In a piece titled Sanctuary Was a Lovely Word. Then the G.O.P. Got Hold of It, Clyde Haberman, the Times’s NYC columnist [Email him] writes:

When they finally got down to business, after being serenaded by a guitarist on YouTube, it took the Republican presidential candidates 11 ½ minutes Wednesday night for one of them to acknowledge that illegal immigrants are human beings.

Quite. And it would take longer than that, during a Democratic debate for candidates to admit that they were criminals. But that’s by the way–“Sanctuary“ may be a lovely word, but it’s frequently an extremely ugly thing, and its other name is “corruption.”

Here’s an American Conservative article by me that’s never been online before:

Test Case
By Steve Sailer
Bureaucracy fails when civil servants aren’t put to the test.
The American Conservative
September 10, 2007
You might think that liberals who want to expand the federal government and conservatives who want to shrink it could at least agree to improve how well it works. Yet, good government projects, such as boosting the quality of the federal workforce, have largely dropped out of media discussion despite ample evidence that the federal government no longer functions as well as it once did, relative to what’s now technologically feasible. In its mid-20th Century prime, the federal government matched up reasonably well in efficiency and effectiveness against, say, Sears-Roebuck. Today, however, it’s blown away by Wal-Mart’s relentless improvements.
For example, in June, while the Senate was blithely considering mandating a convoluted new immigration system for the federal bureaucracy to administer, the State Department’s nearly century-old responsibility for issuing passports was melting down under the strain of merely a moderate increase in demand predictably caused by a law passed three years before. In an era of cheap networked computing, many Americans still had their summer travel plans ruined by federal incompetence.Everything about the federal government is extraordinarily complicated, and thus there are many plausible explanations, both specific and general, for its current malaise.

Democrats, for instance, have denounced Bush Administration appointments. Indeed, the latest political picks seem prone to “marketing major post-modernism,” the assumption picked up in college that some egghead over in France proved there’s no such thing as truth, so there’s no need to feel guilty about shamelessly spinning everything for maximum political benefit. Still, there are roughly 600 civil servants for each Presidential appointee, so the nefarious impact of the thin top layer can be overstated.

Much less debated is what Steve Nelson, director of the Office of Policy and Evaluation at the Merit Systems Protection Board, a federal watchdog agency, calls the “human capital crisis” facing the federal civilian workforce of nearly two million (not counting the Post Office).

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At Cato Unbound, Linda Gottfredson is debating Jim Flynn, Stephen J. Ceci, and Eric Turkheimer:

Proponents of the taboo on discussing race and IQ assume that the taboo is all for the common good, but whose good, exactly, is served? It is most certainly not individuals of below-average intelligence, who face a tremendous uphill battle in modern, literate societies where life becomes increasingly complex by the day. General intelligence (g) is simply a general proficiency to learn and reason. Put another way, it is the ability to deal with complexity or avoid cognitive error. Virtually everything in life requires some learning or reasoning and thus confers an advantage on brighter individuals. Life is complex, and complexity operates like a headwind that impedes progress more strongly for individuals lower on the IQ continuum. Everyone makes cognitive mistakes, but lower intelligence increases the risk of error.

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This the review of Pat Buchanan’s new book, and the reviewer is Peter Wehner, [send him mail] a former executive assistant to George W. Bush, a

Peter Wehner on Day of Reckoning on National Review Online
Good Morning, Patrick!
Reports of our decomposition are premature.

By Peter Wehner

The man who authored The Death of the West has now turned his considerable spirit of despair to America. Patrick J. Buchanan has written Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart.

According to excerpts posted on The Drudge Report Monday, Buchanan writes, “America is coming apart, decomposing, and …. The likelihood of her survival as one nation … is improbable…” He adds, “America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive.” Our culture is collapsing, according to Buchanan, and we face a perfect storm of crises.

Wehner goes on and on about how wonderful everything is, compared with, specifically, the period of the 1990’s, and how there will soon be as few murders in New York as there were in 1963. He also mentions an article that he and Yuval Levin recently published in Commentary Magazine, , “Crime, Drugs, Welfare — and Other Good News,” [December 2007]

You may be less interested in the issue of neoconservatism vs. paleoconservatism than VDARE.com’s writers are, but take a look at Peter Wehner’s curriculum vitae:

Mr. Wehner served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations prior to becoming deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush in 2001. In 2002, he was asked to head the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he generated policy ideas, reached out to public intellectuals, published op-eds and essays, and provided counsel on a range of domestic and international issues.

Prior to joining the Bush Administration, Wehner was executive director for policy for Empower America, a conservative public-policy organization headed by William J. Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Mr. Wehner also served as a special assistant to the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and, before that, as a speechwriter for then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.

Given that kind of CV, it’s obvious that you would only give a guy like that a Pat Buchanan book to review if you really didn’t like Pat Buchanan. Remember what I said, on the front page today, and also here, about us being the alternative to National Review? This is another reason why. And it’s one more reason that we need to ask you to send money.

As VDARE.COM prepares to launch its ninth annual War Against Christmas Competition, readers who share our concern about the national trend to abolish the holiest of days might will want to know where to go to find reassurance that Christianity still thrives at Christmastime.

I recommend a wonderful book by Brenda J. Verner titled 101 Ways To Have A Christian Christmas available at Amazon.Com and from the publisher, Tyndale House.

Verner’s book will resonate with VDARE.COM readers. Each of the six chapters–“Your Home,” “Your Family,” “Your Neighborhood,” “Your Town,” “Your Church,” and “Christian Christmas Activism” offer practical advice for celebrating a true Christian Christmas.

In the sixth chapter Verner, who is also known as the Christian Christmas Lady, gives the correct terms for today’s politically correct lingo.

In her author’s note, Verner writes that she “never encountered anyone who openly voiced opposition to the lordship of Jesus Christ until she went away to college –first to Ithaca College and then to Harvard University.” Despite the pressure put on her during her student years to reject her faith in Jesus and become more “progressive,” Verner resisted and has taken her Christmas message to the world in her book.

Verner, who you can contact directly at her e-mail here Chrchristmaslady@aol.com sends this message to VDARE.COM readers:

I am Brenda Verner, the Christian Christmas Lady. I am the author of the book “101 Ways To Have A Christian Christmas.” As we begin this 2007 season of Advent, most Christians are aware that not only the celebration of Christmas, but also our very Christian culture is experiencing relentless assaults by secularists, with the intent of diminishing the open practice of Christianity in the United States. Over the course of the past fifty years, organized consistent campaigns to de-Christianize the marketplace and the public square, particularly the celebration of Christmas, have been relatively successful at dampening exuberant public displays of worship of Jesus Christ. Presently, the American Christmas shopper is in the grip of merchants who demand to present a secularized Christless Christmas. This should be considered no small issue.

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