From Obama’s Wright speech:

I can no more disown [Rev. Dr. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

The story, on pp. 88-89 of Dreams is that Obama’s white grandmother, who was raising him and earning most of the money in the family while his own mother was off in Indonesia working on her 1067 page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing, rode the bus each morning to her job as a banking company executive. One day, the 16-18 year old Obama wakes up to an argument between his grandmother and grandfather. She didn’t want to ride the bus anymore because she was hassled by a bum at the bus stop:

“Her lips pursed with irritation. ‘He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”

Obama’s lefty white grandfather doesn’t want to give his wife a ride because she was being prejudiced:

“He turned around and I saw that he was shaking. “It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time. I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.” He whispered the word. “That’s the real reason why she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that right.

“The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure. In my steadiest voice, I told him that such an attitude bothered me, too, but reassured him that Toot’s fears would pass and that we should give her a ride in the meantinme. Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me. Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that it was all right, I understood.

“We remained like that for several minutes like that for several minutes, in painful silence. Finally he insisted that he drive Toot after all, and I thought about my grandparents. They had sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers would still inspire their rawest fear.”

Then Obama drives over to his grandfather’s friend Frank’s house, an old black CPUSA member, for counseling, who tells him:

“What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”

“Frank closed his eyes. His breathing slowed until he seemed to be asleep. I thought about waking him, then decided against it and walked back to the car. The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.”

Man, what a family full of drama queens! And now Obama is equating his own grandma, who was the main breadwinner in his dysfunctional family circus, and who is still alive, with Rev. Dr. God Damn America.

Classy.

The Washington Monthly’s liberal blogger Kevin Drum, who voted for Obama, commented about this scene and others:

“Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a “fist in my stomach,” for example, and he “still burned with the memory” a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian.”

So, in summary, let’s look at how Obama smeared his own elderly but very much alive grandmother, calling her:

Well, no, according to Obama’s 1995 book, it is not at all true that she “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn’t pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her — an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position — good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn’t pulled up.

If this was some doofus politician like Bush or Biden who retold the story in a misleading fashion, you might view it as just their usual struggle with using the English language to get across what they really kind of, sort of mean. But Obama is so superb with words that it’s perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.

During his masterful speech at the 1992 John Randolph Club, the late Murray Rothbard observed:

Anger by the good guys, the accredited victim groups, is designated as “rage,” which is somehow noble…On the other hand, anger by designated oppressor groups is not called “rage,” but “resentment“: which conjures up evil little figures, envious of their betters, skulking around the edges of the night.

Obama’s speech today did not directly speak about “rage”—just “anger”—but only with whites did he mention “resentment.”

“Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.”
“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments”

Obama said the “anger” by blacks may be “counterproductive,” but he presents its as completely legitimate. He makes it clear that he thinks most black dysfunction is largely—though not solely—rooted in the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

In contrast, while Obama tried to be conciliatory to white “resentments” by “recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns,” the only “legitimate” concerns he recognizes are economic problems such as healthcare and outsourced jobs—which he sees as the root causes. Illegitimate concerns are “blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally.”

As Steve Sailer noted, Obama had to deal today both with Wright’s racial and his leftist demagoguery. The second, at least, remains unrepudiated.

Now here’s an interesting news item. In Yuma, Arizona, they want to build a moat to protect the border. And it seems to have a lot of support.
According to this Reuters article,

Most plans to gain control of the porous U.S.-Mexico border focus on some combination of fence. But this city in far west Arizona is looking to build a moat.Faced with high-levels of crime and illegal immigration, authorities in Yuma are reaching back to a technique as old as a medieval castle to dig out a “security channel” on a crime-ridden stretch of the border and fill it with water.

Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden, who supports the proposed project, brings up the medieval moat connection:

The moats that I’ve seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here.

The proposed moat would be in the Colorado riverbed:

The proposal seeks to restore a stretch of the West’s greatest waterway, the Colorado River, which has been largely sucked dry by demand from farms and sprawling subdivisions springing up across the parched southwest and in neighboring California.

Here’s an article about the Colorado River , here’s a map of the Colorado watershed. In the Yuma area, by the way, the U.S. - Mexican river runs mostly north-south, not east-west.
There could be an environmental advantage to the moat, as well:

The plan to revive the river, which drains from the Rocky Mountains through the Grand Canyon and runs for 23 miles (37 kilometres) along the border near Yuma, seeks to create a broad water barrier while also restoring a fragile wetland environment that once thrived in the area.

Sheriff Ogden says that

What you are building is a moat, but it’s bringing the life and the wildlife back. It’s innovative thinking. It doesn’t take much brainpower to build a 12-foot high fence around something, but this is unique.

Here’s the first stage:

The project is starting with a desolate 450-acre patch of scrub and thickets known as Hunter’s Hole, a once-thriving wetland on the border a few miles southwest of Yuma that has become a haven for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico and a headache for local law enforcement.

Sheriff Ogden explains the current situation:

“It’s in the United States, but it’s become a no-man’s-land, an area where bodies were dumped, where people and drugs were smuggled over the border,” said Ogden, whose deputies share much of the responsibility for tackling border-related crime with federal police.

How would it be constructed ?

Engineers plan to dig a “security channel” up to 10-feet (3 metres) deep and 60 feet (18 metres) wide through the problem area, which lies a short way inside the border. The dirt removed would be used to create a levee along the outside to give U.S. Border Patrol agents an elevated patrol road overlooking the line.

It would provide advantages for the birds and the local residents:

The area would also be replanted with native sedges and rushes to provide habitat for threatened local species such as the Yuma Clapper Rail, a secretive marsh bird. Backers say it would also provide a space for residents of Yuma, a farming town popular with winter visitors, to walk and fish.

And the project’s backers have an ambitious plan:

The organization behind the project would like to extend it the entire course of the Colorado River, which marks the U.S.-Mexico border, in what it sees as an environmental recovery program that complements the Border Patrol’s task.

Environmentalists and the Border Patrol working together!

“It doesn’t replace the Border Patrol’s efforts, it supplements them. At the same time you are restoring habitat in a secure environment and creating a place to relax,” said Charles Flynn, the executive director of the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area Corporation.

Unlike some other border plans, the moat proposal has widespread approval:

The planned revival of the Colorado River, where it carves through desert peppered with fertile farmland, is something of a standout. It has won the backing of the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns the land; the Bureau of Reclamation, which has provided a grant to drill wells and pump groundwater, and a letter of support from the Border Patrol. Also on board are Yuma City Council and local residents including the Cocopah Indian tribe, who have farmed the river’s flood plains for centuries.

The project even has support on the Mexican side of the border !

Perhaps more surprisingly, it has also won support across the boundary in Mexico, where plans to build border fences are eyed with suspicion. Local environmentalists there have embraced the project and plan to work in tandem to restore the wetlands on the Mexican side.”Instead of putting up walls and promoting division, we can promote security and friendship,” said Osvel Hinojosa, the director of Pro-Natura, an environmental group in northwest Mexico, of the proposal.”Moreover, instead of damaging the environment, we can improve it.”

Sounds like a great plan, with wide support. So dig that border moat !

In the southwest and other parts of invaded America, our stupidly generous medical system continues being bled dry by freeloaders from around the world. Today’s article is a mix of sob story plus a helpful examination of the cost of one injured illegal alien to the American community — nearly half a million dollars.

ECATEPEC, Mexico - When the motorcycle that illegal immigrant Laura Velázquez was riding slammed into a concrete wall, it cost a Phoenix hospital $478,000 to save her life.

The hospital is footing the bill. But Velázquez’s life in America is finished after hospital officials sent her back to Mexico.
[Weak immigrant sent home after free treatment in Ariz., Arizona Republic, March 17 2008]

If the hospital did indeed absorb the cost of this young woman’s treatment rather than charge the taxpayers, then that cost is passed on to all patients in terms of more expensive medical care. Otherwise the hospital would quickly be forced to close its doors like many others. There are other costs at patient level — services cut back, departments closed, techology purchases shelved. Citizens get a lowered quality of healthcare and are forced to pay more for it because of illegal foreign deadbeats.

The cash outlay alone is mind-boggling. A recent study found that San Diego County spent $155 million in unpaid medical care for foreigners in 2006.

But the Arizona Republic is telling this story, so the Mexican is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstance because she was brought here as an 11-year-old child by her parents. That’s true up to a point, but Miss Velazquez is an adult now who must accept her life as a Mexican citizen.

But Velázquez’s case also shows how innocent people can get ensnared in the illegal-immigration controversy. Velázquez, now 22, never asked to come to the United States; she was brought as a child. She wasn’t driving the motorcycle; she was only a passenger.

Her journey home has attracted the attention of Mexico’s national media. Government officials in Ecatepec, her hometown on the outskirts of Mexico City, say she should have been allowed to recover in Phoenix, and they have accused the United States of indifference.

In this case as in others, Mexicans believe Americans should provide free medical care and social services for them because they are “here struggling for this country.” The only cure for such a misplaced sense of entitlement is negative reinforcement — like sending patients home — repeated thousands of times.

The recent case of illegal transfer of technology to India now involves the Indian embassy. This is reported by the Daily Times in Pakistan:

An Indian embassy employee, only identified as “Co-Conspirator A”, and an Indian-American businessman have been charged with conspiring to obtain secret weapon technology from American companies. While the name of the Indian embassy employee is not known – the Indian embassy offering no comment – the businessman has been named as Parthasarathy Sudarshan, 47, who entered a guilty plea in a federal court on Thursday, suggesting that the Indian government violated a pledge made in 2004 that it would not try to bypass US export-control laws and regulations imposed after the Indian nuclear tests of 1998. The Indian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment. In a separate case, a Minnesota company, MTS Systems Corporation, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $400,000 for repeatedly falsifying documents in order to illegally export equipment for use in India’s nuclear programme.

Now, this of course is the country Bill Gates wants American Business to get its IT help from.

Now, what are the security ramifications of the bulk of sensitive corporate and governmental data in the US being handled by nationals of a country that is engaged in espionage in the US? I’ll bet the Indian spies have a lot of good dirt on a lot of people.

Here’s the text.

As always, very eloquent.

I’m sure it will be taken as the Sister Souljah moment I’ve long urged Obama to carry out on Rev. Dr. Wright. Amidst all the high sounding phrases, however, it’s not clear whether Obama is confessing that he blatantly lied last week when he asserted:

“The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”

Nor does it appear that he’s withdrawing from Wright’s church, to which he donated $27,500 on his two most recent available tax returns.

Obama is trying to leave the impression that this is kind of a recent senile crack-up on the part of Wright (who is 66):

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

No, this is just Wright being the same Wright who went with Farrakhan to see Gadaffi when he was 42. The only difference is that it’s Wright being Wright on Youtube.

When he was told he needed a church to be politically successful, Obama searched out Wright out of all black pastors on the South Side. He got what he was looking for.

And, no, not all black pastors are like Wright. Here’s the website of the biggest black megachurch in LA, West Angeles Cathedral, with almost three times as many members as Wright’s Trinity. It’s a Christian church, not the far left politics in dashiki vestments.

In summary, unless I’m missing, Obama’s speech is a lot nice words and zero action.

We’ll see if he ever holds a press conference on this topic.

My full length article comparing Hispanics to blacks is now up at American Conservative:

Is Brown the New Black:
Assimilating Hispanics into the Politics of Victimhood

One reason the black-Hispanic relationship is poorly understood is that class intersects with ethnicity in complex ways. At the bottom of society, among prison and street gangs, race rules. In the Los Angeles County jail, which is 60 percent Hispanic and 30 percent black, the two groups fought murderous battles in 2006. Last October, federal prosecutors accused the Florencia 13 street gang of trying to ethnically cleanse blacks from its unincorporated neighborhood in LA County. (The political impact of this violence shouldn’t be exaggerated, though. The respectable folk who do most of the voting don’t approve of gangbangers feuding.)

In poorer neighborhoods, black residents feel uneasy about men speaking Spanish around them. Not being able to understand what is being said robs them of their street smarts. Are the two men next to you at the bus stop talking in Spanish about soccer or are they plotting to mug you? Who knows?

At the top of the power structure, in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, blacks and Latinos get along quite well, united by party (92 percent of elected Hispanics are Democrats) and a mutual desire to keep the affirmative action gravy train chugging along. Ward Connerly, a black opponent of ethnic quotas, has noted that when he was a regent of the University of California, the heaviest pressure on the regents to cheat on the anti-preference language written into the state constitution by Prop. 209 came not from the Black Caucus in the legislature but from the larger Latino Caucus. They threatened to cut UC’s budget unless more Hispanic applicants were admitted.

Black politicians tend to view Hispanics today much as Irish politicos once saw their fellow Catholic Poles: silent partners in their coalition who should be grateful for their natural leaders’ experience and charm. Not surprisingly, Hispanics don’t agree. In some of the formerly all-black slum municipalities just south of Los Angeles, where Hispanics now make up the great majority of residents but only half of voters, ethnic politics has gotten nasty. But overall, Hispanic politicians know that time is on their side, so they can be patient about the arrogance of black colleagues.

In the middle levels of society, blacks and Latinos do compete. Relations aren’t warm, but African-American men have tended to cede blue-collar jobs to immigrants without putting up massive resistance. Moreover, the swelling numbers and various dysfunctions of illegal immigrants generate numerous jobs for civil servants (who are typically required to be citizens). Therefore, many blacks are paid by taxpayers to teach, police, guard, administer, and otherwise deal with illegal aliens. It doesn’t make for trans-ethnic amity, but it’s a living. [More]

Dennis Dale explains John McCain’s Media Magic:

I’ll give [McCain] this much: he’s figured it out. To get the press on your side, humor the bastards night and day. Flatter them. Give them ‘access’ and they’ll love you for it so much they won’t ask you any tough questions. Give ‘em access and they’ll do nothing with it, lest they lose it. Brilliant.

That’s the trick Tom Cruise’s old PR agent, Pat Kingsley, figured out as well. Tom’s just about the hardest-working man in show biz, so she gave the media outlets a deal: they could have tons of Tom’s time, as long as they didn’t ask him any interesting questions (“So, Tom, what’s the deal with this moon man religion of yours? Has the space monkey cult figured out some secret way to keep you from going gay?”) If press did ask him something besides whether he does all his own stunts or just 99% of them, they’d not only lose all access to Tom, but to the rest of Kingsley’s stable of clients. It worked for years, and then he fired her and put his sister in charge. You’ve seen the results.

Eamonn Fingleton has a new book coming out entitled In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony.That reminded me that about a dozen years ago, I saw Walt Disney’s 1934 Silly Symphony musical cartoon short “The Grasshopper and the Ants.” Even though Disney came up with a happy ending for Aesop’s fable–when winter comes, the hardworking ants take in the profligate fiddle-playing grasshopper and let him be their Musician-in-Residence–it’s stuck in my head ever since as a dismaying allegory for the mid-21st Century economy.

The 8-minute cartoon is now on Youtube and it’s only gotten more relevant for Americans this month: What are all us grasshoppers who aren’t star entertainers going to do for a living in the coming globalized world?

P.S., Ziel has some sharp thinking on the economy at Your Lying Eyes.