The Washington Times’s  Jerry Seper reports on yet another reminder that American government is not truly a two-party system, but a one-party regime with a hard left-of-center wing (the Democrats) and a just plain left-of-center wing (the post-Reagan GOP).

Anything to do with our awkward neighbor, Mexico, always brings out the worst in both wings of the regime. That’s what’s happening with  growing narco-anarchy in Mexico, where the American approach has consistently been to throw good money after bad while refusing to look at the character of the recipients.

The leaders of both big American political parties blithely adopt the Leftist canard that the reason Mexican drug cartels are so heavily armed is that Americans have the right, under the Second Amendment, to own weapons. The presumption, never proved or even seriously tested, is that Mexican narcotraficantes get all their weapons from the United States.

The Democratic Party remains committed to disarming Americans in defiance of the Second Amendment, but for tactical reasons is not trying at the moment to revive Bill Clinton’s unconstitutional “assault weapons” ban. Barack Hussein Obama and his Barbadian-American attorney general  both favor reinstating it, but Obama had decided not to push that now, even though the ban “made sense” in his mind.

That can only be because, bloodied by the fight over socialist medicine and contemplating the prospect of another fight over illegal alien amnesty and “guest-worker” programs, the Democrats don’t want to take on yet a third major assault on the Constitution that most Americans will hate.

In  this instance, the Republican riding to the Democrats’ aid is a better-forgotten apparatchik of the administrations of both feckless former Presidents Bush: Robert Bonner, former federal judge and former head of the Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Bonner, presumed to be an expert because of the appointments he once held, has emerged from his L.A. law office to call for the reinstatement of the “assault weapons” ban.

Bonner [send him mail] claims that, along with other measures, is vital to help restore (if it was ever truly present to restore) civil order in Mexico. No doubt this endorsement by a prominent Republican who is supposed to know something about Mexico and the border will embolden Obama and Holder along with Democrats in the Congress–and go-along Republicans like Lindsey Graham–to push soon to reinstate the ban.[Bush aide urges weapons ban to slow Mexican drug war November 17, 2009 Jerry Seper]

And so, once again, our rulers propose to subordinate the legitimate interests and Constitutional rights of Americans to the perceived needs of Mexico and Mexicans. This is, of course, nothing new. The right of Americans to live in states that the federal government protects against invasion, as Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution mandates, has been subordinated for decades now to the “need” of Mexicans, other Latin Americans and just about anyone else (as long as he is not of European heritage - unless, of course, he is Jewish or Irish; thank you, Messrs. Jackson and Vanik, and thank you, Ted Kennedy) to enter our country, squat here, pillage our over-generous welfare, school and penal systems, drive drunk and kill people, sell drugs and kill people, undercut Americans at work, and render huge swathes of our country utterly alien to the natives.

The Irish Government has a plan to help deal with the recession:

Irish government to pay immigrants to go home

Recession-crippled Republic offers cash to non-EU nationals who agree to leave country

Henry McDonald, The Observer, Sunday November 15, 2009

Ireland is offering money to immigrants to leave the recession-crippled Republic. The Irish Department of Justice has confirmed that it is opening an EU-funded project to persuade foreign workers and asylum seekers to return to their country of origin.

A spokeswoman told the Observer this weekend that the scheme will only apply to non-EU nationals living in the Republic and would involve the department spending almost €600,000 this year to pay for immigrants and their families to return to nations outside the European Union.[more]

Why doesn’t the US try this? It will always be cheaper to buy someone a ticket to a foreign country than to support them in the United States. Ireland has also abolished birthright citizenship. See also A Buyout Option For Europe’s Muslims?, By Steve Sailer, November 6, 2005.

Islam meets soccer in France… what could possibly go wrong?

European soccer fans can get rowdy even under normal circumstances, but throw Islam plus immigrant nationalism into the mix, and the situation becomes still more incendiary, as shown in Saturday’s fracas. The port city of Marseille experienced an outbreak of serious rioting when local Algerians became miffed at their team’s poor showing in a World Cup qualifier match that took place in Cairo.

Authorities sent in more than 500 police to restore order on the streets — diversity doesn’t come cheap.

Violence in Marseille over Algeria, Egypt soccer, Reuters, November 14, 2009

Rioters smashed shop windows, hurled stones at police and set fire to several boats moored in the southern French port of Marseille after Egypt beat Algeria in a soccer World Cup qualifying match on Saturday.

A police spokesman said more than 500 officers were deployed in the centre of Marseille, an often volatile city with a large North African immigrant population and football supporters who are considered among the most passionate in France.

Egypt won the match, which was played in Cairo, 2-0.

Police said they had made eight arrests, mostly for throwing objects, while one man was arrested for setting fire to a rubbish bin.

At least six boats were damaged and two were sunk when a fire was sparked by a smoke bomb of the kind seen frequently in French football stadiums.

The news that the huge acceleration of the immigrant influx into the UK under the Tony Blair Prime Ministership was the result of deliberate anti-historic nation malice – reported by Brenda Walker and Steve Sailer yesterday – will not surprise regular VDARE.com readers.

Exactly the same appears to have been the case with the US 1965 Immigration Act. See Norbert Schlei—Guilty of Malice Aforethought in America’s Immigration Disaster?

Andrew Neather, whose urge to boast surfaced this confession in the charmingly titled article Don’t listen to the whingers - London needs immigrants London Evening Standard 23.10.09

is, for the age of Google, very elusive to research. Although the name might be thought to be English, it was virtually unknown in Ancestry.com’s benchmark 1891 Census sweep – recently adopted perhaps?

But a familiar pattern emerges from the article (which is notable for the contempt it evinces for any British not living in London):

I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

…despite Roche’s keenness to…be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean…Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.

Well,well.

Race / History / Evolution Notes has taken Jacob Berkman’s list from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a step farther and broken out all the obvious ethnicities of the 2009 Forbes 400.

My initial estimate of the ethnic breakdown:

Northwestern European 53.5%
Jewish [or part Jewish] 35.25%
Italian 3.5%
East Asian 2%
Indian 1.25%
Middle Eastern 1.25%
Greek 1.25%
Eastern European 1.25%
Hispanic 0.5%
Black 0.25%

The black Forbesian is Oprah. (more…)

Slate has an article pooh-poohing old systems of trying to classify personalities by physical type and then worriedly reporting on new studies showing that maybe there is a correlation between say a heavy brow ridge and aggressiveness after all.

Facial Profiling
Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?
By Dave Johns

What the article leaves out is how fully the arts have always participated in “facial profiling.” It was never just some pseudo-scientific fad.

Back when images were expensive but words were cheap, novelists used to devote an extraordinary number of words to describing the looks of their characters, precisely with the assumption that the reader could pick up hints about the character’s character. For example, Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, spent two full pages on a minute description of detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: blond, 6′-3″, and so forth — pretty much the exact opposite of Humphrey Bogart. (Robert Heinlein was more forward looking: he never described what his characters looked like, allowing readers to assume wrongly what Johnnie’s race is in Starship Troopers.) (more…)

If you look at the people picking up the Nobel Peace Prize, they’re frequently “indigenous” people like the mendacious Rigoberta Menchu or Third World “wise men” like Mohammed Yunus. , Wangari Maathai, or Shirin Ebadi. (All together now–“Who?”)But if someone is going to discover something new in physics, chemistry, or medicine…not so much. John Derbyshire posted this at SecularRight–Ice People Club:

Scanning back through the last ten years, I get the following headcounts.

I have used the Ice People / Sun People schema of We Are Doomed, with Europeans and East Asians as Ice People, Africans and Amerindians as Sun People. Subcontinental Asians I have cut crudely, with Moslems as honorary Sun People and non-Muslims as honorary Ice People. It’s a fair balance, I think, and doesn’t actually make much difference to the numbers.

Here we go. For each year I list the six Nobel categories in order:  Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. The score in each box is Ice People / Sun People, so “2-0″ means two Ice People and no Sun People.

Year	Phys	Chem	Med	Lit	Peace	Econ
2009	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	TBA
2008	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2007	2-0	1-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	3-0
2006	2-0	1-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	1-0
2005	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2004	3-0	3-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2003	3-0	2-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2002	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2001	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	3-0
2000	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	2-0

That gives us totals of 28-0 for Physics, 25-0 for Chemistry, 27-0 for Medicine, 10-0 for Literature, 4-6 for Peace, 17-0 for Economics.

This provoked a lot of point-and-splutter, plus personal attacks in the 51 (so far) comments. Even before the age of affirmative action, the Nobel Peace Prize has always been the Special Olympics of the Nobel World. You don’t have to achieve peace, you just have to mean well.

• 1910 - Permanent International Peace Bureau
• 1913 - Henri La Fontaine

Both prizes awarded for, basically, preventing the First World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow

• 1925 - Sir Austen Chamberlain, Charles G. Dawes
• 1926 - Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann
• 1929 - Frank B. Kellogg
• 1931 - Jane Addams, Nicholas Murray Butler
• 1933 - Sir Norman Angell
• 1935 - Carl von Ossietzky
• 1937 - Robert Cecil

All those prizes were for actions tending to prevent the Second World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow.

Closer to our own time, we read that

• 1973 - Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho

Shared a prize for making peace in Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnam, deploying Soviet arms and Democratic congressmen, invaded and conquered South Vietnam.

• 1976 - Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan

Shared a prize for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, which peace was brought again in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, (basically a surrender) after some more violence George Bush brought peace to Northern Ireland once more in 2007 and if you’re interested, Hillary Clinton is in Belfast right now, bringing it yet again.

• 1993 - Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk

Shared a prize for bringing  peace to South Africa–which is not notably peaceful.

• 1994 - Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin

Solved the problems of the Middle East. No comment. So if Obama doesn’t deserve the Nobel, and he doesn’t, he’s not the first.

We’ve been worrying recently about the American Enterprise Institute’s Jason Richwine because he’s so effective. Recently, he even managed to get an attack on Linda Chavez’ Hispanic hype into the Dallas Morning News, of all places:

Though we want to believe Hispanics are on the old European path to economic assimilation, the evidence does not support our desires. This fact becomes more undeniable with each new data set collected and each new analysis performed, but prominent commentators are still seduced by wishful thinking.

Earlier this week, for example, columnist Linda Chavez, in a piece published in Viewpoints, reiterated her belief that Hispanics are just like other immigrant groups and that their economic progress leaves little to worry about. She is wrong…

The Hispanic first generation is quite poor, on average, with adult men earning little more than half the annual income earned by white natives. Though still relatively poor, second-generation men make considerable progress, increasing their average income to around 80 percent of the white average.

If we were to end the analysis here, we might conclude that Hispanics are right on track toward economic assimilation. The problem is that assimilation promptly stalls with the second generation. The Hispanic third generation makes no further progress and remains significantly poorer than white natives.

The same story is true for education. Though much better educated than their immigrant parents, the Hispanic second generation drops out of high school at more than twice the white rate and graduates from college at less than 60 percent of the white rate. The third generation does no better.

These facts are not in dispute. They can be confirmed by examining any major dataset that separates the second and third Hispanic generations. So how can some observers still be so optimistic?

Often they highlight the progress between the first and second generations without looking at the third. Other times they focus on side issues and factoids without considering the big picture.

Chavez falls into the latter category with her recent column.

(Jason Richwine: Latino immigrants are not on path to economic parity, Thursday, October 1, 2009. Links in original. Hispanic stall presaged by VDARE.COM here).

We (or at any rate I) worry about Linda Chavez too. Back in 2001, we were even sorry she was dropped by Dubya as Secretary of Labor because of a (guess what) illegal alien servant scandal. She’s so charming and reasonable in personal conversation and so useless in print. I presume her stuff is no longer ghosted by the appalling John J. Miller (whom we seem to have scared out of the immigration debate). But given Miller’s standard of veracity, you never know.

Horse rustling, in which the horses are not stolen and ridden away, as in Old West horse theft, but where the horses are killed and butchered on the spot, turned into steaks and chops, and carried away in pickups and vans, is now a problem in South Florida. The reason: the area’s Hispanic population, which includes communities of people with a taste for horsemeat, and communities of people with a taste for theft. USA Today actually says this in an article on the subject:

He said some butchers in Miami have stolen frozen horse meat in their stores for trustworthy customers. Sometimes the meat is sold in neighborhoods out of coolers.

The meat sells for $10-$20 a pound depending on the cut. It can be as high as $40 a pound when supply is short.

Couto said some Miami restaurants serve horse meat, which is considered to be sweeter, less fatty and higher in protein than beef. In European countries such as France, Italy and Belgium, the meat is seen as a delicacy.

It is also eaten widely in Central and South America, where it is believed to have medicinal value, Couto said.

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, said much of the demand is likely from Cubans immigrating to South Florida.

Beef is a rarity in Cuba, so Cubans often turn to equine dishes such as tasajo, which is made with cured horse meat.

However, people from many other Latin American and Caribbean countries also live in Florida.

“It may be Haitians,” Suchlicki said. “There are a lot of Nicaraguans in Miami. A lot of Argentines.” South Florida sees rise in illegal horse meat market, By Alan Gomez, USA TODAY

See also They Kill Horses, Don’t They? (Mexicans, That Is.) and Hispanic enrichment and Florida horses, more recently by Patrick Cleburne.

Apparently the Irish have been intimidated by current economic issues into voting away their sovereignty, reversing the courageous stand they took less than two years ago.

Ireland backs EU’s Lisbon Treaty BBC News Saturday 3 October 2009

The pressure was enormous. Even our intelligent friend The Irish Savant was swayed.

Here at VDARE.com we follow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s doctrine. Nations are the wealth of mankind. Why the Irish, having been such a bore for the English-speaking world for centuries because of their endless bitching about independence, should agree to be ruled by a gang of bureaucrats from Continental Europe, (with its dismal history), is mystifying.

But that is not the point of this blog. The point is that this is another triumph of the elite over the electorate. Being in the EU has always been pleasant for the European elites, who can access huge patronage from Brussels and play on a bigger stage. And in Ireland they made it plain that they would continue re-running this referendum until chance circumstances or fatigue gave them a victory. (The treaty itself has not been amended at all.) After that – no more votes.

Exactly how key social issues are decided in America – although here of course they also have the Trump card of the Supreme Court.

A bad day for freedom.