SPOKANE, Wash. – The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.
But it's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.
Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.
As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds.
Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.
"Yes, I am a smuggler," she said. "I'm taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with."
For his part, Beck has taken to washing his dishes on his machine's pots-and-pans cycle, which takes longer and uses five gallons more water. Beck wonders if that isn't as tough on the environment as phosphates.
"How much is this really costing us?" Beck said. "Aren't we transferring the environmental consequences to something else?"
Police charged Carlos David Rodriguez-Bautista, 34, with felony hit-and-run and Carlos Humberto Agustindiaz with misdemeanor hit-and-run in Gray's death. Investigators say that Rodriguez-Bautista was driving the first vehicle to strike Gray.
The drivers of the two other vehicles that hit Gray stayed at the scene and will not be charged, police said.
Rodriguez-Bautista is an illegal alien with a typically checkered history:
A nice touch on Agustindiaz was that he was turned in by the landscape service after they noticed blood all over the truck. No word (yet) on whether he is a guest in our country.The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency placed a detainer on Rodriguez-Bautista. Officials believe the Honduran native might be in the country illegally.
Wake District Judge Ned Mangum increased Rodriguez-Bautista's bail from $8,000 to $25,000 after he found the suspect has been three pending charges of failure to show up for court in Onslow and Alamance counties.
Mangum said that the suspect was also charged with driving while impaired in Raleigh in 2006, but the judge did not the disposition of that case. (sic)
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Officers arrested Rodriguez-Bautista after identifying him as the driver of a 2003 Chevrolet passenger van that had heavy front-end damage consistent with having struck a person. Officer M.J. Corso spotted the van while on patrol in the 7200 block of Woodbend Drive shortly before midnight Thursday.
Investigators said they think Rodriguez-Bautista stopped and got out of the van after he hit Gray, then drove away from the scene.
Police also charged Carlos Humberto Agustindiaz, who was driving a truck for Apex-based Parker’s Landscape Services, with misdemeanor hit-and-run in the case.
A congressional report released this month criticizes the way local and state police agencies enforce immigration laws, saying the program is not being used correctly and could lead to officers misusing their authority.Some whiner from the local illegal prostitution promotion club whines about some illegal being caught for fishing without a license - not a big enough crime in his august opinion. Harrison disagrees:
But Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison says he believes 287(g) – the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's program that gives local law agencies access to federal immigration databases so they can identify illegal immigrants they have arrested – is doing exactly what it was intended to do.
Since last July, when it was introduced in Wake County, more than 1,400 people have been identified as illegal, Harrison said.
In a report last week, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found immigration officials did not clearly explain to officers how to use their arrest authority under the program, nor did they tell local officers that the program is meant for the pursuit of serious offenders.
"That's their opinion. In my opinion, here in Wake County, it's doing exactly what it's intended to do," he said. "And that's take criminals off the streets."Please - $40 million is pocket change to this Congress and if we had had this program earlier, more real citizens like Lewis Gray might still be alive and the rest of us would save much more than $40 million.
Harrison says the sheriff's office does not target Hispanics, but that if they are arrested, their immigration status will be checked.
"When we catch someone, if we think they need to come to the jail, that's where they come. So why should I look at it any differently?" Harrison said. "That's the way we do business. That's the way we protect and serve the citizens. I'm extremely happy with the way the program is running right now."
The congressional report says the big question is whether the results are worth the $40 million required to fund the project.
From the Charlotte (NC) Observer - Stimulus dollars may end up helping illegal workers:
Thousands of N.C. jobs and millions in wages created from the federal economic stimulus package could wind up going to illegal immigrants.
Congress stripped language from the $789billion package that would have required employers to verify the legal status of workers paid with stimulus money.
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While it's impossible to say definitively how many illegal immigrants will get jobs, multiple studies estimate at least 14 percent of the construction labor force is in the U.S. illegally. Experts say actual numbers are likely much higher.
Based on what I have seen around here, 14% is a vast underestimate. So how did this happen?
The House of Representatives included an amendment in the original stimulus bill that would have required all recipients of stimulus money to use E-Verify, a federal program that checks Social Security numbers. House and Senate negotiators removed the requirement in the final version.
Golly, I'm sure surprised. The House and Senate negotiators were all Democrats and a critical part of their votes comes from illegals. Think I'm kidding? How about North Carolina which "went" for Obama last year by 14,000 votes, but has about 55,000 driver's licenses expiring this year where the driver identified themselves with a tax id number and not a Social Security number. That's a favorite illegal alien dodge and only the most naive think they that declined motor voter registration when they got their licenses.
Barack Obama has announced his payoff plan for all the deadbeat supporters that he and his pals forced the banks to give mortgages to and what a surprise - it involves fleecing the taxpayers to payoff their mortgages. What a deal for us!
I could wax lyrical, but I'll let CNBC reporter Rick Santelli do it for me. What a hoot - I especially liked, "The government is promoting bad behavior... do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages?" Barack Obama does because it's how he used to getting votes - buying them with taxpayer money. Too bad for you suckers who are actually paying off your mortgages - you get to pay for Obama's pals too.
The farce in Washington continues with Barack Obama (President Hope-a-Dope) taking time out from his busy gym schedule to give a "tough partisan speech" to the Democrat junketers spending the taxpayers money on a party at the posh Kingsmill Resort & Spa. Barry is trying desperately to rescue the gignormous pork bill that Congressional Democrat leaders have cobbled together in the name of "stimulus" which is hanging around his neck like an albatross and what better way than saying we have to have lots of pork because it is an emergency? Well, it makes sense to him at least.
Charles Krauthammer has some fun with Obama's clown car of sleazy appointees and then gets to the pig picking in The Fierce Urgency of Pork:
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you tossed a credit card into a meeting of Shopaholics Anonymous? You know - those poor sad people whose only stimulation comes from spending a whole lot of money they don't have on a whole of stuff they don't need? Well, watching the current shopping frenzy enveloping the Democrats in Washington is the closest I am likely to ever get to such a sight. As the Wall Street Journal observes, the Donks have been on the wagon for 40 years and have just fallen off with a bang:
"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus," but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm's point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.
We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it.
Hit the link, for some of the details of the Democrat shopping list, but I'm sure you won't be surprised. Every ridiculous purchase that you can think of has made it onto the list. What about the stimulus excuse? (Economic stimulus that is, not the the Donks creaming their jeans.)
Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.
Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren't likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President's new budget director, told Congress a year ago, "even those [public works] that are 'on the shelf' generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy."
The rest goes to the usual laundry list of buffonery and waste plus some juicy payoffs to Donk political supporters like government workers and ACORN. Here are some I like:
Here's another lu-lu: Congress wants to spend $600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars. Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles.
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As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.
Of course, once the hogs get their noses in the trough, you can also be sure that they are going to demand the same funding plus more in future years.
So where does that leave the taxpayers whose credit cards have been stolen for this shopping spree? Well, aside from not fixing the banking crisis caused by the Democrats insisting that banks make loans to illegal aliens and deadbeats and the Democrats insisting that their pets, Fannie and Freddie, "package" up those loans and sell them far and wide; what we are most likely to get is runaway inflation. Some factoids:
The U.S. National Debt was $930 billion in 1980, or 33% of GDP. Today it is $10.7 trillion, or 76% of GDP. The National Debt has grown by 1,150% in 28 years. With the planned fiscal stimulus (taxing future generations), the National Debt will reach 100% of GDP during the Obama administration. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 1998, their National Debt as a percentage of GDP was 65%. The Great Deniers say we are not Argentina. They say we are safe because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This is like jumping off a 20 story building and as you pass the 10th floor someone yells out the window asking how you are doing. You answer, “Good, so far”.Can you say Weimar Germany? I knew you could. And if you like to read the stats, it looks like the money supply is already growing out of bounds even before the shopaholics get to the store.
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Every single dime of the $1 trillion will be borrowed. The government will borrow $1 trillion from foreign countries, hand it out to their constituents, while encouraging them to resume borrowing and spending. Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel will force insolvent banks to lend money to companies, consumers, and deadbeats in foreclosure proceedings. The change we can believe in is - we will borrow and spend our way out of the largest debt bubble in history. Consumers and companies are acting rationally and trying to purge themselves of debt. The government will not allow that to happen. A massive additional dose of leverage will revive the patient. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Are the politicians running this country insane, unintelligent, or just so corrupt that special interests outweigh the interests of the American people? The current pork laden stimulus package will lead to a rerun of Japan's lost decade, with one vast difference. Our lost decade will terminate in a hyperinflationary collapse.
Websense Security Labs™ ThreatSeeker™ Network has detected that malicious hackers have registered multiple bogus user accounts on My.BarackObama.com (an online community for citizens to rally behind President Obama), in order to spread malicious code around the Web. A My.BarackObama.com social-networking account empowers the user with tools to join groups, raise funds, and even create his or her own blog. The option to create your own blog is a common feature provided by most of the popular Web 2.0 social sites today, driven by user-generated content.The good news is that the movie is a porn video which certainly embodies the Democrat party agenda for America, but the bad news is that in order to view the hot steaming action the faithful are asked to download a codec which unsurprisingly is a trojan horse program that infects their PC's much like Barack Obama mythology has infected their tiny brains.
In the Obama campaign, malicious hackers created blogs on My.BarackObama.com with a fake YouTube image, enticing visitors to "Click here to see movie".
