A reader who was trying to call his Senator’s office to talk about the Senate Sellout found that her staff was asking him for the bill number. (This Senator is Hillary Rodham Clinton, junior Senator from the State of New York.)

I don’t know why they don’t know it automatically, it’s probably the biggest thing to hit Senate offices in a generation, but for those of you who don’t know, it’s S. 1348, [PDF (large--790 pp.)HTML]

There’s no companion House bill yet, and given the public’s reaction to this, there may never be.

In my previous blog entry I wrote about the U.S. National Cemetery in Mexico City and the planned Memorial Day ceremony there.

As a follow-up, I’d like to link to an article which appeared the day after Memorial Day, reporting on the ceremony held there.

U.S. ambassador Tony Garza participated by laying the memorial wreath, and reading the Gettysburg Address.

An American Legion post in Mexico City participated in the ceremony, by trooping, posting and retiring the colors. Post #2 commander John Lambuth gave a speech, remembering the veterans of the post who had passed away the previous year.

It’s good to know that there are Americans in Mexico City taking care of our cemetery.

Don Thompsan writes at Associated Press

Every 30 minutes, day and night, guards walk the tiers of the isolation unit at California State Prison, Sacramento, checking inmates to make sure they don’t kill themselves.

The guards have been doing so since October, when the prison system instituted a series of reforms to cut the high rate of inmate suicides. The steps were prompted by a federal judge’s finding that a disproportionate number of suicides occurred in the isolation cells used to segregate inmates for disciplinary or other reasons.

The measures, which include screening inmates for potential suicidal tendencies and training guards how to intervene, appear to be making a difference.

California is among the national leaders in both exodus of US citizens-and prisoner abuse(which is strongly linked to prisoner suicide). Could this have anything to do with the high levels of immigration in that state?

Bill Gates has lots of money to get his point of view to the public. Who speaks for these troubled Americans? I’m not saying prisoners should be coddled, but even authoritarian governments like Singapore don’t appear to have this problem.

The New Mexico governor and Democratic Presidential candidate has an unusual background — New England high WASP and Mexican. His grandfather was a Boston naturalist of Mayflower descent who collected specimens in Central America and married a Mexican lady from a prestigious family of Oaxaca. He became a planter and rancher in Nicaragua, and, according to the candidate’s autobiography Between Worlds, “fathered children by four different women in Mexico and Central America.”

Richardson’s father was born in Nicaragua and grew up in Latin America and on the Eastern Seaboard, including Boston, Vermont, and Fisher’s Island in Long Island Sound, home to an ultra-exclusive Charles Blair Macdonald golf course. During the 1913 Tufts-Army football game, he tackled cadet Dwight Eisenhower, breaking his leg. Richardson’s dad went to work for what is now Citicorp in Italy and married an Italian colonel’s daughter in Genoa. He was the top Citicorp banker in Mexico City from 1929-1956 and married his Mexican secretary (making Richardson 3/4th Mexican, 1/4th WASP). Richardson’s father sent his pregnant mother to Pasadena, CA so that Richardson would be born in America (making him eligible for the Presidency).

Richardson was raised by his parents in Mexico City for 13 years before being sent to prep school in Massachusetts. Richardson then attended private Tufts U. as a legacy, to which his father had donated generously. There he majored in international affairs at the Fletcher School. He married a Massachusetts girl of (I believe) Irish and Jewish descent.

Richardson went to work as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. In 1978, Richardson carpetbagged his way to heavily Hispanic New Mexico and became a professional politician. He has held a variety of posts such as Congressman, Energy Secretary, UN Ambassador, and the Clinton Administration designated negotiator with foreign dictators. He is now a second term governor of New Mexico.

Presumably, his career has been helped along by being a twofer — he’s one of these new-fangled Mexican-Americans and he’s a traditional preppie WASP Old Boy at the same time!

Richardson’s resume resembles the elder George Bush’s — lots of impressive sounding jobs, both in a Southwestern state and in the corridors of power of the Eastern Establishment, but nobody’s too sure whether he did a good job in any of them.

On paper, he sounds like a plausible Democratic nominee in 2008. To win, the Democrats don’t seem to need to gamble on a high-risk candidate like the irascible Hillary or the sometimes brilliant but moody and self-absorbed Obama. They just need a guy who won’t blow it for them. And yet, Richardson’s candidacy doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

That Richardson is 3/4th Hispanic has generated only a tiny fraction of the frenzy of interest that Barack Obama being 1/2 black has generated, which fits my theory that most Americans barely notice mestizos compared to blacks, especially if they don’t have a Spanish surname. Americans really aren’t very interested in Mexicans, while, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, they find blacks fascinating.

Obama, who wrote a 442 page thematic autobiography about his being psychologically tortured by his lifelong resentment of his mother’s race, is praised by people who obviously haven’t read his book for being the “post-racial” man “comfortable in his own skin” who “transcends race.” Ironically, all those phrases would seem to fit the sunny, glad-handing Richardson far better than they apply to the race-obsessed Obama. And yet, while so many people credulously project their racial fantasies onto Obama and pay no attention to what the man actually wrote at age 33, Richardson, when anybody notices him or his ancestry at all, seems to attract suspicion and irritation, as on Meet the Press on Sunday, when Tim Russert grilled Richardson in a way that he wouldn’t dare with the widely-worshipped Obama.

Running for President, Richardson can’t seem to figure out what to do about his dual ethnicity. His whole career, it’s been this nice little advantage for him, but now he’s running for President and it’s taking on this symbolic importance that he can’t quite figure out how to spin. Sometimes Richardson sounds as ethnocentric as Cruz Bustamante, the centrist Democratic Lt. Governor of California who could have gotten himself elected California Governor in the three-way recall election of 2003 against the Republicans Schwarzenegger and McClintock, but, for some inexplicable reason, decided to campaign for Gobernador de Alta California instead. (Perhaps he believed Karl Rove’s hype about the size of the Latino vote?) Bustamante ended up turning an early lead in the polls over Arnold into a 17 point loss.

Other times, Richardson sounds like the Washington insider he is.

He ends up seeming phony, which, combined with some veracity problems (e.g., he always claimed he was drafted by a big league baseball team, but he wasn’t) and New Mexico’s reputation as the Louisiana of the desert when it comes to crooked politicos, isn’t helping his campaign.

The only other prominent American I can think of who was high WASP and Mexican (assuming the President’s nephew George P. Bush is not a prominent American yet) was the CIA’s paranoid genius spymaster James Jesus Angleton. (Matt Damon played him as a dull WASP in last year’s oddly intentionally-less-interesting-than-reality Robert De Niro movie “The Good Shepherd.”) Angleton’s father was a cavalry officer in Pershing’s 1917 punitive expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa and his mother was a 17-year-old Mexican society beauty. Angleton was raised mostly in Italy where his father was an NCR executive and attended prep school in England.

Many residents of Utah, it seems, think like Paul Nachman about the need to tell their Senators – Bennett and Hatch - how bad the Bush Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill is.

Angry Utahns by the hundreds are calling, e-mailing and faxing Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, demanding he oppose an immigration bill that would provide legal status to an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants…
In the past week, Bennett staffers have answered about 1,000 phone calls, and 95 percent of them denounce the fragile bipartisan immigration bill.
Hatch hasn’t said how he will vote, but his office has been hit by a similar deluge of voters arguing against the immigration compromise.
“The intensity of the callers is tremendous,” said spokeswoman Heather Barney. “Many are very very angry.”

Sen. Bennett sides with Bush on immigration reform by Matt Canham The Salt Lake City Tribune May 30 2007

Bennett is sniggering at them:

Those voters generally receive a coy answer.
“My public position is that I’m reviewing the amendments,” Bennett said Tuesday.
It’s a ploy meant to defuse emotion. But here’s what Bennett’s staffers are not saying: he plans to vote for it.

His stated reason displays staggering economic illiteracy:

Our economy is dependent on labor that is coming from illegal immigrants and that is true of St. George,” Bennett said.

(St George is a particularly rapidly growing part of Utah)

Bennett uses St. George as an example of a nationwide issue. He says if the government forcibly removed undocumented workers “you would throw the United States into a serious economic recession,” he said

So America never prospered before being flooded with poorly educated Hispanics? In fact, of course, VDARE.COM’s Ed Rubenstein has shown that the economic contribution of illegals is trivial.

In a sense, though, Bennett’s blinkered focus on business probably does explain his arrogant rejection of his Constituents’ concerns: he is following the money. In the interview he gives a hint he will not run again in 2010 (he was born in 1933): no doubt thoughts of lucrative sinecures are exerting their magic.

As so often, the comment thread produces incisive input:

GI MOM: 5/30/2007 7:21:00 AM

Most the new people in St.George are from Cal. They moved there because they can no-longer stand the illegals massive takeover. People in St.George do not want ANY illegals, and they also are against the unchecked building. Bennett will not be getting their votes.

A lady called Mary Jessel has posted a superb, detailed discussion too long to quote here.

And an anonymous post raises a sadly relevant issue

This is hardly surprising as most Mormon politicians have been pro-illegal immigration for years. Going down the list; Cannon, Hatch, Flake, Bennett, Huntsman, Leavitt are all to the left on immigration compared to most Republicans, and even some Democrats….that is why Utah, one of the “reddest” voting states in the union, has one of the most liberal set of laws with regard to illegal immigration.

A point very eloquently made to me when I last blogged on another Mormon, Jeff Flake. As I said when Congressman Chris Cannon survived his Primary challenge

How strange it is that Mormonism, that most American of religions, might well be causative in the Nation’s fall.

In 2004, financial writer Annie Jacobsen reported on a terrifying flight on Northwest Airline from Detroit to Los Angeles, in which 13 Syrians behaved as if they were about to blow up the plane. She wrote about the experience on the financial website Women’s Wall Street in what turned into a series of columns about the terrorist behavior going on in the skies.

For her responsible reportage about the situation of continuing danger from Muslim terrorists on airplanes, she was slammed by government mouthpieces as a silly and hysterical woman. However, she received numerous communications from security personnel, flight crews and other passengers who concurred that what she saw was real. Her series of columns grew into a book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again..

Now the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security that the Syrians were indeed engaged in a terrorist probe.

“Agency management was not only covering up numerous probes and dry-run encounters from Congress and other federal law-enforcement agencies, it was also hiding these incidents from their own flying air marshals,” said P. Jeffrey Black, an air marshal stationed in Las Vegas. [...]

“One man rushed to the front of the plane appearing to head for the cockpit. At the last moment, he veered into the first-class lavatory, remaining in it for about 20 minutes,” according to the report. One man carried a McDonald’s bag into the lavatory, and “another man, upon returning from the lavatory, reeked strongly of what smelled like toilet bowl chemicals.”

“Some men hand signaled each other. The passenger who entered the lavatory with the McDonald’s bag made a thumbs-up signal to another man upon returning from the lavatory. Another man made a slashing motion across his throat, appearing to say ‘No.’ ”
[Report confirms terror dry run, Washington Times 5/30/07]

Continuing on the subject of how well the government is protecting us, we learned more today about the man with drug-resistant tuberculosis who resisted mild entreaties from public health officials that he not travel by airplane. (See my article The X-Ray Files: How Political Correctness Is Destroying Effective Public Health Policy.)

Dr Julie Gerberding, director of the Center for Disease Control, said “I think we were surprised that the patient had left the country.”

Lou Dobbs opened his program with the story, emphasizing the failure of security agencies to corral one easily identifiable person.

DOBBS: Good evening, everybody. Health officials tonight are struggling to find people who traveled on two trans-Atlantic flights with an American infected with a highly dangerous and contagious form of T.B. The man is being treated in a hospital in Atlanta for what is called extensive drug-resistant T.B. The man drove back into this country from Canada after flying to Montreal from the Czech Republic.

Customs and Border Patrol agents were on alert for this man, but he was still able to cross our border undetected and not stopped. Elizabeth Cohen tonight reports from Atlanta on the global investigation into this T.B. scare. Jeanne Meserve reports on our apparently broken system that does not permit tracking international travelers with dangerous diseases almost six year after September 11th.

Security concerns of various sorts will be made far more complicated by Washington’s amnesty scheme. Today’s reports of performance are not reassuring, to say the least.

The results of 159 years of Hispanic assimilation in New Mexico: The commentariat is laughing at Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson for being humiliated by Tim Russert on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to immigration. Last week this is what all the newspapers said. “The Senate’s compromise immigration bill is forcing the presidential candidates to confront a divisive issue. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson praised the bill. ‘This legislation makes a good start” towards “re-securing our Southern border.’” A few days later this headline appeared. “Hispanic presidential hopeful confronts immigration debate. On Wednesday Richardson said that after read[ing] the immigration bill in detail, he decided to oppose it, saying the measure placed too great a burden on immigrants, tearing apart families that wanted to settle in the U.S., creating a permanent tier of second-class immigrant workers and financing a border fence. This is fundamentally flawed in its current form and I would oppose it. We need bipartisanship, we also need legislation that’s compassionate. I’m not sure this is it.’” How can you be for it and 72 hours later against it?

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, no, this is what happened. I was announcing for president, and the day before, I saw a summary of a bill that had been proposed in the Senate. … The bill is then presented, and I read it the next day, and it contained some problems.

He realized after reading the the 300+ page bill that his initial reaction had been wrong? What a flip-flopper!

(Of course, I don’t actually believe Richardson read the bill. I’m sure he just heard more about it. And the reasons he says he changed his mind — e.g., the bill cuts back on extended family reunification for legal immigrants — are mostly bad ones. But, this controversy over a politician changing his mind on an incredibly complex piece of proposed legislation after 72 hours of reflection illustrates the jaw-dropping irresponsibility of the prestige press when it comes to immigration. You aren’t supposed to think about immigration — that’s the mark of a yahoo. You are just supposed to instantaneously react emotionally in order to show whether your are a Good Person or a Bad Person.)

MR. RUSSERT: But let’s go through the resume a little bit. First, there’s governor of New Mexico. As you well know, they rank states in a whole variety of categories from one being the best, 50th being the worst. This is New Mexico’s scorecard, and you are the governor. Percent of people living below the poverty line, you’re 48. Percent of children below, 48. Median family income, 47. People without health insurance, 49. Children without health insurance, 46. Teen high school dropouts, 47. Death rate due to firearms, 48. Violent crime rate, 46. You’re the very bottom of all those statistics of all 50 states, and you’re the governor for five years.

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, Tim, let me just say that we’ve made enormous progress in all of those areas. [More]

He’s been governor for five whole years and he hasn’t yet turned turn New Mexicans into Minnesotans? What a loser!

The press is obsessed with political horse races and bored with long-term realities. Yet, the pervasive, unchanging mediocrity of New Mexico sheds important light on the issue of the day, immigration.

Despite being one of the four border states, there is remarkably little immigration from Old Mexico into New Mexico. Why not? In large part, because it’s already filled with Latinos, many of who trace their ancestry in New Mexico back before the U.S. seized it in the Mexican-American war. After 159 years in the United States of America, they still haven’t much assimilated to American standards. What does that say about the prospects for assimilation of newcomers from Mexico?

Jim Pinkerton writes in Newsday:

‘Those who are looking to find fault with this bill will always be able to find something.” That was George W. Bush at his press conference Thursday, defending his proposed immigration legislation. He didn’t quite say to critics, “Bring ‘em on” - but was close enough to get this critic going.

Of course, the president immediately went on to laud the “comprehensive” virtues of his bill, urging its congressional enactment. But if we examine the legislation, we will indeed see plenty of faults - such that “comprehensive” becomes a catalog of costly flaws. As the old business joke goes, “We lose money on each sale - but that’s OK, because we make it up on volume!” [Poor immigrants end up being expensive May 29, 2007]

Dr. David Yeagley has a new book out, Bad Eagle: The Rantings of a Conservative Comanche available to be bought.

It features writings from around the web in handy paperback form, including some of his work for VDARE.com.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy is surprised at the level of rhetoric displayed by President Bush in a speech attacking critics of the immigration bill:

Those determined to find fault with this [immigration] bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don’t like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people.

Professor Kerr says

Just to be clear, what I find notable — and very unfortunate — is the use of this kind of language coming from the President of the United States. I realize that it’s easy to find such rhetoric online, and that some columnists use it. But it’s different coming from the President of the United States, who deserves to be held to a much higher standard.

In the comments, some of his readers search for historical parallels, but the main thing, noticed by one commenter, is that this is a case of a President attacking not his political enemies, or those who he perceives as the nation’s enemies. That would be almost normal, like FDR talking about “malefactors of great wealth” or calling isolationists “The New Copperheads.” Who Bush is attacking is his base. Even people who’ve supported Bush through thick and thin are starting to think he’s losing it, including David Frum, author in 2003 of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush and of course, author of the 2003 NRO article Unpatriotic Conservatives, asks on NRO if it’s “really smart to abuse“ people who been loyal to Bush, and Jay Nordlinger says, also on NRO

A little advice for President Bush: Watch your rhetoric against opponents of the immigration bill. Be understanding of those who oppose it. Why? Well, in part, because they include some of the people who still love you — and that band is not getting any bigger.

That’s what’s so amazing–if President Bush was attacking us, that would make sense, but he’s actually attacking those people who support him.