Just in case you’re not pissed off enough about the whole illegal-immigration thing, this ought to do it:

For prices starting at $50, two nonfederally recognized Indian tribes are offering membership to thousands of illegal immigrants, claiming they can achieve legal status by joining the groups.

In Nebraska, some people reported paying up to $1,200 to join the Kaweah Indian Nation, which became the target of a federal investigation after complaints about the tribe arose in at least five states.

Manuel Urbina, the tribe’s high chief, acknowleged his group has sold at least 10,000 tribal memberships to illegal immigrants for about $50 each.

“We are not going against the law, we’re with the law,” he said, claiming membership papers can help illegal immigrants avoid being detained by authorities if they are asked for documents.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the Kaweah group recognition in 1985 because it was not a real tribe.

I know of one fake Indian who could use this kind of service.

Here’s a photo from Agence France-Presse:

Here’s the caption:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)

I will leave it up to our readers and ballistics experts to determine the veracity of the woman’s claim that these unfired, still-in-their-pristine-brass rounds struck her house.

Bryan at Hot Air emailed AFP:

You are currently running a photo identified as taken in Iraq. It depicts a woman holding two bullets, captioned as having struck her house during the course of a US-coalition raid. But as you can plainly see from the photo, the bullets are pristine and have never been fired. Perhaps your photographer and caption editor ought to be, though.

Heh.

Oh, and lest you give the photographer, Wissam al-Okaili, the benefit of the doubt, he’s done this kind of thing before.

UPDATE: Suitably Flip has a good one.

[Hat-tip: This Blog Is Full of Crap]

I decided to take the road less traveled on the way home from Amarillo to Houston this week. Around lunchtime (always a good time for bigjolly) I was passing through Llano on TX-29 when I spotted the tell-tale sign of smoke coming from a building.

It looked interesting, so I decided to stop and grab a bite. What a treat! I didn’t realize that I had inadvertently found one of the best BBQ joints in Texas!

Cooper’s Pit Bar-B-Que is the name of the place and boy, is it good. They do bbq the old fashioned way, directly over a bed of mesquite coals. As you walk up to the place, you find a series of pits going.

The next thing you see is a pit opened up, with a wide selection of meats just waiting for you to enjoy. You direct the pit boss to the cuts that you want and the amounts.

He takes the cuts you’ve selected, dips ‘em into a big pot of sauce and plops ‘em onto a tray for you to take to the cutters. Be very careful at this stage - no prices are listed! If you are like me, you will select enough that when you see the bill, it will shock you. Be very careful.

After receiving your tray from the pit boss, you go inside to the cutters. They will take your selections, cut them into standard sizes, weigh and wrap them, then give them to the cashier (remember, careful!). On the way to the cashier, you’ll pick up any sides you want (potato salad, coleslaw, etc.) or desserts (might I suggest the blackberry cobbler?).

After emptying your bank account because you didn’t listen to me, you’ll take your treasure to an open seating area, complete with all the fixin’s, including a big pot of beans and more of that special, wonderful sauce.

Now the fun begins. You sit down and open up your treasure! Be sure and click on this pic.

Hey, it’s lunchtime. Gotta go - too bad Cooper’s isn’t around the corner!

While your sons and daughters are placing their backsides on the line in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, some sleaze on the home front are taking advantage of government bureaucracy to make themselves rich.

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

How did they manage to get away with this for the last seven years? Since there is a war on, the Pentagon “streamlined” the parts ordering process to ensure that equipment arrived in the field in a timely fashion. “Priority” invoices were often automatically paid to prevent backlog, but for some reason there appears to have been no follow-up examination of the books to protect you, the taxpayer, from being fleeced.

“The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas — that’s why they got paid,” Stroot said. If the item was earmarked “priority,” destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, “there was no oversight.”

The scam was unearthed because someone finally noticed a ridiculously large bill, but one of the twin sisters is already beyond the reach of the law.

Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced soon, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.

We can only hope that the law deals very harshly with these unscrupulous people. In the meantime, the Pentagon is planning to recover your misspent $20 million by selling off the sisters’ loot.

Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and “high- end automobiles” that the sisters spent the money on.

“They took a lot of vacations,” she said.

This is your government in action, folks: wasteful, sloppy, and easily taken advantage of. It does not matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge; this is the nature of the beast. Large, bureaucratic institutions are structurally vulnerable to this kind of problem, and the federal government is about as large and bureaucratic as they come. That alone should give pause to those seeking to nationalize the health care system. Do you really think your two aspirin are going to be cheaper (or even available) when this same government is buying them for you?

I have somehow landed on the email list for Texas Democratic candidate for senate Rick Noriega. On Monday, I received an email with a desperate plea for a contribution because Mr. Noriega was going to be out for 2 weeks for National Guard duty. I respect Mr. Noriega’s service and thank him for it.

Is it a proper way to advance your political career by shouting about your service every chance you get? The reason I ask is because when I see advertisements like this, it makes me question the person’s motivation for his service. Is it really for the country, for duty, for honor? Or is it to have another feather in your cap to attack a political opponent?

I also think that campaigning like this incites your supporters do stupid, idiotic things, as LST editor Matt Bramanti noted here. As I read Mr. Bramanti’s post, I recalled the email that I had received. The rabid supporter of Mr. Noriega’s, bluecollar, that chose to use a fallen soldiers death to promote his candidate, received his orders from Mr. Noriega’s email.

Please take a moment to watch the video, and help spread our message by forwarding this email to 5 of your friends today. Invite them to join our campaign!

With Mr. Noriega’s self-promotion of his service fresh on his mind, the commenter, bluecollar, made a serious error in judgment, posting Mr. Noriega’s “message” in response to the Chronicle’s brief note. My guess is that he thought he could reach more than just five friends this way. Perhaps even get kudos from Mr. Noriega’s campaign for his creativeness.

Unfortunately, the fallen soldier’s family and friends found out about this crass attempt to market a Democrat candidate and were hurt and upset. Several of them responded to Mr. Noriega’s supporter on the Chronicle website.

I am Jeff’s cousin-in-law. What you bluecollar failed to read obviously is that he died in Afghanistan, not Iraq. The Taliban attacked us first, or don’t you remember 9/11? It’s hard enough dealing with his death without people like you degrading what our soldiers and Marines are doing. Oil war, very interesting observation. And you have been to Iraq how many times? You’ve looked into the eyes of how many Iraqi children? And You’ve seen the poverty that they were living in first hand while their leader sat on gold toilets and lived in palaces and shot anyone who disagreed with him, including family members?

I ask that you have respect for my family and not post anything else about my cousin, our family including his children and wife or our soldiers and Marines. Don’t cry for our family, Jeff fought and died over there so we won’t have to fight the fight over here. He was a true American Hero, he should be honored as such.

The Chronicle removed Mr. Noriega’s supporters comments after hearing from the family.

Mr. Noriega is not the right man for Texas. In Mr. Noriega’s campaign email, he derided current Texas Sen. John Cornyn for voting against a bill requiring the military to keep soldiers on leave longer. Sen. Cornyn thinks that should be a military decision.

Also in Mr. Noriega’s email, he lashed out at Sen. Cornyn for voting against a bill banning the use of torture on terrorists detained in the field. Sen. Cornyn recognizes that putting women’s underwear on the heads of terrorists isn’t life threatening.

Texas is fortunate to have Sen. John Cornyn representing us, a man that doesn’t carry his accomplishments around on a sign, a man that just goes about getting the job done. A man that blocked the amnesty program that was going to be forced upon us. A man that made certain that border security was fully funded and that it included the ability for Homeland Security to detain persons that had over-stayed their visas.

Sen. John Cornyn is right for Texas, not Rick Noriega.

Bring in the clowns

A little something from UK Indymedia.  I love those wacky “environmental activists“.

Warning if you read enough you will run into strong language. 

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Job Wanted–Prepress production operator seeking day shift position with opportunity to eventually advance into supervisory role. Candidate has over seventeen years experience in the printing industry working in diverse fields from newspaper to high-end clients including Pepsi, Mary Kay Cosmetics, R. J. Reynolds, Donruss Sports Trading Cards, etc.

Applicant has a B.A. in Communication Arts and has a wide range of experiences from graphic design and ad building to preflight and prepress service. Project experience is also widely diverse including packaging, multi-page layout and trading cards. Interested parties should contact candidate with resume request via email at “cchd AT houston DOT rr DOT com”.

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Get paid to tell us what you think– Register to participate in one of our focus groups; earn money telling us what you think about politics, your community and consumer goods. Click here to learn more and sign-up!

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Dawn Wolf Design– LST’s full-service graphic designer of choice. Talented, professional, competitively priced; a generous LST volunteer, we could not recommend her more highly. | 713-984-9200 | website

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