Joe Guzzardi will be a guest on the Mark Edwards, ‘Wake Up America’ program at 10 P. M. PDT, 1:00 AM Eastern. Listen here.

The LA Times reports on the campaign for governor of the northern half of Baja California by former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon (whom I wrote about a month ago in VDARE.com):

He offers reporters drinks of his favorite tequila, custom-brewed by a Chinese-Mexican restaurateur and fermented with rattlesnake hides and penises of lions and tigers, which the father of 19 swears makes him virile.

On a recent swing through the Valle de Mexicali, Hank took the wheel of a van carrying 14 volunteers and screeched around tight turns, ran stop signs and blew through red lights. In the rush to keep up, one volunteer almost slammed the door on a woman trying to give Hank a letter.

Hank, 51, is PRI royalty, the son of Carlos Hank Gonzalez, an early party stalwart and former governor of the state of Mexico and Mexico City mayor who amassed a billion-dollar fortune and, according to legend, coined the phrase, “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.”

The younger Hank moved to Tijuana in 1985 to run the historic Agua Caliente track, which features dog races. The enormous grandstand is the showcase property in an empire that includes shopping centers, hotels and off-track betting parlors.

Hank, who inherited half his father’s wealth, estimates his worth has doubled to $1 billion in the last three years.

To many, he appears to spend every penny of it.

This year he flew in superstar singers Julio Iglesias and Luis Miguel to entertain at personal parties. He owns about 30 cars and a house in Vail, Colo. Three times a year, he throws open the doors at the racetrack for gift-giving extravaganzas. On Mother’s Day, thousands of women cart home stoves, refrigerators and other appliances.

Behind his home he keeps an enormous private zoo. It has bears and lions, kangaroos and ostriches, and three rare white tigers. The zoo, which has 20,000 animals, isn’t that impressive, Hank says. “Any sultan or guy in Africa has a zoo,” he once said. …In a comic book distributed to children at events, Hank is depicted as a caped superhero, Hombre H., a fearless crime fighter and protector of the poor.[Ex-Tijuana mayor forges link to poor Jorge Hank Rhon is closing the gap in the race for governor of Baja California state. By Richard Marosi, August 5, 2007 ]

Fun stuff.

So, it’s not true that the American media doesn’t cover Mexico, but what’s lacking is any kind of resonance in the NY-DC media echo chamber. This kind of south-of-the-border color gets dutifully reported upon, but that’s as far as it goes in the press.

For example, while Jorge Hank Rhon is the out-of-control Sonny-Fredo member of the Hank family, his brother Carlos Hank Rhon is more the Michael Corleone-type, who has had ties to lots of big timers in American politics, including the President of the United States. But who cares about boring stuff like that?

There are six GOP hopefuls that have better than a 1% chance of getting that party’s nomination according the betting market Intrade.

Markets like Intrade have a much better record of predicting electoral outcomes than methods like polls, so these are probably fairly realistic odds.

Now on August 11, 2008, in Ames Iowa the state GOP will have their straw poll. One two of the six major candidates above are actively participating in that contest. Factors that are important there:
Iowa is a conservative state. of the major candidates, only Paul and Romney are likely to pass the “family values” litmus test. The rest are plagued by nasty rumors, divorce, estranged children or a history of affairs.

The Iowa caucuses and the straw poll are a test of activist support. Funding and media support are secondary factors in these contests.

Iowa is a major chance for minor candidates to build momentum before the closely grouped primaries after New Hampshire.

Many pundits will be looking at Tancredo’s performance as an indication of how well a campaign centered on immigration can do. I disagree with this claim. Tancredo has focused largely and control of the immigrants themselves-and regulating employers and investors that profit from immigration has been a secondary factor in his thinking. Furthermore,despite his early attention to H-1b expansion, Tancredo’s recent voting record on H-1b expansion has been fairly weak. Paul has placed less emphasis on immigration, but has a stronger recent record on H-1b expansion. I would suggest that in the GOP there are more activists that have either been impacted by H-1b expansion-or have a friend that has than there are folks impacted by immigration of less skilled worker. Thus, the relative performance of Paul and Tancredo may be an indication of how GOP voters prioritize addressing different types of immigration.

What may be more important measure of GOP attention to immigration is the total support of Paul, Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo in these early contests. These are the three candidates with records on immigration that are clearly more restrictive than average. If any of these folks drop out early, the others will probably get their supporters.

Paul is especially interesting in Iowa, because he has held some very successful rallies in Iowa-and because of his history of libertarian activism, he has a large base of loyal activists. I suspect that both Tancredo and Paul will do better in the straw poll and caucuses than is expected-and that whichever one stays in will build substantial momentum as the race develops.

I got emailed this item from Canada:

- Mexican refugee requests skyrocket

Middle class wants to escape drug cartels, corrupt authorities

By Nicholas Keung, IMMIGRATION/DIVERSITY REPORTER, Toronto Star, August 05, 2007

Manuel Lanveros could have come to Canada through normal immigration channels as a skilled immigrant.

Instead, the Mexican citizen simply hopped on a plane and asked for refugee asylum here because, he says, he couldn’t afford to risk his life on the two-year wait.

An architect with 15 years of experience, Lanveros represents a new wave of Mexican refugees who contradict the desperate day-labourer stereotype: educated, upper-middle-class professionals who claim corrupt authorities are failing to protect them from drug cartels, abusive spouses or gay bashers.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, Mexican asylum claims have skyrocketed in a decade, from fewer than 1,000 a year to 5,000. For the past two years, Mexico has been Canada’s top source country for refugee claims.

With the defeat this spring of a U.S. immigration bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants – and the increasing hostility of many Americans – observers worry that Mexicans hoping for a safe haven will instead file claims in Canada.

Francisco Rico-Martinez, of the Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ) Refugee Centre, says 85 per cent of the advocacy group’s clients are now Mexicans. As many as 15 new cases arrive at his door each week.

“My concern is we’re going to be swarmed by Mexicans in the U.S. who don’t have status there and can come to the border because they don’t need a visa to come to Canada,” says Rico-Martinez, himself a refugee from El Salvador. “We’re starting to get calls from Mexicans in the States, five to six a week, hoping to file refugee (claims) in Canada. But we may not even know half of the Mexicans here who are without status, because they don’t need visas to come.”

They have a photograph of a refugee claimant saying he’s fleeing the homophobia of Mexican society. In 2003 I did a short item that said

[I]t’s worth noting that the immigration authorities are starting to consider Latin American homosexuals as victims of persecution because they are from countries with the same sodomy laws as were in force in every state in the union until 1961, New York until 1980, and in 23 other states until the Lawrence v. Texas decision.

Can we have some kind of moratorium here, where foreign states are given a few years to catch up to the latest liberal ideas promulgated by the Supreme Court?

Have you ever noticed how vastly much more attention is paid in the America press to Israel, a country of 6 million an ocean away, than to Mexico, a country of 109 million that shares a 1,952 mile border with us?

I’m not talking here about press bias for or against Israel or Mexico, just about the amount of coverage of the two countries in America.

For example, last year a leftist uprising that started among school teachers seized control of the big Mexican city of Oaxaca, a common destination for American tourists, and held it against federale attacks for quite a long time, but this seemingly interesting news created barely a ripple in the American media compared to the tsunami of reporting and commentating on Israel.

The most telling line in this story is “Gorby is neither Jewish nor African-American.” As you can see by his picture, he’s what’s known as a “White guy.” And I suppose, since he’s not a member of either group, he’s not allowed to have theories about why Jewish students at his school pass the bar 90 percent of the time, black students as low as 12 percent. And his remarks actually were innocuous, considering that he was offering an environmental, rather than genetic hypothesis. It’s true that a young man who spent his youth studying Talmudic logic will have much less culture shock in law school than someone who didn’t, but of course, a group doesn’t develop a tradition of study unless it has a large number of high IQ members.

In fact, if Gorby had been simply been saying that Christianity itself was anti-intellectual, he could probably get a grant to prove it.

Did prof’s views on Jews, blacks cross line?
JOHN MARSHALL | He sues law school, says remark about students’ religions cost him his raise
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH CHICAGO SUN-TIMES , August 1, 2007

Is it racism? Robust academic debate? Or clumsy words better left unsaid?

John Marshall Law School professor John Gorby has filed a lawsuit against his employer, saying he was improperly punished for what he believes were innocuous comments to a student after class.

The student, who is Jewish, was doing well in class and Gorby pondered whether his religious training — which from a young age encouraged critical analysis of written Scripture — explained why Jews pass the bar at higher rates than African Americans.

Gorby opined that blacks were brought up in religions such as Baptist churches that “emphasize an emotional and spiritual religious experience rather than discussion and debate about the meaning of scriptural language.”

Gorby is neither Jewish nor African-American.

The student shared some of Gorby’s comments with classmates, resulting in an elevator confrontation in which an African-American student asked Gorby if it was true that he said blacks don’t do well in his class.

She filed a complaint with an assistant dean. The Black Law Student Association demanded Gorby be suspended for 30 days without pay. Gorby addressed the student group trying to straighten things out.

The arguments have been going for five years. That first conversation took place in Gorby’s office in 2002. The law school has gone through three deans since then.

The first one took no action on the complaints against Gorby and agreed to give him a 5 percent raise, the lawsuit states.

The second dean, Patricia Mell, killed the raise and put a letter of reprimand in Gorby’s file which said, “Academic freedom does not excuse poor judgment. It does not excuse ‘pondering’ about racial or religious stereotypes to students who legitimately may fear that their law professor may see them through that prism and treat them accordingly in class.”[VDARE.com note: Patricia Mell is an African-American,[ which you would think would be relevant here.]

Gorby appealed and the school’s appellate board ruled for him, removing the reprimand from his file.

But he never got his raise. And he spent $25,000 on attorney’s fees. He thinks the whole episode represents a stifling of the academic freedom that should allow him and other professors to have provocative discussions with students about subjects such as how to boost bar-passage rates that — according to his lawsuit — have ranged as low as 12 percent some years for African Americans at John Marshall compared with about 90 percent for Jews.

Gorby asks for about $1 million.

[More]

The Malaysian Muslim referred to in headlines as a “Californian“ is also referred to as “San Jose Man“, “South Bay Man,” “Man.”

But one headline writer did refer to him him and his brother as ” Malaysian brothers.” That’s Eddie Chua’s story Malaysian brothers charged with having terror links It’s in the Malaysian Star. Which is published in Malaya. Thank you, Mainstream Media! You are providing us at VDARE.com with job security.