Now Arizona, better known for resorts, retirees in golf carts, and college basketball teams whose players never graduate, is suddenly at the center of a debate that could shape U.S. politics for the next 10 years. The only surprise is that it took so long. All the great economies have been struggling with the immigration issue for years. Just last week, France was in tizzy about the burqa, the full-length outfit with only an eye-slit that conservative Muslim women wear. Nicolas Sarkozy’s government has considered banning the burqa on security grounds (you can’t identify the person), but the real reason behind this initiative, Arizona’s or any of the dozen being considered in other states or countries is fear of change.

No doubt, the Great Recession of the last three years has heightened American insecurity. Although the downturn has hit blue-collar workers the hardest, many people who thought they were solidly in the middle class have seen their savings, their safety net, even their homes evaporate in the financial collapse. The next step for many of them would be to step “down” into the blue-collar workforce. Suddenly, the Mexican, Salvadorian and African immigrants they hardly noticed during boom times are now potential competitors.

African Americans, who lost more than their fair share of blue-collar jobs in the downturn, have long been ambiguous about illegal immigration. As Cord Jefferson noted here a few months ago, a growing number of experts believe that blacks and Hispanic immigrants battle for unskilled jobs at the bottom of the labor pool. Black Americans have not turned out in large numbers at immigration rallies, despite the fact that many African-American politicians talk of the need for coalitions with Hispanics.

But a law that puts you in jeopardy for being has special resonance with black Americans. We already know the peril of living in a state where you are presumed guilty by the color of your skin. A law that makes a suspect of anyone who might look illegal should make us vigorously resist this encroachment.

When Pacquiao and Mayweather reached an impasse, Pacquiao went on to easily defeat Joshua Clottey on March 13 and Mayweather took a lopsided unanimous decision against Mosley in their welterweight super fight on Saturday night.

Mayweather, who accused Pacquiao of using performance-enhancing drugs despite having no evidence, had insisted on strict blood and urine testing, which was employed during the lead-up and immediate aftermath of his fight with Mosley.

Pacquiao, who has a defamation lawsuit pending against Mayweather and his team over the accusations, agreed to unlimited urine testing — but with limits on how many blood tests he would take and how close to the fight he would agree to be tested.

Now, less than 48 hours after Mayweather’s victory, Pacquiao seems to be in a compromising mood in order to make a fight for which official negotiations have not yet begun.

“I am willing to help the sport for the future of the sport. I do not want to see anyone cheat or cheat this sport. For that reason I am willing to consider taking blood [tests] as close as 14 days prior to the fight, as long as my opponent does the same, and it is not a lot of blood, just enough to test,” Pacquiao is quoted as saying on his official website.

Mayweather has no issue undergoing the same kind of testing as his opponent.

During the previous negotiation, Pacquiao had insisted on a cut-off of blood testing 30 days before the fight and eventually moved to 24 days when it came to light that he had taken a blood test during that time frame before his second-round knockout of Ricky Hatton in May 2009.

Pacquiao had agreed all along to take a blood test immediately after the fight.

“I do not want anyone having an unfair advantage where someone may get hurt,” said Pacquiao, who is in the final days of his congressional campaign in the Philippines. “I am willing to do my part to help this sport out.”

Pacquiao had said previously he did not want to have blood drawn too close to the fight because he feels like it weakens him.

“Mayweather is the furthest thing on our mind,” Michael Koncz, Pacquiao’s adviser, said in a statement to Pacquiao’s website. “Our focus has been and continues to be Manny’s desire to become congressman.”

Following the election, Pacquiao and his family are expected to go on vacation and the fighter will discuss his next bout upon his return.

“As Manny has stated many times, we are willing to fight anyone, anytime, anywhere in accordance with the athletic commission’s rules and regulations in which ever state we fight in,” Koncz said. “We will not be bullied into or entertain any additional rules or regulations to be imposed by our opponent.”

Top Rank’s Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter is headed to the Philippines to support Pacquiao in the final days of his campaign. He told ESPN.com on Monday that during the trip he will not talk to Pacquiao about Mayweather, drug testing or any boxing business.

“As far as I am concerned, I am not even going to raise anything,” Arum said. “We’re not even going to talk about future plans until after election and that’s the truth.

“I have no thoughts about the other stuff but I have an open mind to everything. Obviously, he’s my fighter and I will do what he asks me to do, but there’s a time for everything. And the time is not now.”

Mayweather said after the fight Saturday night that he would fight Pacquiao under the same kind of Olympic-style testing used for the fight with Mosley.

“If he wants to fight it’s not that hard to find me,” Mayweather said. “We tried to fight before and it didn’t work, and we moved on. Mosley did what I asked him to do and if every athlete in the sport would do that, we know we would have a clean sport. Everyone should take the test. I am willing to take the tests. If Manny takes the test we can make the fight happen. If he doesn’t we don’t have a fight.”

After highly publicized relationships with R&B singer Christopher Williams and an abusive relationship with Wesley Snipes that left her partially deaf in her right ear, Halle’s first marriage was to former baseball player David Justice, shortly after midnight on January 1, 1993.  The couple separated in 1996 and their divorce was finalized in 1997. Justice played with the Atlanta Braves and experienced a measure of fame as the team rose to prominence in the early 1990s. The couple found it difficult to maintain their relationship while he was playing baseball and she was filming elsewhere.  By all accounts, he marriage ended acrimoniously, with Halle seeking a restraining order against Justice.  Berry has stated publicly that she was so depressed after her breakup with Justice that she considered taking her own life, but she could not bear the thought of her mother finding her body.

Christopher Williams later said, “I have (men) come up to me like, ‘How could you just leave Halle Berry?’ I’m like, how could you just leave the last relationship you was (in)? (Halle) is just a woman, but because her name is in lights, people are damned near ready to bare their souls.

“They would probably crucify JESUS again just to get with her. It’s funny because the stars that get all of the good write-ups, you go and meet them and they are total a**holes.”

Berry’s second marriage was to musician Eric Benét. They met in 1997 and married in early 2001 on a beach in Santa Barbara. Berry credited Benét with support after she was involved in a February 2000 traffic collision, in which she suffered a concussion and left the scene of the accident before the police arrived. The couple separated in 2003. After the separation, Berry stated, “I want love, and I will find it, hopefully”. While married to Benét, Berry adopted his daughter, India. The divorce was finalized in January 2005.

Berry has been the victim of domestic violence, and now works to help other victims. In 2005, she said “Domestic violence is something I’ve known about since I was a child. My mother was a victim of it. Early on in my life I made choices, and I chose men that were abusive because that was what I knew growing up… First time it happened, I knew enough to keep moving.”

In November 2005, Berry began dating French-Canadian supermodel Gabriel Aubry, nine years her junior. The couple met at a Versace photoshoot. After six months with Aubry, she stated in an interview, “I’m really happy in my personal life, which is a novelty to me. You know, I’m not the girl that has the best relationships”.

At one time, Berry indicated that she did not intend to marry again, insisting the couple’s life was already complete without the need for a marriage. She has stated that she hopes to have a second child right away. Aubry recently told In Touch magazine, “I’d like Nahla to have a sibling in 2009.”

On April 30, 2010, it was reported that Berry and Aubry had separated. Berry’s representative confirmed their relationship had ended a few days later, saying: ‘They have been split for some time, but remain friends and committed parents to their daughter’. They worked out a financial and 50/50 custody deal with a family lawyer, but TMZ reported that it is not final. The source said: “As much as it can be it’s been an amicable split. They both traveled a lot for work anyway, so they were used to spending time apart for long periods, but I think Halle has taken it pretty badly, she truly loved Gabriel and thought she had found the one.”

Investigators acknowledged that much about the bombing attempt, the most serious in the United States since the Christmas Day incident aboard a commercial flight bound for Detroit, remains a mystery. That includes whether an organized group or a determined individual was responsible and whether an intelligence review will turn up clues that pointed to a possible attack.

In a statement, police said the other components still were “certainly capable of producing human casualties and broken windows but not enough to take down a structure,” according to NYPD bomb squad experts.

I love my family with all my heart.   The fact that I return to the city a few times a year proves it.  I know, I know…you want me to remain faithful to my home city no matter what.  Well, I do.  I check the Cincinnati Reds score daily (they won their third straight last night) despite the fact they have had 9 losing seasons in a row and are still under .500 this year.  I pay attention to the Cincinnati Bengals religiously and feel that their draft picks were good ones.  I still love Skyline Chili and Montgomery Inn BBQ ribs more than most Cincinnatians do.  In fact, a buddy’s mother just came to visit us in Lyons, CO and she made us a nice dinner of Skyline.  We loved it.

Aside from my family and the aforementioned teams and restaurants, my love for Cincinnati has diminished greatly over the last six years since I have left home.  Ask yourself what YOU think of when you think of Cincinnati.  If you are like most of mainstream America (I hope not!), you think of Jerry Springer, historically bad race relations, and a football team that has drowned in the NFL for 15 straight years and haven’t won a playoff game since 1990.  The Bengals?  BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!  Wrong, the BUNGLES!!

I have a whole host of friends that have transplanted from OH here to CO.  I’m not the only one who thinks this way.  I write this post to just get some things off my chest about Cincinnati, blow off some steam if you will, so I can return to the homeland with all this guilt off my chest.  If Cincinnati was a husband, his wife would leave her.  I just never got the things I needed from Cincinnati like winning sports teams, forward thinking, and things to do. Instead, we see sports teams that strive to be mediocre, overwhelming conservatism, and nothing to do except go to bars, most of which lack any sort of theme or fun.

So I’ll keep you posted on how Cincinnati goes.  Let me know of your Cincinnati experiences, I would love to hear.

OK, all this has stemmed from a national test score program that rated Detroit’s public schools the worst in nation.  How bad you ask? well to begin with 69% of their 4th grade kids has below BASIC {not average} skills, 77% of 8th graders had below BASIC skills.  So in essence when you ask a kid in Detroit “how many fingers am i holding up?”,  3/4 of them say “12″.  Now a failure of these proportions absolutely reeks of corruption and extreme negligence, but is arresting he teachers and administrator the logical answer?

Now look at it this way:  Who runs these school districts? School boards run these districts, well then how are these schools boards formed? Well school boards are ELECTED by the local population. So the parents that are wanting these people arrested are the very people responsible for their current positions? Well in this case it seems so. Oddly enough the Detroit area has one of the lowest voter participation numbers in all of the country.

This is the result of an area and its population being dis-enfranchised by the system of government, which leads them to not participate (by choice), which in turn leaves only the corrupt and incompetent in positions of power.  If only the real positive examples of these poor communities would stand forth and take action against the apathy of these community’s to even participate in their own future,  things like this would not happen.  You wouldn’t have an entire generation of retards that can’t add 2 + 2, much less pay their rent, balance their bank account and save for their children to college, thus giving them a better chance at life, in turn their children saving for college for their kids and so on so fourth.

Is it not the responsibility of the parents to see to their child’s development into adulthood? Is making sure your child isn’t an absolute moron part of the parents job duties?  Some people may make the argument these are some of the poorest places in America and the parents have no other options?  I can understand being too poor to move out of a bad area, but that only leaves the option to make that area better any way you can.  But most of the poor believe it is up to the government to fix all their problems and until it does they are not going to participate in it.

Some leaders of these community’s claim that there is a cycle of oppression that holds their people down.  In this instance it seems as if, it is a cycle of ignorance and apathy, that allows the cycle of oppression to continue. Now we can see how both the Parents and children of these areas are so poorly educated and equipped to deal with the modern world today.

The episode was a continuation of last week’s episode which depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.

A radical Muslim website threatened the show’s creators following that episode.

Comedy Central confirmed to FoxNews.com that it had censored the show, and that the episode was not available on its website.

In addition to bleeping the words “Prophet Muhammad,” the show also covered the character with a large block labeled “Censored.”

A radical Islamic website had warned the creators of “South Park” that they could face violent retribution for their depiction of Prophet Muhammad.

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2. We do not think we are better than non-believers. We are all human. We all make the same mistakes, we all fall into the same traps. Because we follow the word of Jesus Christ, we try to live by his word and teachings, trying to be better people every day, but we know that nobody is perfect, and will never be perfect

3. Liberals think that since we are followers of Christ, that we aught be perfect, and if we’re not, if we somehow become ‘human’ like them, than we are hypocrites, and somehow worse than they are

4. We do not try and push our beliefs on non-believers. As followers of Christ, we believe there is a heaven and hell. We want to see our friends, family and neighbors go to heaven with us. If we didn’t care, we would say anything. God calls us to be disciples. If someone knew that your house was going to be broken into tomorrow, wouldn’t you want them to say something to you?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/24/obama-shatters-spending-record-year-presidents/