You should buy my book. Then you won’t be stunned the next time.

From Nicholas Stix’s blog, a letter from one of the Heretical 2, who are seeking asylum in the US against political persecution in Britain. The point is that Britain’s anti-free-speech laws involve violation of basic human rights of the kind that are still protected by the First Amendment. One of the victims writes of his US Immigration Court experience:

The judge [immigration judge Rose Peters] doesn’t ignore the possibility of imprisonment for political speech: she supports it. To quote from her ruling:

According to evidence presented before the Court, Applicants have been arrested, tried, and convicted under legitimate laws of the United Kingdom. Generally, legitimate prosecution cannot be considered persecution for asylum purposes…In the present case, Applicants were tried and convicted by a highly developed and sophisticated legal system. As such, it cannot be said that their conviction was arbitrary or lacking due process of law. (pp. 7-8) [Emphasis added.]

Michelle Myers, the DA [federal prosecutor], made no attempt to rebut any of our claims about persecution: her entire reply consisted of a report on the European Community’s efforts to crush free speech. She and the judge were obviously fully in support. I repeatedly made the point in my testimony that one of the chief reasons for our flight was to warn Americans of the implications of our conviction for speech on an American-based site: Namely, that American citizens too were liable to arrest and imprisonment if they entered British/European jurisdiction. The judge and DA are obviously quite happy for that to take place. Free speech and free enquiry are white male values and both are marked for destruction under the present Marxist diversitoids. That’s not to say all white males support free speech or all non-whites and non-males oppose it, simply that it will not survive if white males lose power.

Can we have another cheer for diversity?

INDUSTRY, California - Officials from several area restaurants have made citizen’s arrests on 27 day laborers at the Home Depot on Gale Avenue in Industry, authorities said Thursday.

Officials from businesses near the Home Depot at Gale and Fullerton Road near Rowland Heights recently complained that laborers were urinating in public and harassing customers in the parking lot. [...]

The General Manager of Frisco’s Diner denied being one of the restaurants involved in the citizen’s arrest, but he said people from his store have complained about day laborers.

“They are kind of an eyesore in front of our business,” said General Manager Frank Millan. “I have customers that are sometimes afraid to go out to their cars because (laborers) are surrounding the area. It is bad for all businesses around here.” [Citizens arrest 27 day laborers at Rowland Heights-area Home Depot]

As I mentioned, Tyler Cowen of Marginal Review spent some time recently tap dancing around his reader’s impassioned question: “Why is Steve Sailer wrong?”

However, wouldn’t the more fundamental question be:

“Is Steve Sailer wrong?”

In other words, the reader was asking not for objectivity but for rationalization to quell his Doubts. I suspect Tyler’s answer (basically, it’s all very complicated, and, besides, Steve Sailer is a bad person) and the pummeling Cowen took in his own Comments section by much better informed people won’t serve to drive too many Doubts away.

It is beginning to look deliciously like the Sotomayor nomination, besides being crucially revealing about what drives Barack Obama, might make an important contribution to moving national debate in a direction congenial to VDARE.com. To where ethnicity and ethnic interests can be honestly and frankly considered - including the interests of Whites.

In Court Choice Pushes ‘Identity Politics’ to Forefront By Peter Baker The New York Times May 30 2009

Abigail Thernstrom is allowed to get off some zingers

“He didn’t pick a post-racial candidate…“She’s a quintessential spokesman for racial spoils.”
Ms. Thernstrom, a Republican appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, said the real question was what the episode revealed about Mr. Obama. Is he the apostle of a post-racial society or a more subtle player in the country’s age-old identity politics or something in between? “I think he’s a complicated person,” she said.

Right question; wrong answer. Anyone who reads Steve Sailer’s book America’s Half Blood Prince knows that while Obama might be a complicated writer he is very simple politically: race is the only thing that matters.

But not bad for Thernstrom, who has a history of wimpishness. Not bad for the Times either.

Sotomayor’s nomination has set off a scramble by Hispanic “Republican” consultants to proclaim ethnic loyalty before Party obligation - including our old friend Lionel “Blood runs thicker than politics” Sosa.
Sosa provided the juicer quotes to a Huffington Post essay yesterday trying to intimidate the Sotomayor sceptics

This matter is lovingly discussed today by 24ahead.com

I don’t need to tell anyone why Sosa isn’t saying anything negative and is helping the HuffPost (and in effect Obama): “Blood runs thicker than politics”. Allowing Sosa to speak for Republicans shows once again just how dumb the GOP leadership is. The GOP leadership completely fails to realize that playing the identity politics game is a big loser for them. They’re trying to play a Dem game on a Dem field using Dem rules and Dem referees, and everyone knows how that’s going to turn out.

Sosa was particularly hostile to the anti-Sotomayor recent remarks by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. And these are themselves an important development – neither man was historically to the forefront in these types of battles (to put it mildly). As James Fulford remarked here when Limbaugh’ new outspokenness attracted attention

Limbaugh isn’t particularly interested in race, but he’s interested in whatever his audience is interested in, and that includes racial issues.

The audience is going to get more interested in racial issues as it becomes more difficult for the MSM to hide that the Obama Administration is totally motivated by ethnic animus and that White Americans are the target.

Meanwhile, hat tip to One Old Veteran’s wonderful news clipping website for alerting me to what may be the lethal blow to the Sotomayor nomination.
Obama Picks Anti-gun Judge for the Supreme Court Gun Owners of America Friday May 29 2009

The Heller decision put the Supreme Court in support of the Constitutional protection of the individual right to keep and bear arms. Sotomayor, a politically correct lover of centralized government power (as long as she is part of the power elite), immediately went into counter-attack mode against the Heller decision.

Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel earlier this year which ruled in Maloney v. Cuomo that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states….Sotomayor disdains this important right of individuals (the right to keep and bear arms-VDARE.com), as indicated by an earlier opinion from 2004. In United States v. Sanchez-Villar, she stated that “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.”

(VDARE.com link)

Before the age of Talk Radio and the Internet, Washington could get away with this kind of thing. Now, not so easy.

Voting data wizard Andrew Gelman has a very good post up: “Where does the Hispanic vote really matter?” reviewing the 2008 election. His conclusion: not too many places.

I said much the same things immediately after the 2000 and 2004 election. Hispanics are not a crucial “swing” vote. They’re more of a “flow” vote in that they tend to go with the flow of their white neighbors, just consistently farther to the left. (For example, the high point for the GOP in share of Hispanic vote in House elections was Newt Gingrich’s 1994.)

We hear much obsessing over the Hispanic vote, but some of that was a smoke screen made up by Karl Rove. Rove’s two big successes — 2002 and 2004 — stemmed from mobilizing heavy turnout among white voters and winning a high share of whites. But you aren’t supposed to talk about appealing to whites, so Rove did a lot of hand-waving about how Republicans were going to win via Hispanics, and a lot of innumerate journalists bought it.

McCain, the chief Republican spokesman for amnesty in 2006, did poorly in motivating whites to show up and vote, and did mediocre in attracting whites votes, so he lost. Having an economic crash right before the election and the pointlessness of his own campaign other than as a celebration of his vanity no doubt doomed him anyway, but one obvious lesson is that being a famous amnesty enthusiast is a net loser for a Republican candidate — it doesn’t motivate Hispanics (who aren’t very excited about making illegal immigration easier, and the ones who are are going to vote Democratic anyway) and it depresses non-Hispanic whites.

In the long run, of course, due to immigration and affirmative action, it’s hard to see any successful GOP strategy other than a national version of their success in the South, which is based on carrying 75 percent of the white vote. I think the country would be better off with a competitive two party system in which whites were widely distributed among the two parties, but in the long run, that’s unlikely to happen due to immigration. We’ll either end up with a competitive system with most whites in one party, or we’ll end up with non-competitive, corrupt one-party dominance by the Democrats on the model of the Chicago Machine writ large.

One of the odd side effects of the Ricci case is that it continues to inspire a lot of watery commentary about me.

For example, Tyler Cowen blogs on Marginal Revolution:

“Why Steve Sailer is wrong”

That’s a request I received and probably the reader is referring to IQ and race.Let me first say that I am not the Steve Sailer oracle. On such a sensitive matter I don’t wish to misrepresent anyone, so I’ll simply tell you what I think of the issues, without suggesting that he or anyone else necessarily disagrees.

In other words, this post is going to be about a straw man. If anybody is actually interested in what I have had to say about IQ and race, well, in 2007 I published FAQs on IQ and race. (more…)

I was curious when I first saw this thing about immigration fraud in New York, particularly when I saw the line that referred to “Immigration fraud, often orchestrated by immigrants….” I thought all immigration fraud was orchestrated by immigrants. But reading it, I saw they’re talking about something different.

Cuomo Widens a Probe Into Immigration Fraud
By Kirk Semple And Jenny Manrique
New York Times, May 28, 2009

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday that his office had issued more than 50 subpoenas to individuals and businesses in New York City — including numerous immigrant-assistance organizations, a travel agency, an English-language school and a church — as part of a widening investigation into immigration fraud.

Customers have complained that the businesses and their directors have masqueraded as legitimate providers of immigrant services, many offering legal aid they are not authorized or able to provide, officials in Mr. Cuomo’s office said. Some immigrants told investigators that they were falsely promised permanent residency or American citizenship, even though the firms or individuals were not qualified to secure such benefits.

“Immigrant communities across New York City continue to be put in jeopardy by unscrupulous individuals and organizations offering them nothing more than empty promises and false hopes,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.

Immigration fraud, often orchestrated by immigrants, has proliferated across the country, victimizing people desperate to gain legal residency or citizenship. Law enforcement officials say such schemes are particularly difficult to uncover and prosecute because many victims are in the country illegally and are hesitant to seek help from the authorities for fear of deportation.[More]

The statement is Cuomo Launches Sweeping Investigation Into Immigration Fraud Across The New York City Area also available [En Español]

And as you can see, they’re not talking about immigration fraud, which is what happens when an immigrant lies to the immigration authorities in order to stay in the US. It’s fraud directed against immigrants. That’s what Cuomo is interested in stopping, and I’m sure that if he can, he’ll arrange for the “victims,” (illegal immigrants who were trying to bribe their way into legal status) to stay in the country in order to testify.

From a recent blog by a defense attorney who got a contract to train city employees (city unnamed) in avoiding sexual harassment. I found this amusing:

I’ve now completed the first day of training the employees of a local city to avoid sexual harassment, having made roughly 2 hour presentations to two groups of about 20 each.

Impressions:

1. Never try to explain the confluence of federal and state law to government employees before noon.

2. Apparently everyone in this city likes to go “GIRL, you’re looking FINE, SHOW me!”, and then the other employee turns around in place, and the first one goes “WOOOOOO!” It is probably impossible to break them of this, at least with the amount of time and the tools and use-of-force limits I am presented with.[Sexual Harassment Prevention Training AAR: Day One | Popehat]

This is stereotypical, but as usual, probably accurate. And of course, it’s also true that different groups have different standards of what constitutes inappropriate behavior, which must lead to a lot of litigation.

Via Kathy Shaidle, this article about how in the middle of an expenses scandal that affects both major political parties, the mainstream British left and right have united in a a “bipartisan” campaign against the BNP.

Yet to New Labour and Conservative politicians and their media supporters, anybody who could consider voting BNP looks like a member of an alien race. The contempt and loathing for a large part of the electorate within the political-media class was well illustrated on last week’s BBC Question Time, when one liberal newspaper columnist said she might favour a General Election to sort out the crisis, but had decided to oppose it out of fear that people might vote for the BNP. In which case, why not abolish elections altogether? These people’s idea of democracy is revealed as the freedom to vote for parties and candidates approved by the elite. [When all else fails, bash the BNP| In its phoney moral crusade to stop the British National Party, the elite has replaced politics with emotional blackmail, By Mick Hume, Spiked-Online.com, May 2, 2009]

For more about this, see last night’s article  An American Asks: What’s So Bad About The BNP Anyway? By J. Paige Straley. The basic point is that when there’s a “bipartisan consensus” it gives the voters no opportunity to vote for change. And if conservative parties in particular are distressed by the success of third parties, they might try dumping the “bipartisan consensus” and returning to the values of their base.