Reader B.J. Verner, (e-mail) also known as the Christian Christmas Lady and the author of “101 Ways to Have a Christian Christmas” reports that Comcast Cable Services[Contact them] has gone politically correct.

Each year 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas.

It is one of the most unifying Americans rituals that we practice. All of us have our personal Christmas Advent rituals. One of my favorite for years has been to turn on the Comcast Cable Services community announcements to have the Christmas music as a backdrop to my Advent activities. In Chicago Heights the community bulletin board is on Channel 4.

I usually have it on most of the day while I do Christmas decorating, Christmas cooking, or when friends are over. Comcast played all kinds of Christmas music–carols, ditties, pop Christmas classics. Their offering usually runs the gamut of the thousands of Christmas songs and instrumentals that are representative of our American culture.

However this year, to my stunned surprise, it is December 21th and no Christmas music on the Comcast Cable Services community bulletin board. They have Christmas announcements from churches and community organizations and green and red messages from the Chicago Heights Mayor’s office–but no Christmas music. They are playing progressive jazz! They could at least play progressive jazz Christmas tunes. I am wondering if this is only local, could it be that Comcast has nixed Christmas across its national system?

The Republican Establishment has long assumed that they would someday get back to winning the Asian-American vote, like they did in the 1992 Presidential race. After all, Asians are the model minority, prosperous, business-owning, legal immigrants, often victims of Communism. If they aren’t going to vote GOP, what major immigrant group will?

Arthur Hu, however, explained the basic rule of Asian-American voting to me back in 2000:

“Asian Americans traditionally vote slightly more conservatively than their neighbors do - exactly as optimistic Republicans assume. The problem for the GOP, however, is that Asians tend to have highly liberal neighbors. Currently, 45% of all Asian-born immigrants live in three heavily Democratic metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City.”

And, American-born Asians are increasingly driven by the political climate on elite campuses, with their obsession with minority victimhood.

Ben Adler of Politico.com reports “Asian-American youth trend Democratic.” He begins with the example of a University of Southern California Chinese-American co-ed who is changing her registration from Republican to Independent. USC used to be the epitome of the private college for the, shall we say, “well-rounded” children of wealthy Republicans: the “University of Spoiled Children” we called it when I was at UCLA 1980-82. When the USC football team would come on the field for the big game against UCLA, we Bruin fans would all pull credit cards from the pockets of our Calvin Klein designer jeans and wave them in the air in the direction of the USC fans. Ha-ha! What a clever jibe at the wealth of the USC students! (Of course, now that I think of it, all us UCLA students back during the Carter Administration apparently already had credit cards to wave at the USC students, so maybe the class contrast wasn’t quite as obvious as we had imagined at the time.)

Carmen Wong, 21, is a Chinese-American senior at the University of Southern California. Her parents are Republicans and she used to be one, too, but she recently switched her voter registration to independent.

Although Wong is fiscally conservative, she is socially liberal and has turned against the Iraq war. She would vote for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president, and she’s not sure who she’ll support if he is not the Republican nominee. But she likes Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Wong epitomizes a recent trend among young Asian-Americans: their widespread abandonment of the Republican Party.

The Institute of Politics at Harvard University recently released data from an online survey of 2,525 18- to 24-year-olds. Among the survey’s more notable statistics are those concerning party affiliation among Asian-Americans: 47 percent identify themselves as Democratic, 15 percent Republican and 39 percent independent — making them more Democratic than any other ethnic group except African-Americans in the survey.

Betsy Kim, 44, a Korean-American who is executive director of the American Majority Partnership, the Democratic National Committee’s constituency outreach program, sees a clear generational shift toward Democrats among Asian-Americans.

Kim said that Asian-Americans her age and younger lean Democratic because “Democrats do more to benefit communities of color.”

Rather like those polygamous Mormon separatists who live right on the Utah-Arizona border and build their houses on skids so they can drag them just across the dividing line when the state police are coming to arrest them, Voltaire spent his last two decades on the French-Swiss border in the village of Ferney, near Geneva, just in case.

Canadian native Mark Steyn lives in a small American town, not far from the Canadian border. The wisdom of residing in a country with a constitutional protection for free speech (or should I say, the country?) was pointed out by his being called before Canada’s Human Rights Commission to account for the crime of publishing an excerpt from his bestseller America Alone in Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsmagazine. Apparently, freedom of speech is not a human right in Canada.

The Canadian Islamic Council that filed the nuisance suit may not win against somebody as globally-connected as Steyn, but the lesson for anybody actually living in Canada is clear.

This abuse isn’t as severe as what psychologist J.P. Rushton had to put up with a decade and a half ago in Canada–he was under police investigation for over half a year. But, it is indicative of how diversity and civil liberties are increasingly in collision.

The future of the world may well look like the old Ottoman Empire writ large: multiculturalism on a remarkable scale, but public liberty close to non-existent — it was simply too dangerous in such a diverse community.

In the short run, we may be able to slow down the arrival of the long run by organizing boycotts of tourism and conferences in countries, such as Canada, that abuse the right to free speech.