THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Waterboarding: The Latest Fad To Sweep The U.S.: Coney Island, New York’s famed amusement park, has a new freak-show attraction: Visitors to the “Waterboard Thrill Ride” can feed a dollar into the slot to activate a robot in a black hood that pours water onto the face of a robot strapped to a table, reports Reuters. The come-on to customers: “It don't Gitmo better!”
† Obama Supports Genocide Against Black Africans With Campaign Donations From African-Americans: Mediaweek reports that John McCain “bests Obama” with “a $6 million advertising buy on NBC Universal’s Olympic coverage which begins [tonight].” That’s $1 million more than what Obama is spending.
Et tu, McCain? By supporting the “Genocide Olympics” McCain didn't “best” Obama, just matched him in his tacit support of China's human rights abuses and its complicity in the Darfur genocide. McCain could have been the better man by standing on principle, drawing another distinction between him and the feckless Obama.
† Fake Diplomas For Real Terrorists?: Steven Karl Randock Sr., who ran a WA diploma mill that sold some 10,000 high school and college degrees from 121 fictitious online schools and phony transcripts and diplomas from 66 real universities, has been sentenced to three years in prison, reports The Associated Press. His wife, Dixie Ellen Randock, received the same sentence last month.
† Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too (second item): Writing about the egregious human rights abuses and violations of safety and child labor laws at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, IA, The Wall Street Journal’s lone liberal editorial board member, Thomas Frank – author of “What’s The Matter With Kansas” - takes Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to task for failing to investigate the practices of meatpacking plants for seven years:
All across the Midwest there are meatpacking towns just like that one in Iowa, tiny hamlets dominated by a big employer whose misdeeds a lot of people suspect … but whom no one dares to cross. …
Conservatism didn't create these hellish conditions, but it has strained to preserve them.
Sure, the Bush administration’s pro-business, anti-regulation policies are partly to blame – but more so is his failure to secure our borders. And complicit in that failure are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other small business groups, the AFL-CIO, the ACLU, La Raza and other activist groups, all of which have repeatedly gone to court to stymie even the most half-hearted federal government attempt to find out if companies are knowingly hiring forged documented aliens.
And what about the MSM? For intance, a New York Times editorial about the ICE raid that uncovered and documented the Agriprocessors abuses concludes: “By treating illegal low-wage workers as a de facto criminal class, the government is trying to inflate the menace they pose to a level that justifies its rabid efforts to capture and punish them.” Um, the workers broke laws (illegal entry into the U.S., using forged government documents to obtain employment and identity theft) and their employer broke laws - and they all should be prosecuted and punished appropriately.
It seems to The Stiletto that a variety of players spanning the ideological spectrum conspired to create these hellish conditions and are bending over backwards to preserve them.
Editorial Note: Rabbinical Council of America member Shmuel Herzfeld frets that the meat butchered at Agriprocessors may not even be kosher:
[T]here is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. ...
The affidavit filed in the United States District Court of Northern Iowa, for instance, alleges that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant. If true, this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher.
What’s more, two workers who oversaw the poultry and beef division were recently arrested for helping illegal immigrants falsify documents. If they were willing to break national immigration laws, one could reasonably ask whether they would be likely to show the same lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws [emphasis, The Stiletto].
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