But a citizen, (not a media personality) sent this question in:

TASH: Mayor Giuliani, this question to you comes from Marshall Brannon (ph) of St. Petersburg.

Your immigration plan calls for all immigrants to learn English to gain citizenship. So why is your campaign airing an ad in Spanish?

GIULIANI: The reality is I believe that America is a country that is built around the English language. If you want to become a citizen, you should demonstrate your facility with English.

If you know other languages, that is wonderful and that’s a wonderful thing and if we have substantial portions of populations that know other languages, I’m very comfortable trying to reach them in both English and in Spanish.

The core of my plan on immigration is to stop illegal immigration at the border, with a border stat system, with technology, with the increased border patrol. I believe we can stop the illegal immigration if we stop it right at the border.

And then we should develop a tamper-proof ID card so that people that want to come into the United States should be allowed to do that.
We have to teach new behavior. The new behavior is if you want to come into the United States, you have to identify yourself, which, after all, makes the United States like every other country. Right?

You can’t get into most countries without identifying yourself.
And then if you’ve got the tamper-proof ID card, you’d be allowed to work, pay taxes, get online, become a citizen, follow the rules. But at the end of the line, you’d have to be able to read, write and speak English.

If you speak a second language or a third language or a fourth language, I think that’s great for America. I think America has to be a country that has facility with more languages given the global economy we live in and I think we can be very comfortable with that.

But the focus has to be on being able to read, write and speak English if you want to be a citizen.[GOP Debate Transcript Part 4 - WPTV NewsChannel 5]

Actually, Giuliani is wrong–it would make America more competitive if more Americans could learn useful foreign languages like Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese, since it would reduce reliance on translators and such–but it doesn’t help to import semi-literate Spanish-speakers from Mexico and Central America. What they do is establish Spanish-speaking colonias in America, sometimes taking over whole towns. And of course, the real reason he’s running Spanish-language ads in the hope that he’ll get some of those famous Hispanic votes. If there are any Hispanic Republican primary voters, Giuliani’s immigration enthusiasm may be what they want.

Yesterday, Jeff Sessions—who is the most dedicated immigration reformer in the Senate—gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation with 15 yes or no policy questions he would like to ask the presidential candidates on immigration. You can see the list here.[Watch or listen online here.] Some may object to some civil liberties issues in a few of the policies such as biometric IDs, but for the most part, these are all very solid measures.

Most of these provisions were simply the president acting as chief law enforcement officer and enforcing and/or enacting the laws already on the book, or simply getting the funding for laws already passed. Sessions acknowledged that this list was far from complete, and it did not mention anything about birthright citizenship and cutting welfare to illegal aliens.

Two of his questions were if they would reject “any path to citizenship” and if they would replace chain migration and the visa lottery with at least 50% of visas with some sort of merit based visas.

I think that these last two promises are a bit too vague. One could massively increase legal immigration and at. Furthermore, plenty of proponents of amnesty are now content to give indefinite legal status to illegal aliens with no definite promise of amnesty.

He elaborated on this a bit in the Q&A, and threw around the number of 500,000 legal immigrants a year, and said that there was no reason why all of them couldn’t already speak English upon arrival. He repeatedly emphasized that we can simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to come to this country, so we must select our immigrants based upon the national interest.

Sen. Sessions clearly understands what duties a president has towards the citizens of this country.

I don’t know if any candidate will end up answering his questions, and if they do, I doubt they’d be very sincere. At the end of the lecture, I wondered why Sessions didn’t run for President himself.

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate in Dumb and Dumber: The Army Lowers Recruitment Standards … Again:

The latest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon’s longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls “high-quality” recruits—those who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50^th percentile on the Armed Forces’ aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be “Category IV”—defined as applicants who score in the 10^th to 30^th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs.

The “aptitude” test is the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which is a highly “g-loaded” functional equivalent of an IQ test. In fact, the military provided Charles Murray with all the AFQT data that makes up the middle section of The Bell Curve.

What’s interesting here is how much more the Army values IQ over a high school diploma–There are roughly as many high school dropouts (25% of all young adults according James Heckman) as there are people scoring at the 30th percentile or less on the military’s IQ test (30%, by definition). Yet, the military has only allowed the percentage of new recruits below the 30th percentile to increase from 0.6% to 4.1%. Yet, over roughly the same time period, it has allowed the percentage of high school dropouts it takes in to grow from 6% to 29.3%.

Second, and more practically, high-school dropouts tend to drop out of the military, too. The National Priorities Project cites Army studies finding that 80 percent of high-school graduates finish their first terms of enlistment in the Army—compared with only about half of those with a General Equivalency Degree or no diploma. In other words, taking in more dropouts is a short-sighted method of boosting recruitment numbers. The Army will just have to recruit even more young men and women in the next couple of years, because a lot of the ones they recruited last year will need to be replaced.

Third, a dumber army is a weaker army. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Pentagon and published in 2005, evaluated several factors that affect military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and found that aptitude is key. This was true even of basic combat skills, such as shooting straight. Replacing a tank gunner who had scored Category IV with one who’d scored Category IIIA (in the 50^th to 64^th percentile) improved the chances of hitting a target by 34 percent.

Today’s Army, of course, is much more high-tech, from top to bottom. The problem is that when tasks get more technical, aptitude makes an even bigger difference. In one Army study cited by the RAND report, three-man teams from the Army’s active-duty signal battalions were told to make a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Teams with Category IIIB soldiers (who had ranked in the 31^st to 49^th percentile) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IVs had only a 29 percent chance. The study also showed that adding a high-scoring soldier to a three-man team increased its chance of success by 8 percent. (This also means that adding a low-scoring soldier to a team reduces its chance by a similar margin.)

In case you are wondering, here’s the Wikipedia summary of the AFQT (which is the crucial subset of the larger ASVAB — the AFQT determines whether you are allowed in, while the other parts of the ASVAB influence your specialty once you are in).

An Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score is used to determine basic qualification for enlistment.

AFQT Scores are divided into the following categories:

• Category I - 93-99
• Category II- 65-92
• Category IIIA - 50-64
• Category IIIB - 31-49
• Category IVA - 21-30
• Category IVB - 16-20
• Category IVC - 10-15
• Category V - 0-9

The formula for computing this AFQT score is: Arithmetic Reasoning + Math Knowledge + (2 x VE). The VE (verbal) score is determined by adding the raw scores from the Paragraph Comprehension and Word Knowledge tests (i.e., how many questions the aspiring recruit got right on each) and using a table to get the VE score from that combined PC and WK raw score.

AFQT scores are not raw scores, but rather percentile scores indicating how each examinee performed compared with all other examinees. Thus, someone who receives an AFQT of 55 scored better than 55 percent of all other examinees.

Law prohibits applicants in Category V from enlisting. In addition, there are constraints placed on Category IV recruits. Presently, all Category IV recruits must be high school diploma graduates. Further, the law constrains the percentage of accessions who can fall in Category IV (currently, the limit is 20%).

One of the shock-shock-shocking things The New Republic revealed about the Ron Paul Letters is that he said unkind things about Martin Luther King. That he was pro-Communist, that he was a plagiarist, and that he engaged in sexual immorality.

Christopher Hitchens is a great admirer of Dr.King’s non-violent campaign, of his preaching, (which Hitchens insists could have been just as good if Dr. King hadn’t been a Christian) and because of Hitchens own personal and ideological history, he doesn’t think any of this is particularly wrong.

So Hitchens repeats, more or less approvingly, all the same facts:

The entire self-definition of “the South” was that it was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. But the heavy burden would never have been laid upon him if religiosity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin with. As Taylor Branch shows, many of King’s inner circle and entourage were secular Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for several decades and helping train brave volunteers like Mrs. Rosa Parks for a careful strategy of mass civil disobedience, and these “atheistic” associations were to be used against King all the time, especially from the pulpit. Indeed, one result of his campaign was to generate the “backlash” of white right-wing Christianity which is still such a potent force below the Mason-Dixon line…

…
At no point did Dr. King—who was once photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was sticking straight out of his chest—even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved. In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian. [VDARE.com Note: Please understand that Hitchens means this as a compliment.]

This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife. He spent the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don’t blame him. (These things, which of course disturb the faithful, are rather encouraging in that they show that a high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.)[God Is Not Great, P. 176, By Christopher Hitchens, , 2007]

Of course, these facts are more or less inescapable, and are featured in regular biographies, like Bearing The Cross, by David Garrow, and in fact in a report that Sam Francis submitted to Congress when they were discussing making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday. Jesse Helms gave a speech about some of it.

At the moment, my point is not to condemn either King or Hitchens for immorality or pro-Communism, but to point out that if James Kirchick had been looking for evil condemnations of Dr. King, he could have found them closer than the musty libraries that hold the Ron Paul Reports–he could have found them on the New York Times bestseller list, authored by Christopher Hitchens.

The de-Canadianization of Canada has gone hand in glove with a decrease of freedom of speech in that country. But it’s encouraging to see that there are Canadians who are fighting back.
Case in point is Ezra Levant, Canadian writer, lawyer, and conservative activist. As publisher of the now defunct Western Standard, Levant reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons, which offended Syed Soharwardy of the”Islamic Supreme Council of Canada”.

Thanks to Soharwardy’s complaints about the cartoon reprints and Levant’s criticism of Islam, Levant was hauled before the “Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission” this month, where he gave a principled defense of his rights and attacked the injustice of the commission. You can view his opening statement here . Levant bases his defense in part on the 800 year heritage of British Common Law and charges that the Human Rights Commission is “applying Saudi values, not Canadian values”. Click here for Levant’s website.[VDARE.com Note: Litigious Canadian Muslims take note--Allan Wall lives TWO countries south of Canada.]