San Francisco is up to its eyeballs in red ink, but lowlife Mayor Gavin Newsom can’t give away taxpayer money fast enough to illegal aliens. In order to speed up the waste of money, he has decided to advertise the fact that the city is a sanctuary for illegals (and has been since 1989).

Uber-lib politicians do love to feel virtuous: “Come one, come all–get your free welfare goodies in generous, liberal San Francisco! We are nicer than Lou Dobbs and all those annoying citizens who believe in law and borders.”

A series of new television and radio commercials, billboards and bus shelter signs will soon go up around San Francisco advertising the fact that the city by the bay is also a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants.

City officials on Wednesday unveiled the $83,000 ad campaign, which features images of smiling residents and the iconic city skyline and spreads the message in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Russian. Brochures, which will be handed out in public buildings like police stations and hospitals, promise safe access to city services for the undocumented and a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy when it comes residency status.

“We are standing up to say to all of our residents: We don’t care what your status is,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said. “We care that you, as a human being, are a resident of our city and we want you to participate in the life of our city.”
[S.F. promotes services for illegal immigrants, San Francisco Chronicle, By Cecilia M. Vega, April 2, 2008]

On Wednesday, the Chronicle pointed out the city’s large budget hole: San Francisco officials move to cut overtime pay.

The city is also facing a projected budget deficit of $338 million in the coming fiscal year, which begins in July.

But in wacko San Francisco, providing services for illegal aliens is job #1!

Below, Mayor Gavin Newsom showed his support for illegal Irish in 2007.

Inspired by San Francisco’s generosity, the John and Ken radio show (broadcast from Los Angeles) plans on organizing busloads of illegal aliens to be sent north to San Francisco, financed by listeners. The show located a bus ticket that costs only $10 for a one-way red-eye trip.

John and Ken have put together some great political theater previously, such as Politial Human Sacrifice in 2004 that targeted useless Republican David Dreier for electoral defeat. They were not successful in getting him voted out of office, but Dreier was given a serious scare and improved his squishy support for immigration enforcement to some degree.

Listen to the segment where John and Ken plot to send thousands of LA’s illegals to San Francisco (discussion of the bus ride project starts about 10 minutes into the mp3 file). Upon arrival, surely the foreigners will be welcomed personally by a joyful Mayor Newsom. Everybody happy!

In the humble Fairfax County tab section of today’s Washington Post, reporter Jerry Markon [Send him mail] tells us of the uptick in pedestrian accidents in the area, which has prompted the expenditure of $400,000 in taxpayer dollars on a new safety campaign: A New Push for Pedestrian Safety | Police Target Drivers, Walkers and Cyclists to Halt Increase in Area Fatalities, April 3, 2008.

What Markon doesn’t say directly (or even ask about) is the obvious: that uptick is almost certainly caused by the influx of illegal aliens. You simply can’t go out driving in the D.C. area without dodging, in any three-mile stretch, a small Hispanic man on a cheap child’s bicycle, weaving wherever he pleases.

Not only does Markon hide this reality, he tries to spin it into something caused by racism and capitalism: “A recent study by Inova Fairfax Hospital found that many pedestrians involved in crashes are from ‘marginalized portions of society,’ including immigrants, the poor, minorities, the homeless and elderly people.’”

Hey, Jerry, maybe it’s not “racism” causing the problem, but the the inability of illegal aliens to follow the American custom of walking on crosswalks. Never mind, I say and say again, that they’re not even supposed to be here to begin with. Why is the cost of their double-layered lawlessness laid at my feet by the government and the media? Would Jerry bother talking to a citizen-motorist about having to dodge the omnipresent Hispanic jaywalkers and median-strip clingers?

The costs aren’t limited to safety initiatives (in English and Spanish, thanks) that soft-headed government officials feel compelled to push. I see personal injury cases where police report witnesses have “Jorge Gonzalez” or “Maria Lopez” running into the street before getting hit by a car. Naturally, this doesn’t stop them from suing the driver for negligence. Often, they pocket huge sums, which are usually paid for by municipalities or insurance companies.

And you know where that money ultimately comes from: those “nonmarginalized” folks we call law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. Ever notice how, for being “marginalized” as a group, illegal aliens spend a lot of time in the middle of the street–and the newspaper page?

The last line of an LA Times article about something else mentions:

The [NATO] alliance meanwhile is poised to offer membership to Croatia, Albania and Macedonia, though Greece has threatened to block Macedonia’s bid.

Theoretically, at least, NATO is a serious thing — it’s a defense alliance. Article Five of the NATO treaty kind of sort of commits us to go to war for Croatia, Albania, or Macedonia if they get attacked by any of their numerous neighbors:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

I guess it’s just a personal moral failing of mine, but for some reason, I can’t really see Macedonia as being all that crucial to vital American national interests. Albania, sure, it’s at least as important to us as the Panama Canal. And Croatia’s practically Canada in terms of strategic value to the U.S. What true American wouldn’t gladly sacrifice his sons’ lives for Croatia?

But Macedonia? I’d bet that 95% of Americans don’t know Macedonia exists, and the other 5% are Greeks who hate it for stealing the name of Alexander the Great’s homeland.

Obama-worshipper Chris Matthews briefly pressed his idol tonight on the matter of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Without 5,000 prepackaged words of patented Baroque O’Blarney nuanced thoughtfulness, Obama sounded like a Time-Life Records two-for-the-price-of-one deal on the Greatest Hits of George W. Bush and Dan Quayle:

OBAMA: I think that what has happened is we took a loop out of — and compressed the most offensive things that a pastor said over the course of 30 years, and just ran it over and over and over again. There is that other 30 years. I never heard him say those things that were in those clips.

MATTHEWS: But you did say you heard him say controversial things.

OBAMA: But I’ve heard you say controversial things.

MATTHEWS: You didn’t give me $27,000 dollars either.

OBAMA: The point is this is a church that is active in AIDS. It’s active on all kind of thing. And so this is a wonderful church. But as I said, look at the amount of time that’s been spent on this today, Chris. At a time when we haven’t talked about a whole host of issues.

The LA Times reports:

And while insisting — as he has previously — that he was not present when Wright made the pronouncements that fueled the recent furor, he steered clear of specifying the “controversial” statements he has said he did hear from the preacher.

What did the Presidential candidate know and when did he know it?

Look, that’s a stupid question, but only because the answer is clear from Obama’s own autobiography. Before Obama ever met Wright in the 1980s, he had heard from other South Side black pastors that Wright was a radical. That’s the main reason Obama was attracted to Wright rather than all the other pastors he had met as a community organizer: Wright was the optimal combination of leftism and successfulness.

Isn’t anybody else getting tired of Obama repeatedly yanking our chains about his relationship with Rev. Wright? Unlike his protege, Wright has made sure to leave a paper (and DVD) trail decades long, and it’s not thoughtfully nuanced to the verge of utter incomprehensibility, either. The Rev. says what’s on his mind, and in no uncertain terms.

C’mon, Obama, be a man. Stand up and admit to one of two logical possibilities:

- Yes, I used to be about as leftist as Rev. Wright, but I changed my mind for the following reasons …

Or

- Yes, I still am about as leftist as Rev. Wright, and here’s why …

What Obama is counting on is that white Americans don’t take blacks’ ideological views seriously. Obama is betting on everybody treating his relationship with Wright as a racial matter rather than as an ideological matter, and since all nice people shy away from thinking about racial matters, they’ll just let it drop.

In contrast, if Wright were a white minister who was an outspoken advocate of Sandinista-style “liberation theology,” a white Obama would, at a minimum, be spending a lot of time answering searching questions about his ideological evolution. But, because Obama and Wright are black, nobody takes the disagreeable Wright’s ideology seriously, and everybody assumes that the personable Obama must share their ideology.

It must be driving Wright crazy. Here he goes on Fox News a year ago and tells Sean Hannity a half dozen times that he is a follower of black liberation theologian James H. Cone, and that if you want to have an argument with him about where he stands, you should first read a stack of academic books by Cone and by Dwight Hopkins. And nobody paid any attention.

Wright doesn’t seem to consider himself a creative intellectual in the class of Cone, but he does view himself as a man who has thought hard for decades about subjects like the immorality of corporate capitalism.

And yet, Obama is getting away with going around the country on national television implying that the 66-year-old Wright is some kind of elderly uncle who has, tragically, gone crazy in his dotage. In reality, Wright holds the same political views today as he had when he first reeled in Obama two decades ago.

And the white media believe Obama’s lies about Wright because nobody takes a black man seriously as an intellectual!

So, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he’s going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he’s going to do about it.

He’ll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won’t take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn’t you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright’s memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright.