So Representative Eric Cantor (R-Va) feels it expedient to curry favor with the MSM by sneering at Rush Limbaugh, and smearing the patriots who prevented the election of the RNC-preferred RINO in NY-23 this past week:

Can it be? Another Republican leader taking on Rush Limbaugh? Apparently so. And that leader is Virginia’s Eric Cantor, the second-highest-ranking GOP member in the House.

Eric Cantor takes on Rush Limbaugh, harsh GOP rhetoric Steve Padilla Los Angeles Times November 6 2009

This is derived from a Bloomberg News report

Cantor Calls for Inclusive Party, Criticizes Limbaugh Rhetoric by Lorraine Woellert November 7 2009

Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said the comparisons were wrong…
Cantor, 46, said Republicans must stay unified if they are to win elections. “That’s the lesson learned” from the Nov. 3 Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia and the loss of a New York congressional seat in a race that divided the party

VDARE.com is not gung-ho about Rush. He and his staff resolutely fled from various credentialed attempts to get him to just consider the Alien Nation thesis when the book was published in 1996. As Peter Brimelow said at the time of the last CPAC Conference:

…there was another reason I skipped Limbaugh: I knew, from long observation, that notwithstanding his brilliant barn-burning delivery, he wouldn’t actually say anything new, especially in the area of immigration and the National Question that are VDARE.com’s focus. I think the NR editors are mediocrities intellectually and morally, but they do know a political risk when they see one, from long practice in not taking them. And they were quite right to say of Limbaugh, in their obviously uneasy editorial on the controversy: “His views are not extreme and his manner is not, for that matter, particularly angry.”

However, the fact is that he is at present – for Immigration Patriots, Conservatives, even GOPers – our Rat.

Is Cantor? As the only Jewish Republican Congressman, he comes under vicious community pressure, which calls for sympathy. But a thoughtful analysis of his Numbers USA ranking (“B”) indicates that he is not just bad – he is dangerous.

This B rating (which puts him in the middle of the Virginia Delegation, 50th out of 176 among House Republicans, and 189th out of 535 all Congress) is achieved by subterfuge.

Cantor votes steadily for enforcement proposals. Any “Law and Order” – or even “Competent Government” - man really has no alternative.

But he utterly failed (F-) on votes to “Reduce Unnecessary Visas”, did poorly (C) on “Amnesties”. Even worse, he DODGED all votes on the “Anchor Baby Citizenship” question – the Jugular of the transformation of America effort.

It needs to be emphasized: Switzerland has quantitatively a similar immigrant issue to America. It is far less of a political threat because being born there does not make a Baby Swiss.

Eric Cantor is in favor of transforming America. He opposes any effective measure to stop it. This is no surprise. His votes are probably the most extreme expessions of his prejudices his district can be fooled into tolerating.

This man deserves no place in the GOP House Leadership.

David Axelrod is spinning Republican victories in gubernatorial elections as victories for Obamaism. Is there anything this President can’t do? (Or lie about?)

George Neumayr in the American Spectator:

” ‘Victory has a thousand fathers,’ said John F. Kennedy, ‘but defeat is an orphan.’

David Axelrod, netting the prize for the most shameless display of post-defeat spinning, added an additional father to Bob McDonnell’s victory in Virginia: Barack Obama.

McDonnell ran ‘not as a Sarah Palin Republican, but more as a Barack Obama centrist,’ said Axelrod, according to liberal columnist E.J. Dionne.

Axelrod’s fanciful description of Obama as a ‘centrist’ betrays what he denies: that hundreds of thousands of voters in major states once thought permanently blue did recoil from a year of radical, Obama-led change, both real and proposed.”

Barack Obama as a centrist was always  a David Axelrod created myth. This is something we said before the election, and Americans who get their news from the New York Times are finding out afterwards.

If he survives, the Ft. Hood shooter will of course be charged with murder, but it’s reasonable to inquire whether treason should also be charged. After all, for a major in the U.S. Army, trained at taxpayer expense in the use of weapons, to shoot 40 unarmed comrades-in-arms would seem like a reasonable example of waging war on the United States.

However, the Constitution’s delineation of treason might not cover this:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

What does “levying war” mean? Although “levying” is sometimes today said to be the same as “waging,” that doesn’t appear to be the legal definition. In one of the the treason cases (Bollman) growing out of the still mysterious Aaron Burr conspiracy, the Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court ruled in 1807, “But there must be an actual assembling of men for the treasonable purpose, to constitute a levying of war.” In other words, “levying” means raising a body of warriors. Therefore, whether Major Hasan plotted solely alone or was conspiring with others, and if so, did they in some fashion “assemble,” would appear to be relevant.

On the other hand, the second type of treason, “or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” would appear to be an easier hurdle to leap. The first time the Supreme Court upheld a treason conviction was in the 1947 Haupt case in which naturalized citizen Hans Mark Haupt was sentenced to life in prison for sheltering in his Chicago home his son, a German spy (one of the eight saboteurs landed by a German sub in a semi-farcical failed infiltration). The son was convicted by military tribunal and executed. In the father’s case, noted civil libertarian Justice William O. Douglas wrote the majority opinion upholding the father’s conviction, while Justice Jackson wrote a lonely dissent arguing that the father’s intentions were filial rather than treasonous.

Since the elder Haupt was legally guilty of treason for merely helping his son, then Hasan’s shooting two score American soldiers in cold blood would appear to be an even better example of “adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” However, that does raise the issue of who exactly our Enemies are, a question that has been left rather ambiguous by Congress’ refusal to issue a Declaration of War since 1942.

We just found my article on the economist Gordon Tullock, published in the dead-tree version of Forbes Magazine in the pre-internet Dark Ages. Tullock has a remarkably fertile mind, very like (in this respect at least) Milton Friedman and I hoped to begin a series of annual interviews with him, as I already had with Friedman. But both projects were victims of the retirement of the great Forbes editor Jim Michaels: his successor, Bill Baldwin, said (or more probably echoed the advertising salesmens’ knee-jerk opinion) that we had to find younger economists.

Tullock’s concept of rent-seeking is more than ever relevant in the age of Obama—as is his view, as a trained Sinologist, that China, now even more lauded as the engine of the global economy, might well return to despotism, or even break up completely.]

Peter Brimelow will be on The Bruce Elliott Show tomorrow morning to discuss his article, “After NY-23: Goldwater, Reagan, And The Mirage Of ‘Moderation.’” The program airs in Baltimore and the interview will run shortly after 6:00 a.m. Early risers can listen to the show here.

From City Journal:

William Voegeli

The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm

California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks.

In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout provided the framework that best explains why people vote with their feet. The “consumer-voter,” as Tiebout called him, challenges government officials to “ascertain his wants for public goods and tax him accordingly.” Each jurisdiction offers its own package of public goods, along with a particular tax burden needed to pay for those goods. As a result, “the consumer-voter moves to that community whose local government best satisfies his set of preferences.” In selecting a jurisdiction, the mobile consumer-voter is, in effect, choosing a club to join based on the benefits that it offers and the dues that it charges.

(more…)

Adrian Blomfield of the neocon Daily Telegraph does a great job of giving the Ft. Hood shooter’s Palestinian cousins in Ramallah in the West Bank (Ramallah is the capital of the Palestinian National Authority) enough rope:

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the suspected shooter at Fort Hood U.S Army Post where according to authorities 12 people were shot and killed and 31 other were wounded Photo: EPA

Speaking from their home in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Hasan’s relatives painted a picture of a man cornered into an act of “lunacy” by the repeated discrimination of his peers and an attempt by the army to force him to serve in Afghanistan.

“They discriminated against him because he was a Muslim,” Mohammed Mohammed, one of Hasan’s cousins, told the Daily Telegraph. “We’re not trying to make excuses for him but what we were told was that he was under a lot of pressure.

“What we imagine is that he could not take this bad treatment and gave vent unfortunately.” …

In the house next door, Hasan’s brother Anas had locked himself indoors with his wife, refusing to speak to anyone, including his relatives.

According to his cousins, Hasan was badly scarred by the deaths of his parents in 1998 and 2001. Along with his two brothers, he became increasingly devout, they said.

“They became very religious after their mother died,” Mohammed Hasan said. “They were very observant. They prayed a lot.”

Yet the two cousins insisted that the major’s religion was not tinged with political fanaticism, although they said he had become increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative in recent years.

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Now that I think about it, I realize I always had a gut feeling that, somehow, it was all Malcolm’s fault. If only I’d trusted my instincts, like he told me to in Blink … Imagine how much money I could have made shorting the stocks of companies that had hired Malcolm to give speeches!

William Saletan [Email him] writes in Slate

“Fort Hood, Texas, hosts tens of thousands of men who are trained to fight for their country. But none of them stopped Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as he blew away 13 of their colleagues Thursday afternoon. It was a civilian police officer, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who confronted and shot him in an exchange of gunfire.”[Girls in the Hood | If women can defend Fort Hood, they can defend America. By William Saletan, November 6, 2009]

That’s stupid–the reason that none of the servicemen present on the scene shot Major Hasan because none of them had a gun. The Army has a mania for keeping loaded guns away from soldiers, which it not only exercises at Fort Hood and Fort Dix, but in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the Mexican Border.

Women can make good police officers, in spite of their physical weakness, but they can’t do ground combat.  Fred Reed explains why:

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Looked at in detail, today’s unemployment numbers give even more reason to ask Peter Brimelow’s question: “Where are the calls for an immigration moratorium?”)

Rumors that the recession is dead are exaggerated. Payrolls dropped by a seasonally adjusted 190,000 in October, bringing to total number of jobs lost in the recession to 7.3 million. It was the 22nd straight month of employment decline.

The “other” employment survey - of households rather than business establishments - registered a gut wrenching job loss of 589,000. The household survey is used to calculate the national unemployment rate - which hit 10.2 percent in October.

Both surveys show a growing disconnect between GDP, which grew at a 3.2% annual rate in the third quarter, and the job market. Not to worry, economists say: employment is a lagging indicator.

The great unanswered question: is it different this time? Is the lag longer? Or, put differently, are the job/GDP linkages of past recessions irrelevant in our increasingly globalized, open-border economy? From our perspective, the displacement of native-born workers by low-wage immigrants could easily disrupt the historical nexus between GDP and jobs.

American worker displacement stalled at near record levels in October, as Hispanics and non-Hispanics lost jobs at identical rates:

• Total employment: -589,000 (-0.43 percent)
• Non-Hispanic employment: -519,000 (-0.43 percent)
• Hispanic employment: -70,000 (-0.43 percent)

The October draw comes on the heels of a month in which Hispanic employment rose by 192,000 and non-Hispanics lost nearly 1 million jobs.

Non-Hispanic employment has declined every month since April 2008.

Over the longer run, of course, national employment trends are overwhelmingly tipped in favor of Hispanics. From January 2001 through October 2009:

• Hispanic employment increased by 3,437,000 positions (+ 21.3 percent)
• Non-Hispanic employment fell by 2,938,000 positions (-2.4 percent)

For years we have illustrated these divergent trends in VDARE.com’s American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI):

The black line tracks Hispanic job growth; the pink non-Hispanic job growth; and the yellow line VDAWDI - the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth. All lines start at 100.0 in January 2001.

In October VDAWDI rose to 124.3, up slightly from September’s 124.2. The October index is calculated like this:

• For every 100.0 Hispanics employed in January 2001 there are now 121.3
• For every 100.0 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001 there are now 97.5
• VDAWDI equals 124.3 (=100 X 121.3/97.5)

VDAWDI peaked in September 2008, just before the bottom dropped out of the labor market. The onset of the Great Recession saw a sharp reduction in Hispanic job growth, both in absolute terms and relative to non-Hispanic growth.

But in recent months GDP and VDAWDI have both rebounded. Could a resurgent VDAWDI derail the much anticipated job recovery? Stay tuned.