In 2004, financial writer Annie Jacobsen reported on a terrifying flight on Northwest Airline from Detroit to Los Angeles, in which 13 Syrians behaved as if they were about to blow up the plane. She wrote about the experience on the financial website Women’s Wall Street in what turned into a series of columns about the terrorist behavior going on in the skies.

For her responsible reportage about the situation of continuing danger from Muslim terrorists on airplanes, she was slammed by government mouthpieces as a silly and hysterical woman. However, she received numerous communications from security personnel, flight crews and other passengers who concurred that what she saw was real. Her series of columns grew into a book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again..

Now the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security that the Syrians were indeed engaged in a terrorist probe.

“Agency management was not only covering up numerous probes and dry-run encounters from Congress and other federal law-enforcement agencies, it was also hiding these incidents from their own flying air marshals,” said P. Jeffrey Black, an air marshal stationed in Las Vegas. [...]

“One man rushed to the front of the plane appearing to head for the cockpit. At the last moment, he veered into the first-class lavatory, remaining in it for about 20 minutes,” according to the report. One man carried a McDonald’s bag into the lavatory, and “another man, upon returning from the lavatory, reeked strongly of what smelled like toilet bowl chemicals.”

“Some men hand signaled each other. The passenger who entered the lavatory with the McDonald’s bag made a thumbs-up signal to another man upon returning from the lavatory. Another man made a slashing motion across his throat, appearing to say ‘No.’ ”
[Report confirms terror dry run, Washington Times 5/30/07]

Continuing on the subject of how well the government is protecting us, we learned more today about the man with drug-resistant tuberculosis who resisted mild entreaties from public health officials that he not travel by airplane. (See my article The X-Ray Files: How Political Correctness Is Destroying Effective Public Health Policy.)

Dr Julie Gerberding, director of the Center for Disease Control, said “I think we were surprised that the patient had left the country.”

Lou Dobbs opened his program with the story, emphasizing the failure of security agencies to corral one easily identifiable person.

DOBBS: Good evening, everybody. Health officials tonight are struggling to find people who traveled on two trans-Atlantic flights with an American infected with a highly dangerous and contagious form of T.B. The man is being treated in a hospital in Atlanta for what is called extensive drug-resistant T.B. The man drove back into this country from Canada after flying to Montreal from the Czech Republic.

Customs and Border Patrol agents were on alert for this man, but he was still able to cross our border undetected and not stopped. Elizabeth Cohen tonight reports from Atlanta on the global investigation into this T.B. scare. Jeanne Meserve reports on our apparently broken system that does not permit tracking international travelers with dangerous diseases almost six year after September 11th.

Security concerns of various sorts will be made far more complicated by Washington’s amnesty scheme. Today’s reports of performance are not reassuring, to say the least.

The results of 159 years of Hispanic assimilation in New Mexico: The commentariat is laughing at Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson for being humiliated by Tim Russert on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to immigration. Last week this is what all the newspapers said. “The Senate’s compromise immigration bill is forcing the presidential candidates to confront a divisive issue. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson praised the bill. ‘This legislation makes a good start” towards “re-securing our Southern border.’” A few days later this headline appeared. “Hispanic presidential hopeful confronts immigration debate. On Wednesday Richardson said that after read[ing] the immigration bill in detail, he decided to oppose it, saying the measure placed too great a burden on immigrants, tearing apart families that wanted to settle in the U.S., creating a permanent tier of second-class immigrant workers and financing a border fence. This is fundamentally flawed in its current form and I would oppose it. We need bipartisanship, we also need legislation that’s compassionate. I’m not sure this is it.’” How can you be for it and 72 hours later against it?

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, no, this is what happened. I was announcing for president, and the day before, I saw a summary of a bill that had been proposed in the Senate. … The bill is then presented, and I read it the next day, and it contained some problems.

He realized after reading the the 300+ page bill that his initial reaction had been wrong? What a flip-flopper!

(Of course, I don’t actually believe Richardson read the bill. I’m sure he just heard more about it. And the reasons he says he changed his mind — e.g., the bill cuts back on extended family reunification for legal immigrants — are mostly bad ones. But, this controversy over a politician changing his mind on an incredibly complex piece of proposed legislation after 72 hours of reflection illustrates the jaw-dropping irresponsibility of the prestige press when it comes to immigration. You aren’t supposed to think about immigration — that’s the mark of a yahoo. You are just supposed to instantaneously react emotionally in order to show whether your are a Good Person or a Bad Person.)

MR. RUSSERT: But let’s go through the resume a little bit. First, there’s governor of New Mexico. As you well know, they rank states in a whole variety of categories from one being the best, 50th being the worst. This is New Mexico’s scorecard, and you are the governor. Percent of people living below the poverty line, you’re 48. Percent of children below, 48. Median family income, 47. People without health insurance, 49. Children without health insurance, 46. Teen high school dropouts, 47. Death rate due to firearms, 48. Violent crime rate, 46. You’re the very bottom of all those statistics of all 50 states, and you’re the governor for five years.

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, Tim, let me just say that we’ve made enormous progress in all of those areas. [More]

He’s been governor for five whole years and he hasn’t yet turned turn New Mexicans into Minnesotans? What a loser!

The press is obsessed with political horse races and bored with long-term realities. Yet, the pervasive, unchanging mediocrity of New Mexico sheds important light on the issue of the day, immigration.

Despite being one of the four border states, there is remarkably little immigration from Old Mexico into New Mexico. Why not? In large part, because it’s already filled with Latinos, many of who trace their ancestry in New Mexico back before the U.S. seized it in the Mexican-American war. After 159 years in the United States of America, they still haven’t much assimilated to American standards. What does that say about the prospects for assimilation of newcomers from Mexico?

Jim Pinkerton writes in Newsday:

‘Those who are looking to find fault with this bill will always be able to find something.” That was George W. Bush at his press conference Thursday, defending his proposed immigration legislation. He didn’t quite say to critics, “Bring ‘em on” - but was close enough to get this critic going.

Of course, the president immediately went on to laud the “comprehensive” virtues of his bill, urging its congressional enactment. But if we examine the legislation, we will indeed see plenty of faults - such that “comprehensive” becomes a catalog of costly flaws. As the old business joke goes, “We lose money on each sale - but that’s OK, because we make it up on volume!” [Poor immigrants end up being expensive May 29, 2007]

Dr. David Yeagley has a new book out, Bad Eagle: The Rantings of a Conservative Comanche available to be bought.

It features writings from around the web in handy paperback form, including some of his work for VDARE.com.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy is surprised at the level of rhetoric displayed by President Bush in a speech attacking critics of the immigration bill:

Those determined to find fault with this [immigration] bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don’t like. If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people.

Professor Kerr says

Just to be clear, what I find notable — and very unfortunate — is the use of this kind of language coming from the President of the United States. I realize that it’s easy to find such rhetoric online, and that some columnists use it. But it’s different coming from the President of the United States, who deserves to be held to a much higher standard.

In the comments, some of his readers search for historical parallels, but the main thing, noticed by one commenter, is that this is a case of a President attacking not his political enemies, or those who he perceives as the nation’s enemies. That would be almost normal, like FDR talking about “malefactors of great wealth” or calling isolationists “The New Copperheads.” Who Bush is attacking is his base. Even people who’ve supported Bush through thick and thin are starting to think he’s losing it, including David Frum, author in 2003 of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush and of course, author of the 2003 NRO article Unpatriotic Conservatives, asks on NRO if it’s “really smart to abuse“ people who been loyal to Bush, and Jay Nordlinger says, also on NRO

A little advice for President Bush: Watch your rhetoric against opponents of the immigration bill. Be understanding of those who oppose it. Why? Well, in part, because they include some of the people who still love you — and that band is not getting any bigger.

That’s what’s so amazing–if President Bush was attacking us, that would make sense, but he’s actually attacking those people who support him.

Two columnists normally numbered as leftish or “Progressive” have weighed in with valuable and distinctive attacks on the Bush Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill.

Paul Krugman has generally been MIA on Immigration. How immigration bill could make things worse The Arizona Daily Star May 27 2007 begins almost apologetically with the usual ritual incantations

My own grandparents came to this country during that era, which ended with the imposition of severe immigration restrictions in the 1920s. Needless to say, I’m very glad they made it in before Congress slammed the door.
As supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews

Then veers abruptly into relevance:

Today, there’s a highly technical controversy going on among economists about the effects of recent immigration on wages. No matter how that dispute turns out, it’s clear that the earlier wave of immigration increased inequality and depressed the wages of the less skilled.
For example, a recent study by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were around 10 percent lower than they would have been without mass immigration

Of course, this is in principle exactly the present day finding of the Statistics Canada paper I blogged about on Saturday (and which still has yet to see any US MSM coverage).

Krugman then goes on to make an ingenious argument. He suggests that the non-citizen status of so much of the population in the early 20th Century “diluted democracy”

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population denied any political voice.
That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn’t have the right to vote.
Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal… by creating a fully enfranchised working class.

For this reason Krugman rejects any guest worker program. He, in effect, fears it is a trick by the GOP to avoid the Brimelow/Rubenstein prediction.

While abrasively self interested, this analysis is correct: it is the mechanism by which the Swiss keep tight control of their country despite an alien population proportion similar to the US.

Froma Harrop, while far less show-cased than Paul Krugman, has written much valuable work on immigration. Her May 22 column The Working Class Is Not Stupid About Immigration highlights a key reason why the American immigration disaster has gone so far: Worker Organization leaders betraying their followers:

The Service Employees International Union is backing a proposal to greatly expand the supply of low-cost labor pouring into the United States. The reason why is close to crazy…First off, any self-respecting union would blow its top at the very suggestion of a massive new guest-worker program. The AFL-CIO adamantly opposes the idea. Its president, John Sweeney, complains that the program gives employers “a ready pool of labor they can exploit to drive down wages, benefits, health and safety protections, and other workplace standards.”
It seems curious that the union does not mind adding another half million workers a year to compete with its own members. Its Website contends that America has a shortage of 10 million workers and that “nearly half of all jobs created from now until 2012 will be held by workers with a high school diploma or less.”
Duh — but don’t worker shortages cause wages to rise?

Harrop seems genuinely puzzled at the behavior of the SEIU

…one can’t be sure whether the SEIU aspires to be a union representing workers or an arm of the National Council of La Raza, a group that claims to further the interests of Hispanics — and does a lousy job of it.

VDARE.com has noted the odd stance of the Service Employees International Union and its grandstanding President, Andrew Stern before, for instance here and here. In all probability, as with the execrable former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, what we have here is a case of obsessive ancestor worship – from which Paul Krugman, thankfully, appears to have freed himself.