When Obama said “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”, Justice Alito was seen to mouth “Not true.” (Already a T-shirt, as Kathy Shaidle points out.)

Megan McArdle writes:

I’m sorry, I’m having a really hard time getting worked up about Alito’s “breach of protocol”.  It’s totally true that justices usually sit there like a stone.  On the other hand, president’s don’t usually call out said justices for being too wrapped up in that dumb first amendment–much less call them out with statements that seem to be unequivocally false.

McCardle is right that it’s “unequivocally false”–the speech that McCain-Feingold is meant to suppress is core First Amendment speech, and the Supreme Court was right to decide “Citizens United” the way it did.

On Chuck Wilder yesterday I said that if Obama doesn’t want people shouting “You lie” or saying “Not true,” (which may have been unconscious on the part of Alito) then he needs to stop lying.

But what’s amazing about this is that Obama, in response to a Supreme Court decision that something is unconstitutional, promises to pass more laws that are just as bad.

H/T the invaluable and indefatigable One Old Vet blog for In Arizona, a Stream of Illegal Immigrants From China , By Stephen Ceasar, The New York Times January 22, 2010

The number of Chinese immigrants arrested while illegally crossing the border into Arizona through the busiest smuggling corridor in the United States increased tenfold in the last fiscal year, according to the United States Border Patrol in Tucson.

In fiscal 2009, 332 Chinese immigrants were caught in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, up from 30 the previous year, Border Patrol figures showed. And in what could be a sign of a record-breaking pace for this year, agents in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector arrested 281 Chinese immigrants from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, the first quarter of the current fiscal year.

This of course is a blinding illustration of the criminal fecklessness demonstrated by America’s political class in not building an effective border fence. Like Israel. The gap is such a magnet that it is attracting people from the other side of the world.

And let no one say enforcement does not work:

Chinese smugglers have traditionally used shipping containers to take immigrants through American ports, but that has subsided as container inspections have increased

(VDARE.com emphasis).

Now Chinese immigrants do not pose the same problems as Haitians. They bring their own, for instance slavery:

Chinese immigrants commonly pay smugglers upward of $40,000 each to lead them from their homeland to the United States, Mr. Jimarez said… “The price far exceeds other nationalities, mainly due to the elaborate nature of the trip from China to Mexico…”

Peter Chan, a Tucson businessman who works as an interpreter at the federal courthouse in Tucson, said some immigrants had told him that they had paid a deposit of $5,000 to $10,000 to Chinese smugglers before leaving China.
If the immigrants make it to America, Mr. Chan said, they begin paying the smugglers the remainder of the cost.

(VDARE.com emphasis)

The report notes that many of the immigrants are from Fujian Province, whose inhabitants have acquired an unsavory reputation for cruel exploitation of their own people in this situation.

Thanks very much, John McCain.

Unrelated note: news of ex-Congressman J.D.Hayworth:
Former Ariz. congressman plans run against McCain myway.com Jan 23 2010

Republicans are cheering the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission that overturned parts of the McCain Feingold Act that restricted independent corporate expenditures.

I am less optimistic.

I am a pragmatist rather than an idealist when it comes to elections and electoral law.  So no matter what the constitutional merits of the Supreme Court’s decision, this could be a disaster for patriotic immigration reform.

Having worked with dozens of patriotic immigration reform candidates in Republican primaries, I can say without a doubt the biggest problem is money.  Whenever an open border candidate like Chris Cannon is seriously threatened, or if a Tancredo like candidate has a real shot, the money will come pouring in from the lobbying and corporate interests.

Because of the $2,300 cap on individual donations and ban on corporate donations, we will usually be able to stay within at least 1/3 to 1/2 as much as the open borders candidate.   We will have more total donors giving 50 or 100 contributions, but they get the big money contributors.

However, on ballot propositions like prop 200 and 202 in Arizona when there are very few campaign finance regulations, we  will be outspent at least 5 to 1, and in some cases 10 to 1.

We can still win ballot propositions with those financial gaps because the voter is just answering a question.  However money combined with the media can completely turn candidates positions on their heads and fool the voters into supporting the open borders candidate.

Sometimes you have to wonder about what kind of swamp gas the professorial elite are breathing in the upper altitudes of academe…

Example: Sunday’s review of the new book Game Change in the Washington Post had a jaw dropper of an aside, tossed off by Prof. Alan Wolfe (of Boston College).

At one particularly inane moment during the debates, for instance, Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself being grilled over whether illegal immigrants ought to have New York driver’s licenses. Compared with terrorism or the coming economic catastrophe, this was not the most burning question. The media focus on this kind of issue is precisely what the liberal bloggers gripe about; surely, they insist, our politics does not have to be this trivial.

Trivial? Accurate identification is trivial?

In fact, secure identification is a first line of defense against terrorism, and drivers’ licenses serve the ID function in America. In today’s dangerous world, authorities need to know who people really are.

The 9/11 Commission listed dependable ID as one of its recommendations for improving national security.

Memory assist: 9/11 hijackers Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al Hazmi were both unlawfully present in the United States when they obtained drivers’ licenses which permitted them to board the airplanes they used as weapons.

Therefore we friends of sovereignty regard drivers’ licenses as non-trivial and quite an appropriate topic for Presidential debates.

I’ve argued that Sara Palin is a cultural rather than a political phenomenon, although none the less powerful for that. But if she really wants to run for President–and I think she could win–at some point she will have to start talking about politics.

Of course, she didn’t really get much chance to say anything in her Fox interview with Bill O’Reilly last night–nobody does on O’Reilly’s show–but there was this deeply disappointing exchange:

O’REILLY: …All right. Now, Harry Reid gets in trouble with the Negro dialect remark and the light skin color.

PALIN: Yes.

O’REILLY: I — what would you — say, I’m Harry Reid, OK?

PALIN: Yes.

O’REILLY: And say — no, I’m not going to say that. Say I’m — what would you say to me?

PALIN: Well, obviously those were — you can’t defend those comments.

O’REILLY: But he’s sorry. He’s sorry. Is that enough?

PALIN: Well, he says he’s sorry. That — that way of thinking is quite foreign to, I think, most Americans today. I — I come from a…

O’REILLY: Do you think it was a racist statement?

PALIN: I come from a very diverse state. My family is diverse. I’m married to an Alaska native. A lot of us don’t think along those lines that somebody’s skin tone would be criteria for a qualification for the presidency. So his — his thinking and his articulating of that — that thought was — is quite perplexing. It’s quite unfortunate. And I think it’s unacceptable.

O’REILLY: Do you think it was racist?

PALIN: I don’t believe that he’s a racist. But I don’t believe that Trent Lott was a racist, either. And that double standard…

O’REILLY: No, we did that last night. Right.

PALIN: I know. And that double standard is — and that hypocrisy is another reason why so many Americans are quite disgusted with the political games that are played, not only on both sides of the aisle, but in this case, on the left wing, what they are playing with this game of racism and kind of letting Harry Reid’s comments slide, but having crucified Trent Lott for essentially along the same lines (inaudible). [VDARE.COM links added].

Palin is right that the 2002 Lott Lynching reflected a double standard, but to say that Reid’s comments were “unacceptable” just strengthens the Political Correctness that is the great curse of American public discourse. As Paul Gottfried argues here, Reid was manifestly correct and anyway the Sensitivity Stalinists are opposed to everything Palin stands for. Why is she trying to appease them?

The sad reason: she is falling into the hands of the same type of conventional campaign consultants who have persuaded Scott Brown to eschew the immigration issue–and, for that matter, Lou Dobbs and O’Reilly himself.

Sarah Palin can go only so far as the purely symbolic leader of the American implicit community. Eventually, she will actually have to lead.

My suggestion: next time O’Reilly announces “I’m saying to myself, ‘If Sarah Palin and John McCain were in, could they bring unemployment down under 10 percent?’ And I’m not sure you could”, don’t change the subject to Obamacare. Say “Immigration Moratorium!“

I found this on The Other McCain’s blog:

I wonder what David Frum or David Brooks would think of Ray Stevens.

US: Pa. firm stockpiled temporary-worker visas

By MARYCLAIRE DALE (AP) – 6 hours ago

PHILADELPHIA — A Pennsylvania staffing company gamed the nation’s visa program by obtaining hundreds of work visas under names culled from a Mexican phonebook and supplying the paperwork to illegal immigrants placed in landscaping and other seasonal jobs, authorities said Monday.

“They were almost like a shadow government, because they procured all these visas, and they were the ones able to control who’s getting them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin R. Brenner told The Associated Press.[More]

The company above, in stockpiling visas for imaginary workers from Central America and Mexico, was at least partly helped by the fact that Spanish doesn’t have that many different names.There may be tens of thousands of people named, for example, Juan Hernández,for example, so that if you stockpiled phony visas in the name Juan Hernández, you might be able to sell it to someone who actually had that name.

I know that if I’m searching online for what I think of as the Juan Hernández, a Mexican government functionary/American academic, last seen working for John McCain, I might find any of these others:

• Juan Bautista Hernández Pérez (born 1962), Cuban boxer
• Juan Gerardo Hernandez, Cuban writer
• Juan Hernández Ramírez (born 1965), Mexican football (soccer) player
• Juan Hernández Saravia (born 1880), Republican officer in the Spanish Civil War
• Juan Hernández Sierra (born 1969), Cuban boxer
• Juan Martín Hernández (born 1982), Argentine rugby player
• Juan Hernandez (diplomat) (born 1955) Mexican diplomat and attorney
• Juan Carlos Hernández (born 1989), La Ceiba Honduras

And in the news   Juan Hernández is a basketball player for Temple, a Santa Rosa businessman, and a guy who got arrested Saturday in Nacogdoches. Instead of foreign aid or a Marshall Plan, maybe Mexico needs more names.

The Rasmussen poll has just reported that Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a celebrated opponent of illegal immigration, is the strongest GOP candidate in the 2010 gubernatorial Arizona race –a particularly remarkable achievement because there is an incumbent Republican governor. This comes after Rasmussen’s earlier report that Senator John McCain is in trouble against former Congressman J.D. Hayworth in the 2010 GOP Senatorial primary. Hayworth is also an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, publishing a book on the subject in 2006.

This would be a perfect storm for immigration patriots and a terrible blow to the Treason Lobby. We can be sure that (a) John McCain is is going to have NO DIFFICULTY raising campaign funds; and (b) an Arpaio-Hayworth win will go straight down the memory hole, like California’s Proposition 187 (and Arizona’s Prop 200).

But, in the words of renowned psephologist Robert Burns, “it’s coming yet, for a’ that”.

David Frum wrote recently that

“Whatever happened to immigration?

Republican House leader John Boehner says we are living through a political “rebellion” on the Right. Yet the issue that most excited conservatives just 18 months ago has almost disappeared.

Immigration went unmentioned in the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey. Doug Hoffman’s Palin-backed candidacy tiptoed around the subject—even at one point appearing to endorse guest-worker programs.

California is immigration ground zero. In the special election Tuesday in California’s 10th Congressional District, the Democrat, John Garamendi, endorsed a McCain-Kennedy style amnesty. The Republican, Doug Harmer, laid low. “[Immigration: A hot-button issue on ice, By David Frum, The Week, November 4, 2009]

Well, immigration hasn’t disappeared–for one thing, it affects all the other issues, (see list) for another thing, Obama and La Raza still want amnesty, and Republican voters don’t want it.

This would be a great opportunity for Republicans, if they weren’t afraid that anything they say against amnesty will be criticized both from the left and from the Righteous Right–which includes David Frum–as “racist.”

So the issue hasn’t disappeared, it’s been disappeared–like Lou Dobbs. I note, by the way that David Frum’s website used to be called NewMajority.com, it’s now called FrumForum. That it more credible–David Frum’s version of conservatism is not going to build a new majority.

Lawrence Auster asked

“How reliable can a book on political strategy be that is called “Conservatism That Can Win Again,” when its author endorsed and joined the campaign of a candidate who ended up winning one delegate? “

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…)