When The American Cause announced that Peter Brimelow would join Ward Connerly and Lou Barletta to speak on the topic “Winning the Hillary Voters,” libertarian blogger Dave Weigel dismissed the panel as, “Winning Over Hillary Voters With White Nationalism”

“So, that’s the editor of an anti-immigration Website, a man who travels the country organizating anti-affirmative initiatives, and a Pennsylvania mayor who lost his 2002 and 2008 runs for Congress in the northeastern Pennsylvania counties that went for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the presidential primary. This seems to read much more into Clinton’s infamous comment that she was winning “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” than she meant.

Weigel failed to note that Ward Connerly is black and that his initiatives have won in blue states full of working class whites such as Michigan. He also forgot that Barletta not only received over 7% more of the vote than McCain did in his district; but in—as far as I know—an unprecedented event, the Democratic Party of Hazleton gave him the nomination in a landslide as a write-in candidate. But anyone who suggests that you can win working class white Democrats by opposing affirmative action and illegal immigration is a “white nationalist” to Weigel.

So I was naturally surprised to see Weigel write an excellent piece about how Republicans can win by appealing to white voters turned off by our “post racial” presidents racial politics after Gatesgate, exactly what Steve Sailer argued for in VDARE. Weigel points to Obama’s rapidly falling approval ratings among white voters in response to his Racial policies. He quotes GOP Strategist George Fletcher, “He got really close to losing the image he has as a post-racial president. For a few days, the question for a lot of people became, ‘Wait a minute. Is he the president of the United States? Or is he just the president of minorities?’”[GOP Sees Opportunity With White Voters After Gates Saga, August 7, 2009 ]

Weigel noted that low turnout among elderly whites and high minority turnout contributed to GOP’s 2008 loss, and now “The problem for Democrats is that the white voters who might sour on the president because, in part, of the race issue are more likely to turn out to vote than the young and black voters who made up his margin of victory in 2008.”

For some reason, Weigel doesn’t call this strategy “white nationalism.” Well neither has VDARE. The Sailer Strategy is just common sense.

Larry Auster has done a lot of blogging about Henry Louis Gates’s arrest for “disorderly conduct,” starting with Henry Louis Gates, confirmer of racial stereotypes, and continuing with much much more. (The results of the suppression of the police report and The Cambridge Police Department, like liberal dhimmis, refuse to release the Gates arrest report)

The Boston Globe had the police report up on its website, and took it down, presumably because it had too many facts in it, so Auster has posted it himself.[Arrest report (PDF)]

The obvious point here is that if anyone was being a racist here, it’s Gates. He sees a policeman come to his door, judges him by the color of his skin and his blue uniform, and starts yelling. The latest story, published in the New York Times, is that Gates is demanding a humiliating apology from James Crowley, the arresting officer, (“I would like a one-on-one with Officer Crowley,” he said in an interview, “and I’d like him to apologize. But that will in no way determine if I sue him, the Police Department or the city”) and it includes this startling fact:

“[Gates's] front door was stuck shut, and his taxi driver helped him pry it open. According to the subsequent police report, a woman called to report two black men trying to force entry.”

Because there were two black men trying to force entry–Gates was breaking into his own house. This is not a crime, of course. I’ve done it myself.  So have most of my readers, unless they live in a town so small and monocultural that  they don’t lock their doors. But it certainly justifies a police officer asking a question or two.

And if Gates weren’t a racist himself, he wouldn’t object to a white policeman inquiring when someone was reported breaking into his home.

Update: Thanks to Larry Auster, a man who’s not easy to please, for the link and the kind words.

Dr Norm Matloff’s revelation on Friday that immigration-cheerleading talking head Dan Siciliano of Stanford Law School is in fact a professional Treason Lobby operative (former immigration attorney, grant-eater at The American Immigration Law Foundation) caught my attention. Who is Dan Siciliano?

Siciliano is described as a legal scholar and an entrepreneur on his Stanford Law School biography page, but the experienced resume reader will wonder - how? BA University of Arizona 1993, Graduate Study (Economics) Stanford 1993-7, JD Stanford 2004 (3 years?) – does not leave much time, especially as he says he co-founded (in 1994!) and was for five years executive director of the “Immigration Outreach Center “ in Phoenix, (along with the now Executive Director of the AILF). This in addition to privately practicing immigration law!

What is clear, however, is that Siciliano has greatly profited from loudly espousing PC opinions. It has got him a slot at what Wikipedia alleges is the country’s second law school with no record of legal scholarship that I can find, and he has apparently testified before both the US House (PDF) and Senate on Immigration – also with no appreciable published credentials. The liberal-spotters running the Truman Scholarships, which Siciliano was awarded while at Arizona, got the message across.

The Left has amazing patronage and grooming capabilities at its disposal.

No doubt, as with Professor Kennedy in Michigan, the Corporate fruits of rabid pro-immigrationism in Silicon Valley are considerable too.

But why a Siciliano? Italian-Americans have tended to turn up on the Patriotic side – Barletta, Guzzardi, Borzellieri. Could it be the Treason Lobby managers feel the need for a change in their public visage from the Julian Simons and Tamar Jacobys? When you want someone to go on TV and lie that H-!B imports have superior skills to Americans:

“Frankly, we do not have sufficient talent at the cutting edge technology level…The H-1Bs…are oftentimes folks who have recently acquired their skills in advanced engineering programs and they bring to the companies that they work for the chance of building larger teams”

it is probably shrewd to have someone who looks like he might be a displaced American worker.
Firing Foreign Workers CNBC March 6 2009 @2-39 -3-11

Tell Dan Siciliano he is harming his fellow Americans. (Be appropriately polite.)

In a sense, the great winner of the 2008 Presidential election cycle was the MSM. The candidates for both parties were the MSM favorites, despite Obama’s manifest inexperience and ominous baggage, and McCain’s emotional instability and disloyalty to GOP themes – as a result of which many Republicans simply did not vote.

A key technique in this process is suppressing counter-arguments by ignoring them - a technique much favored in the early 90s by Open-Borders fraud Julian Simon.

All this comes very much to mind when considering Obama’s Silence on Immigration Can’t Last Long Commentary by Albert R. Hunt March 2 2009(Bloomberg)

Apparently the open borders forces mobilizing to try to get Obama to honor his implied promises to them induced this Prince of the Inside-the-Beltway media establishment to give them a hand.

The result is remarkable for a tone of peremptory arrogance:

…the notion that illegal immigration can be finessed is a mirage. The problem will only get worse, and so will the politics. Obama, 47, a Democrat, would have to renege on his campaign promise to push a major immigration overhaul along the lines of the Kennedy-McCain measure in his first year… the president and his politically astute chief of staff are likely to conclude that stalling isn’t an option on immigration.

But it is also an astonishingly shoddy job from a professional point of view. Long-refuted assertions, discredited sources, and simple mis-statements of fact are slapped together with a carelessness which would disgrace a student journalist. But of course, if you are Al Hunt, concerned only with the climate-controlled world of DC political punditry, why bother working harder? No one allowed to confront you will disagree.

Hunt echoes the tired line that immigration restrictionism is politically costly:

Earlier fears that immigration had hurt Democrats …were trumped by several dozen races where immigration-bashing failed and advocates of the Kennedy-McCain- type measure succeeded.
Dramatic illustrations came in the heavily Hispanic states of New Mexico and Arizona. Three years ago, nine of the 11 House members from those states were Republicans; today eight of the 11 are Democrats, in large part because of Hispanic voters.

This of course was scrupulously analyzed and comprehensively refuted by Marcus Epstein, with such an effect that even the New York Times reacted: but of course it is not required of an Al Hunt! to keep abreast of the debate and deal with these arguments.

Then there is the inconvenient detail that the country is in the worst recession in decades. Fleetingly Hunt falters:

With joblessness having soared…it is tougher to argue that the economy needs these workers.

But he discards the thought by quoting Tamar Jacoby:

“Immigration reform may be harder in the middle of a recession, to make the case that we need more workers,” Jacoby says. “But the only way out of a recession is to grow out of it, and we need workers to do that.”

Jacoby’s rigidly fanatical open-borders mania has been crushingly refuted by Larry Auster and it is hard to believe she is still taken seriously…but, perhaps, since Auster is not on the DC cocktail circuit, why should Hunt know about that?

What he certainly should know about is Congressional races. He asserts:

One incumbent Democrat whom House Republicans were confident of defeating last November was Representative Paul Kanjorski of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Republican candidate was the mayor of Hazleton, whose local crackdown included fining landlords for renting to illegal immigrants…Yet on Election Day Kanjorski survived.

It is certainly true that Patriots did hope for a huge upset in Pennsylvania’s 11th district. The heroic Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta offered a powerful challenge. But it is difficult to believe that anyone who knew the ground was “confident”. The 11th district has gone Republican three times in the last 78 years (39 elections). That is even before considering a pro Democrat redistricting in 2000. Obama unsurprisingly carried the State 55% - 44%. Even so, Barletta was only defeated 52%-48%.

Al Hunt here is either relying on truly stupid Republican sources (possible, but no credit to him) or is simply misrepresenting the facts.

I have noticed the poor quality of Al Hunt’s immigration work before. One possibility is that since absolutely no Inside-the-Beltway person this Media Big Foot would take seriously is interested in Immigration Restriction, he has had no need to grasp the arguments.

But I suspect the cause is closer to home. The entire DC Media Establishment, with its restauranting, cocktail partying, catered-dinner-party culture, totally dependent on domestic help and child care – particularly if one has a working wife - hugely benefits from large supplies of amenable illegal labor. Local DC Black Labor is NOT used – as anyone who moves around Georgetown can see. This is a hugely embarrassing subject, best not thought about, or discussed.

Once again, one realizes: the upper echelons of the MSM commentariat is staffed not with a view to supplying the best and the most incisive – but with a determination to repress such views by blocking them out.

Complain to Al Hunt

I was saddened to find that Lou Barletta didn’t make it into Congress, since Tom Tancredo is retiring, we need more people like in Congress. I see that they brought out the big guns to campaign against him. The Hotline Blog reports

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA 11), one of the cycle’s most endangered Dems, has held on to beat ‘02 nominee/Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta (R), 52-48%. Barletta was one of the GOP’s best recruits this cycle, but Kanjorski survived.

And in PA-12, reports of Rep. John Murtha’s (D) demise were greatly exaggerated. He beat back ret. Army lieutenant colonel William Russell (R) by a surprisingly easy 59-41% score.

Pres. Clinton campaigned for both in the waning days of the campaign, and each touted the money they brought back to their districts as a reason to return them to DC.

I don’t know why Bill Clinton is still in public life. Ann Coulter doesn’t think he should be even in private life.

It’s tense race in Pennsylvania’s 11th Congressional District.

Barletta spokesman says returns could take a while | PolitickerPA
People waiting for the results of Pennsylvania’s most competitive Congressional race may need to a wait a bit, Shawn Kelly says.

Kelly, the campaign spokesman for Republican Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta, said the combination of paper ballots in Lackawanna County and lines potentially stretching past the official poll-closing time could make for late returns.

“It could be a long night,” Kelly told PolitickerPA.com by phone.[More]

Paper ballots are fine, but they have to be counted.

Very recently, the MSM has had to adjust its policy of studiously ignoring the race for Congress in the 11th District of Pennsylvania, arguably the most important in the country.

That is because their nationwide surveys are obliging them to report, as Bloomberg curtly puts it

Representative Paul Kanjorski is trailing Republican challenger Lou Barletta in the race for the northeastern Pennsylvania district the Democrat has held for 12 terms.

Democrats’ Prospects for Gains in House Rise: Campaign Notebook By Joe Sobczyk and Laura Litvan Oct. 18 2008

Barletta is of course the hero of the Hazleton battles, which he fought as Mayor of the northeast Pennsylvania town to protect his constituents from the destructive consequences of a heavy influx of low-skilled Hispanics. His campaign to unseat veteran Democratic Pol Kanjorski (whose NumbersUSA voting report card score has unsurprisingly risen from a career average D+ to a B- in recent years as Barletta came to prominence) was honored by being the first targeted in TV ads by the Democratic National Committee as I noted in the summer.. A number of polls have actually shown him ahead.

A victory here, in a district held only for one term by the Republicans in the last 64 years - where the incumbent got 72% of the vote in 2006 and has a huge funding advantage - would be a dramatic triumph for Barletta and the patriotic immigration reform cause. No one is under any doubt as to the importance of the immigration issue here:

At 70, Beverly Shandrick has been a Democrat for decades. She likes U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski and says, “He’s done a lot for the senior citizens.”
But the “immigration problem,” she says, might drive her to vote Nov. 4 for Republican Lou Barletta, Hazleton’s mayor…
“They’re taking over the town,” Shandrick says of immigrants. “There’s been a lot of crime since they moved in.”
Barletta leads a new Franklin and Marshall College poll by 5 percentage points in what has become the most closely watched congressional race in Pennsylvania.

Immigration fuels Kanjorski-Barletta race By Tom Infield philly.com Friday October 17 2008

Kanjorski is not weathering the unusual bother of having to campaign well. On Wednesday he failed at the last minute to show up at a debate. And, unlike many other threatened Congressmen, he championed the recent Bailout Act -which he was involved in crafting – enabling Barletta, who opposed it, to remark:

“If he’s so opposed to President Bush’s policies, why did he agree to bail out his Wall Street buddies?”

Kanjorski skips out on forum with Barletta By David Pierce Pocono Record October 16, 2008

VDARE.com is legally prohibited from endorsing candidates.

I feel the need to post an old blog.

Congratulations to Hazleton’s Mayor Lou Barletta:

Hazleton mayor named Pa.’s Mayor of the Year timesleader.com Sunday July 20, 2008.

Barletta, of course, came to fame two years ago with a city ordnance impeding the influx of illegal immigrants into his little north-east Pennsylvania town. Yet another in the apparently endless supply of Treason Lobby Federal Judges struck it down on the usual tortured grounds, but Barletta is still fighting, much to the irritation of the local establishment, (amongst others):

Barletta continues immigration fight with a gimmick standardspeaker.com July 20 2008

Barletta is trying to find a way to keep Hazleton free of illegals. He’s asking businesses to buy into his I-9 Challenge, so named for the federal I-9 employment eligibility document that all full- and part-time workers must sign before taking a job.

The Standard-Speaker grudgingly concedes

Those who know Barletta know he’s truly passionate about immigration

Barletta is apparently running for Congress against an incumbent Democrat. It speaks volumes of the unacknowledged power of this issue that the Democrat National Committee is already spending heavily against him:

House Democrats launch first TV ad of fall race
By DAVID ESPO The Associated Press July 17 2008

Needless to say, they do not dare to challenge Barletta on Immigration, but instead - laughably - try to link him to President Bush, from whom on the immigration issue Barletta could not be more divorced.

This contest means that VDARE.com, as a tax exempt entity, will probably have to stop commenting on this remarkable patriot. (We have always hoped to set up a separate arm able to deal with this kind of situation, but sadly have not yet found the backing.)

But we can repost an old blog Go, Lou Barletta!

Barack Obama’s remarks to San Francisco supporters on all the various things that are the opiates of the masses in Pennsylvania reminded me that when I was about nine, just like the kid in the movie classic Christmas Story, I relentlessly nagged my parents into getting me a BB gun. But, living in a dense suburb, there really wasn’t much to do with a BB gun, so before I could put my eye out with it, I was on to nagging for other toys. Around my 13th birthday, some friends talked me into trying golf at the tiny par-3 course a few blocks away, and I was instantly infatuated.

I suspect golf took the place in my life that hunting would have filled if I had grown up differently. Golf is a suburbanized form of hunting. You wander around a landscape using a long stick to violently project a pellet into the distance. There’s a big overlap in the demographic among hunters and golfers — male and heterosexual — but golf tends to appeal more to the fastidious white collar class who shrink at the blood in bloodsports. We like to shoot birdies, but in the metaphorical sense that golf provides. (Let me be clear — I don’t have any emotional or moral aversion toward killing animals. It’s the gutting and cleaning of them after the fun part of shooting them that grosses me out.)

So, hunting has been in decline for a long time, with golf rising to replace it. (Obama, for example, is a slightly above average golfer, with a 16 handicap.) Now, golf is in decline, too, as the concept of “going outside” strikes the new generation as so Second Millennium. Why go outdoors when you can stay inside and shoot bad guys on your screen?

Still, while guys who like guns mostly like guns because they like guns, there is a functional dimension to the gun control debate that is omnipresent, but nobody wants to spell out: As I wrote in my Baby Gap article in 2004:

The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. …

White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.

Still:

In sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.

In contrast, in Britain, where there are fierce gun control laws, rural dwellers are constantly subjected to “Clockwork Orange”-style home invasions by urban criminals who drive out from the city. In contrast, due to gun ownership and, likely, the greater effectiveness of racial profiling in America, crime rates in the exurbs and rural areas tend to be very low. When Congressman Denny Hastert suddenly became Speaker of the House, and thus second in line of succession to the Presidency, the Secret Service came out to change the locks on his house in a far suburb of Chicago so nobody could let themselves in and steal national security documents. They discovered he didn’t have any locks on his house.

Reader Ron Kyser wrote to say nice things about my recent article The Mexican Country Mouse And The American City Mouse and to point out something I missed:

The “country mouse” piece was excellent, as usual, but, whoa, Nellie, you let the most outrageous–and revealing–statement by the Mexican woman who moved to Kentucky pass without comment: “The police control the streets.”

The hell they do!

Rural Kentuckians control themselves.
Indeed, rural [insert state demonym here] control themselves everywhere. The police don’t have to do anything. Members of small-town (and suburban) police forces are notorious for getting in trouble themselves, with substances, their families, and occasionally the law, because their jobs are too boring for their personality type, which is similar to that of criminals in its attraction to risk. (One year, 90% of the infractions at the two-year state campus in tiny, isolated Canton, N.Y., were committed by the 50% of students magoring in Criminal Justice.)

But Mexicans assume the low crime rate is due to diligent police work. What a window into their mentality!!

It’s not only immigrants who don’t understand what things are like outside the big city. I wrote a while back, when Michael Bloomberg was making fun of Mayor Lou Barletta [“I testified before Congress and New York’s a city of 8.3 million people. The guy who testified after me came from Hazleton, Pa., which is 30,000 people, and according to him, there has never been a crime committed in Hazleton, Pa., that wasn’t committed by an undocumented”] that

even as a fairly safe New Yorker, who doesn’t have to ride the subway, for example, Bloomberg has lived all his life behind locked doors, in constant peril of crime, keeping a close eye out for people on the street who might attack him. I don’t believe he has any concept of what small-town life might be like, except to mock it.

To give you a counter example, when Denny Hastert, who lives in Yorkville, Illinois, became Speaker of the House in 1999, his new security detail went to his home to install new, high security locks on the doors, they found that that there were no locks there, period. They had to install them from scratch.

There are a lot of homes in Kentucky with no locks on the door, but not in Los Angeles, New York, …or Mexico City.