Namely, listening for the silent dog whistle sounds of racism and getting offended.

Is Hillary a racist? After years of the Clintons sticking the knife in other people, it’s fun to watch them getting carved up over very little.

Liberal blogger Steven Benen is keeping a list:

Here’s a closer look at the most notable recent incidents, with my patented Willie Horton Rating System — 5 Hortons for the most offensive use of ugly, divisive rhetoric, 1 Horton for the most innocuous.

* Bill Clinton referred to Obama’s movement as a “fairly tale” — 1 Horton

This one has been misconstrued, repeatedly. Looking at the full context, the former president described Obama’s reputation as an opponent of the war in Iraq as a “fairly tale.” That, in and of itself, is a debatable point, but there was no racial subtext.

* Hillary Clinton downplayed the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. — 4 Hortons

I realize the original quote has been taken from context in a variety of instances, but even in its full context, I think Clinton tried to make a point with some poorly-chosen words.

* Andrew Cuomo’s “shuck and jive” comments — 3 Hortons

It’s questionable, and the context helps make Cuomo look a little better, but he probably should have realized how comments like that could be construed.

* Bob Kerrey’s “Muslim” and “madrassa” comments — 5 Hortons

It’s hard to defend Kerrey on this.

* Billy Shaheen’s drug dealer comments — 5 Hortons

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

* Bob Johnson’s drug dealer comments — 5 Hortons

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

* Sergio Bendixen, a top Clinton pollster, on Latino and Black communities — 2 Hortons

Bendixen conceded the other day, “The Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” He’s playing with fire, given the environment.

* Hillary referred to “spadework” on the Today show — 1 Horton

It’s a real stretch.

* Clinton aide on Obama as an “imaginary hip black friend” — Incomplete

An anonymous Clinton adviser explained what he/she sees as the difference between Hillary supporters and Obama supporters: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary,” the aide said. “If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.” I’d give it the full 5 Hortons, but I have no idea whether the person is a close aide or a tangential “adviser.”

* Bill Clinton referred to Obama as a “kid” — 1 Horton

Donna Brazille was emphasizing this one last week, but I think the subtext dealt with youth and inexperience, not race. (Still, given that Obama is older now than Bill Clinton was in 1992, it’s an odd comment, but that’s another story for another day.)

By the way, I predict that somebody will get in serious trouble within the next ten years for using the word “linchpin” (also frequently spelled “lynchpin”).

Also, by the way, did you know that Sir Francis Galton invented the silent dogwhistle? And you know what that means! So, within 20 years, the term “silent dogwhistle” will be considered racist.

The people running healthcare corporations would love to lower their costs (though not ours) by hiring foreign nurses on the cheap. Mexico is so handy, plus many of their patients in southern California are Mexican anyway. (“More than 80 percent of patients at El Centro Regional are Spanish-speaking, for example, and most are originally from Mexico.”)

EL CENTRO – For years, the Imperial Valley’s largest hospital has grappled not only with the national nursing shortage but with a lack of Spanish-speaking nurses able to communicate easily with the Latino patients who fill most of the beds.

The solution may be right next door, in Mexico.

“For the valley, nothing makes more sense,” said Tomas Virgen, assistant chief nursing officer at the 163-bed El Centro Regional Medical Center. After years of searching as far as the Philippines for nurses, El Centro Regional has begun recruiting in the Baja California capital of Mexicali, a dozen miles south.

Potentially, an unlimited number of Mexican nurses could work in the United States under a special provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but few are trying, and only a small portion of those have been successful.
[State and national nursing shortages could be addressed by hiring from Mexico, San Diego Union Tribune, Jan 13, 2008]

In addition, check out the slide show with audio about Mexican nurses included with the article. One Mexican working in the US complains that there is racism in Americans’ objections to importing foreign medical personnel from Mexico. But Mexico has the lowest pass rate of nationalities currently applying to work here. That’s not racism but a realistic recognition on the part of Americans that Mexican culture lacks an interest in scholarship.

“Their bedside manner, their caring for patients are some of the best I’ve ever seen,” said Tony Minks, chief operating officer for Kaiser Permanente. “Where they need help is with the technology that we have.”

Talk about damning with faint praise. Most Americans would prefer nurses with a strong training in medicine and science, rather than dubious touchy-feely skills in hand-holding.

Of course, sub-standard Mexican nurses in hospitals with a mostly hispanic clientele would be a camel nose under the tent.

Look forward to being issued a Spanish phrase book with your stylish hospital gown at some future surgery.

VDARE contributor Randall Burns has repeatedly suggested that the value of American citizenship to an immigrant is several hundred thousand dollars.

Nevada immigration lawyer James Kelly, speaking at a local bar association meeting last Thursday, has chimed in with a statement that certainly tends to support Burns’s estimate. Said Kelly to his colleagues: “Banishment is the worst punishment possible. People would rather go to jail than leave the country.” (Attorney: Small crimes turn big for aliens, by Scott Neuffer, The Record-Courier [Gardnerville, NV], January 13, 2008).

Last year Ms. Tucker, a columnist and editorial board member at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, received the prestigious journalism award in the “commentary” category.  The Pulitzer folks said she earned it

for her courageous, clear-headed (emphasis added) columns that evince a strong sense of morality and persuasive knowledge of the community.

Hmmmmmm.

Fast-forward to her Jan. 13, 2008, column, in which Tucker (e-mail) calls for a national uprising against the idea of a Voter ID because (Oh, my God!) it’s nothing more than a clever Republican scheme aimed at stopping America’s poor  from voting for Democrats,  “Voter ID law an ugly effort to subvert ballot,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Political activists from across the ethnic spectrum should convene the biggest political demonstration since the historic March on Washington in 1963.

Where is Al Sharpton when a genuinely critical issue comes along? Where’s Jesse Jackson?

This is “clear-headed” writing that reflects a “persuasive knowledge of the community”?

Black Americans - and the rest of us who are serious students of the Al and Jesse Show - know full well that these two “TV moths” have about as much concern for “genuinely critical issues” as I do about whether Dr. Phil crossed the line when spoke to the media after his visit with the troubled Britney Spears.

Otherwise, don’t you think both would have spoken out years ago about an immigration policy that is sticking it sideways to our poor?

In “The Theory of Dyevolution” in the eXile, Richard Bickerstaff riffs on the Cochranian theory of accelerating evolution to suggest that the horrific shortage of men in Russia after WWII led to sexual selection for good looks in women.

Is Natural Selection really over? I thought so, But show me a really attractive woman from a photograph before 1910. Being unable to find first-rate hotness in history always perplexed me. The only solution I could conceive was one of those pitiful sophomore “social-constructionist” arguments, which never comfortably rested with my libido. But research recently published in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences asserts human evolution has sped up since the invention of agriculture. The authors claim human genetic change has been happening at 100 times the rate of any other period over the last 5,000 years. Since eXile-readers share an interest in hot Soviet-bloc girls and war, I’d like to present a related theory that the two are inextricably linked.

The estimate for Soviet War dead in World War 2 is 24 million (plus five million, if you count Poland). The Soviet casualties are split pretty evenly between military and civilian. The military casualties were men–young men, most without children. Civilian casualties are likely stacked 2-1, men to women. The battle-plan on the Eastern Front was basically Gary Brecher’s genocidal “primitive warfare”; men were most worth butchering, whatever the situation, and the nearer to fighting (marrying) age, the better. While the Nazis wanted to exterminate whole Slavic populations for “living space,” women were killed less promiscuously. Stalinist purges, likewise, focusing mainly on party-members, also targeted men.

This left Eastern Europe, postwar, with a serious demographic shortage of men of marrying age. [More]

I like this article, and I like Bickerstaff’s style. Still, my impression is that the numbers generally don’t work out on these kind of single-generation selection event theories. This reminds me of the old theory that Steve Levitt’s Harvard economist buddy Roland Fryer is trying to revive that African-Americans have high blood pressure on average because of the high death rate on slave ships selected for salt retention.

Greg Cochran pointed out Fryer:

The reason it wouldn’t have an important effect is that you don’t get a lot of genetic change in one generation unless you try _really_ hard. If they lost the bottom 15% of the people (in terms of salt retention) during the Middle Passage, a cutoff of about one std below average, the increase in salt retention would be about a tenth or so of a standard deviation, assuming a narrow-sense heritability of 50%. You’d never notice the difference. [And, of course, genetic differences in salt retention didn't cause all the deaths in the Middle Passage, so this estimate is optimistic.]

Still, the Soviet sex-ratio skew after WWII is a fascinating event that must have had a lot of impact on society, but I’ve seldom read much about it.

By the way, in Old Master paintings, most girls are a little funny-looking. One partial exception is Botticelli. For example, at Venice Beach in LA around 1980, somebody painted a large-scale mural version of Botticelli’s Venus as a roller-skater girl.

This story in the New York Times highlights the black vs. feminist dynamic in the Hillary-Obama race that Pat Buchanan wrote about on Thursday:

Race and Gender Are Issues in Tense Day for Democrats - New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: January 14, 2008

LAS VEGAS — After staying on the sidelines in the first year of the campaign, race and to a lesser extent gender have burst into the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest, thrusting Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton into the middle of a sharp-edged social and political debate that transcends their candidacies.

The race and gender problem is that Obama has the race, and Hillary has the gender. (Actually the both have a race and gender–but since Obama’s gender is male, and Hillary’s race is white, no one cares.)

It’s an amazing testimony to Clintonism that Bill Clinton got away with being called “the first black President” and that Hillary, but for Obama’s competition would be presenting herself as, in effect, the first female “black President. “

Both Clintons are in fact extremely white–Bill was actually the white governor of a Southern state, who paid a courtesy call on the notorious segregationist Orval Faubus before his first election for governor, and invited Faubus to his inauguration. (See Chapter 18 of My Life. by Bill Clinton.)

Hillary, on the other hand, was actually a Goldwater Girl in 1964. Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because, although he wasn’t a segregationist himself, he felt it violated states rights.

Now Hillary is in trouble for saying that a divisive white Southerner was more important in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Martin Luther King was, merely because he, (Lyndon Johnson) was President of the United States–here’s what this ex-Goldwater Girl and former First Lady of Arkansas is supposed to have said:

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. … It took a president to get it done. ” [Obama Calls Clinton Allegations “Ludicrous” « FOX Embeds « FOXNews.com]

Someone needs to alert the New Republic about this woman. But my point is this–if she wants to be the underdog, and get the sympathy vote, if necessary by crying, she’ll have to deal with the fact that she’s a wealthy, famous, and well connected member of the elite, as well as being whiter than white.