The pipeline bombings in Mexico I mentioned earlier are having economic repercussions:

Mexican pipeline attacks disrupt suppliers -
Mexican pipeline attacks disrupt suppliers

By Stephen Downer
Crain’s Detroit Business, September 13, 2007

Production at several automaker plants in Mexico for five automakers as well as more than 100 suppliers’ plants has been shut down in the wake of rebel bomb attacks on fuel pipelines in southern Mexico that occurred Monday.

A leftist rebel group has claimed responsibility for the bombings, Mexico’s second such attack in the past three months.

Also, the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, rebel group said it is planning more attacks, according to Reuters. The group accuses the government of secretly abducting two of its guerrilla organizers.

And why is this a potential problem for the US? Well, this story gives you a hint:

El Paso Times - Illegal immigrants try to get badges for jobs at nuclear lab
Illegal immigrants try to get badges for jobs at nuclear lab
Associated Press
Article Launched: 09/14/2007 02:22:26 PM MDT

SANTA FE, N.M. — Three illegal immigrants who used fake documents to try to get badges so they could work on a construction job at Los Alamos National Laboratory are charged with knowingly possessing a false alien registration card.

Noel Lopez-Villegas, 29, and brothers Juan Carlos Nieblas-Rodriguez, 41, and Guadalupe Nieblas-Rodriguez, 39, were turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement after lab security officers became suspicious of the documents the trio presented to the lab’s badge office Wednesday.

ICE said the men had fake resident alien cards, known as green cards. One told agents he bought the fake document for $70 to $75 in Albuquerque; another said he obtained his card from a friend who had since returned to Mexico, ICE said.

As I pointed out during the insane “Borat” frenzy of a year ago, Sacha Baron-Cohen’s character is basically one giant old-fashioned Polish Joke, with a few updatings for the age of political correctness. For example, to make Eastern Europeans look primitive and backward, they filmed Borat’s home village in a dilapidated, feckless Romanian Gypsy village. But, the movie then makes the point that one of the many faults of Eastern European gentiles is that they are prejudiced against … Gypsies! Yet, almost nobody noticed that “Borat” was based on old Yiddish anti-Polish jokes.

So, I was glad to find a review on IMDB by a scholar who did her Ph.D. dissertation on Polish-Jewish relations (probably not a prudent choice, considering that the world’s most famous living author can’t get his two-volume history of Russian-Jewish relations published in New York) who noticed the same thing. Danusha V. Goska writes:

There’s more going on here, and I know I’m risking a lot by pointing this out.

Borat speaks Polish. Only speakers of Polish will get that. He says “Dzien Dobry,” “jak sie masz,” “dziekuje” and other Polish phrases. The film’s opening and closing scenes were shot in a real Eastern European village. Real Eastern European folk music is played on the soundtrack.

With “Ali G,” Baron Cohen exploited vicious stereotypes of Blacks. With “Borat” Baron Cohen is not targeting Kazaks. He’s exploiting a centuries-old, contemptuous and hateful stereotype of Eastern European peasants that can be found in various Western cultures - witness the American “Polak joke” - - and is common in one thread of Jewish culture. In this stereotype, Poles, and, by extension, Eastern European Christian peasants, are, like Borat, ignorant, bestial, and disgusting. A good précis of the stereotype can be found in a famous passage in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. It can be found in the “Golem” article on my website.

In fact, “Borat” has a lot in common with Marian Marzynski’s controversial film “Shtetl.” In both, cameras invade an impoverished Eastern European peasant village. Villagers who are not sophisticated or worldly are conned into appearing on camera to perform for us as if they were trained monkeys. We laugh at them, or feel disgust at them, because they are dirty, because they are poor, and because they keep pigs. In any case, gazing at these lesser peasants, we know that we are superior. Perhaps Baron Cohen will try this technique next in a Darfur refugee camp or a homeless shelter. Poor, unsophisticated people can be so amusing.

Baron Cohen speaks of women as if they were less than dirt. Don’t misunderstand him. He’s not mocking misogyny. He’s milking misogyny. The things Baron Cohen says about women in this movie are grotesque; they are brutal. He makes fun of mentally retarded people. He makes fun of white, Christian Southerners, a group everyone feels safe mocking.

Reviews, and no doubt many viewers, are telling you that “Borat” is a fearless laugh riot that punctures political correctness and makes you laugh till you cry. It’s that very description that made me want to see it. I thought I’d be getting something like the Colbert Report.

I’ve gotta think I’m not the only one, though, who found looking at Baron Cohen’s hatred for an hour and a half to be an icky, profoundly unfunny experience.

Here is a Google News link to all the media stories featuring Houssein Zorkot, the Lebanese Medical student arrested for carrying a loaded AK-47 in public. There are about 6. Here’s his pro-terror web page, Google cache version. And here’s an item from Powerline noting how little coverage this has gotten.

The Detroit Free Press has this hard-hitting news story, from which you may note the complete absence of words like “Arab, Lebanese, Muslim, immigrant,” or “terror.”

You’ll notice they say he had painted his face black. That’s how you can tell he’s an iimmigrant. If he were an American, he’d know that painting your face black is not a way to avoid suspicion.

Still, he may actually be in less trouble than he would be if he’d gone to a fraternity party in that condition, and his lawyer may use it to argue that he was “mistakenly profiled.”

Wayne County news briefs

September 14, 2007

DEARBORN: Student held on weapons charge

A Dearborn man faces a Sept. 21 preliminary exam on charges he carried a loaded AK47 in public.

Houssein Zorkot, 26, a medical student at Wayne State University, was arraigned before Judge Mark Somers in 19th District Court.

According to a city news release, Zorkot was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, possession of a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle and one count of felony firearm.

Police were called to Hemlock Park on Saturday night after reports of a man carrying an AK47.

The man, dressed in all black with his face painted black, tried to leave in a black SUV, but officers used their cars to prevent him from fleeing.

Zorkot is being held in the Wayne County Jail in lieu of a $1-million bond.

I just found this summary of a book I haven’t read on Google Book Search.

Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Immigration Reform

By Nicholas Laham

Laham argues that Ronald Reagan demonstrated gross ineptitude in his conduct of immigration policy. He failed to press for much-needed reforms in legal immigration while he supported the establishment of a fraud-ridden employer sanctions regime, which had no discernible effect in achieving its goal of stemming the flow of illegal immigration.

He failed to take the first step toward the establishment of a fraud-resistant worker verification system, which would enable the employer sanctions provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to be effectively enforced. Additionally, he supported the amnesty provisions of IRCA, which granted permanent legal residence to 2.7 million often poorly educated, unskilled, and low-wage illegal aliens.

According to Laham, Reagan’s failure to develop a sound and effective immigration policy was not due to the president’s urge to satisfy the desires of special interests. Rather, the Reagan administration was crippled in its ability to design a sound and effective immigration policy by the lack of accurate and reliable information on this issue and by the president’s own ideological hostility toward big government.

These factors impeded the ability of Congress to design an effective employer sanctions regime capable of stemming the flow of illegal immigration to the United States. This thorough and controversial analysis will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with American immigration studies, the presidency, and contemporary public policy.

I agree that the IRCA Amnesty of 1986 was a disaster, but I’m not sure how much of the fault was Reagan’s. However much we may complain about Bush’s amnesty advocacy, in the end, immigration policy is in the hands of Congress. Which is good, otherwise we’d have another amnesty.

Of course, any law that’s made has to be enforced, while Congressmen have frequently stepped in to block enforcement, the President can “block” enforcement by just doing nothing.

I don’t believe Reagan did that, but Bush has.

Yet another federal official has blurted out that terrorists have been intercepted sneaking across the Mexican border:

DALLAS — Texas’ top homeland security official said Wednesday that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida have been arrested crossing the Texas border with Mexico in recent years.

“Has there ever been anyone linked to terrorism arrested?” Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw said in a speech to the North Texas Crime Commission. “Yes, there was.”

Security chief says terrorists have been arrested on Texas border, by Jeff Carlton, AP; Houston Chronicle, September 12, 2007.

This is something that periodically happens. Tom Tancredo noted another example in his book In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border amd Security.

But, as Tancredo also noted, the federal government always seems to want to bury the news. True to form, AP’s Carlton reports that

Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso, said Wednesday she was unaware of any border arrests of people with terrorist ties. An ICE spokeswoman in San Antonio did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press. U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Lloyd M. Easterling was unable to comment.

Which is very odd. Isn’t the Bush Administration desperate for rationales for its Iraq War? Is marrying Mexico through de facto open borders really more important to the Bush dynasty? Is it because Tancredo has publicly said that if there’s a terrorist attack traceable to an illegal alien crossing the border, he will move to impeach Bush? (A fact still inexplicably absent from Wikipedia’s Movement to impeach George W. Bush entry).

Similarly, the federal government continues to tie itself in knots about one intercepted alien with alleged terrorist ties, Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed. Carlton writes:

McCraw identified the most notable figure captured as Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, who was arrested in July 2004 at the McAllen airport. She carried $7,300 in various currencies and a South African passport with pages missing. Federal officials later learned she waded across the Rio Grande.

After her arrest, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a release saying she was wanted for questioning about the bombing of a U.S. Consulate office, jibing with similar statements from a U.S. congressman.

But the department quickly retracted the terrorism connection, calling it “inaccurate on several levels.” Michael Shelby, then the U.S. attorney in Houston, said in January 2005 that any suggestion Ahmed was involved in terrorism “is in error.”

According to federal court records, Ahmed pleaded guilty to improper entry by an alien, making a false statement and false use of a passport. She was sentenced to time served and deported to South Africa. Other details of the case were sealed.

But on Wednesday, McCraw described Ahmed as having ties to an insurgent group in Pakistan and whose specialty was smuggling Afghanis and other foreign nationals across the border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel could not confirm details about Ahmed on Wednesday.

Well, was she or wasn’t she? Only the Bush Administration knows for sure. Presumably.

Hat tip, JC.