Hip hop artist Will.i.am has come out with a new video entitled “We Are the Ones”, based upon Obama’s nonsensical slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”. You can view it here .
Along with its cult-like “O-BA-MA” chanting, the video is a bilingual collection of celebrities setting forth the great virtues of Obama, who will change the world, protect the environment, and according to one speaker, apparently can remove fear from the planet Earth. Wow!
Interestingly, some of the Spanish-speakers in the video refer to América - do they mean the U.S., or, as in the Spanish language, the entire Western Hemisphere ?
One of the Obama-boosting celebrities in the video is Colombian immigrant John Leguizamo, an actor with an enormous chip on his shoulder. It was Leguizamo who said

You grow up Latin in this country and you’re a third class citizen from the word go…there were no Latin people on ‘Star Trek,’ …this was proof that they weren’t planning to have us around for the future.

This is fascinating–I would be interested to learn if the women in question are immigrants doing work “Americans won’t do.” And if they’re licensed to drive in the State of New York

Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring - New York Times
March 10, 2008

By DANNY HAKIM and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

ALBANY - Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He scheduled an announcement for 2:15 after inquiries from the Times.

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

An affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan in connection with that case lists six conversations between the man, identified as Client 9, and a booking agent for the Emperors Club.[More]

Via The Swamp, the Journal has either been watching Reverend Jeremiah Wright on DVD, or actually going to church on Sunday to find out:

Under the law that governs tax-exempt organizations, churches are allowed to support causes or ballot initiatives such as laws to ban same-sex marriage. They also can hold a candidates’ night for all office-seekers in a race. But according to guidance provided on the IRS’s Web site, churches are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

The prohibition is aimed at preventing government subsidies — in the form of tax breaks — from going to organizations that support political parties. Other types of nonprofits are permitted to engage in partisan political activity but have more limited tax protections. For instance, their financial supporters aren’t allowed to claim tax deductions for their donations.

With 6,000 members, Trinity is the largest United Church of Christ congregation. The church is centered in a poor Chicago neighborhood, near public housing and down the road from Cut Rate Food & Liquors, which posts a sign reading “No drug dealing.” A review by The Wall Street Journal of 13 sermons at Trinity seen live or through church-recorded DVDs since late December found nine instances of ministers at Trinity appearing to promote Sen. Obama’s candidacy.

From the Pulpit

Some of the sermons mentioned Sen. Clinton or her husband in unflattering ways. During that Christmas morning sermon, Mr. Wright declared that Hillary Clinton “ain’t had to work twice as hard just to get accepted by the rich white folk who run everything or to get a passing grade when you know you are smarter than that ‘C’ student sitting in the White House.” [Obama Pastors' Sermons May Violate Tax Laws - WSJ.com]

Of course, it’s always seemed that black churches got away with a lot of this stuff, and that Democratic politicians would regularly campaign there.

Chidanand Rajghatta writes in the Times of India:

Some 500 Indian workers caught in what they claim is a human trafficking racket have asked the Indian government to protect their families in India from vengeful recruiters even as they filed a class action anti-racketeering lawsuit in the US against their American employer.

…..

The case involving the Indian workers and their alleged exploitation is more than a year old. Sometime in 2006, hundreds of welders and pipefitters, mostly from Kerala, responded to a series of advertisement placed by a recruiting company run by Mumbai-based Sachin Dewan promising green cards and permanent residency in US. Over 600 workers from all around India and some from the Gulf paid Dewan up to Rs 10 lakh (about $ 25,000 in today’s rates), often selling their homes and raising loans, for the promised “American dream”.

When they arrived in US, they discovered that there were no green cards. Instead, the workers found themselves working for Signal International, a major marine construction company, on ten-month “H-2B’’ visa that bonded them to work for it.

Basically, corporate criminals at Signal International were scamming Indians with the offer of US green cards. I personally think all assets of Signal International and their clients should be available to do right by these people. I also think these guest workers should be sent home so the American public aren’t left holding the bag here. What I expect will in fact happen here is that Signal International will get a slap on the wrist–and the American public will wind up paying the bulk of the costs here.

Back in 2004, the NYT reported:

“While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

“They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.”

By Gates and Guinier’s standards, Barack Obama should be the perfect example of the wrong kind of person to get affirmative action: his father was an elite immigrant (so Obama was a Harvard legacy as well as affirmative action admittee) and his mother was white.

I wrote in VDARE.com in 2004:

The personal motivation of Gates, who has risen to be (as he likes to joke) “the head Negro in charge” of African-American studies in this country, is straight-forward.

He’s one of the few members of the black academic elite whose background is typical for the average middle-aged African-American. Gates’ father was a millworker in West Virginia.

The background of Guinier, whose nomination to a high post in the Clinton Administration was famously killed by Clint Bolick’s skewering her as a “quota queen,” is more complicated. She is exactly the kind of dubious affirmative action beneficiary she is protesting.

Guinier looks like she could be the late Gilda Radner’s half-sister because her mother was Jewish. Her Jamaican-born father Ewart Guinier was a prominent Communist Party USA labor leader. Much of her career has been an extrapolation of themes from his life. For example, she advocates the kind of complex multiple voting schemes that helped the CPUSA elect two New York City councilmen during her father’s heyday, before the CIO expelled his union for being a Stalinist front.

So, Guinier’s old-fashioned Communist upbringing has helped make her more sensitive to class unfairness than is fashionable on the left today, where race trumps class.

Of course, Barack Obama has done pretty well for himself with all the affirmative action breaks he has received. In contrast, his wife Michelle, who is from exactly the kind of all-American working class black family that Gates and Guinier would prefer that preferences go to, has somewhat floundered about, wasting her admission to Guinier’s Harvard Law School, quickly dropping out of the legal profession and devoting most of her career since to being a political insider getting paid for diversity make-work. So, maybe there’s a good reason that Harvard has largely given up on traditional Michelle-style American blacks in favor of Barack-style exotic newcomers and blacks who were raised by whites.

Economists devote strikingly little attention to immigration, so they tend to be suckers for the occasional study that comes along supporting their prejudices. For example, recent papers by Ottaviano and Peri claiming that lots of immigrants in California made the natives better off got lots of play.

George Borjas of Harvard couldn’t replicate their findings, however, and now he’s finally figured out why:

The Ottaviano and Peri data … classify … high school juniors and seniors as part of the “high school dropout” workforce. Their finding of immigrant-native complementarity disappears if the analysis excludes these high school juniors and seniors.

Things that seem too good to be true usually aren’t

That’s Barack Obama’s golf handicap, according to Golf Digest’s new list of the top 200 golfers in Washington. A 16 puts him 123rd on the list, but in pretty good shape among elected officials. That’s because the top end of the list is dominated by lobbyists, such as #8, Jeff Becker, president of the Beer Institute and a 2.2 handicap, suggesting he does a lot of Beer Institute business on the golf course, and then in the 19th hole after his round. He is a man, I would guess, who feels that he has found his calling in life.

Among elected officials, Obama is tied for 37th, and tied for 15th among Democrats. His handicap is without a decimal place, so it’s not USGA official. In other words, bet on super-lobbyist Vernon Jordan with an official 16.1 handicap rather than Barack Obama with a fuzzy “estimated” 16. Still, a 16 is a good handicap, saying you ought to be shooting in the 80s on a good day, and have a chance at the 70s once in a blue moon.

Obama is well-positioned to succeed George W. Bush, who is a 15. Neither McCain nor either Clinton show up on the list. Bill Clinton claimed to be around a 12 handicap, but was notorious for not following the precise Rules of Golf. Clinton played so much golf as President that his handicap improved while he was in office (or perhaps the playing partners writing down his score became more fawning).

Eisenhower averaged just under 100 days per year as President in which he teed off. I recall reading that Clinton’s ambition was to break what he had heard was Eisenhower’s record of 103 rounds in one year during 2000, his final year in office. I don’t know if he accomplished this.

In case you are wondering, among the 27 elected officials on the Top 100 (handicap index of 13.5 or better) are 15 Republicans and 12 Democrats.

The top woman on the list is Republican pollster Linda Divall at an outstanding 1.9. Second best woman is former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman at 15.5. Condoleeza Rice is a 22.

T best name for a lobbyist on the list is AT&T’s “federal relations” guy, Lyndon Boozer (15.0)