his friends shepherd’s crooks might lead to a scene better suited for Bruce Lee’s Revenge,” added Lauren.
“We’d like Ethan and a little girl his age to be the littlest angels,” the director explained. “He’ll walk down the center aisle with little Mandy Carrington. When they reach the manger, they’ll kneel and present silver and gold gift-wrapped boxes to the Baby Jesus. They’ll have one line to say, but if they forget it, nobody will ever know.”
“I’m sure he can manage that,” Lauren told her. “Frank and I look forward to his performance.”
When the big night arrived, Lauren helped Ethan into the long white terry-cloth robe Frank’s mother had made for him. At the school, Frank helped him put on his cardboard and tinfoil halo and wings. Then he stood back and examined Ethan with a critical eye.
“It looks like he’s wearing a nightgown,” he said. “I hope he doesn’t fall asleep!”
While the actors prepared for the pageant, several volunteer parents laid out refreshments for after the program. Several shepherds, angels and even sheep began craning their necks longingly toward the table. The three kings and their camel seemed briefly to be considering a detour, but apparently thought better of it.
The house lights dimmed, and the assembled parents scrambled to their seats. The young actors walked (or in the case of the sheep, crawled) to their appointed places on and around the stage. Then the pageant began.
After the arrival of a cooperative, sound-asleep Baby Jesus who looked at least five months old, the two littlest angels began their walk down the darkened aisle. Lauren beamed at Frank as they heard the complimentary whispers of other parents in the audience.
“Oh, aren’t they sweet!”
“You could almost believe they’re angels, couldn’t you?”
“Looks are deceiving!” snorted Frank.
Just then, something caught the eye of the other littlest angel. She poked Ethan’s shoulder, and then mutely pointed off to the left. Ethan followed Mandy’s finger with his eyes, then turned to regard her quizzically.
They both stopped walking, and made a quick decision. With a whoop of delight, both angels dashed toward the refreshment table as fast as they could run. Mandy tripped on her robe and almost fell, and Ethan lost his halo, but within seconds both of them were stuffing their mouths with candy and Christmas cookies.
The audience tittered, and then began to howl with laughter. The director gamely guided the remaining actors through to the end of the pageant. Mandy and Ethan continued eating, oblivious to the sporadic shrieks of uncontrolled mirth from both on stage and off.
When the pageant ended, Lauren and Frank searched out Mandy’s parents in the crowd heading for the refreshments.
“Actually, it was pretty funny,” Mandy’s mother was saying. “We can teach them about the real meaning of Christmas when they’re older.”
“Are you taking Mandy caroling at the church tomorrow night?” asked Lauren.
“Oh, no. We have too much last-minute shopping to do, and I also have to cook part of our Christmas dinner ahead.”
“We can’t make it, either,” said Frank. “Our tree is up but not trimmed yet. And I want to put up a few more outside lights.”
“It’s too bad we didn’t make it to the special Advent service last Saturday, either, but we had to take Mandy to see Santa Claus” said Mandy’s father. “After we fought our way home through the traffic snarl at the mall, it had been over for at least two hours.”
“I guess we’ll all be lucky if we have time for just the morning service on Christmas day,” Frank responded. “Say, we’d better hotfoot it over to that refreshment table right now, if we want to get our share of the goodies!”
“Next year, no doubt they’ll remember not to put the eats too close to the infant Jesus’s cradle,” noted Lauren as they filled their paper plates. “Maybe they’ll put them off in another room or something.”
“You know, we ought to do that at our house, too,” said Frank thoughtfully. “Our outdoor manger scene is swamped by megawatts of reindeer, sleigh bells and light strings. The wise men would be lucky if they could see the guiding star through all that.”
“It’s the same at our place,” Mandy’s father agreed. “You’d never smell the hay in the manger if we had one. It would be overpowered by fruitcake and mistletoe.”
“And our ‘Silent Night’ is shattered by rock-and-roll Christmas music blaring out of the boom box,” his wife added. “You’d be nuts to try to pray or study the Bible over all that racket.”
The four parents looked at one another in silence for a few moments.
“They’ve been feeding their faces long enough, don’t you think?” Frank finally asked.
“They certainly have!” agreed Mandy’s father. “Let’s get them out of here. Will you be going to the caroling tomorrow?”
“You can count on us,” the other three responded. “How about you?”
Back in January, we shared a Guest Post with our readers on the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI). The author, Lowman Henry, noted:
“[T]he Wolf Administration has entered into an agreement with nine other mostly northeastern states to cap each of the states’ carbon emissions from transportation (your car). The states have one year to come up with a plan. Such plans will most certainly include additional taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel…the money will be “redistributed” to “low carbon transportation systems” – in other words urban mass transit…Thus the lofty sounding Transportation and Climate Initiative allows Governor Wolf to advance two of his top agenda items: establish a new revenue stream to keep urban mass transit afloat and penalize users of carbon-based fuels. Keep in mind, those users include you every time you start your car or use a product that was delivered to the store by motor vehicle, which is to say everything.” (Emphasis added)
Rich and Indifferent
The TCI plan was released on Dec. 17, and it is everything we feared it would be. The Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, CAP, has joined with allies from across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in voicing our opposition to this plan. We noted in a joint letter:
“Legislators should not allow one citizen of a state — the governor — to impose such serious financial burdens on all other citizens. Such a decision rightfully belongs to the people’s representatives and should be reached through the legislative process, not by the decree of a single executive. “The TCI is a poorly conceived, fundamentally regressive, and economically damaging proposal.”
Pennsylvania already has one of the highest gas taxes in the country. According to TCI’s own estimates carbon emissions will decrease by 19 percent from 2022-2032. They don’t think that’s good enough. Instead, the TCI is advocating a new gas tax ranging from five to seventeen cents per gallon in order to reduce emissions by only an additional one to six percent. The mere fact that Governor Wolf would consider increasing the tax yet again is appalling. The question now is whether or not the legislature will take substantive action to reclaim its power of the purse to combat the measure.
The heaviest wolf to be taken by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service was killed on 70 Mile River in east-central Alaska on July 12, 1939. It weighed 175 pounds.
I wouldn’t mess with it.
Heaviest wolf William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 12-19-19
Snowflake Impeachment Makes Joke Of Government — Yesterday’s (Dec. 18) impeachment vote of our great President Donald Trump was a disgraceful joke. The Democrat ladies of Congress color-coordinated their dresses for the “prayerful and somber” event and had a wine and cheese party.
Call it the snowflake impeachment.
The D’s disgraceful “prayerful and somber” impeachment wine and cheese party.
Not good. We went to the Walmart site. The same peanut oil was $32.48.
To get the free next-day shipping we needed $35. The site suggested a few items to bring it up to what was needed. We added a bottle of bleach for $2.67.
One can always use bleach.
So for $5 less than Amazon, Walmart gave us our peanut oil and a bottle of bleach.
Quirinus was a trusted Roman deep stater who was appointed Legate of Syria with instructions to figure out how much in taxes the Empire could get from Judea Province. One of his first orders was to carry out a census. It is for that which history remembers him.
Old friend Mary Hickey who writes under the name Lorna B. Marlowe has compiled from short stories she has written over the years a great and uplifting book called Nice Stories About Nice People.
One of the stories, the Christmas-themed The Littles Angels, will be popping up here within the next couple of days.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019 (HR 5038), a massive amnesty that the bill’s title tries to disguise. The final vote, mostly along party lines, was 260-165.
By giving the legislation a sympathetic but totally misleading name, its Open Borders signatories hope that the public will get behind it, and encourage the Senate to pass it. The House dares not identify HR 5038 as what it is: an amnesty that includes lifetime valid work permits, Green Cards and a path to citizenship for up to 1.5 million illegal aliens who have been employed – or claim they’ve been employed – in ag at least part-time during the last two years. Amnesty would also be granted to their family members.
Illegal alien ag workers who spent as little as weekends-only on the job would qualify. But a big caveat, the Green Cards won’t come until the workers have been subjected to a minimum of four years of slave-like labor. Growers know that once their laborers have Green Cards in hand, the workers will leave their indentured servitude positions to head off for better jobs in construction, manufacturing or retail. History confirms this pattern. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to about 1.1 million so-called Special Agricultural Workers, or SAWS, plus their spouses and minor children. But once the government issued the Green Cards, the ag workers quickly found more lucrative employment.
HR 5038 extends its damage beyond the ag industry. The bill’s sponsors kept the numerically unlimited H-2A category for seasonal work. But, HR 5038 expanded the H-2A guest worker program to include dairy, meat and fish processing, and canning employment, and would also set aside 20,000 H-2A visas each year that could be used for year-round agricultural jobs traditionally held by American workers.
The bill would also create 40,000 additional Green Cards each year for longtime H-2A workers and other low-skilled foreign workers. If HR 5038 becomes law, it would virtually ensure that Americans employed or seeking employment in several industries would be shut out or possibly lose the jobs they already hold. Passed without debate, the legislators didn’t acknowledge the inconvenient truth that legal immigrants or U.S. citizens hold about 50 percent of agriculture or agriculturally related positions.
HR 5038 offers not a modicum of modernization. The House bill, bowing to the powerful ag lobby made up of mostly former federal employees, spends more than $100 million annually to guarantee that growers will have continued access to unproductive, low-wage immigrant labor. True modernization means mechanization. Unlike humans, robots can operate 24/7 and have been successfully put to use worldwide. Machines manufactured in Australia, Holland and Japan harvest radishes, brussels sprouts, kale and other crops at, compared to manual picking, lightening-like speed.
Once employers become foreign worker-dependent, they stop looking for practical alternatives like mechanization. Employers count on immigrant workers’ continuous presence in their future plans instead of taking full advantage of the no-cap H-2A visa. At the same time, foreign workers come to depend on their meager earnings to support their families, thereby vastly increasing the likelihood that the “guests” will become permanent fixtures. As the old and often-repeated immigration bromide goes, nothing is more permanent than a guest worker.
Congress has introduced an ag amnesty bill every year for more than a decade. Anti-American worker Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who during her 25-year congressional career has an unbroken record of endorsing more worker visas, is the original sponsor of HR 5038. But if Congress really wanted to help farm workers instead of their hooked-on-cheap-labor employers, it would slow, instead of promote, more guest programs that will eventually include amnesty.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
