Boston Herald’s Margery Eagan has a pretty good, if nothing special, column today that jumps off on that infamous nail-salon fight last week (I guess it was really more of an assault than a fight) where an English-speaking customer lashed out at a Spanish speaking one. Here’s Ms. Eagan’s closing sentence:

“If you’re going to speak a foreign tounge around here during this anti-illegal debate, your best bet’s to be a Swede.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but here’s to you, Ms. Eagan: Hoom di hoom yah öppie fenugen bork bork bork!

I’m not much of a fan of the Boston Dirt Dogs and their “we so krazy!” spiel, but the Missus likes them. Or at least used to like them, back in the days, when the site was frequently and quickly updated, as opposed to now, when it seems to be running on super slow motion. Top headline right now: “Down Goes Boomer.” As if nothing’s happened in Red Sox Universe between now and then.

Clock punchers.

Every year my wife buys me the New England Patriots day-by-day calendar with facts and trivia about my favorite National Football League team. This past week was a good one:

May 18:

Q: Against which team did Adam Vinatieri kick 5 field goals in a game in 2004?

A: Buffalo.

May 19

Through 2004, Adam Vinatieri had made 17 game-winning kicks in his career, including the field golas that won won Super Bowls XXXVI and XXXVIII.

May 24

Adam Vinatieri’s 93.9 percent success rate on field-goal tries in 2004 (31 of 33) led the NFL and set a Patriots’ season record.

That Vinatieri dude sounds like a really special player. May we never let him go! At least not to a rival with a high-scoring offense and a dramatically improving defense…

Robert Kuttner is one of few progressives who grasp that immigration does most natives little good, and that worker-importation programs, like the ones just passed in the Senate, which will dramatically increase immigration, hold down compensation for workers. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Kuttner writes:

AMERICA has a nursing shortage, so Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas has the perfect solution: imports. His provision in the Senate’s immigration bill would waive the ceiling on the number of foreign nurses who can immigrate. Most come from poorer countries like the Philippines and India.
According to The New York Times, which first reported on this little-noticed provision, the American Hospital Association reports about 118,000 vacancies for nurses, and the federal government projects a nurse shortage of 800,000 by 2020.

Outsourcing is killing plenty of American jobs. But nursing is a good job that can’t be outsourced, because the patients are here. Hey, no problem. We’ll just in-source foreign workers.

Nursing is not one of those jobs you hear about in the immigration debate that “Americans don’t want to do.” Plenty of Americans would love to be nurses. However, as shortages grow, working conditions deteriorate, and nurses suffer burnout.

Nor is nursing a job where low pay discourages Americans from taking the jobs. Hospital-based nurses earn an average of over $60,000. The problem isn’t the pay; it’s the over work. But the deeper cause of the shortage and the speed-up is our failure to invest in educating the next generation of nurses.

Nursing has been one of those areas where immigration-restrictionists have been crying foul for a long time, as hospitals and politicians have worked together to torpedo the domestic workforce and its apparently outrageous intent to take advantage of favorble market conditions. I’m glad Kuttner is against swamping American labor markets with foreign workers. Sadly, only four Democrat senators agree with him, but a majority of Republican senators do, Brownback notwithstanding.

The Senate says Hasta la Vista, Yanquis.

Bruce at mAss Backwards spots an immigration scam that he predicted last week.

What comes as no surprise to me is that one of the six indicted is a man of the Church. I also don’t find it surprising that the alleged scam took advantage of the Catholic Social Services amnesty program (yes, that’s right: The 1986 amnesty is still granting amnesties to illegal aliens).

John at conservative blog Powerline can’t understand why so many people are down on the economy when economic growth in America is high by international and historical standardards.

Let me toss out a few explanations for the widespread pessimism:

1) Energy prices. The three bucks a gallon doesn’t inspire much happiness in most customers, especially when the oil companies say they need to make ginormous profits to be able to invest in new oil fields - only to turn around and drop a four hundred million dollar pay package on a retiring CEO. I guess those $400 million weren’t needed. The oil companies are robbing Peter and Paul to pay Lee. We’re all in this together, but some are more in it than others!

2) Health insurance premiums went up another 9.2% last year. That’s the bad news. The good news, if you will, is that that was less than in 2004.

3) College tuition. Up 5.9% for private colleges in 2005, and 7.1% for public colleges, compared to 2004.

4) Property taxes. Anybody received a property-tax cut recently?

I refuse to believe that the National Football League has contacted Jeb Bush and asked if he’s interested in replacing retiring Paul Tagliabue as league commissioner. It didn’t happen. Bush is imagining things.

Believe it or not but there’s a crisis in Puerto Rico. The American island-protectorate’s legislature has allowed spending to run away in such a manner that it… well, I don’t really know, but it’s apparently real bad. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle has collected a bunch of priceless comments from area Puerto Ricans. Here’s my favorite:

My mother, a retiree and Social Security recipient in Puerto Rico, views this crisis as a cultural and political catastrophe. “We are not going to be the same. Adopting sales taxes will make us like the Americans,” she says. She also thinks it is a trick or a well-thought-out plan to force the island to become a state.

Surely things aren’t going to get that bad.

The federal Incompetence Express chugs along at a steady pace. The depressing debacle de jour is the alleged theft of names, social security numbers and other personal data of 26 million veterans from a “VA employee’s suburban Maryland home.”

How an employee could leave the office with the data is unfathomable. Why an employee would do so is worth pondering.