I was just reading a book about the 1920s, and there’s an essay in it called New Social Types, by Elizabeth Stevenson. She writes that the State of California placed full page ad on January 5, 1924 that encouraged :people to move to the Golden State, saying that California was very modern, spent a lot of money on roads and schools, children grew taller there because of the sunshine and good , and ended by saying:

There is comfortable room in California for 26,000,000 more people.

Which would be fine–but now California has 37, 000, 000 people.

Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father,, (You’ve heard of it? OK, then, I’ll begin.) has also been issued as an audiobook, read actually by Obama himself. He is, after all, a skilled public speaker.

This is just a gift to Hugh Hewitt, because it’s perfect for radio, and Hewitt has been playing clips of it [Listen| Download MP3] to mixed reactions. But what I noticed is that when Obama reads lines by people who have foreign accents, (mostly his Kenyan family) he imitates their accents.

Also, when he says (see transcript, but you should listen to get the full effect)

I chose my friends carefully: the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist professors and structural feminists, and punk rock performance poets.

If you listen, he says the word Chicanos, in the middle of a regular English sentence,with an accent that makes him sound like Freddy Fender, who I happened to also be listening to today.

When he speaks the words of his African relatives, he speaks with an accent that, if doesn’t sound exactly like an African accent, it at least sounds like Sidney Poitier playing an African.

Of course, this is just more of what Steve Sailer has been saying about how good Obama is at creating his own identity, and of course, when he talks like a black American (see video) he’s doing the same thing.

My point? For a white politician to be caught mimicking foreign accents always means deep trouble for the white politician.

I need to listen to the whole thing to see if Obama has a Chinese laundryman or an Italian barber. That would be fascinating to hear.

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I rarely covers the topic of day laborers since the focus is usually on how global labor arbitrage affects white collar professionals. The breaking story below is compelling enough to make an exception.

Go to the first link, and be sure to watch both videos. The one titled “Protesters outraged over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse patrol” shows some video from the TV12 helicopter, and “Sheriff’s immigration operation moves north” shows on-the-spot coverage from last night.

The conflict over day laborers in Arizona has been going on for a long time. A second article is included that gives some context for the current unrest.

Note: The story takes place in the town of Cave Creek, which is in the northern Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area.

Sheriff’s immigration operation moves north Kevin Curran 12 News Mar. 27, 2008

Protesters outraged over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse patrol

It was a tense evening Thursday night in north Phoenix as Sheriff Arpaio continued his intensive patrol operation aimed at locating illegal immigrants.

The sheriff said 200 deputies and armed posse volunteers fanned out in a new area for the program. They established a command post near Cave Creek and Bell Roads. Sheriff Arpaio claims he is responding to requests business owners in the area. They told the sheriff the proximity of two day labor centers is a concern.

Supporting the sheriff and deputies were members of patriotic motorcycle clubs. Arpaio expected immigrant rights groups to protest his operation and said his troops were prepared for any potential trouble between advocacy groups. “My hope is that cool heads will prevail,” Arpaio said in a statement before the operation started. “There will be a zero tolerance policy in this operation toward any amount of violence or disruption of the peace.”

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says he is disappointed the sheriff will not coordinate his operations with the chief and other professionals at the Phoenix police. “The sheriff is endangering the lives of police and federal undercover officers who may be tracking drug dealers and murderers.”

As for the sheriff’s massive show of force, “if he’s got 200 deputies and posse members to track down people with cracked headlights, he should be going after his long list of people with warrants.”

(more…)

One item in Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ’s “Black Value System” is “Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness.’“

Yet, after decades of preaching to his congregation that blacks shouldn’t move from the ghetto (where, coincidentally enough, his megachurch is located), the retiring Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. says, in effect, “So long, suckers!“

FOX News has uncovered documents that indicate Wright is about to move to a 10,340-square-foot, four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago, currently under construction in a gated community.

Those must be big bedrooms to have only four in a 10,340 sq. ft. house.

The house and land were apparently paid for by Trinity.

The NYT has a long article on a Miami Beach company that has gotten a $300 million contract from the U.S. government to supply Afghan government forces with ammunition, even though it is supposedly run by a 22-year-old. (Here’s CEO Efraim Diveroli’s MySpace profile.) Most of the ammo has apparently turned out to be junk scrounged from ex-Soviet supplies.

What’s not explained in the article is: “Who are these people?”

UPDATE: With lots of help from my alert readers, I’ve found out more about the clan involved.

The NYT article does mention that Diveroli got his start working briefly for his uncle Bar-Kochba Botach’s weapons shop, Botach Tactical.

Here’s a fun discussion thread entitled “BotachTactical.com is by far the worst company I have ever dealt with…,” where ex-customers of Botach discuss their experiences trying to get Botach to live up to its promises. You’ve got to give this family of arms dealers credit for courage — I can see ripping off photographers wanting to buy Nikon cameras cheap, but routinely ripping off the kind of people who want to buy 30-round magazines for their M-16s (the featured item on Botach’s website today), well, that takes some brass.

Botach Tactical operates out of an unmarked building in — where else? — South Central Los Angeles. From The Wave, LA’s black newspaper:

The black community has a gun dealership in it.

Botach Tactical is a state-licensed and city-contracted bulk gun supply business in operation on the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and 43rd Place, it was learned this week.

The gun dealership, owned by Bartochba Botach, was discovered Friday by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, and a group of Crenshaw area residents, who, responding to rumors, went to the unmarked storefront at 3423 W. 43rd Place and demanded entry.

Once inside, the group, which included the congresswoman’s daughter, Karen Titus, and activists Steve Cokely, Sandra Moore and Maurice Griffin, confronted Botach, who admitted to being a gun merchant.

“He said he is an international arms dealer with a government contract and that everything he does at his Crenshaw store is legal,” Moore said. “He told us he has a right to be in there, but we didn’t.

“He said, yeah, he sells guns and ammunition in bulk, but only to law enforcement and the military,” Moore added. “He said he is an Israeli and that he operates the gun business with his family. I asked him why he had to sell them in our community. I was angry, so I told him to go sell them in his own community.”

Moore described the site as the neighborhood’s former pawnshop, stripped of all identifying signage and fortified with thick, double-plated glass. “And dogs,” she said.

“He’s got several vicious dogs on the premises. The guy said he also owns Maverick’s Flat across the street from his gun store and he uses it as a warehouse, so we went over there, too, and I ran into a cop coming out with a box of bullets.”

Waters, Moore and company went directly to the office of their city representative, Councilman Bernard Parks, to report and protest the presence of the gun dealership. Parks spent the next two days researching the business in question and Tuesday reported the following:

Botach Tactical is a gun supply store that has allegedly been operated by Botach for 12 years. Parks said Botach has had other businesses in the community for at least 20 years.

The councilman said Botach has a current valid state license to sell arms and is contracted by the Los Angeles Police Commission to buy and sell guns, ammunition and arms-related materials in bulk through the Internet to police agencies around the country.

Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, who was the area’s city councilman for 12 years before Parks’ election, Tuesday disputed the 12-year operation of the gun dealership at the 43rd Place site.

“It has always been a pawnshop,” Ridley-Thomas said. “When did it turn into a gun store? How did it turn into a gun store? You can’t change the use of a building without proper notification, permits and public hearings.

“Where are the public notification documents?” Ridley-Thomas asked. “This is something the residents would have had to be apprised of in advance and be allowed to respond to before such a business began operating.

“A pawnshop showed up at that location shortly after the [1992] civil unrest and people didn’t like it there. It had always been a controversial site as a pawnshop. How did it shift from a pawnshop to a gun shop, which is something even more controversial?”

In 2006, Luke Ford noticed this LA Daily News story about the SoCal arms dealer who appears to be the uncle of Efraim Diveroli:

Makeup artist to the stars Judith Boteach thought she had found true love when it took four people to carry all of the flowers and jewelry lavished on her the day multimillionaire Yoav Botach proposed marriage.

Boteach said she learned a month after their Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony that her groom hadn’t obtained a California marriage license, but she believed in their future together.

“I loved him,” said Boteach. “I trusted him and he kept telling me (the wedding license) wasn’t necessary.”

But their relationship ended unhappily, with Boteach kicked out of the couple’s Beverlywood home in her nightgown. And she is now embroiled in a court battle for half of Botach’s fortune - millions of dollars she claims he promised her should the couple ever split.

“This is the largest palimony case in American history,” said Robert W. Hirsh, Boteach’s attorney, who explained that his client cannot fight for alimony since she and Botach were never legally married.

According to court records, Botach co-owns 144 commercial and other properties in Los Angeles, as well as Botach Tactical, a nationwide distributor of police and military equipment. But Boteach is seeking access to financial documents to determine the defendant’s assets. “We would not be surprised if his net worth is $700 million,” Hirsh said.

Judith Boteach apparently now runs a Moroccan restaurant, BBC Cafe, in Beverly Hills. An LA Times restaurant review describes her as “Judith Boteach, the charismatic Moroccan American chef and co-owner and her partners Jay and Karine Kaplan and Gabriel Azoulay.”

Apparently, Yoav Botach is the father of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of the bestseller Kosher Sex and host of the Shalom in the Home reality TV show on TLC Network. Shmuley Boteach and Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson) started an “infamous” charity in 2000 called Time for Kids that put on a benefit at Carnegie Hall but somehow never got any money to any kids. The money seems to have wound up with Shmuley’s L’Chaim Oxford nonprofit, which is supposed to promote Jewish life at Oxford U. But it got into all kinds of legal and tax problems with the British government because it didn’t seem to be doing any of that.

The treasurer of the dubious charity was Shmuley’s sister, Alteret Diveroli, which is the name we started with.

But, I must say, at this point there are so many Botaches and Boteaches and Yoavs and Bar-Kochbas floating around that I may have well have gotten some of this wrong.

The VP and #2 officer of Diveroli’s AEY the firm that got the huge contract from the taxpayers, is 25-year-old licensed masseuse David M. Packouz. He appears to be the son of Rabbi Kalman Packouz (a.k.a., Kenneth M. Packouz) of Miami Beach, author of How to Prevent an Intermarriage. Rabbi Kalman is Executive Director of Aish HaTorah Jerusalem Fund.

There’s been a lot of speculation over how young Diveroli got this lucrative contract. One common suggestion is that perhaps he’s a big Republican campaign donor.

Yet, the only person mentioned in this posting who has contributed to a Presidential candidate over the last decade, according to OpenSecrets.org, is pawnshop owner turned merchant of death Yoav Botach, who gave $1,000 to John Edwards last year.

Overall, it just sounds like a whole family full of self-starters.