Doing Dickens

The best street festival of the year going on this weekend in Galveston. It always puts me in the Christmas spirit (although slightly less so when the temperature is 80 degrees).

Back with the Funnies manana.

Immigration reality check

Only one-third of illegal immigrants are from Mexico; the majority are from Europe or Asia. Most did not enter the United States illegally; they are employees or students who overstayed their visas. They have the same income profile as the general population. They have better health and lower incarceration rates. They pay the same taxes you do and more. They do not receive "free" public education or any form of welfare. Overall, annual taxes paid by workers without documentation to all levels of government more than offset the cost of services received, generating a net annual surplus of $25 to $30 billion. Oh yes, one more thing: the Robert Rector/Heritage Foundation "study" is nearly thoroughly bogus.

Almost nothing you have read, heard, or been told by frothing conservatives about illegal immigration is accurate.

Source:

http://www.urban.org/publications/305184.html

It's a large document and requires some reading and thoughtful understanding, something conservatives are mostly incapable of or naturally loathe to do. That's the only "Immigration Problem" we have in this country: ignorance, xenophobia, and bigotry.

Update (12/2): Welcome Topix forum readers! Yes, you are conservative idiots. Yes, you.

Viva Evel

There are thousands of men in their forties mourning the original X-Gamer, who as boys spent many an afternoon building a ramp out of old plywood and jumping over a few boxes or other kids or clutter from the garage, some still holding somewhere in their personal archives an old metal lunchbox with him in that Captain-America jumpsuit:

Most people will remember Knievel for his storied jumps: crashing at the Caesars Palace fountain in 1968, the disastrous attempt to fly across the Snake River in a Skycycle in 1974, or nearly killing himself at London’s Wembley Stadium after clearing 13 buses in 1975. He’d show up drunk for many jumps — and ride like a champion.

I think many of us watched him jump -- particularly after that slow-motion rag-doll tumble he took in Vegas -- to see if this time he might kill himself. I vividly recall the hype leading up to that Snake River rocket ride, and when it fizzled out I thought to myself, this guy is nothing but a huckster. Before that I had considered him only an idiot.

He was seemingly fearless, driven to try stunts that were — admit it — astonishingly stupid and pointless. But as a P.T. Barnum-caliber showman, he made the outcome seem somehow relevant and made millions care about what happened to him. He had an amazing, unfathomable need to be a real-life superhero.

But what a price he paid, only to be proven a mere mortal, time and time again. Perhaps his mortality is what made his fans adore him so. He failed so many times, so spectacularly and so publicly, that he ended up instead the ultimate antihero.

He jumped 13 cars in the Astrodome in 1971, setting an attendance record for the time. Here's a video of it. I can still feel the anticipation: the wheelies past the line of cars, the way he would ride to the top of the ramp and rev the bike's engine before backing down and making the jump.

He was quite obviously the inspiration for the satirical Super Dave Osborne in the '80's and '90's. By that time Knievel had retired and withdrawn from public life, although he had recently sued, and then settled with -- two days before his death -- rapper Kanye West over his image in a video.

Even watching his son Robby duplicate his jumps in recent years was nostalgic. There was really no one like Evel Knievel. He wasn't one of my generation's heroes, but he certainly was one of its icons. And for the first time in many decades he's not feeling any pain, so that's got to be a comfort.

So long, Rudy

Is there any Republican politician out there who just has normal, run of the mill sexual relationships? Any one at all?

No gay airport bathroom propositions, no asking underaged congressional pages to email you their penis size, no secret visits to prostitutes in multiple states? No divorcing your cancer-stricken, hospitalized wife in order to better carry on an affair with someone else? No weird sex trysts overlooking the smoldering ruins of New York's ground zero, or billing your secret mayoral booty calls to the budgets of city agencies tasked with helping poor people? No meth-addicted gay sex while preaching about the horrors of gay sex? No calling your coworkers at night while masturbating, telling them how much you'd like to falafel them up in the shower? No shoving pictures of fetuses in people's faces, or taking their own daughters into "chastity vows", or pontificating about the dangers of man-on-dog relationships?

Seriously, is this why Republicans are always so obsessed with governing everybody else's sex life -- because it's simply inconceivable to them that any two people would have a healthy, non-messed-up relationship?

Last night's YouTube debate questions were prepared well in advance of the breaking scandal yet it slipped in anyway; Giuliani denied all. That's not going to go over well with a GOP base having nearly nothing in common with a thrice-divorced cross-dressing librul.

And so, with the mayor's blood in the water, they each went at each other hammer and tong in St.Petersburg last night. First Mitt and Rudy over immigration, then later McCain and Ron Paul over Iraq, and later on McCain and Romney over waterboarding, and several skirmishes in between that appeared to this observer to give Mike Huckabee a star turn. He did the best job of avoiding questions with laugh lines that I've seen. And I thought Fred Thompson and McCain did well enough in comparison to the other loons to warrant a second look by the indecisive GOP voter.

Romney and Huckabee stand to benefit the most from the fast-approaching conclusion of the Giuliani campaign. Maybe McCain, although he still has a deep hole to climb out of. Perhaps it opens the door a bit wider for Dr. No.

But those madcap libertarians are pretty unpredictable, so who really knows?

Julie Mason had the live-blog. As one commenter there noted: "Mars and the Stars and Bars. And not one question on health care."

Update: Who's Playin' (Norman Fell! Precisely!) and Texas Moratorium Network (Preach it, Huck!) have quick opinions and video snippets.