Dean Barnett has an article on the disaster that immigration may be for the Democrats…in the Weekly Standard, of all places:|

AS THE DEMOCRATS brought their weary road show to Vegas tonight, most analysts suspected that Hillary Clinton would get a mulligan on the illegal immigration question that she botched so badly at their last tussle. It played out as expected. Right out of the box, Campbell Brown asked the candidates about illegal immigration. Rather than focus on their own purported solutions to the crisis, they collectively decided to focus their ire on George W. Bush for not solving the problem first.

This has become the default refrain for Democrats when they have nothing to say or no real means of moving the ball forward–blame Bush. Among the more fevered elements of their base, it usually works. They blame Bush for everything, so of course they were willing to blame him for a liberal governor’s dreadful plan to grant licenses to illegal immigrants, and a presidential aspirant’s clumsy refusal to distance herself from such foolishness.[Slouching Towards Disaster The Democrats' immigration time-bomb. by Dean Barnett, 11/16/2007]

Okay, there is one valid point to be made about Hillary’s criticism of Bush–when she complains that he didn’t pass “comprehensive immigration reform” (amnesty) what she’s complaining about is his failure to get it through the Senate–where she’s not only a member, but a member of the majority. That would her failure, for those who consider the defeat of amnesty a failure, rather than a glorious victory.

But Bush wasn’t trying to get the illegals drivers licenses, he was trying to get them citizenship. The whole thing, for them and their heirs forever. And leading the amnesty charge, in the name of votes from imaginary Hispanic Republicans, was the Weekly Standard.

See, especially, Y is for Yahoo | Turning the GOP into an anti-immigration party could dash Republican hopes of becoming a long-term governing party, by William Kristol, April 10, 2006, but also Bordering on a Victory, Barely Illegal, Law and Borders , and Republican Border Wars.

When the headlines about shocking crimes disappear from the news, it’s easy for the general public to forget about the continuing pain and loss that crime victim families feel.

We should be grateful to columnist Kerry Dougherty for recording the scene at the sentencing of Alfredo Ramos in Virginia Beach. He is the drunk-driving illegal alien Guatemalan who killed two teenaged girls, Alison Kunhardt, 17, and Tessa Tranchant, 16, whose car was sitting at a stoplight. Ramos was massively intoxicated at the time of the crash, with a blood alcohol level of three times the legal limit.

Dougherty described the emotionally wrenching testimony given by the two families and how the courtroom was “engulfed in grief.”

When Alison’s stepfather, John Warner, lamented that all he has left are memories, photographs “and an empty chair,” Ramos seemed unmoved.

Ramos didn’t flinch when Warner stared at him and said, “I’ll never forgive you. Ever.”

When Alison’s sister told the court how much she missed her sibling, Ramos sat perfectly still.

“They’re dead and he’s fine,” Ashley Kunhardt wailed helplessly.
[Ramos will have plenty of time to discover his absent remorse, Virginia-Pilot 11/20/07]

Grieving father Ray Tranchant was interviewed on the O’Reiilly Factor Nov. 19 after the tough sentence had been handed down. What he said was a reminder of how the political can become the personal in very tragic ways.

TRACHANT: Well, I — I have to go to work every day and do my job. You know, Tessa’s mother and Allie’s mother and father, they’re stricken…

But you know, the leaders who don’t want to do anything, and they want to waffle, for example, you know, just [the] city council, seven months later in Virginia Beach, finally made a statement. They’re waffling.

The attorney general in Virginia is a known Republican. And he went out to the police force and said hey… you can lock these guys up. But the governor said nothing.

When you are on the highways for Thanksgiving, please drive extra carefully — Washington’s policy of open borders for criminals has made our roads far more dangerous.

We are all thankful that the hard work of loyal citizens and institutions like VDARE.com have made great strides in the war to preserve American sovereignty, yet lives are still being lost at the hands of hostile foreigners

Appreciate all that you have this Thanksgiving, but remember that some families have suffered a great deal from immigration anarchy.

Here’s Will Saletan’s third and last article at Slate.

Noah Millman responds in detail at American Scene in The Sound of a Dam Breaking.

At Cato Unbound, social scientist Eric Turkheimer writes:

“When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.”

Which raises the question, if Eric Turkheimer were ever to discover anything that would support race science realism, he would do what with it, burn it? Couch it in such high-flown philosophical language that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what he meant? Publish it while vigorously disapprobating himself?

Hasn’t he just wrecked his credibility as an objective scientist? Shouldn’t he be ashamed of that, rather than proud of it?

Turkheimer goes on:

“Why Race Science is Objectionable

“If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups?”

My observation over the last 25 years has been, going back to Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man that while most of the talk is about the white-black IQ gap, among those who take the lead in demonizing realists, most of angst, anger, and underlying agendas are due to the Jewish-Gentile IQ gap. Of course, quite a few of those demonized, such as Richard J. Herrnstein of The Bell Curve, are Jewish, too.

In our discussion of how to measure school effectiveness, many people had commented that it would be nice to have IQ scores for students as well as their achievement test scores.

I had forgotten that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running the National Longitudinal Study of Youth since 1979, and it’s still going on, now into a second generation of children of women in the first study, so there is a nationally representative sample of thousands of people for whom we know both their IQs and their mom’s IQs, along with a huge amount of detail about their lives and the lives of their mothers. As I wrote in VDARE.com last year:

In 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics established a nationally representative sample of about 13,000 young people born from 1957 to 1964. In 1980, the military paid to have the entire sample take its enlistment IQ test, the Armed Forces Qualification Test. In 1990, the NLSY methodically checked up on how they were doing in life. The military provided the data to Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein and it wound up as the centerpiece in the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve.

The NLSY is still going on. It has now even measured the IQs of 6209 children of women in the original panel—2557 of whom were born to black female panelists.

The social scientists keep interviewing the children born to the first generation participants, children who now range in age from new-borns into thirty-somethings, every two years. They typically had their IQs measured twice, first as pre-schoolers, then as 4th or 5th graders. Up through age 14, they were given a school achievement test called the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, and a lot of characteristics were collected about the schools they attended, such as (I believe) phonics versus whole word reading instruction. Here’s the official write-up on what info has been collected on the children.

The sample sizes could be large enough to explore the major issue of how good a job California has been doing fostering achievement among public school students compared to the rest of the country.

The data is free and available to the public from here (except for the children’s zip codes, which are only available to non-creepy types).

Edublogger Joanne Jacobs has read William Saletan’s Slate series on IQ, and has written a post titled:

Saletan suggests liberals will have to struggle to deny the facts, like creationists rejecting evolution, or “try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity.”I don’t understand genetics very well. I wonder about the evidence that IQ increases significantly over time as groups have more access to education. But I have to credit Saletan with guts for writing about this issue.

On the same theme, Gene Expression defends DNA pioneer James Watson for telling an inconvenient truth.What if IQ is linked to race? at Joanne Jacobs

It’s amazing that Ms. Jacobs has been doing educational journalism for years, has written a book about an inner-city charter school, and it looks like she’s never heard of this concept before. What did she think all those people were mad at Charles Murray about?

In a related note, Megan McArdle is in Cambodia for the Atlantic Monthly, where locals asked her why the District of Columbia had so much crime–and apparently, she had no idea:

I wanted to say, “they are poor”. But that seems a ridiculous statement in a country of 85 million people who are nearly all living at a lower standard of material consumption than the poor of DC.

Cambodia has a per capita GDP of $2,800–and in an earlier post, she mentioned that “only about 10-15% of the population” has electricity. In the end, she still has no idea what makes the District of Columbia more violent than Cambodia:

I’m not sure what I mumbled, but I changed the topic pretty quickly. I wonder how often my hosts have done the same to me when they just couldn’t explain.

Megan McArdle (November 20, 2007) - What is poverty, she said, and washed her hands?

I think it’s just possible that if she did figure it out, the Atlantic would fire her. Which would be a shame, because she’s a nice girl. But I think the Cambodians would have told her about their own troubles with the Hmong if she’d asked.

An article on the Inter-Press Service website, dateline Mexico City, is titled “Mexicans Jittery About Raids, Deportations.” It presents the usual sob stories about deportation from the point of view of the Mexican government. The first paragraph reports that

Panic has taken hold of the six million Mexicans who live in the United States without residence permits, because of the ongoing crackdown on “illegal aliens”, which has involved an increasing number of raids and deportations.

A Mexican dwelling in Los Angeles tells a reporter that

We are being harassed and persecuted, and I confess we are extremely nervous. We don’t feel that Mexico is helping us at all. I’ve thought about not taking my son to school anymore, because they might capture me, or him, and then we’d separated, which would not be fair to him. But what can I do? He can’t stay home or go into hiding.

The Calderon administration is adding two more Mexican consulates in the U.S. And consulates’ ability to meddle is being enhanced:

Consulates will also strengthen their legal assistance teams, who help defend immigrants when they face discrimination, and provide advice and support if they are detained with a view to deportation.

Calderon also plans a PR blitz:

And to project a positive image of migrants in the U.S., the Mexican government will launch “direct media campaigns aimed at showing migrant success stories and raising awareness of the many contributions” migrants make to U.S. society, said Calderón.

“The idea is not to pursue purely confrontational strategies and wars of words, which only exacerbate anti-Mexican feeling and arouse the worst discriminatory phobias, but to win the battle in U.S. public opinion, so that Mexicans may be recognised as who they are — a major support for the economy and society,” the president said.

Calderon promises that “My government will not rest until it achieves full recognition and respect for the rights of Mexicans abroad.”

Open Borders fan and gay marriage enthusiast Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco, is going to be giving illegal aliens official San Francisco ID cards to make up for the fact that they’re “undocumented“–somewhere in Mexico there’s a dresser piled high with the wallets they forgot. But Michelle Malkin points out that illegal alien ID didn’t start in San Francisco:

Congress and the White House have allowed these sanctuary cities to operate with impunity. And it is the Bush Treasury Department that set the precedent for illegal alien ID cards by approving the use of the matricula consular card over the objections of veteran law enforcement officers.

Before Republicans jump all over San Fran for approving security-undermining, phony baloney IDs to illegals, they might want to take it up with the White House first.

Early coverage of the Matricula Consular card first appeared here in November 2001..