When I heard that the story of a worker at “Your Black Muslim Bakery” in Oakland, California who shot a journalist wasn’t getting as much play as you might expect, I wasn’t surprised.

When they arrest a guy like that, you know they can’t headline it “Black Arrested” and then they also can’t headline it “Muslim Arrested,” so I thought to myself, “What are they going to say–’Baker Arrested’?'”

I wish I’d put that on the blog, because I was right:Bakery handyman charged in editor’s killing Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle. August 7, 2007

I was looking at Justin Raimondo’s site, Antiwar.com this morning.

I noticed a London Times story by Deborah Haynes in Basra, Richard Beeston and Greg Hurst on pressure on the UK government to take more Iraqi refugees. What I think is of interest to US readers is that:

Last month Denmark granted asylum to 60 former Iraqi staff and their families before its forces withdrew from the south. The US has said it will take in 7,000 Iraqis this year, including former employees.

Somehow,I think arrangements could be made for other countries–maybe other Muslim countries–to accept these folks. The issue just isn’t the US or UK or certain death in Iraq.

These visas aren’t free regardless of what the military thinks with their strange accounting practices. With chain migration, 7000 initial visas will cascade over time.

Additional Iraqi immigration is just one more cost of the war.

Liberals bloggers and readers of Daily Kos have been getting together at an annual convention, and it turns out–surprise, surprise–that when you see them in person, this latest manifestation of civil society consists of a whole bunch of white males. From the Washington Post:

A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators
At the Yearly Kos Bloggers’ Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males
By Jose Antonio Vargas

CHICAGO, Aug. 5–It’s Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab’s organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.

Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.

“It’s mostly white. More male than female,” says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. “It’s not very diverse.”

There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group–”We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution,” Cooper said in a speech Saturday night–what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers–bloggers, policy experts, party activists–are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues. …

Historically, the progressive movement has included a myriad of special-interest and single-issue groups, and the challenge has always been to find common ground. The same is true on the Internet, but with an added twist. The Internet, after all, is not a “push” medium like television, where information flows out, but a “pull” medium, where people are drawn in.

Build a liberal site such as Daily Kos, as the Persian Gulf War veteran and former Republican Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zuniga did five years ago, and bloggers either join the discussion or not. For two years now, Moulitsas has lent his name to the conference. But on Saturday, Cooper announced that next year the event will be called “Netroots Nation.”

Cooper is worried about generating more “inclusion,” using the word no less than six times in 15 minutes. …

It’s hard to think of another movement that has affected politics in such a short period of time, and the blogging culture is an informal, friendly community that has no one leader or single issue–except, perhaps, strong opposition to the war in Iraq. Last year’s Blogads Reader Survey found that the median political blog reader is a 43-year-old male who has an annual family income of $80,000, and judging by the number of middle-aged men who attended one panel after the next here, it’s hard to argue with that. …

Stoller half-jokingly says that the netroots community is full of “white liberal men,” then quickly points out that Moulitsas is part Latino. (The other half is Greek.)

A lot of the influential segments of American society are almost as white male-dominated as in 1960, especially those where affirmative action doesn’t apply, such as at liberal netroots conferences or as CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, which are about 99% white.

Political blogging, for example, is overwhelmingly dominated by white males, plus the occasional upper-caste Indian. Writing Hollywood movies might be more white male dominated than in 1960–whites still make up 94% of big movie screenwriters, and the male to female ratio apppears to have increased as action became more important than dialogue.

In general, white males still tend to most of the interesting new things in the world.
(more…)

A reader notified me that this morning, days before Saturday’s Ames Straw Poll, the Des Moines Register published an article by Lisa Rossi, with this first sentence:

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul sketched out his vision of a limited government that includes the abolition of the Federal Reserve, the end of federal involvement in education and amnesty for immigrants in the nation illegally.

Shortly later they published this retraction:

From Des Moines Register state editor Dan Piller, regarding your posts: We hear you.

Ron Paul is against illegal immigration. In the process of editing Lisa Rossi’s story, Paul’s opposition to amnesty was lumped in with his opposition to the Federal Reserve and federal involvement in education.

The lead paragraph in the story thus could be read, and many did read it that way, that Paul is in favor of amnesty for immigrants when in fact he is not.

The Register regrets the error.

The offending sentence was changed to:

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul sketched out his vision of a limited government that includes the abolition of the Federal Reserve and the end of federal involvement in education.

Paul also reiterated his opposition to illegal immigration.

The Des Moines Library confirms that the error made it into the print edition-where the real damage will be done.

This suggests to me the possibility that GOP candidates sponsored by wealthy and corporate interests are scared of the immigration issues–so they feel compelled to play dirty tricks on candidates like Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter that have reasonable records on the issue. The stakes here are very, very high. A simple apology for potentially changing the race early on here isn’t nearly enough.

Iowans deserve some accurate, in-depth reporting on the immigration stands of all the GOP candidates.

This is from Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com:“…a classic American success story”

In Buffalo, a federal judge has sentenced Belarus native Maxim Levin to time served and ordered him to pay $334,000 restitution following a guilty plea over an extensive scheme of staging car crashes and submitting bogus insurance claims. The prosecution resulted in guilty pleas from roughly two dozen defendants, some of whom who were actually in Brooklyn at the time of claimed accidents hundreds of miles away in Buffalo.

….

(Michael Beebe, “Man gets time served for staging crashes”, Jul. 7, and Dan Herbeck, “Ex-clinic head pleads guilty in phony claims from auto insurance”, Mar. 5, Buffalo News pay-archive coverage; BH Times, Jul. 8; Buffalo FBI office 2005 and 2007 releases; Johnsville News, Nov. 24, 2004; NY State Insurance Dept., Feb.). Like Greedy Trial Lawyer (Jul. 8), I find the most piquant element of the case to be the character testimonial given by Levin’s brother-in-law, trial lawyer Matthew L. Kolken, [email]who wrote to Judge William M. Skretny asking leniency and describing the Levin family as “a classic American success story”.

Of course, Walter Olson is more impressed with the fact that before he got arrested, Maxim Levin was a pre-law student, but at VDARE.com we’re more interested in the fact that he was ab(legal) immigrant. And Matthew L. Kolken is not just a trial lawyer, although that’s bad enough, he’s an immigration lawyer.

Reid Wilson writes at Real Clear Politics:

Poll participants were asked to predict the top five finishers at the straw poll, and answers were ranked in order. A first place vote was worth five points, a second place vote was worth four points, et cetera, meaning 150 points was the maximum one candidate could achieve.

Romney scored 144 points out of 150 possible. Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who, according to an ABC/WP poll of Iowa voters, is the top choice of 5% of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers, finished a distant second, with 59 points. Tancredo, though, led national front-runners

……

Tancredo’s second-place finish, if that lead holds on Saturday, would be a massive coup for a campaign driven largely by the congressman’s views on illegal immigration and the war on terror. 20% of respondents, a slight plurality, said Tancredo had the most to gain at the poll, and that his performance would improve his standings in national polls. Aside from Romney, Tancredo was the only candidate to receive any first-place votes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian in the truest sense of the word, did not receive a single vote in the poll. The lone anti-war voice on the GOP stage, Paul would be unlikely to earn support, or even notice, of people involved in Republican circles enough to be an elected board member.

Now, this poll is flawed as a predictive tool. Ames isn’t about what the GOP leadership wants or thinks. The Ames straw poll is about who has supporters who will spend a day for their candidate. I expect both Tancredo and Paul will do better than commonly expected-regardless of how good the free eats are provided by Romney’s wealthy backers.

I don’t think Ames can be won by folks that hope for jobs or pork in the event of a GOP victory.

I don’t think what the Iowa GOP leadership wants matters that much-especially for folks coming back from Iraq that might go to Ames because they are having trouble finding a job–and feel economic issues are ignored by Democrats.

I think the situation is getting more and more volatile, and we just may see a few parties crashed.

“Bilingualism” is…about political power

said Peter Brimelow during VDARE.com’s first year. The concept that requiring workers to speak a second language creates a privileged group advantaged over native-born Americans is one to which we constantly return.

Now the wonderfully industrious blog A Certain Slant of Light has produced and beautifully documented another exemplifying atrocity:

Speaking Spanish: The Job Oregon’s Fire Crew Bosses Shouldn’t Have To Do

Oregon has apparently furtively established a requirement to speak Spanish for senior fire fighting commanders (an important employment opportunity in rural Oregon in forest fire season).

Because of the state’s language requirement, Jaime Pickering can no longer work as a crew boss and supervise 20 firefighters. He can only manage a squad of four firefighters.
“If you have one Spanish guy on the crew, as an English crew boss, you can no longer be a crew boss. You have to step back to a squad boss, which is a demotion,” Pickering said.

A healther society would of course decline to hire non-English speaking firefighters as a danger to their colleagues.

ACSL concludes:

…this sort of thing will expand… unless the president and the Congress develop the mettle to enforce the borders and insist that assimilation, rather than multi-culturalism, becomes the order of the day …Otherwise, if the rest of the country were to follow Oregon’s lead, you likely wouldn’t be able to land (or retain) a job as a hotel manager, construction superintendent, or agricultural field foreman.

With discrimination in favor of Hispanics against anglophone Americans now reaching into the Oregon woods, this is not far-fetched.

Complain to Marvin Brown, Oregon’s State Forester.