Here goes that Jimmy Carter again. It’s bad enough that the guy won a Nobel Peace Prize after one of the most failed administrations in American history. And after some of the treasonous acts he has committed after he left office. After all, it is no secret that there is an unwritten rule that a former U.S. President does not speak ill of a sitting one, which Carter did to President Bush…repeatedly.

Now we hear from the State Department that the former president is planning a mid-April trip to Syria. A trip which, I might add, is of an unsanctioned nature. FOXNews.com is reporting that Carter will land in Israel, and then will make visits to Syria and Saudi Arabia. What a nut job this guy is.

Fox quotes a State Department spokesman as saying, “[T]he State Department has expressed our concerns and advised President Carter that past engagement with the Syrian regime has not produced positive results.” And according to the Arab newspaper al-Hayat, Carter also plans to meet with Khaled Meshal, the exiled leader of the Palestinian terror group Hamas.

Several calls by Fox News to the Carter Center seeking comment were apparently, and conveniently, not returned. Hmm…wonder why.

Since his failed presidency in the latter part of the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter has been very harsh on Israel, and has worked against a successful solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He has even gone so far as to author a book entitled “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”

As Alan Dershowitz points out, “South African apartheid, against which I and so many other Jews fought, was the absolute control over a majority of blacks by a small minority of whites. It was the opposite of democracy.” He goes on to explain that the majority rules in Israel, that there is no South African-style apartheid in Israel.

Why, then, Dershowitz asks, would Carter attack Israel with accusations of apartheid? It is a question that he and many others, myself included, would like to have answered. If I am not mistaken, and I am not, Carter was president when a bunch of crazed, Iranian, muslim students overran a U.S. embassy and took dozens of Americans hostage until Ronald Reagan won the presidency and was sworn into office in 1980.

If anyone should be familiar with the hostile nature of Islamic extremists it is Jimmy Carter! Why on Earth would he want to go “represent America” on an unsanctioned trip to meet with leaders of terrorist organizations? It is simply beyond the pale and defies imagination.

In Dershowitz’s column, “The World According to Jimmy Carter,” posted Nov. 2, 2006, on the Huffington Post, Alan points out many discrepancies in Carter’s book. Here are but a few:

• Carter repeatedly claims that the Palestinians have long supported a two-state solution and the Israelis have always opposed it. Yet he makes no mention of the fact that in 1938 the Peel Commission proposed a two-state solution with Israel receiving a mere sliver of its ancient homeland and the Palestinians receiving the bulk of the land. The Jews accepted and the Palestinians rejected this proposal, because Arab leaders cared more about there being no Jewish state on Muslim holy land than about having a Palestinian state of their own.

• Carter repeatedly mentions Security Council Resolution 242, which called for return of captured territories in exchange for peace, recognition and secure boundaries, but he ignores the fact that Israel accepted and all the Arab nations and the Palestinians rejected this resolution. The Arabs met in Khartum and issued their three famous "no's": "No peace, no recognition, no negotiation" but you wouldn't know that from reading the history according to Carter.

• Carter blames Israel, and exonerates Arafat, for the Palestinian refusal to accept statehood on 95% of the West Bank and all of Gaza pursuant to the Clinton-Barak offers of Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001. He accepts the Palestinian revisionist history, rejects the eye-witness accounts of President Clinton and Dennis Ross and ignores Saudi Prince Bandar's accusation that Arafat's rejection of the proposal was "a crime" and that Arafat's account "was not truthful"--except, apparently, to Carter. The fact that Carter chooses to believe Yasir Arafat over Bill Clinton speaks volumes.

And these are only three of the falsehoods in Carter’s book that Dershowitz points out. There are many others. And yet they gave this guy a Nobel Peace Prize? I should think I would deserve one before Mr. Carter.

At any rate, Carter’s unending championing of the phrase “ignorance is bliss” goes on unchallenged. Hey, Mr. President, while you’re there, could you see what you can do about these outrageous gas prices? Thanks!

Michael A. Minton is the author of the upcoming book “Mr. Right Opinion-Unplugged and Unashamed.” The book will be available through authorHOUSE at: http://www.51756.authorworld.com/

Hi All,

Just an update on what's going on with my upcoming book, "Mr. Right Opinion-Unplugged and Unashamed," available soon from authorHOUSE Publishing, at http://www.51756.authorworld.com/.

On Saturday, April 12, 2008, at 4:00 p.m. EST, I will be doing an interview about my book and current events on an internet radio show called Key to Victory, hosted by Cao.

You can catch the show online at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Cao. Also, if you miss the live broadcast at 4:00, the show will be archived and accessible at the same website.

I hope you are able to tune in and cheer me on in my efforts to promote both my book and the Conservative Movement which, regardless of what the MSM (Mainstream Media) would have you believe, is alive and well!

I just wanted to let you know about this. I hope you can make it!

Thanks,
Mike-a.k.a. Mr. Right Opinion

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While perusing Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper on Sunday, April 6, 2008, my eyes were naturally drawn to an article entitled “Arizona Waging Immigration Fight On Its Own Terms.” As you may have read, I have focused quite a bit of energy and brain-power on the issue of illegal immigration. In fact, a lot of my new book, Mr. Right Opinion-Unplugged and Unashamed (available soon at: http://www.51756.authorworld.com/), deals with this very topic.

However, I was particularly interested in this article because it sounded as though the newspaper was praising Arizona for dealing with the issue on its own terms, as opposed to waiting for the federal government to get around to it (as if that will ever happen). And if you read the Courier-Journal, or any other Gannett-owned newspaper, you know how out-of-character it is for anything conservative to get positive coverage.

Now, I will be the first to admit that my articles are biased. I report on current events from a conservative point of view, and I make no apologies for it. However, I am the operator of a news and opinion weblog. I am not, nor do I claim to be, an independent source of news. The Courier, however, is supposed to be a newspaper; inherently obligated to report on current events from an unbiased stance. But as we all know, unbiased journalism is nearly impossible to find these days.

At any rate, the story started out on a good note. Reporter Nicholas Raccardi, of the Los Angeles Times (no bias at that paper), starts the article by noting that “Arizona has become a laboratory for whether a state can single-handedly combat illegal immigration.” This statement obviously makes the point that the feds are doing next-to-nothing on the illegal immigration front. And nothing could be closer to the truth.

The article points out that Arizona, in recent years, has made it almost impossible for illegals to receive government services, and that a new law there makes it possible for the state to close businesses that hire illegal immigrants. It also says that the sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, has his deputies, along with “posses” of volunteers, going out to search for “illegal street vendors or immigrants.” All good things in my opinion. Any time a state can solve problems without the interference of the federal government, that is a good thing. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Apparently, state Rep. Russell Pearce, who has authored some of Arizona’s toughest immigration laws, feels as I do. The LA Times quotes him as saying, “What I love about what Arizona is doing is that we don’t have to rely on the federal government…. It has truly woken the rest of America that states can fix that problem.”

Up to this point, the news story had been strangely, and uncharacteristically, positive about Arizona’s fight against illegal immigration. It just seemed to good to be true…and it was! Mr. Riccardi was just setting us up for the kill. The rest of his article is just a rant about how unfair it is to illegals for American states to actually enforce immigration law. The article spends all of three paragraphs highlighting the positives of the state’s immigration fight, and it spends the remaining twenty-three paragraphs on a huge, bleeding-heart diatribe about the evils of enforcing the law.

By my estimation, that is nearly an eight-to-one allotment of negative vs. positive coverage. This is a terribly unfair advantage to the pro-illegal camp. Especially when one considers the fact that news outlets are supposed to be neutral in the first place!

The article states that “Illegal immigrants complain that it’s impossible to find good work and (they) are leaving the state.” It would seem to me that this outcome is the whole goal of what the state is doing, and that Arizona is therefore meeting it’s goal. That’s really not too hard to figure out.

Mr. Riccardi does point out one legitimate complaint: he says that a minority of illegals have been unfairly victimized by the system the state uses to verify the employability of potential illegals. Apparently, Arizona uses a system called E-verify, a federal pilot project that allows businesses to verify the status of workers. It seems that the system has mistakenly identified a small percentage of people as possible illegals.

However, the acting chief of E-verify, Katherine Lotspeich, said officials would soon be proposing several changes which would make the system more error-free. The reporter then identifies one of the “victims” of the E-verify system, a naturalized citizen who was told by employers that he would lose his job due to information supplied by E-verify.

What the article tries to hide, though, is the fact that the reason the “victim,” Mr. Ochoa, was classified the way he was is that he, like some 3,200 foreign-born U.S. citizens, failed to register his citizenship with the Social Security Administration. Therefore, they are classified by E-verify as possible illegal immigrants. So, in reality, what the reporter tries to call victims of the system are actually victims of their own failure to properly register their citizenship.

It truly is amazing how these folks at the LA Times try to play on our emotions. In one case, they talk about a thirty-two year-old illegal by the name of Jorge Hernandez. They say that Mr. Hernandez, who has lived in Phoenix illegally for the past eleven years, lost a job he had worked at for years because of the new employer-based sanctions enacted by Arizona.

The quote from the newspaper is: “Now he struggles to support his family by working as a day-laborer, and is thinking of leaving.” Seriously, that’s what they say in trying to garner my sympathy for this man who is here illegally in the first place. They say he now dreams of moving to New Mexico, where the anti-illegal immigrant sentiment is weaker.

State Rep. Pearce, whom I quoted earlier, said that the positive effects of Arizona’s efforts were undeniable. “Smaller classroom sizes (and) shorter emergency room waits” have been seen as a result of the state’s work. He also says, “Even if (illegal immigrants) are paying taxes-and most of them aren’t-the cost to taxpayers is huge.”

The state’s work in fighting illegal immigration is having a major impact. So effective is it that the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora has complained about the number of refugees fleeing Arizona and coming back to Mexico. Imagine that…a Mexican state complaining about the number of Mexican “refugees” crossing the border! Only now, the illegals are heading in the right direction!

Hello fellow Opinionators! I am home from the hospital; thanks go out to those who sent their well-wishes.

I am home, and I even have my next story picked out. However, at the moment, it is just too painful to spend any time at the computer. I am hoping, though, that the pain medicine will kick in long enough for me to sit down and actually write the article.

I know I haven't touched much on illegal immigration lately, so that will be the topic. Hopefully it will be up later today.

Thanks for hanging with me, and I will be heard from soon.

Mike