Theodp writes at Slashdot:

“The Department of Homeland Security stepped up to the plate Friday for corporate H-1B visa interests as it changed immigration rules without notice to allow employers to hire an unlimited number of foreign students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math to work in the U.S. for 29 months after graduating with a bachelor’s degree or higher — longer if an H-1B visa is pending — provided they studied in the States for one academic year under an F-1 visa and their employer enrolls in the Department’s e-Verify program. ‘This rule will enable businesses to attract and retain highly skilled foreign workers, giving U.S. companies a competitive advantage in the world economy,’ said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in justifying the change, which the DHS made without notice or comment by exploiting a ‘good cause’ exception that allows procedural rules to be bypassed to prevent ’serious damage to important interests.’ In explaining its motivation, the DHS cited testimony by Bill Gates (’I don’t think there should be any limit’) as well as the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, which counts major H-1B stakeholders Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft among its members.”

Would anyone but a lawyer not think that hiring a bunch of young men from areas that have either a tendency towards substantial financial scams or extremely active intelligence agencies, might just bring substantial security problems?

Can the US government even do an adequate background check on folks coming in from places like India and China?

This issue is being discussed more here.

Time Magazine runs a cover story on Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetero, but bowdlerizes her leftist politics and exotiphilic sexuality. For example, Time vaguely burbles:

“Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. “I suddenly realized,” he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, “that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen … was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different.”

But as I noted in The American Conservative over a year ago, on that same page (p. 125), Obama went on to make much clearer why the incident was so upsetting to his delicate sensibilities:

Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men. He pompously intones, “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

Ben Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:

“There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. ‘More than once,’ he recalls, ‘my mother would point out: “Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.”’”

I summed up:

I suspect he feels that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries and Third World men; but if she had been wiser, where would he be? This is one of life’s conundrums that’s hopeless but not serious, and yet Obama can’t help being serious about himself.

A British reader writes:

Have you seen the Time profile on Obama’s mom? It is a wonderful read-between-the-lines piece.

Aid agency circles are rife with stories of white females falling for charismatic Third World figures. Many come from frightfully-posh English private-school backgrounds. It usually ends disastrously.

Sixties black nationalist Michael de Freitas worked in London as a pimp, drug dealer and strong-arm man. Then he reincarnated himself as a black leader called Michael X and started doing away with rivals in his native Trinidad. He was tried and hanged in his native Trinidad for murder in 1975.

One of his victims was Gale Ann Benson, the infatuated, privately educated daughter of a Conservative MP. She was a model and a socialite and was attracted by the aura of danger. Again she bit off more than she could chew.

Her body was found in a shallow grave. She was still alive when she’d been buried.

Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul told their gruesome story in his short book “The Killings in Trinidad.” (Here’s Joan Didion’s review.)

My correspondent goes on:

It also ended disastrously for a 27-year-old children’s aid worker called Emma McCune. In 1991, she took herself off to a refugee crisis in southern Sudan.

McCune scandalized the relief community by marrying a local guerrilla leader; to whom she became a “First Lady-in-Waiting”

Formerly a champion of children’s rights, Emma couldn’t stop her husband from holding hundreds of adolescent boys in a squalid camp. According to Wikipedia she embraced the hardships of African life (bouts of malaria, water teeming with bilharzia), she was well-fed by local standards, eating fish that her husband’s soldiers had stolen from a weaker, starving tribe.

“They were instantly attracted to one another, and Machar, who already had a wife, proposed on their second meeting a year after the first. After taking up with Machar, including using a UN-supplied typewriter to produce manifestoes, she was fired by Street Kids International. She lived with Machar as war intensified and he split his faction away from the larger movement. At one point they fled a machine-gun attack. In 1993, after becoming pregnant, she moved to Nairobi; she died in a car crash.”

A book about her has been written by Deborah Scroggins called Emma’s War. It was to be filmed by Tony Scott.

Nicole Kidman was scheduled to play Emma.

By the way, I’ve finally figured out why the seemingly cosmopolitan Obama grew up so narrowly Afrocentrist in his identity and why he became a politician. It’s a pretty funny story rooted in his mother’s passive-aggressive war on her poor second husband Lolo’s attempts to provide a decent living for her and some other guy’s kid, but I’ll have to postpone it until I have time to type in more of Obama’s endless sentences.

On a 1-10 scale of infuriating stories about foreign parasites feeding on American society, this case is an 11. Its central figure illustrating illegal aliens at the trough is a 21-year-old Mexican awaiting her 4th liver transplant. Kudos to reporter Anna Gorman for including the dollar figures of costs for taxpayers and important statistics about the availability of transplant organs: Immigration debate hits home for liver transplant patients (Los Angeles Times, April12, 2008).

Ana Puente was an infant with a liver disorder when her aunt brought her illegally to the U.S. to seek medical care. She underwent two liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center as a child in 1989 and a third in 1998, each paid for by the state.

But when Puente turned 21 last June, she aged out of her state-funded health insurance and the ability to continue treatment at UCLA. [...]

Puente’s case highlights two controversial issues: Should illegal immigrants receive liver transplants in the U.S. and should taxpayers pick up the cost?

The average cost of a liver transplant and first-year follow-up is nearly $490,000, and antirejection medications can run more than $30,000 annually, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees transplantation nationwide.

Donor livers are also in scarce supply. In California, nearly 3,700 people are on a waiting list for livers, according to the network. Last year, 767 liver transplants were performed in the state. More than 90% of the organs were given to U.S. citizens.

The reader also learns about the California programs that give illegal aliens more rights and privileges than citizens.

Late last month Puente learned of another, little-known option for patients with certain healthcare needs. If she notified U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that she was in the country illegally, state health officials might grant her full Medi-Cal coverage. Puente did so, her benefits were restored and she is now awaiting a fourth transplant at UCLA.

Get that? Breaking the law gets her a special provision of California policy providing free healthcare for illegal aliens only. Nice! Naturally she has already signed up for her new freebies, from the old source (us battered taxpayers).

After freeloading so much stuff from the American taxpayer, Puente has a sense of entitlement that just won’t quit…

“It doesn’t matter if I’m undocumented,” she said. “They should take care of me at UCLA for the rest of my life because I’ve been there since I was a baby.”

This is an excellent, maddening article that deserves a close reading.

Incidentally, California is deep in debt: California proposes $7 billion for prison healthcare (LA Times, April 12):

As of Oct. 1, the state had $57.3 billion in debt outstanding, plus $78.2 billion that has been authorized but not yet borrowed. The prison borrowing would not be dependent on approval by voters because state officials want to use a type of bonds that requires only lawmakers’ permission.

And lest we forget, Puente’s nation of citizenship, Mexico, is quite wealthy (often ranking around #15 in GDP among nations) and could easily afford to take better care of its citizens. Mexico only pretends to be poor so it can dump its unwanted sick and uneducated on Uncle Sucker, as well as hustle foreign aid for various alleged reasons.

Schwarzenegger and the SacraMexico legislature recently pitched a healthcare program that would include illegal immigrant children. If their idiotic legislation were ever to pass, all the sick kids of Mexico and beyond would soon be here, and California would sink in red ink like a stone.

I mentioned earlier that Obama recorded the audiobookversion of Dreams from My Father, in his own voice.When I say in his own voice, he frequently speaks in dialect, mimicking either African accents, or a funkier African-American accent than his natural “Straight Outta Princeton” speech.

Someone has put up a nine-minute clip of the worst things in the book, interlaced with more recent clips. Worth watching and listening.