Here’s a recent story that exemplifies the Bizarro World of contemporary U.S. immigration policy.
Texan Saul Espinoza was born in the city of Brownsville, a natural-born American citizen, who got into trouble with the law, getting arrested for theft and drug charges. But Espinoza figured out a clever way to avoid charges, that worked for years.
The ruse was, according to the Associated Press, to pose as an illegal alien :

Espinoza said he duped authorities for years and avoided criminal charges by telling officials he was Joel Garza, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

So this guy figured that he was more likely to remain a free man as an illegal alien than an American citizen. And for several years, he was right ! Notice he was even “telling officials” that he was an illegal !
Well, the scam worked for years, but now it’s been discovered:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to deport him to Mexico after his latest legal trouble before officials decided to take another look at Espinoza’s case.

So now Espinoza’s cover has been blown, but it worked for a time. How many others are using the same scam ?

Alex Veiga reports at AP:

The median price in a six-county area of Southern California fell to $408,000 — the lowest level since October 2004, when it was $402,500. That median is 19.2 percent below the region’s peak price of $505,000 last summer, and it’s 1.7 percent below January’s median, the firm said.

In the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, the median price fell 11.6 percent to $548,000 compared to a year earlier and 17.6 percent from the region’s peak median price of $665,000 last summer. Bay Area prices were essentially flat from January.

What happened in a nutshell: California prices were propped up because of migration from the rest of the US–and immigration from other parts of the world. Now, Americans are leaving California faster than they are coming–and the productivity of the newcomers isn’t enough to support the insane values of California real estate.

The California of today is has become more like Mexico–and more like Hong Kong–but mostly more like Mexico. That means more corrupt and poorer services. We are even seeing shanty towns emerge in Socal–and many of the residents don’t appear to be recent immigrants.

Here’s today’s ABC News headline:

If you are new to the topic of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, here’s a link to my blog posts on him over the last year.

Shortly after her husband was sworn in as a U.S. Senator, Michelle Obama famously received a raise from the U. of Chicago Hospitals from $122k to $317k for doing whatever it was she did for them.

But why was she getting paid $122k by the giant hospital in the first place?

An answer may have emerged in an NYT article, “In Developer’s Trial, E-Mail Note Cites an Obama Role.” Like everything involving Tony Rezko and the Obamas, this article is complicated and boring. (For example, Rezko’s involvement in the Obamas’ purchase of their Chicago mansion had to do with zoning details and, likely, with Michelle being on the Chicago Landmarks Commission, but don’t ask me to put together a lucid story of what exactly went down.)

What is interesting is part of this NYT sentence in reference to a 2003 email:

“The vaguely worded message also seemed to raise the possibility that Mr. Obama, who at the time was chairman of the Illinois Senate’s health committee, had been involved in recommending candidates for the board.”

Yes, but there’s no indication of … Wait a minute? Did that say Mr. Obama was “chairman of the Illinois Senate’s health committee?” And this was while Mrs. Obama was being paid over $100,000 per year by one of Chicago’s three big private hospitals to do something or other?

Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

If I didn’t know that Senator Obama is a cross between Mother Theresa, Neo from “The Matrix,” and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I might almost suspect he could be a Chicago politician.

Businessweek reports:

“Work visas, called H-1Bs, allow skilled workers from abroad to come to the U. S. for jobs. Here are the 200 companies that received the most visa petition approvals in 2007.”

The only “American” companies that made it into the top 10 are the monopolistic giants Microsoft and Intel. Several public institutions such as universities and public school systems  made it into this top 200 list.

This is being discussed on Digg.

Mona Charen writes:

“In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the book contains some disquieting elements.

“Obama is the product of a union between a white Kansan and a black Kenyan who met in Hawaii. I had assumed, before reading his memoir, that Obama viewed himself as a natural bridge between the races and that his message of unity sprang in part from his biology. That was wrong. From his earliest years, Obama engaged in a preoccupying internal struggle to make himself a fully authentic black man.”

James Fulford points out that it’s about time more pundits read the Democratic frontrunner’s memoir.

I think a lot of people just assumed that what they knew about Tiger Woods — came from a stable mixed race home, didn’t favor one part of his heritage over another, had a rock-solid psyche, etc. — also applied to Obama. I realize that doesn’t make one bit of sense, but stupid ideas can get stuck in people’s heads for stupid reasons — like all the doctors who assume that whooping cough is practically extinct because whooping cranes are practically extinct.

Charen very nicely sums up the slipperiness of the book:

“Left-wing ideas are not so much articulated in this memoir as presumed.”

Which means you have to read the book to get a sense of where he’s coming from. There are no soundbites in it.

You hear a lot of talk about whom Obama’s role model might be: Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? Ronald Reagan? Obama’s campaign kickoff rally in Springfield, Illinois last year was carefully crafted to remind voters of Abraham Lincoln.

And yet, Obama’s most important role model would seem to be another Harvard Law School grad (Class of 1966), one who was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court during the summer between Obama’s second and third years at Harvard Law School: David Souter, the “stealth nominee” with almost no paper trail. In contrast to the outspoken Robert Bork in 1987, Souter cruised to easy approval by the Senate.

It seems silly to accuse a man who published his autobiography at age 33 of hiding his views like Souter. And yet …

One idea I had was to take random swatches of Obama’s prose from Dreams from My Father and paste it into Word and run the Spelling and Grammar checker to get Readability Statistics. My guess is that the average sentence length in Dreams is very high.

But where can I find slabs of vintage prose from a man who abhorred leaving a paper trail? I thought about checking this statistic from quotations from Dreams in my articles, but I tended to pick more easily comprehensible excerpts and/or replace unnecessary clauses with ellipses to try to make his words less eye-glazing.

All I could find online was Obama’s Preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams, which may not be representative of his 1995 book, since he says in it, “I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.”

For that 2004 selection, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 12.2 (first year of college). I really don’t know how the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is arrived at.

By way of comparison, Obama’s 2004 Preface is rated for a lower grade level than my 2007 American Conservative article, “Obama’s Identity Crisis,” about the book (13.2). Interestingly, though, Obama’s average sentence length is 30.4, compared to my 23.8. And that’s including two comically serpentine sentences I quoted from John Updike’s The Coup (average length 48 words and Grade Level of 21.1, or 6th year of postgraduate work!)

Here’s some interesting material on David L. Paterson, who apparently will be moving up to the governor’s mansion in Albany:

Though his sight is limited, Lt. Gov. David Paterson walks the halls of the Capitol unaided. He recognizes people at conversational distance and can memorize whole speeches. He has played basketball, run a marathon, and survived 22 years in the backbiting culture of the state Capitol with a reputation as a man more apt to reach for an olive branch than a baseball bat.

If Spitzer resigns after being snared in a prostitution scandal, the biggest changes in a Paterson administration would probably revolve around style.

“He’s a guy who had two handicaps: his blindness and his race. And he never made excuses for it,” said civil rights leader Al Sharpton, a longtime friend. “He’s the guy who has said, ‘I have been in a minority group and a minority within a minority group. And I can make it, so don’t give me no excuses.’”

Paterson, 53, is the son of former state Sen. Basil Paterson, a member of the storied “Harlem Clubhouse” that includes fellow Democrats U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel and former New York City Mayor David Dinkins. The elder Paterson was the first in the family to run for lieutenant governor in 1970. He lost, but later became New York’s first black secretary of state.

David Paterson lost sight in his left eye and much of the sight in his right eye after an infection as an infant. Refusal to bow to his handicap came early. When New York City schools refused to let him attend mainstream classes, his parents established residency on Long Island, where they found a school that would let him go to regular classes.

“He was in the plays and on the stage, and required no assistance in maneuvering around stage and on the playground,” said Dr. Casmiro Liotta, Paterson’s former principal at the Fulton School.

Assemblyman Keith Wright, an old Harlem friend, remembers Paterson playing basketball and generally acting just like the other kids in the neighborhood. In 1999, Paterson completed the New York City Marathon.

After earning degrees from Columbia University and Hofstra Law School, he worked for the Queens district attorney’s office and was elected to the state Senate in 1985 at the age of 31. He built a reputation for working hard in a place where not everyone does.

Though he can read for brief periods, Paterson usually has aides read to him. He also has developed the ability to remember entire speeches and policy arcana. State Sen. Neil Breslin recalled that he told Paterson his cell phone number once and he memorized it.

“He has one of the finest memories of anyone I’ve known,” Breslin said.

Not surprisingly, considering that he can’t really read for long periods of time, he failed the N.Y. Bar Exam. But he has to be pretty crafty to get where he’s gotten. Especially because he can’t really see small details of people’s faces, like whether they’re smiling sincerely or falsely when they promise to support you in some political deal. I bet he has remarkable voice analysis abilities.

And I bet he spends a lot of time talking to people. Being Lt. Governor can be a pretty undesirable position (I’ve known a former NY Lt. Gov. who must not have had terribly stiff competition), but perhaps Mr. Paterson had heard some hints that energetic young Mr. Spitzer just might not serve out his term.

The other blind politician I’ve heard about in recent years was British Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose career was derailed by sexual and financial scandals.