A reader who was trying to call his Senator’s office to talk about the Senate Sellout found that her staff was asking him for the bill number. (This Senator is Hillary Rodham Clinton, junior Senator from the State of New York.)

I don’t know why they don’t know it automatically, it’s probably the biggest thing to hit Senate offices in a generation, but for those of you who don’t know, it’s S. 1348, [PDF (large--790 pp.)HTML]

There’s no companion House bill yet, and given the public’s reaction to this, there may never be.

In my previous blog entry I wrote about the U.S. National Cemetery in Mexico City and the planned Memorial Day ceremony there.

As a follow-up, I’d like to link to an article which appeared the day after Memorial Day, reporting on the ceremony held there.

U.S. ambassador Tony Garza participated by laying the memorial wreath, and reading the Gettysburg Address.

An American Legion post in Mexico City participated in the ceremony, by trooping, posting and retiring the colors. Post #2 commander John Lambuth gave a speech, remembering the veterans of the post who had passed away the previous year.

It’s good to know that there are Americans in Mexico City taking care of our cemetery.

Don Thompsan writes at Associated Press

Every 30 minutes, day and night, guards walk the tiers of the isolation unit at California State Prison, Sacramento, checking inmates to make sure they don’t kill themselves.

The guards have been doing so since October, when the prison system instituted a series of reforms to cut the high rate of inmate suicides. The steps were prompted by a federal judge’s finding that a disproportionate number of suicides occurred in the isolation cells used to segregate inmates for disciplinary or other reasons.

The measures, which include screening inmates for potential suicidal tendencies and training guards how to intervene, appear to be making a difference.

California is among the national leaders in both exodus of US citizens-and prisoner abuse(which is strongly linked to prisoner suicide). Could this have anything to do with the high levels of immigration in that state?

Bill Gates has lots of money to get his point of view to the public. Who speaks for these troubled Americans? I’m not saying prisoners should be coddled, but even authoritarian governments like Singapore don’t appear to have this problem.

The New Mexico governor and Democratic Presidential candidate has an unusual background — New England high WASP and Mexican. His grandfather was a Boston naturalist of Mayflower descent who collected specimens in Central America and married a Mexican lady from a prestigious family of Oaxaca. He became a planter and rancher in Nicaragua, and, according to the candidate’s autobiography Between Worlds, “fathered children by four different women in Mexico and Central America.”

Richardson’s father was born in Nicaragua and grew up in Latin America and on the Eastern Seaboard, including Boston, Vermont, and Fisher’s Island in Long Island Sound, home to an ultra-exclusive Charles Blair Macdonald golf course. During the 1913 Tufts-Army football game, he tackled cadet Dwight Eisenhower, breaking his leg. Richardson’s dad went to work for what is now Citicorp in Italy and married an Italian colonel’s daughter in Genoa. He was the top Citicorp banker in Mexico City from 1929-1956 and married his Mexican secretary (making Richardson 3/4th Mexican, 1/4th WASP). Richardson’s father sent his pregnant mother to Pasadena, CA so that Richardson would be born in America (making him eligible for the Presidency).

Richardson was raised by his parents in Mexico City for 13 years before being sent to prep school in Massachusetts. Richardson then attended private Tufts U. as a legacy, to which his father had donated generously. There he majored in international affairs at the Fletcher School. He married a Massachusetts girl of (I believe) Irish and Jewish descent.

Richardson went to work as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. In 1978, Richardson carpetbagged his way to heavily Hispanic New Mexico and became a professional politician. He has held a variety of posts such as Congressman, Energy Secretary, UN Ambassador, and the Clinton Administration designated negotiator with foreign dictators. He is now a second term governor of New Mexico.

Presumably, his career has been helped along by being a twofer — he’s one of these new-fangled Mexican-Americans and he’s a traditional preppie WASP Old Boy at the same time!

Richardson’s resume resembles the elder George Bush’s — lots of impressive sounding jobs, both in a Southwestern state and in the corridors of power of the Eastern Establishment, but nobody’s too sure whether he did a good job in any of them.

On paper, he sounds like a plausible Democratic nominee in 2008. To win, the Democrats don’t seem to need to gamble on a high-risk candidate like the irascible Hillary or the sometimes brilliant but moody and self-absorbed Obama. They just need a guy who won’t blow it for them. And yet, Richardson’s candidacy doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

That Richardson is 3/4th Hispanic has generated only a tiny fraction of the frenzy of interest that Barack Obama being 1/2 black has generated, which fits my theory that most Americans barely notice mestizos compared to blacks, especially if they don’t have a Spanish surname. Americans really aren’t very interested in Mexicans, while, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, they find blacks fascinating.

Obama, who wrote a 442 page thematic autobiography about his being psychologically tortured by his lifelong resentment of his mother’s race, is praised by people who obviously haven’t read his book for being the “post-racial” man “comfortable in his own skin” who “transcends race.” Ironically, all those phrases would seem to fit the sunny, glad-handing Richardson far better than they apply to the race-obsessed Obama. And yet, while so many people credulously project their racial fantasies onto Obama and pay no attention to what the man actually wrote at age 33, Richardson, when anybody notices him or his ancestry at all, seems to attract suspicion and irritation, as on Meet the Press on Sunday, when Tim Russert grilled Richardson in a way that he wouldn’t dare with the widely-worshipped Obama.

Running for President, Richardson can’t seem to figure out what to do about his dual ethnicity. His whole career, it’s been this nice little advantage for him, but now he’s running for President and it’s taking on this symbolic importance that he can’t quite figure out how to spin. Sometimes Richardson sounds as ethnocentric as Cruz Bustamante, the centrist Democratic Lt. Governor of California who could have gotten himself elected California Governor in the three-way recall election of 2003 against the Republicans Schwarzenegger and McClintock, but, for some inexplicable reason, decided to campaign for Gobernador de Alta California instead. (Perhaps he believed Karl Rove’s hype about the size of the Latino vote?) Bustamante ended up turning an early lead in the polls over Arnold into a 17 point loss.

Other times, Richardson sounds like the Washington insider he is.

He ends up seeming phony, which, combined with some veracity problems (e.g., he always claimed he was drafted by a big league baseball team, but he wasn’t) and New Mexico’s reputation as the Louisiana of the desert when it comes to crooked politicos, isn’t helping his campaign.

The only other prominent American I can think of who was high WASP and Mexican (assuming the President’s nephew George P. Bush is not a prominent American yet) was the CIA’s paranoid genius spymaster James Jesus Angleton. (Matt Damon played him as a dull WASP in last year’s oddly intentionally-less-interesting-than-reality Robert De Niro movie “The Good Shepherd.”) Angleton’s father was a cavalry officer in Pershing’s 1917 punitive expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa and his mother was a 17-year-old Mexican society beauty. Angleton was raised mostly in Italy where his father was an NCR executive and attended prep school in England.

Many residents of Utah, it seems, think like Paul Nachman about the need to tell their Senators – Bennett and Hatch - how bad the Bush Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill is.

Angry Utahns by the hundreds are calling, e-mailing and faxing Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, demanding he oppose an immigration bill that would provide legal status to an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants…
In the past week, Bennett staffers have answered about 1,000 phone calls, and 95 percent of them denounce the fragile bipartisan immigration bill.
Hatch hasn’t said how he will vote, but his office has been hit by a similar deluge of voters arguing against the immigration compromise.
“The intensity of the callers is tremendous,” said spokeswoman Heather Barney. “Many are very very angry.”

Sen. Bennett sides with Bush on immigration reform by Matt Canham The Salt Lake City Tribune May 30 2007

Bennett is sniggering at them:

Those voters generally receive a coy answer.
“My public position is that I’m reviewing the amendments,” Bennett said Tuesday.
It’s a ploy meant to defuse emotion. But here’s what Bennett’s staffers are not saying: he plans to vote for it.

His stated reason displays staggering economic illiteracy:

Our economy is dependent on labor that is coming from illegal immigrants and that is true of St. George,” Bennett said.

(St George is a particularly rapidly growing part of Utah)

Bennett uses St. George as an example of a nationwide issue. He says if the government forcibly removed undocumented workers “you would throw the United States into a serious economic recession,” he said

So America never prospered before being flooded with poorly educated Hispanics? In fact, of course, VDARE.COM’s Ed Rubenstein has shown that the economic contribution of illegals is trivial.

In a sense, though, Bennett’s blinkered focus on business probably does explain his arrogant rejection of his Constituents’ concerns: he is following the money. In the interview he gives a hint he will not run again in 2010 (he was born in 1933): no doubt thoughts of lucrative sinecures are exerting their magic.

As so often, the comment thread produces incisive input:

GI MOM: 5/30/2007 7:21:00 AM

Most the new people in St.George are from Cal. They moved there because they can no-longer stand the illegals massive takeover. People in St.George do not want ANY illegals, and they also are against the unchecked building. Bennett will not be getting their votes.

A lady called Mary Jessel has posted a superb, detailed discussion too long to quote here.

And an anonymous post raises a sadly relevant issue

This is hardly surprising as most Mormon politicians have been pro-illegal immigration for years. Going down the list; Cannon, Hatch, Flake, Bennett, Huntsman, Leavitt are all to the left on immigration compared to most Republicans, and even some Democrats….that is why Utah, one of the “reddest” voting states in the union, has one of the most liberal set of laws with regard to illegal immigration.

A point very eloquently made to me when I last blogged on another Mormon, Jeff Flake. As I said when Congressman Chris Cannon survived his Primary challenge

How strange it is that Mormonism, that most American of religions, might well be causative in the Nation’s fall.