I thought the French-hating stuff of a few months ago (because they wouldn’t do our every bidding, apparently) was all a joke. You know, the whole Freedom Fries thing, and “Send ’em to France,” and whatever. Then I heard the Congressional cafeteria was officially changing the name of its French fries to Freedom Fries and I thought, Is there nothing these people won’t do in the name of pandering to unthinking constituents? Just politics, not real world.

I walked past a Johnny Rockets yesterday, and it had a sign up mentioning some of the tasty items on their menu, including American fries.

It’s not like they’re going to get my food dollar particularly often anyhow, but I can’t bring myself to ever go eat at a place that panders to the knee-jerk idiot on the street. Because if this is what Johnny Rockets has to do to keep customers, it’s quite clear the food alone isn’t enough.

Anyone know when they started calling ’em “American fries”?

The first thing I learned when I moved down to Los Angeles in 1996 was that Los Angeles counts and the rest of the state does not. (There are tiers of not counting, of course: the Bay Area is often referred to as “Northern California,” despite the fact that there’s a whole bunch of California north of it—but that Northern California, filled as it is with rural, blue-collar towns really doesn’t count.) I remember complaining to my friends back in Cupertino about the ubiquitousness of political ads on TV during the fall campaign season, and they hadn’t seen one.

The second thing I learned when I moved down there is that Los Angeles runs on illegal immigrants. Hispanic gardeners drive beaten-up jalopies with the wooden sides covered with gardening tools. Hispanic nannies have walking clubs, pushing babies in strollers. When you order an appliance it arrives from the store being carried by four or six burly guys who speak only Spanish. You hire a cleaning lady from a firm, and she has dark skin and a Biblia she reads on the bus going home. The staff in kitchens of restaurants? Janitors?

The funniest story I heard was a guy who told me about hiring a firm to redo the floors in his house. The work crew showed up the first day and sanded the floors, which, if you’ve ever had your floors sanded you know leaves a big mess. The crew didn’t come back the next day. Or the day after. So the guy calls the floor company and says, “What’s the deal?” The manager says, “Oh, after they finished your place, they went out for a beer and got picked up by Immigration and deported. They’ll be back later this week.”

And they were.

Central California—the agricultural part of California that, you know, feeds the nation—runs on illegal immigrants too. You see them as you speed by on Highway 5 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. They’re bent over the rows of lettuce or strawberries or whatever the hell else is growing out there.

Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about this out loud but it’s the truth. California runs on Hispanic labor, and quite a bit of it is illegal. Nobody asks questions and a lot of work is paid for in cash. Maybe they’re taking jobs away from Americans who desperately want them. I doubt it. The pay is lousy and the benefits are almost non-existent.

Prop. 187 is often described as the initiative to deny social services to illegal aliens. It was more than that.

“Proposition 187’s provisions require California law enforcement, social services, health care and public personnel to:

• Verify the immigration status of persons with whom they come in contact;
• Notify certain defined persons of their immigration status;
• Report those persons to state and federal officials; and
• Deny those persons social services, health care, and education. ”

Okay? It’s not just denial of services—services paid for through taxes that everybody, including the illegal aliens, pays. It’s an unfunded mandate to turn the entire public sector into an arm of the immigration service. It’s about turning an already difficult situation into hell. I mean, does anyone think that using public medical services is an optimal choice?

California voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 187, especially in Los Angeles. This, to me, is proof that most of the people in Los Angeles are, in fact, stupid. Or maybe just incredibly, willfully blind. 187 is the “Muahahaha” Initiative: We know you’re going to keep coming here to take our shit jobs…and we’re going to make your life even more severely hellish while you’re here!

Anyone want to guess what would happen to food prices if all those farmers had to pay for medical insurance for the farm workers? Or what would happen if all the businesses had to pay employment taxes on the people lifting those bales and toting those barges? If, you know, employers had to put up with all those annoying costs instead of just getting away with it because all of those workers are off the books?

I happen to have been against 187 for purely pragmatic reasons (I think)—I’d much rather people go to see a doctor when they’re sick and, you know, avoid passing the illness on to me.

That Arnold Schwarzenegger was for 187 tells me everything I need to know about him (like I didn’t know enough already).

I picked up the paper today—an actual physical paper, something I don’t do very often—and read about Odai and Qusay and the amazingly well-timed (for the White House news cycle, at any rate) four hour firefight. And then I read this article and I feel, well, disoriented.

Odai, 39, Saddam Hussein’s elder son, was the wolf — a sadist who tortured athletes for losing matches, a womanizer who had henchmen snatch women and girls off the street, a tantrum-thrower who beat underlings and rivals to death, a show-off who collected fast cars and jungle pets.

Um, hello?

Colin Farrell is a womanizer.

Odai sounds like, oh, I don’t know…a rapist? Or a psychopath?

Why the hell did the Washington Post use a term like “womanizer” for a vicious bastard like this guy?