From Politico:

Sen. John Edwards plans to warn later this week that the nation’s schools have become segregated by race and income, and he will propose measures to diversify both inner-city and middle-class schools. …

As explained by people who have been consulted about the program, Edwards wants to set aside $100 million to help school districts implement economic integration programs. The money will help finance buses and other resources for schools that enroll additional low-income children.

How clueless do you have to be to try to run for President — as a purported populist — as the Busing Candidate?

This isn’t just a personal failing of Edwards — it reflects how out of touch our ruling class has become. It’s not merely how rich they are — the Roosevelts, after all, were extremely rich — but how political correctness has dumbed them down.

It’s widely assumed that political correctness is just polite hypocrisy and that the big shots understand what’s really going on even though they aren’t allowed to mention it in public — after all, the Clintons sure didn’t send Chelsea to the local public school for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — but that’s naive. What happens is that political correctness severs the mental connection between private and public thinking.

Everybody knows that they, personally, don’t want a whole bunch of inner city kids bused into their kid’s school, but nobody is allowed to articulate publicly the reasons why everybody feels that way. Partly, it’s self-discipline — if a public figure ever happened to candidly mention exactly why he sends his daughter to Sweet Briar Country Day School instead of to Malcolm X. H.S., he’s toast. So, it’s best if he never mentions it in private, either. It could leak out. In fact, it’s even better if he never thinks it inside his own head. He might slip up.

So, concepts that can’t be articulated publicly aren’t, after awhile, even thought anymore.

Money Magazine has published a list ot the 100 best places to live in the United States. The winner: Middleton, Wis., a suburb of Madison. The editors of Money add this caveat:

But make no mistake: Family life is what Middleton is about. In the summer you’ll see parents and kids plying the bike trails of the conservancy, splashing in the town’s waterslide-equipped pool or sailing on Lake Mendota. On the downside, winter is tough, and there’s not great ethnic diversity.

Er…isn’t the lack of diversity that makes it possible for kids to ride safely on bike trails? Even if Money Magazine isn’t up on Robert Putnam’s latest research, they must have heard of “white flight,” a phenomenon usually caused by crime rates.

-

The folks at the Countenance blog ‘liked‘ one of my previous posts so much, I thought I would comment on one of theirs:

The Urban League will hold its National Convention in St. Louis later this month, and hold a Presidential Candidates’ Forum on July 27. So far, there are no Republican takers. Not even Tom Tancredo.

The NAACP is bad enough, but the National Urban League, for the entirety of its existence, has been devoted to the singular purpose of the forced integration of residential neighborhoods, which has provoked urban sprawl, and ruined the equity that the white working class had built in real estate.

Anybody, much less any Republican, that shows up to the Urban League is essentially saying, F-you white America.

First off, the National Urban League has done other things relevant to VDARE.com readers. Their former director Hugh Price was rather skeptical of H-1b visas early on. That was in a day when folks like Trent Lott were voting for expansion of H-1b visas.

Most of the folks that were hurt during white flight in major US cities were in fact Democrats at the time. The GOP made some political hay during that period-but only to a limited extent. To claim this was representative of the equity of white working class is simply not accurate.

Anyhow, the value of citizenship by far swamps the value of other property for the majority of American families. Organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League represent important blocks of Americans-albeit imperfectly.
They are unlikely to change their stands unless they are respected and reasoned with.

Tancredo has a lot to say to those folks. Paul would have even more-he might speak not only on illegal immigration, but H-1b expansion, the massive increase in the US prison system and how African Americans have paid the price of the Iraq war more than the sons of the wealthy. That is not pandering. It is showing what his platform offers them on their terms. It is also good politics. If Paul and Tancredo got cheered at the NUL and NAACP it would make it even harder to label immigration restriction as racist.

If it would be telling anyone to take a hike, it would be the wealthy backers of both parties that created the current mess we are in.

I don’t think that most Americans who oppose busing, affirmative action and government promoted integration of neighborhoods want a political situation in which the leaders of one group can’t sell their ideas to members of the other side. On immigration this is key, because while the wealthy backers of both parties are strong supporters of immigration, the working class in both parties are strongly opposed to immigration.

If folks like Trent Lott can do business with Ted Kennedy, why can’t populists on the left and the right legitimately speak with each other?

Here in Lodi, CA. we pay a bit more attention than most to Roger Cardinal Mahony and the sex abuse cases that he covered up for decades. The reason is simple: pedophile priest Oliver O’Grady raped and molested children in the Stockton-Lodi area while Mahony was Bishop of the Stockton Diocese from 1980 to 1985.

In this morning’s Lodi News-Sentinel, local attorney Larry Drivon, a specialist in clergy abuse cases, said:

“If Roger Mahony had dialed three simple numbers in 1982 or 1984, none of this would come to pass. Those three numbers are 9-1-1.”

Drivon noted that while Mahony issued plenty of apologies this weekend, none of them were for his own complicity.[Attorney: Mahony’s Apology Shallow, By Ross Farrow, Lodi News-Sentinel, July 16, 2007]

VDARE.com is, of course, taboo in the MSM and even, with rare exceptions, in the Big Foot Blogosphere - although there is a gratifying willingness to appropriate our arguments (without acknowledgement) when convenient.

This stems from the allegation of extremism promoted by the thuggery of the SPLC (amongst others, we suspect).

So we have to note coming under attack for centrism even if the argument were not worthy of attention (which it is).

The Countenance Blog (recently spun out of the St Louis Council of Conservative Citizens website) feels Tom Tancredo was mistaken in speaking at the NAACP Convention, and that VDARE.com was wrong to praise him:

This was a stupid thing for Tancredo to do, and a stupid thing for such a usually reliable source of information and opinion like V-Dare to praise, though V-Dare has a history of pandering to blacks on the immigration issue…there are lots of white people in many places of the country that have not yet been afflicted by mass Mexicanization, but are heavily black. So most white people in places like Mississippi, or Cleveland, Ohio, or even here in St. Louis, who don’t understand the furor over immigration because they haven’t experienced its effect, do have first-hand experience with blacks.

What Tancredo and V-Dare have just done is to flip the bird to white people who would be on their side on the immigration issue once they experience Mexicans and Latin Americans, by endorsing the NAACP and all the crime and violence committed by the racial minority that the NAACP represents, which such white people and voters are far more likely to have experienced.

Pandering, of course, means seeking ingratiation by supplying a party with what they want. Pointing out to Blacks that the mass immigration is bad for them as well as for Whites simply does not fit the dictionary meaning. Compliance Blog chose the wrong word.

Perhaps Missouri is an exception, but, alas, Compliance Blog seems to be at least a decade out of date about the Mexican invasion. The most far flung areas now seem to suffering inundation.

Blacks, of course, certainly do create problems for the other Americans, particularly crime. It is silly to say that we “endorse” this. And their leadership is indeed dubious. But as Peter Brimelow said in Alien Nation, whatever may be said about “Afro-Americans”, they are unarguably a type of American. Establishing that there is common cause on the crucial issue of mass immigration is the rational thing to do.

A reader writes:

On the SAT (at least when I was coaching it in the late 1980s for The Princeton Review), there were six reading comprehension passages. One of these was the “diversity” passage — always about a woman or minority. Without even reading the passage itself, a smart person who understood how the test is designed and understood that the answers would never suggest anything derogatory about women/minorities, could get most of the questions correct. I used to amuse my father and older brothers by demonstrating how this worked. The principles I learned at TPR work, more or less, on any standardized college/professional school entrance test.