Mike Rogers is a scandalmonger who calls himself a “Gay activist blogger” devoted to “outing” alleged closet-gay Republicans.

He claims that his sleazy activism is justified because it reveals the alleged hypocrisy of Republican homosexuals who refuse to promote what he insists is the real gay agenda.

Last week his target was Republican Congressman David Dreier. His latest target is Idaho Senator Larry Craig who he charged has engaged in homosexual sex with at least four men – a charge the senator vehemently denies.

Significantly, he refuses to identify his alleged sources for the accusation, surrendering by his refusal any claim to credibility.

Rogers says that digging into the private lives of politicians who support anti-gay legislation is perfectly legitimate, adding because the senator both supported and voted for the Defense of Marriage act, he has a perfect right to out him.

Rogers is one of the so-called gay activists who is going on nationally syndicated radio shows and writing newspaper columns to punish what he believes are gay Republicans for not agreeing with the liberal agenda of gay marriage or whatever the else the gay issue of the day is.

He’s outing all of these targets, not caring who he hurts, simply because they don’t agree with the radical gay agenda. There is no outrage from the Democrats or the media that there is somebody out there punishing conservatives who don’t agree with the liberal gay agenda.

They don’t understand that conservatives don’t look first at people’s sexuality. They look at a person as a whole person. There are people however, who have been described by a gay Republican talk show host as “professional homosexuals” — people who see nothing else but a person’s sexual orientation.

When they get up in the morning and look in the mirror all they see is a homosexual. They see absolutely nothing else about themselves or their lives. Yet just as the radical Muslims have taken over the Muslim faith, these professional gays are putting themselves forth as spokesmen for the entire gay community and being accepted as such by the liberal media.

They are not. The majority of gays want nothing to do with Rogers and his fellow professional homosexuals.

I know a lot of gays who live in California. Most of them are not supportive of gay marriage. Most gays are not supportive of the radical gay issue of punishing the Boy Scouts because they won’t allow homosexuals to be scoutmasters.

These are the issues that the activists are pushing. Most gays are embarrassed by the gay activists but they can’t say anything since they will be ostracized within their own community, just as a black who is conservative is ostracized within the black community.

If a gay speaks out against the radical gay agenda he will be driven out of the gay community, and that includes speaking out against the professional homosexuals who pretend to represent the entire gay community and are accepted as such by the lamestream media.

We are now seeing the outrageous practice of liberal radio talk show hosts allowing radical gays to go on their shows and broadcast their slimy messages, identifying as closet gays conservative Republicans who will not kowtow to them and their demands that they support what Rogers and his ilk claim is the only legitimate agenda for homosexuals.

Rogers may claim his aim is to advance his cause, but it is nothing more than his method of punishing those who disagree with him. He’s telling his targets, “Do what I demand or I’ll expose you to ridicule.”

I don’t care if a Republican politician is gay. What I care about is his agenda. Is it a conservative agenda or a liberal agenda? I vote for those who support my conservative views.

Liberals take it as an article of faith that conservatives hate gays. That’s absolutely untrue. What we don’t support is the radical gay agenda. We are utterly opposed to gay marriage, homosexual scoutmasters or promoting the gay lifestyle in our schools.

And, as I said, most gays agree with me and not with Rogers on these issues.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

For reasons I’ll never understand, some of my fellow conservative talk-show hosts have turned to that bible of liberalism – The Washington Post – to get the “facts” about the U.S.-Mexico border fence just authorized by Congress.

If they wanted to get the real story — and not the misleading one they read in the October 6 edition of the Post — they could easily have done what I did and called Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the man who wrote the bill mandating the building of the 700-mile border fence.

Chairman Hunter knows what he is talking about. He also wrote a bill in the 1990s during the Clinton administration that created the 14-mile-long double fence in San Diego.

The new bill, he told me, uses the same language as his first bill and will have the same effect – the fence will be built despite the Post’s insistence that it won’t. The bill doesn’t say the fence will be built or may be built – it says flatly that it shall be built.

Here are the facts. In a story headlined “In Border Fence’s Path, Congressional Roadblocks,” the Post reported that as soon as Congress had authorized construction of a 700-mile border fence last week, members “rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.”

According to the Post, “… the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects — not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and ‘tactical infrastructure’ to support the Department of Homeland Security’s preferred option of a ‘virtual fence.’”

These so-called “loopholes”, the Post said, “leave the Bush administration with authority to decide where, when and how long a fence will be built, except for small stretches east of San Diego and in western Arizona. “

In other words, the Post interprets the bill as a scam meant to win votes but not really mandating that the 700-mile border fence would ever be built.

The truth, according to Duncan Hunter, is that the amendments, were passed because if they built the wall as described in the first bill they would have been building it through homes and other buildings.

So they needed to amend it to make sure that other people could have the discretion to build the wall around buildings instead of through buildings.

His press conference Wednesday, President Bush was asked: “Are you committed to building the 700 miles of fence, actual fencing?”

His answer? ” … We’re just going to make sure that we build it in a spot where it works … we’re actually building fence, and we’re building double fence in particular — in areas where there is a high vulnerability for people being able to sneak in.

“You can’t fence the entire border, but what you can do is you can use a combination of fencing and technology to make it easier for the Border Patrol to enforce our border … And so I look forward to not only implementing that which Congress has funded, in a way that says to folks, the American people, we’ll enforce our border.”

The president described the plan as “a combination of fencing and technologies — UAVs, sensors … You’ve got some rugged country; you’ve got stretches of territory where you don’t even know where the border is. You’ve got urban areas, like El Paso, or Southern California, where people have been able to sneak in by use of urban corridors. And so, therefore, fencing makes sense there.”

The president cited areas of the Arizona sector, where there are “literally neighborhoods abutting the border, and people come — a hundred of them would rush across the border into a little subdivision, and the Border Patrol would catch two or three, and 97 would get in.”

Buttressing Duncan Hunter’s claim, the president noted: “This border requires different assets based on the conditions — based upon what the terrain looks like. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Finally, If you want to make sure the fence is never built: vote Democrat on November 7.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

The chattering class has been all agog over so-called generic polls showing Democrats will give GOP members of Congress a royal beating in the November elections - and this was before the so-called revelations about Mark Foley’s shenanigans, which sent them into a state of sheer ecstasy.

As heartening as this may be to the Liberals and their media lackeys, neither of these apparently GOP-unfriendly harmful revelations are going to be the main determinants on November 7.

What really matters in most of the 435 House races is the enormous advantage House members have in the simple fact that they are incumbents. And they are all beneficiaries of what I call the incumbent protection act.

According to a study, “Redistricting and Incumbent Protection in 2001-2002,” by the Voting and Democracy Research Center, elections to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002 were dramatically less competitive than elections after the last round of redistricting in 1991-1992:

“In 2002 fewer than one in ten races were won by less than 10% and fewer than one five races were won by less than 20% — less than half of the number of races won by those margins in 1992. Only four incumbents were defeated by non-incumbent challengers, the fewest number in history, and the average victory margin was nearly 40%. Our 2003 Dubious Democracy report has additional data quantifying this alarming state of affairs.”

Their conclusion: “This lack of competition in a post-redistricting election makes it quite possible that House elections toward the end of the decade will be less competitive than any in history.”

Democrats and Republican incumbents have schemed together to create districts for themselves that all but guarantee the members can hang around Capitol Hill for as long as they want. And the voters back home will oblige them.

The old adage that “all politics is local” holds true for members of Congress. In other words, local politics plays a major role in a congressional election. Only rarely do national issues overshadow local issues. That’s another shield that protects incumbents from the national winds of change.

As far as what they are now calling “Foleygate” damaging the re-election chances of individual Republican members of Congress, the fact is that the effect will be negligible to zero. Moreover, the Democrats, by jumping feet-first into the scandal may suddenly discover that they will be the ones who get hurt.

Take Nancy Pelosi as an example. She brazenly accuses the House GOP leadership of failing to protect “the children,” implying that they willingly exposed pages to being sexually molested by Mark Foley.

What hypocrisy! This is the same Nancy Pelosi who wants Boy Scouts to be exposed to homosexual scoutmasters. Does she really think the voters are going to let her and her party get away with this outrage?

Moreover, there are investigations now in progress by the FBI and the House Ethics Committee that are going to turn over the rocks and uncover the complicity of at least some top Democrats - and a whole slew of sleazy operatives working on their behalf - in what was a conspiracy that kept the sordid charges against Foley undercover until they could be used as a last-minute assault on the House GOP.

The real cover-up was theirs.

Finally, if Rush Limbaugh is right - and I think he is - the reaction to this sleazy Democrat plot by the Republican’s conservative base is not anger at Speaker Hastert and his colleagues but instead, at the Democrats, who will pay the price on November 7.

They’ve got it coming.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Benedict Arnold was a war hero whose courageous actions at the Battle of Saratoga helped turn the tide for the colonists in the American Revolution, so it is not fair to him to compare him to the sniveling nest of traitors now endangering our national security in the name of cheap partisan politics.

They are not Benedict Arnolds - they are in a class all by themselves – political and journalistic hacks willing to do anything to win an election and oust an administration they loathe even if by so doing they endanger the safety of their fellow Americans.

Time after time, for months on end, we have watched the spectacle of government officials in the intelligence agencies violate their oaths by leaking the most sensitive secrets to dedicated anti-American newspapers such as the treasonous New York Times.

Vital anti-terrorism operations designed to monitor communications between terrorists overseas and their agents in the United States or track the international movement of funds meant to finance terrorist activities have been compromised, if not rendered useless, by leaks to the Times and The Washington Post.

Both newspapers loathe the Bush administration and the Republican Party, and both have wallowed in self-congratulation for their coups against the security of the American people, delighted to be inflicting harm on the president and his attempts to safeguard the American people if it will help turn the Congress over to their Democrat allies.

They are being enabled by what amount to moles lurking in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, who ignore the fact that they are committing real crimes by betraying their oaths for the most sordid of political purposes.

This latest episode, the leaking of the purported April National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to the Times and the Post, however, is a different kettle of rotten fish. To begin with, the stories in the Times and the Post distorted what was in the NIE – a fact that quickly emerged when relevant parts of the authentic document were declassified and released.

What has emerged since the latest leaks were publicized is the very obvious involvement of the Democrats in the whole shameful episode. It is very easy to understand that given the superior record of the GOP as a proven protector of the safety of the American people and the pitiful record of the Democrats in that regard, it’s obvious that the leaks were designed to raise questions about the Republicans’ ability to safeguard the national security, and thus bolster Democratic claims disputing that record.

What is at stake here is simply the government’s ability to do its job of fighting a global war against a shadowy enemy that has made no secret of their goal of killing us and conquering the West.

That government simply cannot do that job as long as there is a fifth column operating within our borders. And that fifth column is composed of The New York Times and the rest of the liberal media dedicated to crippling the administration’s ability to fight the war and ensure the safety of the American people.

Call it whatever you want, but no matter what name you give it, it remains treason. And if the nation is to be protected from deadly attacks against the homeland by the enemy, the people involved in this treasonous activity have to be stopped from their ongoing betrayal of the United States and the American people, and stopped now.

This is no longer a matter of mere finger pointing. This is time for the handcuffs to come out. If President Bush wants to assure the nation that he is determined to protect them from future 9/11s he is going to have to step forward and loose the hounds of justice against those in the government who are betraying their oaths, and hold the Times and its allies in the media legally accountable for their treasonous activities.

As the president has reminded us, we are at war. With an active fifth column doing its level best to make us lose that war, the time has come to root it out and make its participants pay for their betrayal.

Let’s roll, Mr. President.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Joseph Stalin is alleged to have asked contemptuously just how many divisions the pope had at his disposal. The answer came after the Soviet dictator’s death when the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Eastern Europe came out from behind the Iron Curtain thanks to Pope John Paul II, my father Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – the phalanx that drove a spike through the heart of Soviet tyranny .

Pope John Paul II had no military divisions, but he had a huge army of people yearning for freedom who responded to his message that united they could prevail over a master who commanded vast military forces. Those forces eventually proved helpless in the face of the people’s determination and will.

Today the question might be, “How many supporters does the pope have among the world’s leaders?” Shamefully, the answer is none. Assailed all across the globe by millions of Muslims for quoting a few passages from a debate featuring the 14th Century Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologos II – next-to-last emperor of what had been the Eastern Roman empire — Pope Benedict XVI has been left standing alone among the leaders of the Western world despite his warning that they face a foe determined to subjugate them and their citizens.

Writing in the September 20 Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer reminded the West’s leaders just how much they owe to Pope Benedict XVI, the man they have left hanging in the wind that is blowing like a typhoon from the world of radical Islam

Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of “Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West” wrote: “In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “

He quotes historian Bernard Lewis as warning “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” and observes that the pope is unlikely to be happy about that eventuality.

“Late in 2003 the semi-official Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica departed from John Paul II’s policy toward Islam and published a scathing criticism of the mistreatment that Christians suffer in Islamic societies,” wrote Spencer. “It represented the first indication that any Catholic officials recognized the dimensions of the religious conflict that jihadists are waging against Christians and others around the world.”

He adds that “La Civiltà Cattolica pointed out that ‘for almost a thousand years Europe was under constant threat from Islam, which twice put its survival in serious danger.’ Now, through jihad terrorism and demographics Islam is threatening Europe’s survival yet again — and it looks as if now there is a Pope who has noticed. Maybe in Europe the resistance is just beginning.”

You wouldn’t think so from the wall of silence that has surrounded the West’s leaders, including our own President Bush. Not one of them has sprung to the pope’s defense in the face of the violence and threats made against the pope by Muslims all over the world.

The pope was dangling out there all by himself. There is not one leader in any part of the world – left, right, center or anywhere in between — standing up for the pope who, as Spencer noted has “dared to speak more clearly about the threat that Islam poses to Western civilization than his predecessor — for all his many and remarkable gifts — ever quite managed to do.”

All this proves the point I have been making for a long time: the world fears Islam and its adherents. In an attempt to spur a dialogue between Christianity and Islam the pope quotes a Byzantine leader from 1391 to make his point about the futility of violence between religions and what do we get?

We get a dead nun, churches burned, the leader of the world’s billion Catholics burned in effigy, hordes of angry Muslims demonstrating in the streets and demanding that the pope be hunted down and slaughtered, all of which proved the point stressed by Manuel Paleologos II, in the 14th century.

And worst of all, we get silence from the leaders of the besieged West.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

One of my dad’s more memorable lines was his response to the question about what his strategy was for fighting the Cold War. Simple, he said, “We win, they lose.”

That’s the way it worked out; we won, they lost.

We won because the Reagan strategy was to apply relentless pressure on the Soviets with unflinching resolve, to never let up, and to grind the Communists’ faces in the mud at every opportunity while the world looked on, no matter how much it shocked the media and the go-easy-on-the-Kremlin liberals who feared giving offense to our sworn enemies by treating them unkindly and incurring the condemnation of the world’s wimps.

We are now fighting a war that demands similar resolve and a rigid determination to defeat the enemy, whatever it takes, without regard to how it will shock the media and the anti-war left.

We are not meeting those demands and as a result the mightiest nation on the face of the earth - with the finest military force ever assembled in all the world’s history – is losing the war, not by being defeated in combat, but by default.

In Afghanistan, as both the media and the Defeatocrats have joyfully proclaimed, the Taliban we drove out is back and giving the NATO and coalition forces arrayed against them a very hard time.

Nothing could drive a stake in the heart of that reborn Taliban insurgency better than the killing of their top leadership, yet when faced with a golden opportunity to do just that we did nothing but stand by and watch.

According to NBC, 190 top Taliban leaders attending a funeral and packed in a tight formation were seen by an eye-in-the-sky drone, presenting an easy target for a quick air strike that could have decimated the Taliban leadership and perhaps brought an end to the insurgency in Afghanistan.

A black and white photo published on the front page of the New York Post shows what NBC told the Associated Press are the Taliban militants standing in several rows, like cattle being led to the slaughter pens.

It would have been an easy kill and a major victory in the fight against the Taliban, yet our military were forced to sit and do nothing but watch because the oh-so-sensitive rules of engagement forbid attacking cemeteries.

And that’s not all. While U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan were still raging about the lost opportunity, the military brass was up in arms - not because of a missed chance - but because the embarrassing drone photo was leaked to the media.

According to the Associated Press, Lt. Tamara Lawrence, a spokeswoman with the U.S. military in Kabul, said the photograph was released to NBC by someone who did not have the clearance to hand it out.

“It is an operational security issue and the photo was released at an inappropriate level,” she sniffed to the AP. “Inquiries are being made into how it was released.”

This incident is an example of the out-of-control political correctness that is driving the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of fear of offending the people whose freedom we are fighting to ensure, we are waging a war by half-measures.

Our enemy is a furtive force lurking hidden among the civilian population, using civilians as human shields. The only way to deal with these fanatical insurgents is to kill them all, and in order to kill them all you have to be willing to inflict unintended damage on the civilian population, just as we did when we bombed Berlin and Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When you fight this kind of war, you incur the wrath of the media and the anti-war left, who remain ever-alert for any chance to charge the U.S. with committing “atrocities.” When you allow fear of their reaction to dictate the rules of engagement, you allow them to lead you to defeat.

“War is Hell,” Sherman once said. It still is, and always will be. Live with it, or go hide someplace and hope the victorious enemy won’t find you and cut your head off, a form of political incorrectness that doesn’t bother them one bit.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Listening to the Democrats complain Tuesday about the administration’s handling of the nation’s security had me thinking. If, as they charge, the president is using it as a political issue, I really hope he is.

I also thought that President Bush needs to stop preaching to the choir - to his rock hard supporters - and begin to speak to all the American people about just what’s at stake in the war on terror.

He needs to tell Americans flat out exactly where the Democrats stand on national security. They oppose the wiretaps of al Qaeda terrorists communicating with agents and sympathizers in the U.S.; they are opposed to the tracking of the movement of terrorist funds across the globe, they opposed the Patriot Act – all programs that are designed to protect the American people.

He needs to pound home again and again that these programs have kept America safe from other 9/11s for five long years since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And he needs to remind the people that should the Democrats win control of the Congress all of these vital programs will be gutted and al Qaeda’s determination to strike at the U.S. homeland will be reinvigorated.

When he speaks about national security the president limits the scope of his audience by addressing his Republican base, which does not need to hear what he has to say about national security. They already know what the score is there. He needs to aim at all of the American people, Democrats and Republicans and those in-between. He has to take the gloves off and punch away, showing how the Democrats’ glaring weaknesses on the issue of national security will put the nation in danger.

For too long now the Democrats have been allowed to peddle the fiction that the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism are two different struggles, when even al Qaeda’s top leaders such as bin Laden clearly state the opposite. Even if Harry Reid, Howard Dean and the pitiful Nancy Pelosi can’t recognize that both are part of the same struggle - the war on terrorism - bin Laden and his fellow thugs know that the opposite is true.

The president needs to stress that one reason why America has been spared more 9/11s is that al Qaeda had been forced to concentrate its resources on the insurgency in Iraq. They simply don’t have the resources to fight a two-front war.

Yet the Democrats would like nothing better than to cut and run in Iraq and turn that hapless country into an Islamofascist headquarters for the jihad. Iraq in the hands of al Qaeda would create chaos throughout the Middle East.

Of course they won’t admit that their policy is to abandon the people of Iraq to the mercies of al Qaeda by withdrawing our troops by a date certain. They won’t call their policy a planned withdrawal – they call it a redeployment, suggesting that our troops would be redeployed to another part of the Middle East close by Iraq from where they could re-enter that country if the need arose.

They ignore the fact that not one of the neighboring countries want U.S. troops within their borders. Rep. John Murtha, however, let the cat out of the bag when he suggested redeployment to Formosa, which is just a tad too far away from Iraq, like about 7,000 miles too far. To Democrats it appears as if that’s just a hop, skip and a jump.

The president needs to take the fight to the Democrats. They are not his friends, no matter how much he wishes they were. They are his enemies and he must remind the public exactly where the Democratic party stands and just how much more vulnerable their politically driven policies would make this nation.

Americans need to ask themselves just who they think the President of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas would vote for in Congressional elections on November 7. If you think the answer is all of the above, you better vote for the party they want to lose.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

For a long time now we’ve been listening to the Democrats and their toadies in the media complaining about the Bush administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and its aftermath.

They charge it up to what they call the administration’s incompetence, implying that had the Democrats been running the show, things would have been handled much better.

It takes a lot of gall to make that charge because as one Town Hall blogger, Cato’s Corner, recently pointed out, the Democrats were in charge before, during and ever since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

In the United States, the authorities at the state and local levels are responsible for what happens in their areas. In Louisiana the governor is a Democrat, and the mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat. They were the so-called first responders, and their response was pitiful. They can blame President Bush all they want, but it was their job to handle the disaster and their handling of it was a disaster in itself.

That incompetence continues, especially in New Orleans where the cleanup and rebuilding efforts are lagging far behind where they would have been had they done their jobs competently. And they can’t blame that on the president or the federal government.

The fact is that $11.8 billion has been allocated. That’s everything that New Orleans asked for. They got $6 billion in December, another $4 billion in May, another $1.8 billion recently, and yet they haven’t spent the money.

One big problem: New Orleans has yet to come up with a master plan that will allow people to know what they can do and how to do it.

“The citizens of New Orleans need to know what the plans are, so the citizens can make their plans on whether they should rebuild, repair or sell their homes,” Norman Francis, chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversees federal aid given to Louisiana told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“A lot of people are holding their money back pending an affirmation that the city really has a broader idea of where it’s going in the future. What kind of a city is it going to be?” added Ken Topping, a California planning consultant hired to help.

Moreover, the city refuses to relax the red-tape provisions to allow the people to get the money to be able to rebuild, which is exactly the opposite of what Mississippi’s Republican Governor Haley Barbour has done in his state. He cut through the red tape to allow the people to get the funds necessary to go ahead and rebuild.

Another reason is that the folks in Mississippi are working together, not standing around waiting for the federal government to rebuild. Officials in Louisiana are still whining, waiting for somebody to do everything for them.

The federal government has supplied the funds. It is the local government that refuses to distribute the money. I was talking to a member of Congress from Louisiana who recalled that the Congress had authorized $6 billion last December but New Orleans made the determination that they were not going to spend any of it until they got the whole $10 billion they were then demanding.

In Mississippi, on the other hand, as they were getting the money they were finding ways to spend it to help the people rebuild.

Tragically, the President is playing into the hands of his critics by implying that he is somehow to blame for the situation. He’s allowing the Democrats to use him as fodder in their attacks on him. He needs to stand up and shout, “We’re not to blame. We gave you the money. If the people in New Orleans don’t have the money it’s not because the federal government hasn’t done its job; it’s because your local government officials refuse to do theirs.”

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants - legal and illegal - are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English – the all-but-official language of the United States where they now live.

Can you blame them? They are being enabled by all those diversity fanatics to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise.

It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote.

Nowadays we kowtow to demands that everything from ballots to official documents be presented in many native languages as well as in English.

The result? According to Census Bureau statistics reported in Human Events:

In California, 42.3 percent of the people do not speak English at home. More than 28 percent speak Spanish instead. One in five Californians told the Census Bureau they speak English “less than very well.”

In the city of Los Angeles, for example, 60.8 percent of the people do not speak English at home. Instead, more than 44 percent speak Spanish while 31.3 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”

•

In the city of Santa Ana, a whopping 84.7 percent do not speak English at home while more than 75 percent speak Spanish instead, and 50.8 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”

In Miami, Florida, 78.9 percent do not speak English at home, 69.8 percent speak Spanish instead, and 46.7 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”

•

In Passaic, N.J., 72.7 percent of the people do not speak English at home, 62.9 percent speak Spanish instead, and 45.4 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”

The 10 states with the greatest percentage of people five years and over who speak a language other than English at home are: 1. California: 42.3 percent; 2. New Mexico: 36.1 percent; 3. Texas: 33.6 percent; 4. New York: 28.2 percent; 5. Arizona: 27.4 percent; 5. (tie) New Jersey: 27.4 percent; 7. Nevada: 26.2 percent; 8. Florida: 25.4 percent; 9. Hawaii: 24 percent; 10. Illinois: 21.5 percent.

Where is all this leading? The other day I read a story headlined “Will English Survive Immigrant Flood?” As Pat Buchanan warns in his new book, “State of Emergency – Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” if our language is gone, the conquest is complete.

What holds the country together is the commonality of language. When the Census Bureau released its American Community Survey they revealed that the U.S. continues to be inundated by a flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal. And the question this raises is are they learning out language, are they assimilating into our culture? The statistics cited above say the answer is a resounding “NO.”

Last year one in five people in Washington D.C. were immigrants, compared to one in six in 2000. According to The Washington Post, the city is one of eight U.S. metropolitan areas – along with New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Dallas - that have at least a million immigrants each.

Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to.

Incredibly, while huge numbers of immigrants already here refuse to learn English, in other parts of the world people are learning English just so they can come here. As I heard last year in Kenya, the students there said that English is the language of business and to get ahead in this world you have to learn to speak it.

We are really enabling immigrants to avoid learning English and assimilating into our culture because we give them everything they need so they don’t have to learn to speak English or become part of the traditional melting pot.

By enabling these people, we build an enclave for them that looks just like what they ran away from at home, thereby preventing them from assimilating and becoming part of the American dream. English is the language of business and trade – if you can’t speak it you can’t get out of the occupational ghetto and move up the ladder. You are stuck where you are.

Tragically, the answer to the question of English surviving the immigrant invasion is probably “no.” The English language is on its death bed, a victim of the enablers.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

As could be expected, on Wednesday The New York Times rushed into print with a story about the wonderful compassion Hezbollah is showing in helping those in Lebanon’s civilian population who suffered enormous damage during the hostilities between the terrorist group and the Israelis.

Under the banner line “Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature” the Times exuberantly described the extensive humanitarian efforts Hezbollah is exerting on behalf of the Lebanese people. Wrote the Times: “While the Israelis began their withdrawal, hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable.”

It’s well known that the United States of America is the world’s number-one provider of humanitarian aid – handing out billions to victims of wars and natural disasters in every corner of the globe, but you never see the Times going into spasms of adulation over our generosity. But let a declared enemy of the United States provide a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down to those suffering collateral damage as a result of their actions and the Times gets all gooey with worshipful admiration.

Hezbollah is a humanitarian organization in the same sense as the Mafia is a dispenser of charity and compassion. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, sounded like the neighborhood Mafia don, offering money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war. It was his way of telling the people who their real friends are. It’s not the toothless Lebanese government, he was telling them, but your friendly neighborhood hit men who have your best interests at heart

I think he may have learned the tactic from another mob boss, Al Capone, well known for handing out cash and other goodies to the folks in the neighborhood when he wasn’t beating people to death with a baseball bat or celebrating St. Valentine’s Day by having his enemies machine-gunned to death.

This “Hezbollah-the-good” business is just one aspect of a war that turned into a dark comedy, elevating the status of a group of murderous thugs while humiliating the leadership of what has always been seen as the most-feared military force in the Middle East – the IDF - the Israeli army, which nowadays parades under the politically correct description as a “Defense Force.”

Aside from the fact that the both the IDF’s intelligence capabilities and its strategy were terribly flawed, the whole thing began to assume the appearance of a sick farce when it was learned that among his preparations for the attack on Hezbollah, Israel’s army chief, General Dan Halutz, had reportedly dumped his stock holdings – something I don’t think he learned from studying Karl von Clausewitz.

Tragically, the silliest thing to emerge from the whole farce was President Bush’s comment that Israel had won the engagement with Hezbollah, which is now running freely around most of Lebanon with its fully armed guerillas patrolling the streets in some Lebanese cities, while the IDF licks its wounds after failing to be allowed to disarm the terrorists - which in less politically correct times it could have done with dispatch.

And what could be more ludicrous than a cease fire whose conditions include the stipulation that the Lebanese army, or the United Nations, or a multi-national or just about anybody else around disarm Hezbollah. The Lebanese army says it has no intention of doing so, and the planned multi-national force can’t because it doesn’t exist, and as a result Hezbollah continues to bristle with arms and is probably being supplied with more ordnance from Iran and Syria.

In the meantime, the IDF meanders around the area south of the Litani River waiting for Hezbollah to get out of the area and disarm. I have a suggestion for them: they should take a page out of the Old Testament and march around Lebanon for the next six days and then on seventh day, march around it six more times and blow a horn.

It worked at Jericho, after all.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.