Major League Baseball has sent down investigators to the hometowns in Kentucky of two of their umpires to ask their neighbors if they were members of the Ku Klux Klan. I can think of some better things for them to spend their time investigating (like steroid use by their star players,) but these types of PC witch hunts are so common that I normally wouldn’t bat an eye over this.

What is amazing is the reaction of Jesse Jackson. Rather than shake down the League until there are enough black umpires, he told reporters that “Major League Baseball has done a disservice to its progressive social history by equating southern whites with white supremacists,” and that the league had “essentially defamed their people in their own neighborhoods.” [ESPN - Jackson chastises MLB for 'ill-contrived questions' in background checks , AP, January 31, 2008,]

Call me cynical, but I doubt Jesse Jackson has suddenly become interested in defending whites unfairly accused of racism. I have no way to know what he is up to, but I hope VDARE readers would indulge me with a conspiracy theory.

Earlier this decade, Jesse Jackson went on a campaign against NASCAR, complaining that the drivers and the fans were too white. One of his underlings went as far as calling NASCAR “the last bastion of white supremacy,” and after his complaints the league gave his Rainbow-PUSH coalition $250,000 dollars. Following outrage from fans, they stopped the donations. Jackson defending Southern Whites against a major sports league could give him cover if he decides to extort money from them again.

Just a theory, but if you see Jackson talking about NASCAR racing anytime soon, keep this in mind

U.S. employers pared their payrolls in January for the first time in more than four years. Nonfarm payrolls fell by an estimated 17,000–the first decline since August 2003.

Goldilocks (the “just right” economy I’ve written about before) may not be dead, but she’s very sick.For Hispanics, however, she may as well be dead and buried.

Hispanic employment fell by 197,000, or by 1 percent, in January. By contrast, 234,000 more non-Hispanics were employed, an increase of 0.2 percent.

January was the fifth month in a row in which Hispanic job growth lagged non-Hispanic growth.

Over the past seven years Hispanic employment (the best available proxy for immigrant workers) grew more than 8-times faster than native (non-Hispanic) employment.

Since late summer the roles have been reversed. From August through January 2008 Hispanics either gained jobs at lower rates, or lost jobs at greater rates, than non-Hispanics.

Over this period:

• National employment rose by 495,000 (+0.3 percent)
• Hispanic employment fell by 258,000 (-1.25 percent)
• non-Hispanic employment rose by 753,000 (+0.6 percent)

The past five months marked the longest stretch of declining native displacement in seven years—as clearly seen in our American Worker Displacement graphic:

This may be a cyclical downdraft, concentrated in housing and manufacturing–sectors notoriously dependent on immigrant (and often illegal) labor.

But the total January job loss in those sectors–27,000 in construction and 28,000 in manufacturing–amount to a fraction of the month’s Hispanic job decline. Hispanics are losing jobs throughout the economy.

Could the recent Hispanic job losses reflect heightened workplace enforcement?

Possibly.

In 2007 the federal government claimed to have ramped up enforcement efforts. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 4,940 workplace arrests [Worksite Enforcement fact sheet, ICE] last year, a 13 percent increase from 2006. (In 2002 only 510 such arrests were made.)

Although fewer than 100 of the arrestees were employers, ICE obtained more than $30 million in fines, restitutions, and civil judgments against them in just the first three quarters of FY2007. (In FY2005 these fines totaled a laughable $6,500.)

This comes after years of sharp declines in enforcement activity.
But these apparent “spikes” in enforcement activity coincide with changes in the way the enforcement statistics are presented. The happy trend may be purely statistical, unrelated to reality.

I will write about this–and other statistical legerdemain related to immigrants–in a future article.

Meanwhile, keep the champagne corked.

It’s a little puzzling why the political press is always in such a rush to hurry along the nomination process, to declare various candidates dead and to designate others as sure things. After all, it’s been January until a few hours ago. And even in this ridiculously front-loaded primary season, only 10% of the GOP delegates and 4% of the Democratic delegates have been awarded. Further, we’re only four days away from Super Tuesday, when 23 states hold primaries, so you might think they’d wait until then. After all, this is the political press’ quadrennial moment in the spotlight, so why would they want to declare it over?

But the press has continued to obsess over momentum, even though there hasn’t been much on display. Four years ago, for example, the press rushed to declare Howard Dean dead and John Kerry the electable Democrat, and the Democratic voters went along with the storyline. So, how’d that work out for them? This year, voters haven’t played along, but the press keeps trying to end the nomination process ASAP.

Partly, this momentum infatuation is due to the media’s love of a narrative. But it also is driven by journalists’ incentive structures. They get rewarded for making predictions, but aren’t penalized for making wrong predictions.

I just have the wrong personality for this profession. I don’t make many predictions (at least not the kind of predictions that people want to hear — but I do make plenty of predictions that people find depressing and boring) because I hate being wrong about anything. For example, it was recently proven that one section of an article I wrote seven years ago was wrong. I wrote in 2000: “So, at this point, allegations [of steroid use] against [sprinter] Marion Jones remain mostly guilt-by-association.” Ever since she confessed, it’s eaten away at me that I was wrong about that.

As part of my intensive journalistic quest to discover why almost nobody is terribly enthusiastic about Mitt Romney, I finally watched three or perhaps even four minutes of a Youtube video of Romney making a speech.

As a speaker, he seems about as boring as most candidates. I didn’t notice the Ned Flanders similarity that several readers have stated they see in him. His persona is not overwhelmingly masculine, but he’s not deficient in that regard either.

But what I kept getting distracted by was trying to figure out how old he is. Romney looks like he’s, what, 48? But it says on Wikipedia that he’ll be 61 in six weeks. He’s less than a year younger than George W. Bush, who reportedly takes good care of his health (at least since he stopped drinking 20 years ago), but who has aged a lot in his looks over the last 7 years. (Here’s a picture of Bush this week.)

Romney’s handlers claim he doesn’t dye his hair. And nobody seems to mention “Romney” and “facelift” on the same web page. Maybe he just has good genes due to some Mormon eugenic magic.

For whatever reason, though, he looks like a damn male model. He resembles a model playing an executive in a fashion layout for a men’s business attire chain, or the CEO bad guy in a movie on the Lifetime channel about children being poisoned by corporate toxic waste.

I watched the “historic” debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama last night. The immigration issue was discussed in more detail than in previous debates, especially previous Republican debates.

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton’s immigration positions are practically identical to those of Republican presidential contender John McCain. There is, as they say, not a dime’s worth of difference between the two. They even use the same false dilemma–you either have to deport illegals in mass or put the vast majority on a path to citizenship–to justify a massive amnesty. They should both know that “attrition by enforcement“–cutting off the job magnet at the employer level will, over a period of several years, force illegals to go home voluntarily at their own expense and discourage others from coming–is the principal position of the conservative Republicans. But both Clinton and McCain continue to demonstrate the unprincipled nature of their “compassion” by demagoging about the impracticality of rounding up 12-14 million illegal immigrants. Nobody but a few call-ins to talk-radio shows is calling for that. Clinton’s dissembling about fines, back taxes, and learning English–eye-wash provisions with no teeth and plentiful opportunities to avoid–comes right out of the McCain-Kennedy shamnesty bill. Neither seems to be concerned about the fiscal and demographic disaster likely to result from such an amnesty. It may sound reasonable to those who know little about the subject, but U.S. immigration policy should not be based on clueless ignorance of the consequences of amnesty and other bad policies.

There is one aspect of the immigration crisis, however, where Hillary Clinton’s thinking is superior to that of John McCain. She realizes and had the decency to admit that many American workers and their families are being hurt by our open door immigration policies. To my knowledge, neither McCain nor Bush has ever admitted that. She is at least a listener.

Republicans have put themselves in a position where the Democratic frontrunner is slightly to the right of the Republican frontrunner on a very important national issue–an issue that should have belonged to Republicans big time.

Obama is to the left of McCain but not very much. Obama probably knows better, but he stated that any association of unemployment, especially of blacks, with immigration is just scapegoating immigrants. This is an even more dramatic form of hispandering than McCain’s denial that American workers are being hurt.

I could not help but wonder as I watched the debate between Clinton and Obama how McCain would do against either. We Republicans may not like Hillary’s policy ideas or style, but any objective person will have to admit that she is very intelligent and highly articulate. She overmatches Obama in this regard but not by an extraordinary degree. Both Clinton and Obama have law degrees from two of the top law schools in the United States. McCain is a U.S Naval Academy graduate, and by no means just anyone gets accepted there. McCain’s acceptance at Annapolis, however, may have been influenced by the fact that both his father and grandfather were high ranking Navy admirals and graduates of the Naval Academy. Senator John McCain graduated in the bottom five of his class of 899, ranking 894th. His later record as a Navy pilot was flawed by foolish mishaps in training and with the fleet. He never made admiral. McCain has also demonstrated a well documented tendency for four-letter-word flavored temper outbursts when frustrated, irritated, or opposed. That may be true of Hillary, too, but tonight she demonstrated she could keep her cool.

Hence John McCain might not be much of a match for Hillary Clinton in a debate, Neither do I see him doing especially well against Barack Obama.

John McCain has become the Republican frontrunner largely on the basis of trial polls against Clinton and Obama. The most frequent argument I hear from McCain supporters in the media is that he is the best one to beat Hillary. Many Republican voters have been ignoring issues and have been oblivious to some harsh realities in McCain’s background that will erode his standing in the polls as the media focuses on him over the next nine months, and the voters learn more about his personality and his positions on important issues. Knowledgeable conservatives are already in a state of revolt.

Far from being the most likely Republican to succeed against Clinton or Obama, McCain may have the highest risk of losing in November of any candidate that entered the Republican primaries.

Personally, I would not vote for McCain, Clinton, or Obama in any election. Unless some miracle knocks McCain out of the Republican nomination, we are headed for national disaster no matter who wins.

They are at it again. La Raza (“The Race” in English) is complaining about “hate speech” among immigration restrictionists. The Razas are particularly miffed at the few members of the MSM who consistently tell the truth about open borders, particularly Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck.

A national Latino group said Thursday it is fighting back against what it considers to be “hate speech” that has emerged from the debate over immigration.

National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia announced plans to pressure television network executives and candidates seeking their parties’ presidential nominations to clamp down on such remarks.

The group launched a Web site to counter the speech, www.wecanstopthehate.org, with clips of what it considers offensive comments on television as well as a tracking of hate crimes.
["Hate Speech Cited in Immigration Debate," Google AP, Jan 31, 2008]

According to La Raza, it is hate speech to mention facts like the belief of many Mexicans that the southwest belongs to them; in fact, the reputable Zogby polling organization found in 2002 that 58 percent of Mexicans agree with that idea.

Mexicans have essentially declared war on America via immigration, and even have a name for it — reconquista. But when anyone shines a light on their activities against America, Razas squawk about non-existent racism and hate because they have no rational arguments.

In response, [Minuteman Jim] Gilchrist called the National Council of La Raza a racial supremacy group that “dwarfs the combination of Black Panthers, KKK, American Indian Movement and Asian gangs.”

“I’m exercising free speech and I’m giving my opinion,” Gilchrist said. “My son-in-law is Mexican and two of my three grandchildren are half Mexican. The Minuteman Project is comprised of every race, color and creed.”

And so they are…