How nice to read in Tuesday’s Washington Post [Bush Pledges Action on Borders | Southwest is promised Agents, Jail Space for illegal immigrants, byPeter Baker August 30 , 2005 - Access requires free registration:]

Two weeks after the Democratic governors of Arizona and New Mexico declared states of emergency along the border, Bush used a Medicare speech here to promise residents an increasingly robust federal campaign that will deploy more agents and provide more detention space to stop those trying to sneak into the country. “We have an obligation to enforce the borders,” It’s important for the people of this state to understand your voices are being heard in Washington, D.C.,” Bush said. In emphasizing beefed-up enforcement, though, he made no mention of his stalled proposal to grant temporary guest-worker status to millions of illegal immigrants…Bush drew strong applause in Rancho Cucamonga when he vowed to enforce border control.

Great credit for this shift is due to The Minuteman Project and, also, to the two Western Democratic Governors who smelled the coffee.

But, somehow, one hears an echo of that great campaign pledge “Read my lips: No new taxes“, the breaking of which triggered Pat Buchanan’s heroic campaigns.

Michael Fumento, who has frequently heaped scorn on amateur bloggers, now has a blog himself.

Check out his response to some hatemail he got recently regarding his recent column on the decline and fall of Nativo Lopez ,[Michael Fumento: A Race-Baiter Falls from Grace] where his correspondent questioned Fumento’s right to criticize black and Hispanic leaders :

I would have thought you’d have gotten the idea from my column criticizing a Hispanic that I don’t subscribe to the notion that it’s forbidden to criticize someone outside your own racial or ethnic group. I am a homo sapien; they are homo sapiens. That is my standing. Those they oppress are human beings; that is my motivation.

The complaint that that whites don’t have the right to criticize black leaders is one that’s never heard in reverse; from Martin Luther King bashing Goldwater and Reagan, to Julian Bond comparing Republicans to terrorists, no one has suggested for forty years that they don’t have the right to criticize someone outside their “own racial or ethnic group.”