We sometimes hear that the reason Mexicans are killing so many Americans on US roadways is that they are pueblo boys who never drove a car before (along with the propensity for excessive drinking of course).

As it happens, well practiced Mexican drivers are not a whole lot better, according to la Times in an article today, How am I driving? In Mexico City, like a jerk.

Bad symptoms include disrespect for traffic lights and driving the wrong way on one-way streets. It gets dangerous too.

People park on the sidewalks, Hernandez Garcia says, which forces pedestrians to walk in traffic. Even though the city’s notoriously slow traffic mitigates the danger, on average 1,500 drivers and pedestrians are killed in accidents in Mexico City each year, a rate significantly higher than that in Los Angeles County.

Once, driving tests were required, but they were scrapped because so many people paid bribes to get their licenses. Now the city is drawing up proposals to reinstate the tests. In the meantime, the city has launched a program to educate schoolchildren about traffic laws, Hernandez Garcia says.

No driving tests because of bribery? That sounds familiar.

I just got an email that said

I’m not usually an ambulance chaser but a couple of media stories April 3, 2007 got my attention. First, CNN shows a video of an attempted murder in CNN’s public visitation broadcasting headquarters in Atlanta. The video shows the police pointing their guns at a wounded suspect lying on the floor. The shooter is not shown except for a momentary inclusion of a raised black wrist and closed hand at the bottom of the video. Again, no mention of race by CNN commentators.

Switch to stories on the internet by several local media outlets in New Orleans covering four murders on April 2, 2007 in New Orleans. Again, political correctness reigns supreme: no mention of race. You have to read between the lines– guys arrested with names like Terrell, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson complaining that Hurricane Katrina caused a lot of mental illness in New Orleans. Nice to know that hurricanes not only kill but they cause murders. But I thought the idea of a free press was to hang out our dirty underwear and elucidate problems. Then we can confront our problems. Nope. That is not the idea of a free press anymore. We need to put political correctness at the forefront of the effort to silence any news of the black crime epidemic.

I checked it out, and it seems that a man named Arthur Mann murdered his ex-girlfriend, Clara Riddles, who worked at a hotel attached to CNN headquarters. Both victim and murder were black.

One amazing thing about the racial reporting is that an early report put it this way

The Raw Story | At least 2 wounded in shooting at CNN Center complex
At least two people have been wounded in a shooting that took place near the CNN Center complex in Atlanta, Georgia, the cable news channel is reporting.

“A witness who is a CNN employee saw a male shoot a black female twice at the Omni hotel, which is part of CNN Center,” the cable channel reports.[emphasis added]

See, the victim is identified by race, but not the shooter. My word, they train those CNN employees well! Even when they’re being shot at, they know not to say who’s doing the shooting.

CNET writes:

The rush by companies, particularly of the high-tech persuasion, to apply for H-1B visas has come to an end–only one day after it began.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday that it had received 150,000 applications as of Monday afternoon for the controversial work permits, which allow foreigners with a bachelor’s degree in their area of specialty to be employed in the United States for up to six years.

Now, what this is really about: there are 10,000,000 folks that apply to get into the US each year. A subset of those folks are willing to do are say anything to get US immigration rights-which are considerably more valuable than anything they can reasonably aspire to in their home companies. Bloated, corporate welfare cases like Microsoft, HP, Intel and Oracle depend on cheap guest worker visas so they can pay employees in immigration rights-rather than cash-and appear like viable companies.

Now, there actually are some plausible business reasons why a company might want to transfer employees around. A true multinational might want to move employees both from and to the US. Occasionally there might be someone with key technical knowledge that would add a competitive advantage to the US–in an expanding market segment–and an employer willing to pay reasonable for the ability to bring that employee to the US. That isn’t what is happening here.

The corporate welfare aspect of H-1b is starting to get broad recognition. This story is being discussed on Slashdot.

The first comment:

Those spots should be auctioned off. The more an employer is paying for an H1-B visa, the more highly-skilled the worker in question is likely to be. IOW, we really will be getting those people with skills we can’t find here.

Now, the last thing the corporate welfare queens that own the GOP leadership want is a true, competitive market. The reason the “Conservative” movement is coming undone, is it was always based on some fundamental hypocrisy and fraud which will become more apparent in time.