Remember to enter Amazon via the VDARE.com link and we get a commission on any purchases you make—at no cost to you!
.
Recent News
“Wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor’s War Against White Prosecutors And Racial Reality
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in several speeches she gave in 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2004, according to CNN.[ Sotomayor's 'wise Latina' comment a staple of her speeches, June 8, 2009]
Since Monday, the MSM has been celebrating Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—searching Google News on her name brings up one valentine after another:
- "Discrimination is discrimination, and what Congress said is it continues,"5 hours ago CBS News
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor Explains Class in the US Better Than Anyone, Huffington Post, February 26, 2013
- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: A Proud 'Product of ... Civilrights.org-9 hours ago
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor slams Texas prosecutor for racial remark5. Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2013
- Sotomayor chides prosecutor for 'racially charged' question7. In-Depth, Washington Post, February 25, 2013
- Sotomayor slams prosecutor's racial remarks, Blog -Politico (blog), February 25, 2013
- Sonia Sotomayor Condemns Prosecutor's Racially Charged Question, Huffington Post, February 25, 2013
- Sonia Sotomayor slams prosecutor's moronic strategy, racist remarks, msnNOW, February 25, 2013
What’s this all about?
In a Texas federal drug trial in 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Ponder had asked black defendant Bongani Charles Calhoun on the stand of a situation in which he had found himself,
“You've got African-Americans, you've got Hispanics, you've got a bag full of money. Does that tell you - a light bulb doesn't go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?”
The blacks in the hotel room had been Calhoun’s accomplices. They thought the Hispanics were going to sell them drugs. But the Hispanics were DEA agents. The bag of money came from Calhoun and his black accomplices.
Calhoun claimed to have no knowledge of any drug deal. Of course, he was lying and was duly convicted.
No one saw anything wrong with Ponder’s conduct at the time. And nothing was wrong.
You could say the DEA engaged in “racial profiling”—by having exclusively Hispanic agents play drug dealers. But no one has attacked the agency (yet). Had a racially mixed group of white and Hispanic agents posed as dealers, the buy-and-bust operation would have been a failure because… life is not like that. It would have been a giveaway that the deal was a law enforcement sting.
Indeed, Bongani Charles Calhoun and his crime partners were themselves guilty of racial profiling—that’s why they accepted the Hispanic agents
A VDARE.com reader sent a comment from The Hill
“random minorities with a supposed bag full of money and the guy can't make a reasonable inference? they most likely were not going to buy real estate or deposit it with their stockbroker.” Sotomayor reprimands federal prosecutor for racial remark, By Sam Baker, February 25, 2013.
Eventually, Calhoun and/ or his lawyers sought to convert Ponder’s reality-based question into a racist affront. But by then it was too late to appeal on that basis, and the Supreme Court rejected the argument.
Although Sotomayor acknowledged, the appeal was dead, she attached a statement to the decision, saying the question “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation,” and was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence.” [BONGANI CHARLES CALHOUN v. UNITED STATES (PDF) , U.S. Supreme Court, February 25, 2013.]
Ponder had done no such thing. He had asked a perfectly reasonable question of the defendant, regarding the latter’s state of mind, which would have been formed by valid empirical generalizations which are called, among other things, “stereotypes.”
Some of the earliest valentines were reportorials that seemed to follow the lead of Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday condemned racially charged
Rotten to the Core (Part 3) Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt
Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists "freedom fighters" and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as "terrorists"?
Memo From Middle America | Borders Are Biblical! Evangelicals Resisting Their Pro-Amnesty “Leaders”
Among the many leaders of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform a.k.a. Amnesty movement are evangelical Christians attempting to guilt-trip their congregations. See my article The "Evangelical Immigration Table"—A Treason Lobby Front, which discusses an evangelical group (linked to George Soros) that spearheads the campaign.
Evangelicals don’t form a monolithic entity. There is no hierarchy or central organization that can claim to speak for them. It’s always risky saying “evangelicals” support anything—let alone Amnesty. But that hasn’t stopped various Main Stream Media outlets from proclaiming it in headlines.
In a recent article on the Christian Post website, Napp Nazworth asks On Immigration Reform, Will Evangelicals Follow Their Leaders? February 25, 2013. Nazworth is, of course, referring to pro-Amnesty leaders. He reports research conducted by Dr. Ruth Melkonian-Hoover, [Email her] which she presented at a meeting of the American Enterprise Institute.
Dr. Melkonian-Hoover is not a disinterested observer. She explains her research in a blog entry on G92.org, an evangelical pro-Amnesty website.
If the evangelical community is to be a leading voice in the call for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) [i.e. Amnesty], what steps need to be taken to ignite its voice? In recent years, key leaders within the evangelical community have been instrumental in the support of versions of CIR that attempt to balance moral imperatives of justice and mercy. …Enthusiasm, however, appears to be greater among national leaders than among people “in the pews.”
Evangelical Perspectives on Comprehensive Immigration Reform (Ruth Melkonian-Hoover, G92, December 5, 2012)
So that’s an admission, right off the bat, that the pro-Amnesty drive in evangelical churches is being driven by leaders—not the grassroots.
Dr. Melkonian-Hoover’s research is based on data collected in 2010, before the current Amnesty drive. Recall that data from 2009 shows that evangelicals are more anti-Amnesty than any other major religious grouping. She reports:
- “…white evangelicals see immigrants as more of a threat to both society and the economy than the overall sample of the American population (50.7% versus 35.2%).
- “…only 21.0% of white evangelicals—compared to 40.3% of the overall national sample—believe that immigrants strengthen both the economy and the society.”
But her research also indicates that “…experiences within congregations affect these perceptions.” This is not surprising, given the vast differences among evangelical denominations and congregations.
Dr. Melkonian-Hoover concluded that the key factor was not “frequent church attendance” but “positive messages”. Among regular white evangelical churchgoers whose clergy had discussed immigration, 30.0% reported a positive message and 31.0% a negative one. Among those who were exposed
Happy White Married People Vote Republican, So Why Doesn't The GOP Work On Making White People Happy?
Below is the single most extraordinary chart explaining the results of the recent Presidential election:
It’s widely assumed in the press that victory in the Electoral College is determined by the Gender Gap or by the Rising Tide of Hispanic Voters or whatever. But in fact the relationship between these demographic factors and whether a state votes Republican or Democratic in the four Presidential elections of this century has been relatively weak.
Despite the increasing importance of nonwhite voters, what still determines Presidential elections is a fundamental divide among whites over the very basics of life. Thus, an extremely obscure statistic measuring marriage among younger white women that I debuted here on VDARE.com in December 2004 correlates sensationally with Electoral Votes.
This metric: average years married among white women ages 18 to 44 on the 2000 Census (what I’ll call “Years Married” for short).
“Years Married” had its best won-loss record yet in 2012. Mitt Romney carried 23 of the 24 highest-ranked states. Barack Obama won 25 of the 26 lowest-ranked states.
In my chart above, the length of each state’s bar indicates the average number of years that a white woman 18-44 can expect to be married. Romney’s states are colored in the now traditional Republican red and Obama’s in Democratic blue, with Romney’s share of the two-party vote next to the name of the state.
At the top of the chart is Utah, where white women average 17.0 Years Married and Romney won 75 percent. At the bottom are Massachusetts and California.
In Massachusetts, white women average only 12.2 Years Married and Romney was beaten roughly 5 to 3.
(I left off the District of Columbia, a nonstate that gets three Electoral Votes. White women only average 7.4 Years Married there, and Romney won merely 7 percent in the capital.)
The sole anomalies were Obama capturing Iowa (which is 21st in Years Married) and Romney taking Arizona (41st).
Republicans need to ask themselves seriously why they didn’t win Iowa. Don’t ask: “What’s the Matter with Iowa?” Instead, ask: “What’s the matter with the GOP that they can’t win a respectable state like Iowa?
As for Arizona, I suspect that it’s culturally an exurb of Hollywood, but politically it’s an exurb of Orange County. This may help explain the virulence of the New York Times’ long-running war on Arizona: the Grand Canyon state is supposed to turn into California Jr., not into something new.
More on this Years Married statistic: please note that it is not a measurement of white people getting married in that state. Otherwise, Nevada, with its 24-hour wedding chapels, would be near the top of the list.
Years Married is a measurement of white people being married. Thus, states with high rates of both marriage and divorce, such as Oklahoma (unofficial state song: George Strait’s “All My Exes Live in Texas”), don’t perform quite as well as stable Utah.
The best predictor of Republican performance isn’t the rate of getting married—because if you have a state where a lot of people get married and then they turn around and get divorced, that doesn’t do the Republicans as much good. Divorced white people vote Republican less than 45 percent of the time, while over 63 percent of married white people go GOP. In short, Republicans do well among people who get married and stay married.
To demonstrate how stunningly sorted into red and blue this Years Married graph is, let’s compare it to a more celebrated demographic statistic: Percent Nonwhite.
Lately, everybody has been talking about how the growing nonwhite share of the population hurts the GOP (Peter Brimelow has been talking about this for 16 years).
And, that’s true. It does.
Yet, when you graph it out state by state, the red-blue divide isn’t as clear. At the top of the chart are the whitest states, Maine and Vermont, which Romney lost in landslides. Then West Virginia, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Iowa. Not much of a pattern.
If you look at this chart very carefully, you can see a little more Republican red toward the top and a little more Democratic blue at the bottom…but nothing like the Years Married graph.
This is not at all to say that Percent Nonwhite is unimportant to election results—just that the real world is complicated. Percent Nonwhite correlates with Romney’s share of the vote in the fifty states at -0.32: a low to moderate negative correlation. (It’s stronger if Washington D.C. is included.) This is the kind of hodge-podge you normally see when you graph a single factor that impacts voting.
As I pointed out back in 2000, having a lot of blacks in a state tends to drive whites to the Republicans, while having a lot of Asians seems to make whites more liberal, with Hispanics in-between.
You might think, reasonably enough, that this 2012 Years Married result must be a one-time fluke. Maybe it was the result of the personal characteristics of Mitt Romney, a philoprogenitive Mormon who had 43 years married and 23 descendants?
But in 2008, John McCain carried 19 of the top 20 states on this same metric, while Obama captured the 25 of the bottom 26.
Here’s the 2008 chart:
As I said, I discovered Years Married right after the 2004 election. Unsurprisingly, it worked really well then, too, with George W. Bush winning the top 25 states and John F. Kerry 15 of the bottom 18:
And, finally, there’s 2000, when Bush took the top 25 states and Gore 14 of the bottom 17.
You may be wondering: Why white people? Why not measure Years Married for everybody? The short answer is: that’s what works best.
There is a higher correlation with the Republican candidates’ performance and Years Married among whites than with Years Married among the entire population. Conversely, Years Married among whites correlates better with the GOP’s share of the overall vote than with its share of the white vote.
You could accuse me of “data dredging”—trawling through many possible correlations looking for whatever turns out highest by random luck. But when I dreamed up my Years Married statistic in late 2004, it worked amazing well for two elections. It didn’t project all that well farther back into the past due to Ross Perot’s third party runs in 1992 and 1996. But it has since worked well for two subsequent elections. What more can we ask of a statistic?
It took me a long time to find the single measurement that best correlated with voting by state. Way back in July 2000, I noted here at VDARE.com that the most liberal state, Vermont, had the lowest total fertility while the most conservative state, Utah, had the highest. After the 2000 election, I explained for UPI that Bush had carried the 19 states with the highest white birthrates.
Immediately following the 2004 election, I pointed out in my “Baby Gap” article The American Conservative that the “total fertility rate” among whites was an uncanny predictor of overall voting by state.
Over the next couple of weeks in late 2004, I worked out how to create an age-adjusted measurement of being married. I reported in VDARE.com in “The Marriage Gap” on December 12, 2004 that the rate of being married among white women 18-44 in the 2000 Census had the highest single correlation with voting GOP.
I then fortified my theory by including the impact of geography on home prices—“The Dirt Gap”—which, in turn, determines the “Mortgage Gap.” In places where family formation is more affordable, the “family values” party does better.
Recently, political scientist George Hawley of the University of Houston has confirmed my state-based theory at the county level in a study published in the academic journal Party Politics: Home affordability, female marriage rates and vote choice in the 2000 US presidential election: Evidence from US counties. [February 24, 2011]
After a lengthy review of academic articles on voting, Hawley writes:
The possible relationship between home affordability and aggregate voting trends has largely been ignored up until now by the political science literature, though the topic has been considered by the political journalist Steven Sailer (2008). Sailer hypothesized that “affordable family formation”—which he argued was closely related to housing costs – was a key difference between majority-Republican states and majority-Democrat states. Sailer went on to conclude that the relative affordability of housing accounted for the differing typical political behavior within various large cities. Sailer suggested that the relative costliness of owning a home in America’s large coastal cities, such as Los Angeles, led to later family formation, which partially explained the greater support for Democratic politicians in those cities and regions. In contrast, inland American cities like Dallas are able to expand outward all-but indefinitely, which keeps housing costs low and subsequently [makes] such cities more attractive to young families.
Hawley went on to find a statistically significant effect at the county level in the 2000 election. In all likelihood, other scholars could find similar county results in the three subsequent elections. (In other words, if you are an academic social scientist searching for an important result to publish, check out 2004, 2008, and 2012.)
It’s worth looking at
Peter Brimelow Answers A High School Student: "I Believe My Children Will At Least Exempt Me From 'The Curses Of Those Who Come After.”
Peter Brimelow writes: Many minor public figures often complain that students email wanting them to write their papers for them. But actually I found these questions posed recently by this high school student—who does exist, her teachers assured me!—quite stimulating. Note, however, that she confuses illegal aliens with citizens, which I think is evidence of the Orwellian pitch to which Main Stream Media rewriting of this issue has now risen.
How long have you been involved with immigration issues?
I really started thinking about immigration in my first year in college in England, as a result of Enoch Powell's 1968 (aargh!) speech on immigration into the UK, in my opinion one of the greatest in the language.
Subsequently, I observed the contradictions of US policy as a student at Stanford and an immigrant myself, first to Canada and then to the U.S. This is discussed in my 1992 National Review cover story Time To Rethink Immigration, sometimes credited with restarting the modern debate, which grew into my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.
What role, if any, do you play in the immigration process?
Immigration turns out to be a Third Rail Issue in American politics and any dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. After Bill Buckley betrayed the patriotic immigration reform cause in 1998 and purged National Review of immigration patriots, there was literally no outlet in the Main Stream Media for facts and analysis antithetical to the immigration enthusiast consensus. But the internet set us free and we launched VDARE.com on Christmas Eve, 1999.
Do you feel it is too difficult to become a legal citizen in the United States?
Yes and no. The legal immigration process is extremely complex and cumbersome—and also suppresses, since the 1965 Act, immigration from the traditional sources of Northern Europe and Canada. On the other hand, the absolute number of immigrants is far too high, especially given current unemployment rates
What are your thoughts on the country's current immigration policies?
Madness, both in quantity and quality (skill levels, assimilability etc.) Also a serious moral hazard, in that very large numbers of U.S. residents began their career here by breaking the law.
Do you believe undocumented immigrants fuel the economy by being consumers in the states?
In fact, there is a ton of evidence that they are a net drain because of the welfare state, especially when their anchor babies are considered. As Milton Friedman said, you can't have mass immigration and a welfare state.
What do you see as being the resolution for the yearly rising number of undocumented citizens in the country?
“Undocumented citizens”? They’re not citizens, they’re illegal aliens. (Of course, George W. Bush used to make the same mistake).
The rational resolution is
The White House Court Jesters Of Shamnesty And Sequester
Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.
President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place.
Sessions For President? Immigration Patriot Faces Down Reconquistas
Grim times call for grim men
From my vantage point observing the sewer run of 2013 Amnesty War news, it has become clear that Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has emerged as this year’s patriot champion.
Sessions is not only excellent on Amnesty itself, he is forceful and articulate in denouncing the stealth GOP Establishment agenda of accelerated legal immigration. How many other Republicans would dare say of the treasonous U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
The Chamber’s primary goal has never been to establish a lawful immigration system and secure our borders, but to get as much cheap labor as possible—regardless of how it impacts American workers, legal immigrants, and taxpayers in general.
Sen. Jeff Sessions slams immigration pact supported by GOP House majority leader, [by Neil Munro, The Daily Caller, February 22, 2013].
Of course it takes integrity to defy the Main Stream Media (MSM)/ Conservatism Inc. consensus—especially when the payoff for Treason is, as now, unprecedentedly large. (You there, Jim DeMint?
But what has really impressed me is the evidence that Sessions has the moral fiber to withstand the most extreme form of Reconquista mau-mauing face to face as vividly demonstrated in Latinos plead with Sen. Jeff Sessions asking him to help them and their families By Charles J. Dean, (email him) AL.com, February 20, 2013.
Memo From Middle America | Watch Out America! More Latino Legerdemain Coming To Washington This Week!
[lej-er-duh-meyn]
noun 1. sleight of hand.
2. trickery; deception.
3. any artful trick.
Do you believe that American immigration policy should be decided by American citizens?
You do? You’re behind the times! In recent years, foreign governments have taken a strong interest in our immigration policies and are actively meddling in them. That’s particularly true now with the current debate over “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. amnesty.
Mexico is the main culprit, of course. See my recent article Mexican Foreign Ministry Meddling In Amnesty Debate—Where Is U.S. Government (And GOP)?
But Mexico is not the only case of Latino legerdemain—light-fingered Latin American countries attempting to steal America from under our noses.
For example, three Central American countries—Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras—have teamed up to push for amnesty for their illegal aliens on U.S. soil.
Here at VDARE.COM we’ve been writing about foreign meddling for years. The Mainstream Media might catch up to us if it didn’t have another agenda. But we’re thankful for anything—this month The Hill ran a story headlined Foreign governments lobbying hard in favor of immigration reform (by Julian Pecquet, February 7 , 2013]:
Foreign governments are working hard to shape the debate on immigration reform as momentum for a comprehensive bill builds in Congress. While the issue routinely comes up in talks between foreign leaders and the executive branch, embassy officials are ramping up their outreach to Congress and the White House in order to take advantage of the best hope for reform in years. A number of countries with significant immigration ties to the United States—notably Mexico, Ireland and several Central American nations—have been making their concerns known while doing their best to avoid meddling in domestic affairs.
The Hill article reported that Mexico’s new ambassador Eduardo Medina-Mora (see my article linked above) is already in the thick of it, having had “a number of meetings with the administration” on immigration; and that the Mexican ambassador “is expected to meet with lawmakers shortly as legislation begins to take form.”
Of course, these foreign meddlers have allies in the U.S. Congress:
Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), a leader on immigration reform [with an F- grade from Numbers USA , see VDARE.COM file here], said he’d had “conversations
Funny Thing: Anti-German Racism In Czech Election Doesn’t Bother U.S. Main Stream Media
The outcome of the Czech Republic’s first direct presidential election on January 25th was tipped by base appeals to ethnic loyalty, but the Main Stream Media (MSM) outside the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria has almost completely ignored this fact. The reason: The ethnic hatred was directed not against a group that “matters”—like Jews or Gypsies—but against Germans.
A wrong done to Germans matters as little internationally as a wrong done to the historic American nation matters in U.S. public debate.
It should surprise no one that ethnicity is a powerful factor in Czech politics. The Czech Republic has a dismal record regarding its treatment of Gypsies (called Roma by Czechs and human rights NGOs) maintaining separate schools for Roma children and even having built a wall in one town to segregate the Roma ghetto from the majority population. The Czech Republic’s record on property restitution for Holocaust survivors is also nothing to be proud of—always a cheerful willingness to do so, but seldom any concrete action.
But Germans are a specialty of the Czech Republic: it expelled around 3,500,000 (in words: three and one half million) Czech citizens of German ethnicity in 1945-48. About 240,000 Germans died or were killed during what Germans around the world refer to as “die Vertreibung” (The Expulsion).
The legal bases for The Expulsion and seizure of all personal and real property without payment were the “Benes Decrees,”—which also amnestied anyone who committed any violent or non-violent illegal act, including murder or rape, against the Germans. The Expulsion depopulated the Sudetenland, the Czech border areas next to Germany and Austria, and offered ethnic Czechs free, fully-furnished real estate just for the taking.
After the first round of the 2013 Presidential election, the field of candidates was whittled down to two: former Prime Minister Milos Zeman, a Socialist with good anti-Communist Czech credentials, and Foreign Minister Karl (or Karel) Schwarzenberg, a conservative member of an old, ethnic-German (but anti-Nazi) noble family and an early ally of former president Vaclav Havel. Zeman was favored due to economic conditions and various scandals in the government, but the race was expected to be tight.
In the course of a January 17th debate between the two men, the Benes Decrees came up. Schwarzenberg, a prominent supporter of human rights and himself an exile for 40 years, remarked that “from today’s point of view” the Benes decrees and the expulsion of the Germans were a human rights violation that, had they taken place today, would have landed then-President Benes in front of the Hague Tribunal for crimes against humanity. [Beneš Decrees become campaign weapon, January 22, 2013]
Zeman wasted no time beginning what Czech, Austrian, German and Swiss papers have described as a dirty and dishonest campaign. He was no stranger to using the German issue to his political benefit, having referred to the Germans as a “fifth column” during his time as Prime Minister—a comment
“Yes, This Is War.” When Blacks Say It, Maybe Whites Should Take Them Seriously?
On January 7, four white women—Rebeika Powell and Kayetie Powell-Melchor; and Julie Jackson and Misty Nunley, pictured above —were slaughtered in a Tulsa apartment, allegedly by two black brothers, James and Cedric Poore, pictured below, who appeared in court today [Hearings Set For Brothers Charged In 4 Tulsa Deaths, by Russell Hulstine, NewsOn6.com February 22, 2013].
Needless to say, the national Main Stream Media (MSM) is refusing to report this story, just as it refused to report previous black-on-white Tulsa atrocities within the last two years: gentle young sweethearts Carissa Horton and Ethan Nichols; Dorothy and Bob Strait, who had been married for 60 years; and retiree William Zachary.
Local responses to the slaughter of the four white women were also bizarre in ways that have become banal in the age of racial socialism. Mayor Dewey Bartlett blamed “poverty” and “out-of-state apartment owners.”
Murder victims Carissa Horton, 18, and Ethan Nichols, 21.
Jerard Davis and Darren Price have been charged; each says the other pulled the trigger.
Tulsa murder victims Bob and Nancy Strait
Tyrone Woodfork, charged with the first-degree rape and murder of Nancy Strait etc.; the authorities “disappeared” the murder of Bob Strait, who hung on for weeks before dying from a brutal beating, declaring it to be of natural causes
What’s going on here? I can’t improve on the description at the Facebook page “We Are All Chris Dorner,” set up to celebrate the black ex-LAPD spree killer: “Yes, this is war”. (Christopher Dorner Update: Social media support seen for ex-cop accused of killing spree, February 11, 2013)
Suits me. I consider myself a war correspondent. Since 1990, I’ve been covering America’s longest-running war: The race war that blacks have been waging on whites.
I know; I’m crazy. Paranoid. Delusional. Leftist whites—not to mention blacks—will respond, “There is no race war, except for the one whites are waging on blacks.” Neocons will say, “Race relations are better than ever, except for demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.”
But I have a peculiar habit. When someone tells me he’s going to kill me, I take him seriously.
In 1972, when I was 14, a black boy a year younger than me, John Henry Wright, declared:
“We gon’ kill all the white people.”
Even me?
“Even you, Stix.”
I was then the token white in a small black gang led by Alan “Pancho” Hankins, with John Henry Wright and Arthur Harris. Our main pastime was shoplifting. The other fellows would act as decoys in Waldbaum’s, leading store security astray, while I’d walk out with 20-pound turkeys and such.
Pancho was big on sadism—and masochism. One time he made me beat
Comprehensive Immigration Reformers' Hysterical and Hypocritical Campaign To Link Opponents To Abortion (Again)
As VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow noted in his roundup of the current Amnesty push, the most important thing to keep in mind is that “We’ve been here before—several times.” Thus the Main Stream Media (MSM) has recently been hyping as news the attempts of La Raza Republicans to con gullible pro-lifers into thinking that supporting immigration control means you support eugenic sterilization and China’s policy of forced abortions. But this is simply an old smear recycled.
In fact, pro-amnesty Conservatism Inc. types have repeatedly tried to claim immigration patriots have a secret abortion/eugenics agenda:
- In 2004, Jason Riley who would later author Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, published a hysterical Op Ed attacking FAIR and Center for Immigration Studies of, among other things, being a “big fan of China's one-child policy” who have “made common cause with radical environmentalists and zero-population-growth fanatics on the leftist fringe.”[ GOP Nativists Tarnish Reagan's 'Shining City', Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2004]
- In 2006, La Raza Republican Chris Cannon faced an immigration patriot challenger in the Republican Primary. And, in addition to pretending to oppose amnesty, he also accused his opponent of having “connections to people and organizations that advocate anti-life measures such as euthanasia, sterilization, population control and abortion.” INFORMATION ABOUT ANTI-IMMIGRATION GROUPS, Chris Cannon website, Archive.org link, captured August 2, 2006.
- In 2007, when Tom Tancredo was about to enter the presidential race, the American Spectator published an anonymous blog stating “it’s not clear Tancredo is in line with the mainstream, social conservative wing of the GOP he seeks to align himself with” because of his ties to FAIR and other groups that are tied to people who support abortion rights.[Tancredo’s Dubious Allies, By The Prowler, January 16, 2007] The extraordinary mendacity of this charge can be judged from the fact that Tancredo had a 100% voting record from the National Right to Life committee.
Now, Mario H. Lopez of the Republican Hispanic Leadership Fund has written (or more likely put his name on) a lengthy piece in the Human Life Review, entitled “Hijacking Immigration.”
To give Lopez (or his ghostwriter) his due, this attack, with 197 footnotes and nearly 10,000 words, is much more comprehensive than the previous attacks. But while Lopez has more documentation, his argument basically the same guilt-by-association trick: many board members, former board members and/or donors involved in FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA, including VDARE.com writer Don Collins, Sally Epstein, Governor Richard Lamm, and—the ultimate bogeyman of them all—John Tanton!!! have supported environmental conservation and abortion rights in addition to their support of patriotic immigration reform.
Nowhere in Lopez’ entire piece does he even suggest that any of these organizations have ever promoted legalized abortion and birth control—or any indeed other policy other than limiting immigration.
However, the MSM, which usually presents the Religious Right and Grover Norquist as the root of all evil in America, has done its job in hyping this supposed controversy. The Washington Post published
John Derbyshire On Amity Shlaes On Calvin Coolidge: Why So Little Mention Of The 1924 Immigration Act?
Perhaps as a reaction to the morbidly obese statism of early 21st-century U.S. federal governments, there is a modest upswell of interest in Calvin Coolidge, who of all presidents in the previous century was the most dogged and unwavering in pursuit of lower federal expenditures and debt.
Last week saw the publication of Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge, which I have just been reading. Next month comes Charles C. Johnson’s Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America's Most Underrated President, which I have not yet seen. The main subject of this column will be Ms. Shlaes’ book. (Full disclosure: I am the author of a novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream.)
Coolidge was Warren Harding’s Vice President. He succeeded to the presidency on Harding’s sudden death in August, 1923. Coolidge and his wife were vacationing at the time in the remote Vermont farming hamlet where he had been raised. The thirtieth president was sworn in by his father, a notary public, in Coolidge, Sr.’s living-room, by the light of a kerosene lamp—electricity had not yet reached the village.
Coolidge served out Harding’s term, then easily won a term of his own in a three-way contest elegantly described by Garland Tucker in his book The High Tide of American Conservatism. But, although successful and popular, Coolidge declined to run for a second full term in 1928, for reasons that remain opaque in spite of his having given over eight pages of his autobiography to “explaining” them.
Amity Shlaes’ book concentrates on Coolidge’s budgetary and fiscal policies, which were very astute, and delivered great prosperity and social peace. This all built on foundations laid by Harding, who had created a Budget Bureau (now the OMB) and settled the budget process in the form we still use today, more or less, via the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.
The first Director of the Budget Bureau was Charles G. Dawes, later Coolidge’s Vice President. Dawes—if you are conservative, prepare to swoon—created a Federal Liquidation Board: “an entity whose entire purpose [Ms. Shlaes tells us] was to shutter government and military offices.”
Be still, my heart!
Coolidge continued these policies of federal reduction to such a point that his success generated problems of its own. Just as the trick of being a medieval monarch
National Data | “STEM Shortage” Shouters Suppress Salient Statistics
Not so long ago “STEM” was an obscure acronym. Today everyone in official Washington seems obsessed with the (alleged) shortage of American STEM—“science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”—workers, a shortage that, we are told, could destroy what is left of U.S. economic competitiveness.
That this problem exists is one of the few things Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on. A bipartisan consensus also extends to the remedy: more foreign workers. The STEM Act, proposed by congressional Republicans late last year, would have shifted visas currently allocated to the diversity lottery to a new class of green card for foreign students with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math. In 2011, there were 286,066 foreign STEM students in the U.S.—83% of them from Asia. [As STEM Act Vote Nears, Some Experts Dispute High Tech Worker Shortage, By Soni Sangha, Fox News Latino, November 28, 2012]
The bill did not pass, but the President furthered the cause by ordering Homeland Security to allow STEM students to stay in the U.S. an additional 17 months. All this on top of Mr. Obama’s executive order, issued shortly before the election, forbidding DHS from deporting illegal aliens who came here as children.
There’s something wrong with this picture. When a commodity is in short supply, its price rises, thereby increasing supply, reducing demand, and eventually eliminating the shortage. We’ve see this in oil, where sharply higher prices triggered development of new U.S. fields, reduced consumption, and turned the U.S. from a net importer to one of the world’s largest oil exporters.
Workers with STEM degrees do earn more than those
