Here in Mexico, the ongoing Post-Election Contention continues. Felipe Calderon won by only a quarter of a million votes, but Sore Loser Lopez Obrador continues to contest the election. Most of the protests are in Mexico City. They are non-violent, though quite inconvenient for the residents of that city.

The electoral tribunal is scheduled to hand down the official result by September 6th. Hopefully things will wind down after that.

David Frum has a recent piece on the Mexican Post-Election Contention entitled “How Far Will Obrador Take This?”.

The article is a pretty good overview of the situation, but requires some corrections.

Frum contrasts Al Gore’s acceptance of the 2000 Supreme Court decision with Lopez Obrador’s rejection of the Mexican Electoral Tribunal’s ruling on August 5th.

That’s a mistaken contrast. The Mexican Electoral Tribunal has not yet handed down its final ruling on the election. What it did on the 5th was declare a partial recount, of about 9% of the polling stations .

Frum also garbles the sequence of recent Mexican history. He says that the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) was formed in 2000, which is not correct, it was founded in 1989. Also, Lopez Obrador was not the party’s first leader.

Frum exaggerates apparent winner Felipe Calderon’s free-market credentials. Calderon is free-market by Mexican standards, but not by American standards. He has already promised NOT to privatize PEMEX, the state oil monopoly.

It’s more correct to call the losing candidate “Lopez Obrador”, or “Lopez”, rather than “Obrador”.

This requires an explanation of Spanish surnames which you’re not likely to get from mainstream media English-language writers. That’s because most of them don’t understand Spanish surnames . But that’s why VDARE.COM exists, to tell you what the mainstream media doesn’t.

In Spanish-speaking countries people have two official surnames, one from their father and the other from their mother. My official name in Mexico is “Allan Wall Dunlavy” because Dunlavy was my mother’s maiden name.

The surnames can be used in several ways. You can refer to a man using only his father’s surname (Pedro Gomez) or both surnames (Pedro Gomez Rodriguez) or with the paternal surname and the first initial of the maternal surname (Pedro Gomez R.). Officially though, he is not to be referred to as Pedro Rodriguez.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador should be referred to as Lopez, or Lopez Obrador, or, as he is commonly known, his initials, AMLO. (He’s also referred to as el Peje or Pejelagarto (Lizard Fish) and this nickname is not meant to be derogatory).

By the way, if you’d like to read my commentary on the contemporary Mexican scene, visit (and bookmark) my weekly column over at the Mexidata website (www.mexidata.info) . It’s updated on Sunday night or Monday morning.

From the terrific idea for a Website category: Immigrationcounters.Com

I like this Website!

I have no clue who these people are, (although the writing style is familiar) but they have done a great job in providing a one stop source of real-time information to people who do not study illegal immigration and its consequences all day.

On the site, one can see the real time estimates of such bothersome little details as the number of illegals in the U. S (more on that further down), the amount of money wired to Mexico, the cost of social services to illegal “immigrants” ( the proprietors seem a tad timid on using the legal and correct term for an alien who is present in our Republic illegally), illegals enrolled in public schools, illegals incarcerated - along with the cost of that incarceration, and the number of fugitives who have escaped the Bush Administration’s vast dragnet (cough).

Hooray! Kudos to whoever did this!

Pass this around to the “I don’t follow politics” crowd. Amaze your friends and family!

I do have a bone to pick: On the number of illegals in country, not that it matters, but, it has been done before - and I believe more accurately.

Posted on The American Resistance Foundation Website (now in hibernation ) in the fall of 2004, we have our own illegals-present counters with a beginning figure that was about twice as high as was being accepted at the time.

We got a lot of …ummm….resistance.

While we have adjusted the counters to match new information along the way, we stand by the current estimation of nearly 30 million people who are allowed to live in the U.S. illegally.

We are flattered that Immigrationcounters.com is using similar logic that we use and was illustrated on VDARE.com in August of 2004.

They even cite the independent report from Bear Stearns. It should be noted that the Bear Stearns study was done in 2004 and released in 2005, making their estimation of 20 million illegal aliens here two and a half years old.

Illegal border crossings and visa overstays never stop. Right Mr. President?

Feel safer?

The as yet unknown hosts of this site acknowledge as much:

“On the high end of the spectrum are some private groups that randomly select single sources of data, such as an interview with a border patrol agent or with one elected official. Those sources have placed the numbers around 30 million. Until more data is provided, ImmigrationCounters.com does not yet side with the 30 million figure, yet notes that it may indeed be that high”.

Respecfully, I think maybe the writer should re-read our methodology, which my friend Fred Elbel has spent considerable time illustrating, and acknowledge that the “one elected official” that we cite is one of the main backers of amnesty-again…Arizona Senator John McCain.

I enjoy putting his letter on how many people he thinks crossed our borders illegally in 2002 out as much as possible.

The point is that not many who study the crisis really believe the MSM/Senate/White House/illegal alien lobby ( sorry, I repeat myself ) commonly used figure of “11 million”, which is what the present amnesty-again attempt is based upon.

You know all of the information that is out about how bad the effects of the proposed amnesty are for America?

They are based on the 11 million figure.

Use which ever figure you want, 20 million, 30 million, the point is that 11 million is a very dangerous fairy tale and that if amnesty-again goes through, the results will be two or three times a bad as the worst scenarios being hidden by Bush and his accomplices.

Immigrationcounters.com should become a much used resource for anyone who wants to illustrate the un-spoken consequences of the fact that five years after 9/11, we have virtually open borders, are losing the rule of law upon which our nation was founded and that we are paying for the privilege of watching the third world migrate into our children’s nation.

Si?

I wonder how many VDARE readers will send a link to this site to their U.S. Senators?

I am.

In the recent hot weather, some people have been succumbing to heat stroke and heat exhaustion. Daniel Engber on Slate.com has an Explainer to tell you how heat does this [How does heat kill you? By Daniel Engber MP3]

Stay cool, drink plenty of water, wear a hat, oh, and if you’re in Mexico, and your Government is encouraging you to cross the border illegally through the Sonoran Desert, stay home.

America: taking it to the limit?, published 8/6/06 in the San Diego Union Tribune, details environmental organizations’ refusal to grapple with their elephant in the living room, namely the US population explosion caused almost entirely by immigration. Now, as the nation approaches 300 million, the enviro-elites’ denial is becoming hard to ignore.

The environmental establishment has mostly abandoned talking about the nation’s growing populace, particularly as it relates to immigration. The topic is dogged by internal squabbles, divisive politics and a desire to avoid ethnic discrimination.

One result is that ecological factors are rarely mentioned in the current effort to establish a new immigration policy. The debate mostly centers on economics and national security.

“People have been avoiding it like the plague,” said U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, a hawk on illegal-immigration issues.

“[Environmentalists]will sidestep major challenges to what their stated goal is because it may end up stepping on political friends’ toes,” he said. “They have credibility problems when they are willing to look the other way.” [...]

“Some people … want the Sierra Club to have a position that is more U.S.-centric,” said Stephen Mills, the club’s international program director in Washington, D.C. “We feel that the entire planet is worth protecting, not the U.S. over anywhere else.”

How many average Sierra Club members would continue to send their annual dues if they knew the management didn’t believe the American environment was worth saving? And despite the obvious global interconnectedness of natural systems, we citizens have far more to say about what is done in our own country than across the planet.

The Sierra Club in particular is corrupt to the core, having accepted a “donation” of $100 million on the condition that immoderate immigration not be mentioned as detrimental to environmental preservation.

The article included a preview of a report to be published in September, with some disturbing news about America’s environmental health.

About 40 percent of the nation’s rivers and 46 percent of its lakes are too polluted for fishing and swimming. Wetlands, the biological filters for water pollution, are shrinking by 100,000 acres a year, mainly because of development.

Roughly 6,700 species in the country are at risk of extinction, most often because of habitat loss.

Half of the continental United States no longer supports native vegetation, largely because people have altered the terrain significantly.

See the theme running through? Too many people crowding up the place, paving over every living thing in sight. And Bush’s Washington is planning on importing at least 100 million more in the next 20 to 35 years.

But don’t expect the compromised faux-greens to criticize American overpopulation — as long as it’s “diverse.”