Posted on 02/01/2006 7:42:27 AM PST by walkerk
It's the middle class that gets squeezed by rising cost of health care, but a lot of that is due to the high cost of insurance doctors have to deal with and the high number of illegals who run up the hospital costs causing hospitals to raise their fees to cover overhead.
Here's a thought to warm some of your hearts...
From: Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia
Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real figures from Down Under. It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.
The first year results are now in:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,
Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!
In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent.
(Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals still possess their guns!)
While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.
There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.
Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in "successfully ridding Australian society of guns." You won't see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.
The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.
Take note Americans, before it's too late!
I think the gun control nuts get funding from our Al Qaida friends.
Redraw the city boundaries. Is Hunters Point still doing navy yard work?
It's not a citywide problem - just a few neigborhoods - but the chance to make downtown businesses kick in more money to the City's general fund to combat this "scourge" (to "stick it to The Man", in other words) is too good to miss.
Yah, his stuff -- oh boyo, criminals will just sit up and take notice. They will. But not in the way Pinderhughes proposes...One America: People Respecting Other Peoples, fer starters...
Why?
You're living in the same dream world as the liberals. Both of you wish to deny freedom to people because you believe that they should not be held responsible for their own welfare.
Liberals want to deny that people have a responsibility to get an education and make themselves productive so that they can provide for themselves.
You want to deny that people have a responsibility to educate themselves regarding the harm that narcotics do and decline to abuse them.
Both you and the liberals want to confiscate my hard-earned dollars to pursue your various utopian fantasies. You have to falsely claim that libertarians suggest that decriminalizing drugs will remove all drug problems.
Alcohol is not criminalized and there are substantial social problems associated with alcohol abuse. But there is very little criminal activity associated with the production and distribution of alcohol.
Sorry to be the one to waste your time with these views you find so unconvincing. Perhaps you would hazard a guess as to when the "War on Some Drugs" will be over and we can bring the troops home?
I rest my case.
It's simply more NewsomeBabble for votes.
WE know that here. But for those ardent San Francisco, er, "frisco"-haters, this is just more fodder to validate their hatred.
But, then, Newsome, San Francisco politicans and Democrats are the ONLY gas-bags on the political scene....right? :o)
Exactly what I was talking about from a slightly different point of view.
You are correct about the illegals; they suck out a ton of money from our system. And, from what I have read, they send (as a total in the country) BILLIONS "back home" to Mexico.
Send'em ALL back to their "homeland," children too, even if mama did manage to cross the border here just in time to drop her first - fourth on U.S. soil.
THAT law must change. I think we are one of the few or ONLY nations in the world that allows ANY child who HAPPANS to be born here of foreign parents, ESPECIALLY ILLEGALS (choke!) to be American citizens.
You are correct.
The main pockets of gangdumb are, I think, mainly: Hunter's Point/Bayview and only pockets there, parts of Chinatown (probably near Ping Yuen, the housing project), the Tenderloin (always has been a sludge area, even in the 40's when my parents were around) and the Mission District (16th & Mission and 24th & Mission).
The "stick it to The Man" attitude is always present, compliments of the non-profits, ACLU and the plethora of advocacy groups that start, grow, thrive, get rich and generally run on that very premise.
Woe betide "The Man" who doesn't bend over for said same groups.
The Hunter's Point naval shipyard closed its doors over 20 years ago. The city and navy are still going round and round about clean-up.
The area is PRIME property and will be fought over for the next 10,000 years.
Naturally, government housing and give-aways are being built for the dwindling minority of African-Americans but it's a lost fight as the city has less that 8% African-Americans now.
FORTY PERCENT of the Sunnydale housing project area, once a notorious slum (Yes, African-American slum) is now Chinese. Harhar.
I was on the bus about 5 years ago, going out to the area with some kids. I was just hanging around, not paying much attention when I heard a woman at the front of the bus YELLING at a guy, obviously her husband, who was way in the back of the bus.
The kicker was that they were Chinese, screaming at each other, ticked off, I think, in Chinese!
I looked around the bus and it was almost ALL Chinese! I almost fainted!
It was SUPPOSED to be full of African-American people! Where did they all go and when did all the Chinese move it?
Very weird sensation, believe you me.
There had been an urban myth that the Chinese wouldn't live where there were African-Americans. WRONG. It the property prices are low enough, the Chinese would move into hell itself. That's what happened in the Sunnydale projects area: African-Americans are still moving out (many to Oakland and farther east in the outre'mer of the bay area) and the Chinese are buying up the slightly-less-than-outrageous-price housing in that once nasty, violent, dangerous, crime and gang-ridden poverty-stricken area.
What's interesting is that area has some of the nicer weather in the city. It has the San Francisco Bay to its direct east, right on the water. Thus the fighting over the real estate, now that many of the sacred/untouchable minority is moving out and replaced by another sacred/untouchable minority.
Homosexuals (yet another sacred/untouchable minority--and an extremely vocal, educated, financially secure, politically positioned and determined one) are moving out there too. They are often the vanguard of first moving into icky areas as they open up.
Truth be known, they DO make the area INSTANTLY nicer with their investment, painting, remodeling, etc.
Those icky areas "open up" as property prices slowly drive out those who made the area "icky."
They also tested whatever apparatus it is/was that launches missiles from subs. I recall being handed a baton and being asked to "guard" a fence--I don't know what for--I guess against the rats. The quarterdeck watch was within view and I heard this ringing, turned to look toward the sound and saw a nose-cone whosh up out of the area 200-yards away. The quarterdeck watch thought it was a hoot as my eyes must have bugged out or something. The rats were unaffected.
Always thought it strange that a dairy cow was always feeding on the grass near the gate. I've since been told that one way to detect a certain kind of leak or decontamination is to find it in diary milk.
You wouldn't recognize the entire area that was previously shipping. There MIGHT be one or two REAL piers left for the incoming/outgoing cruise ships. Out of some 80 piers, all but a few are gone, and they are at Fisherman's Wharf in the north/west and in the south/east between the Bay Bridge and Hunter's Point, for the cruise ships.
The rest are changing into a PALM-TREE lined embarcadero with restaurants, condos, the Giants baseball park (almost beneath the bay bridge) and so on.
Amazing what jacked-up-beyond-belief property prices can do.
I had one employee this past year who called me "old man" and I enjoyed that, even more so when I was able to out-work him and his brother. I let him shoot my .50BMG and now he's headed for the service--wants to shoot something bigger--I guess he'll be assigned to a mortar crew or something. I guess trying to shoot over that old smokestack did it.
Did they tear down the old stadium? You could see it from the south end of the Point. And the area between there and the Bay Bridge was mostly empty, a few cranes, open space. Is Treasure Island still open? I think they processed submariners out of the service through there.
I was just kidding about the age.
The "old stadium" (built in the early 60's and called Candlestick Park) out at Candlestick Point is still there. The 49ers still play there.
The Giants play at the new baseball park, SOUTHERN BELL COMPANY (SBC Park), formely PACIFIC BELL (PacBell Park). It's about 1/10 of a mile south of the bay bridge. Nice park, they did a nice job. It holds only 42,000 folks and is state of the art. Reminds me of the Orioles park in Bal'imore.
Treasure Island is now home to:
project housing for welfare, Firefighters training and other odd assortment of things.
It's so beautiful and expensive a piece of property that the in-fighting in the political, legal and real estate circles is ferocious, even worse than the in-fighting over the Hunter's Point area.
In other words, everything is normal.
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