Here’s an item about a case that’s been dragging on for a while–Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia posted a sign saying “This is America” and the Philadelphia City Government has finally decided that, yes, this is America, First Amendment and all:

Ruling: English-only sign at cheesesteak shop not discriminatory - Examiner.com
PHILADELPHIA (Map, News) - A Philadelphia agency has ruled that English-only signs at a famous cheesesteak shop are not discriminatory.

The Commission on Human Relations ruled Wednesday that the sign at Geno’s Steaks does not violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance.

Joe Vento posted the signs at his shop in October 2005. They read “This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH.’”

Critics alleged that the policy discourages customers of certain backgrounds from eating there. They say the signs discourage non-English speakers from going to the shop.[More]

However, not only does every wide spot in the road have some kind of “Commission On Human Relations” to harass business-owners, but there’s a federal civil rights bureaucracy that does the same thing. And this case has been around since 2006. 

I’d like to add that Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (birthplace of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright,  Walter Williams, and Bill Cosby) never had Jim Crow laws in the first place. The first black police officer to be appointed to the Philadelphia PD was appointed in 1881, so I don’t see why the city needs a civil right bureaucracy in the first place.

Here is a heads-up from the ever vigilant Supervisor Mike Antonovich about what “cheap labor” cost LA County taxpayers in the month of January:

New statistics from the Department of Public Social Services reveal that illegal aliens and their families in Los Angeles County collected over $36 million in welfare and food stamp allocations in January 2008, announced Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

Twenty five percent of the all welfare and food stamps benefits are going directly to the children of illegal aliens. Illegals collected over $19 million in welfare assistance for January 2008 and over $16 million in monthly food stamp allocations, for a projected annual cost of $420 million.

“Illegal immigration continues to have a devastating impact Los Angeles County taxpayers,” said Antonovich. “With $220 million for public safety, $400 million for healthcare, and $420 million in welfare allocations, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers far exceeds $1 billion a year – not including the millions of dollars for education.”
[Antonovich Releases January Illegal Immigrant Numbers, KHTS-AM 1220, March 17, 2008]

Linda Chavez calls Reverend Jeremiah Wright racist in National Review…but it’s not that long since she was calling regular Americans racist in her syndicated column, merely for their opposition to illegal immigration, so I don’t know if it means that much.

One of the reasons the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was saying “God Damn America” is that America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. “

It seems that all the evils that Japan committed have been forgotten, so I suppose today’s high school students don’t know about the war in the Pacific at all, and all they know is that Japanese were interned in America, (for no reason,) and that America dropped atomic bombs on Japan, again for no reason, just “God Damned” American wickedness.

A number of people used to be aware that their own lives had been saved by the bombing of Hiroshima, including George Macdonald Fraser and Paul Fussell, author of Thank God For The Atom Bomb.

The bombing also saved millions of Japanese lives–if the fanatical warmongers of the Japanese high command had gone through with their plans for the defense of the Home Islands, it would have been a slaughter. But the most obvious beneficiaries of the bombing were the Westerners held as prisoners of war in Japanese prison camps–if Japan had not surrendered suddenly as a result of the shock of the atomic bomb, they would simply have been murdered. They were already almost at the point of death. One of my favorite stories about this is by Laurens Van Der Post, who found himself on a talk show one August 6, meaning to talk about the problems of Africa, when he found that the other guest on the show was a Japanese doctor who was recounting the horrors of Hiroshima, with no hint of historical context. Van Der Post, who spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese, insisted on providing some:

I began in Japanese, not only to reassure him but as the only means available to me of showing him how involved I felt with him and his people in what had happened that day. I went on in English to tell him my part of the story. The following is what I said to him.

I began by trying to describe to the Japanese doctor what life had been like in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, because he confessed that even after all this time he personally had taken no interest in the matter and had read no literature about it. [Emphasis added]I tried to keep my description as factual as possible, and to keep my own emotions out of it. I barely mentioned the physical brutalities we had experienced at the hands of our Japanese guards. I skimmed over the grimmest of my own experiences. For instance, I said little of how I had been made to watch Japanese soldiers having bayonet practice on live prisoners of war tied between bamboo posts; of how I had been taken to witness executions of persons of all races and nationalities for obscure reasons like “showing a spirit of willfulness” or not bowing with sufficient alacrity in the direction of the rising sun. I had never known there could be so many different ways of killing people–cutting off their heads with swords, bayonetting them in many variations, strangling them, burying them alive. But, significantly, never by just shooting them.[The American Enterprise: The Prisoners and the Bomb, Sir Laurens Van Der Post, October 1995]

You really should read the whole thing, but I emphasized that sentence about the Japanese doctor having never taken any interest about Japanese atrocities, or having read any literature about it. If you are an American, you can never escape the constant drumbeat of guilty liberals affirming America’s guilt, but the Japanese, who did much worse things than America ever did, just don’t do that.

Fussell wrote that

Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.”

Oddly enough, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright does come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen–he was in both the Marines and the Navy in the 1960s, and probably knew personally many of the men whose lives had been saved by the bomb, but it seems that exposure to Black Liberation Theology and a generalized hatred of America trumps that kind of personal experience.

Lots of eloquent words, but what was the action?

No, he’s not ending his membership in Trinity church.

And here’s the policy implications he takes from the controversy:

“In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.”

In other words, let’s just do everything that LBJ did, only more so.

Am I missing something in his speech? Or is that it?

P.S. Man Sized Target has some excellent reflections upon Obama, if I do say so myself.

I just received an e-mail from one Leslie Inzunza [Send her mail]with tips on how to market to the Hispanic (or Latino - Hispanic might be considered offensive, as the word comes from those dirty Anglos) community. It’s mostly standard marketing stuff, but amusing in its attempt push the “diversity” of Hispanics. You can’t assume all Hispanics are the same, Ms. Inzunza tells us, because they consist of all races and come from 22 different countries. If that’s so, why bother marketing to Hispanics at all?[Marketing to the Hispanic community: habla usted Espanol?]

Probably because, contra “diversity”, they’re similar enough. From where I sit, Hispanics, regardless of national origin, are quick to file fraudulent, groundless or wildly exaggerated lawsuits. I just had to postpone a deposition because the plaintiff has gone back to El Salvador for a while… next week, it’ll be a plaintiff in Guatemala. Apparently, their injuries aren’t so bad that they can’t skip back to Central America for a few weeks here and there.

And, there’s money in it. Juries in many jurisdictions will fork over the cash to these folks, especially when there are fellow Hispanics on the jury.

All of which raises some questions: are lawyers really doing America a favor by marketing to Hispanics, thereby encouraging all the frivolous and costly litigation? Are Hispanics really doing us a favor by pursuing the claims?

The entitlement mentality fueling the lawsuit craze is bad enough when restricted to English-speaking American citizens. But tossing in the ethnic angle only makes it worse.