I saw this post on Instapundit.com, about a study trying to prove that liberals are smarter than conservatives:

September 15, 2007

WILL SALETAN on rigged studies. Similar result-oriented sloppiness on race/IQ research would get you drummed out of the academy. But maybe not sloppiness on other topics.

posted at 02:22 PM by Glenn Reynolds

Would it really? No, accurate, unsloppy studies of race and IQ will get you drummed out, to the extent that tenured professors can be drummed out, if you’re coming to the conclusions Professor Rushton does. But no amount of sloppiness will affect your reputation if you’re on the side of the conventional wisdom. See Claude M. Steele’s work on “Stereotype threat,” or the work of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.

Then I noticed, a little later, that he was accused of racism himself for quoting puns about Norman Hsu, the Hong Kong immigrant who is involved in criminal fraud and illegal donations to Hillary. The Instapunning has gotten pretty thick, with the latest gem being ” ‘Hsu-per California Donors Extradition Opus.’ If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious!”

The Instapundit replied

In Internet discourse “racist” — like “fascist” — is often a synonym for “someone who is winning an argument with a lefty.” It’s a term used with such abandon, and so little foundation, that it’s largely lost its original meaning.

This saying has now become almost proverbial, but its original author is, of course, Peter Brimelow.

Remember how much President Bush played up his friendship with Vicente Fox, his “amigo”?

Look how Fox has repaid Bush’s friendship. The former Mexican president has an autobiography coming out called Revolution of Hope, due for release next month.

Reportedly, in its pages, Fox is not too complimentary of George W. Bush. Fox calls Bush stubborn, and describes Bush as “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life” (yeah, Fox has a lot of gall to call somebody else cocky ).

Fox reportedly bashes the Republican Party’s immigration platform. Fox makes fun of Bush’s Spanish, calling it “grade-school level” Spanish. And Fox writes “I can’t honestly say that I had ever seen George W. Bush getting to the White House.”

Let’s remember that such petty criticism is leveled at George W. Bush, a man who tried more than any president in American history to please Mexico, who treated Vicente Fox like a permanent Guest of Honor and gushed on and on about their friendship , who missed no opportunity to extol Mexican culture, who favored Mexican lawbreakers over American citizens, who slandered American citizens who simply wanted our border controlled, and who did everything possible to keep the border with Mexico open.

George Bush did all that, and the ingrate Vicente Fox so casually badmouths him.

There’s a lesson here. Pandering to the Mexican government will not work, and will not gain Mexico’s respect.

Only defending our sovereignty will.

According to a story in today’s New York Times, 66-year-old Michael Mukasey is a leading candidate to replace departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
President Ronald Reagan appointed Mukasey, who served as chief judge, in 1987. Mukasey was also a Manhattan prosecutor when Rudolph Giuliani was the United States attorney.
Among Mukasey’s strong points is, according to the Times, his familiarity with terrorism issues. [Bush May Name Former Federal Judge to Succeed Gonzales,New York Times, David Johnson, September 16, 2007]

In 1993, Mukasey sentenced Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik to life in prison for his role in a plot to blow up the World Trade Center and tunnels in the Wall Street area.
In 2003, as chief judge, Mukasey ruled that dirty bomber Jose Padilla was an enemy combatant but entitled to access to his lawyers.

But Richard Viguerie, founder of the website Conservatives Betrayed.COM urges President Bush to pick the most conservative possible choice for attorney general for the express purpose of picking a fight with the Democrats and to reassert the role of conservatives in government.
Viguerie’s op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times,

“Use the A.G. Appointment to Pick a Fight,”

advises Bush:

“to restore his relevancy and revive the Republican coalition by deliberately picking an ideological fight with the Democrats.”

Read Viguerie’s column here.
Viguerie has also written a book about the decline of conservatism titled “Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.“

Sometimes you have to wonder about the tin ear of the Treason Lobby. Take Larry Craig’s Brave Stance on Immigration By Nathaniel Hoffman New West.Net September 15 2007.

This extraordinary piece is devoted to praising Senator Larry Craig (ID), of all people, while sneering contemptuously at those who oppose mass immigration

When the nativist hissing sounds start at the back of the room, most politicians run… more temporary guest worker visas were opposed by immigrant rights groups, organized labor, Democrats and a wedge group of xenophobic Republicans. (VDARE.com emphasis.)

Hoffman thinks Craig is wonderful because of his acquisition by Idaho’s Cheap Labor lobby, which he documents. He illustrates this by quoting our old friend Craig Reggelbrugge, lobbyist for the open-borders American Nursery and Landscape Association, ludicrously described as

a group that has worked for more than a decade for reasonable immigration reform in the agricultural sector.

( Peter Brimelow noted Reggelbrugge’s arrogant elitism when reporting the lobbying build-up for Amnesty in 2005, quoting him on the GOP:

“But the party’s going to have to choose between the closed-minded restrictionists and the business base. Who’s really the base of the base? Farmers and businesspeople, or the others?”

That is the point of course. Who is the base, a.k.a. the Nation. Citizens, or a miasma of financial interests? Tell Regelbrugge. )

In evaluating Craig’s possible replacements from the point of view of who will be most subservient to the Cheap Labor crowd, Hoffman does quote the remarkable Robert Vasquez (who actually is heroic):

Idaho-based anti-immigration activist Robert Vasquez, who had initially planned to run for Larry Craig’s Senate seat next year, said that none of the people Gov. Otter is considering for the appointment will go far enough in combatting illegal immigration.
“If any one but me is appointed to Larry Craig’s seat, there will be absolutely no change in the status quo vis a vis the illegal aliens in America and Idaho,” Vasquez told me in an email.

Otherwise he displays no interest in or knowledge of the reasons Idahoans might object to Mexicanisation.

Why is Larry Hoffman, who says

He has published stories from Mexico, Cuba, Israel, Palestine and from many dark alleys stateside.

so blind to the costs of mass immigration to his fellow Rocky Mountain area neighbors? It is not as if he has not seen the consequences – he recently left the Bay Area’s Contra Costa Times to move to Boise, Idaho. Since he started writing for New West in June, 40% of his filings have been immigration boosterism.

Fortunately, as often is the case – when give a chance - with simplistic immigration celebratory journalism, readers have been eloquent with puncturing comments:

What is so brave about supporting the cheap-labor lobby? Agribusiness and other supporters of cheap labor give tons of money to politicians…

So you think Larry Craig is standing up for America???? No, you don’t! Declare your support for foreign nationals over US Citizens, just like Larry Craig and be done with it! Traitor!…

It was the public, we the people, not a radical minority, that at last rose up this summer and let congress know that we had had enough of their war on the middle class. For too long, emboldened by a silent public, congress has pandered to business and ethnic voting blocs in disserving the public.

Ask Hoffman why he wants to Californicate Idaho.

David Brooks’s recent NY Times op-ed on how IQ is passe was supported by a new development over the weekend.

You may vaguely recall that back in 2005, the President of Harvard, Larry Summers, the former Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary, made some uncontroversial remarks about how, although men and women have the same mean IQ, the male bell curves are fatter in the tails, which has implications for elite faculty gender balance. His speech was greeted with yawns since everybody in the public sphere in America had long before internalized all the implications of psychometric research, as symbolized by the 2001 appointment of the pseudonymous statistician La Griffe du Lion as Secretary of Education.

Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Lawrence Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, has been replaced as the planned speaker at a UC Board of Regents dinner next week after complaints from faculty members.

“(UC Regents) Chairman Richard Blum and Dr. Summers talked last Thursday and agreed that the regents would have a different speaker,” Trey Davis, director of special projects for the UC system, said Saturday.

Davis was unable to say whether a protest letter signed by more than 300 people from the university system had any effect on the decision to find a different speaker for the regents’ dinner in Sacramento on Wednesday. He referred those questions to Blum, who is out of the country.

Summers, who was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, resigned from Harvard last year after a long-running clash with some faculty members over his questioning whether women might not have the same innate ability as men in disciplines such as science, math and engineering. He also had thorny relations with minority faculty members during his time at the university.

While Summers later apologized for his remarks, which he said were misinterpreted, it didn’t slow the criticism, which continues to this day.

“I was appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to speak to the regents,” said UC Davis Professor Maureen Stanton, who helped put together the petition drive. “I think many of us who were involved in the protest believed that it wouldn’t reflect well on the university that he even received the invitation.”

The petition called Summers’ invitation “not only misguided but inappropriate” at a time when the university is working to diversify its community.

“Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the people of California,” the petition said.

The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31, along with other information about the three-day meeting at UC Davis, Davis said.

“The dinner is an informal, social occasion, with more of a conversation with the speaker than a formal talk,” he added. Blum, who is the husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, made the original decision to invite Summers.

Susan Kennedy, chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will replace Summers as speaker at the dinner.

While delighted that the regents have decided to replace Summers, Stanton now hopes the dispute will be quickly forgotten.

“Frankly, we’d like to see the story just die at this point,” she said

Glenn Beck recently interviewed Rudy Giuliani-and immigration was an important part of that interview.

GIULIANI: Glenn, it’s not a crime. I know that’s very hard for people to understand, but it’s not a federal crime.

GLENN: It’s a misdemeanor but if you’ve been nailed, it is a crime. If you’ve been nailed, ship back and come back, it is a crime.

GIULIANI: Glenn, being an illegal immigrant, the 400,000 were not prosecuted for crimes by the federal government, nor could they be. I was U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York. So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it’s not a criminal proceeding. It’s a civil proceeding.

GLENN: Is it —

GIULIANI: One of the things that congress wanted to do a year ago is to make it a crime, which indicates that it isn’t.

GLENN: Should it be?

GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn’t be because the government wouldn’t be able to prosecute it. We couldn’t prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about 6. In other words, you’d have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to have.

Basically Giuliani wants to have a huge amnesty, tighten the border somewhat and have some policies that would amount to a huge expansion of Guest Worker Visas. I suspect this would mean both a dramatic reduction in the value of citizenship and the expansion of the overall numbers of people in the US that don’t have citizenship rights. The only way to maintain order in such a society would be using very authoritarian tactics–which I suspect Giuliani is more than willing to use.

Instead, we should expropriate the property of those who profited from illegal immigration and use the proceeds to set things right for the US citizens that have been harmed by illegal immigration and the illegal immigrants themselves. Illegal immigrants have violated US laws–but that doesn’t mean their employers and landlords have no obligations towards them. The financial interests that foisted NAFTA on the American and Mexican public also have some serious responsibilities here.

Giuliani talks tough, but he just doesn’t understand the responsibility of the President to protect the value of American citizenship.

Immigration is the new way of war, in case you hadn’t noticed, and America is losing because our open borders welcome enemies.

Terrorism expert Bill Gertz recently discussed the Muslim Brotherhood as one of the more threatening front groups pretending to embrace American values while in reality planning a jihadist future for this country. The islamist Fifth Column is obvious for anyone with eyes to see, but apparently that does not include Washington elites.

The Muslim Brotherhood memo on organizing Muslims in North America said that all members “must understand their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
[Jihadist threat, Washington Times 9/14/07]

As Gertz points out, many in Washington are still cluelessly pursuing strategies of touchy-feely outreach, which was employed at the recent Islamic Society of North America conference. ISNA has been identified as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, yet the DOJ legitimized them by attending their event. Wishing for more “moderate Muslims” to exist will not make it so.

In August, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, and Rep. Sue Myrick, North Carolina Republican, wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to oppose the Justice Department’s attendance at the ISNA conference in Chicago as a “grave mistake” because it would legitimize a group with “extremist origins.”

The Justice Department said in response that its participation at the Labor Day weekend meeting was part of “outreach efforts … to educate the public about how the department works to protect religious freedom, voting rights, economic opportunity, and many other rights.”

In another reminder of how unwise it is to admit Muslims for any reason, the two Egyptians studying engineering in Florida who were arrested last month were found to have produced a video about how to build a remote bomb.

TAMPA - When a South Carolina police officer pulled over two Egyptian engineering students for speeding last month, he noticed one trying to put away a laptop computer.

That computer contained a 12-minute video showing how to take apart a remote-control toy car and reassemble the wiring to make it into a remote detonation device, a federal prosecutor said Friday. The video’s narrator, a graduate student at the University of South Florida, said the device helped “to save one who wants to be a martyr for another battle,” the prosecutor said.
[USF Suspect Produced Video on Remote Controlled Explosives, Investigative Project]

Meanwhile in Europe, Muslims are protesting cartoonist Lars Vilks’ drawing of Muhammed with the body of a dog. in addition, there has been a $100,000 reward offered for his murder, with an extra cash prize if he is “slaughtered like a lamb” — apparently a call for traditional head-chopping.

Like most other Americans, I could do without Islamist fatwas being brought to this country, but if Muslim immigration continues to increase, we can expect that expression of diversity also. We are not immune from the pain Europe has experienced from unwise immigration; we have merely been luckier in geography.