Well, it’s no big surprise, but John McCain is already making “immigration reform”, which in his mind must include amnesty, a priority of his administration, should he win.
In a piece on the New York Times Politics Blog, “McCain Says Immigration Reform Should be Top Priority” (May 22nd, 2008), Michael Luo reports that

In yet another sign of his pivoting toward the general election, Senator John McCain said at a roundtable with business leaders here today that comprehensive immigration reform should be a top priority for the next president.

McCain said it “at a business roundtable held at a Silicon Valley technology firm” where business leaders were complaining about the reputed difficulty of obtaining H1B visas for foreigners.
Quoth John McCain : “…we must enact comprehensive immigration reform. We must make it a top agenda item if we don’t do it before, and we probably won’t, a little straight talk, as of January 2009.”
McCain’s final sentence is a little garbled, but it sounds clear to me that Candidate McCain is pledging himself to start working on “comprehensive immigration reform”, which for him includes amnesty, on Day One of his presidency.
Also in attendance was Governor Schwarzenegger, who also supports “immigration reform” and says it can’t be achieved piecemeal. The Terminator even exhorted his fellow roundtablers to work towards that goal:“I think all of us have to keep that pressure on Congress.”
At another juncture during the same roundtable, McCain discussed illegal aliens :

Later, Mr. McCain took up the topic again, saying the problem of what to do with illegal immigrants already here needs to be solved, saying “they are also God’s children, and we have to do it in a human and compassionate fashion,” which drew applause from his audience.

So is McCain saying that those who are currently illegal aliens in the U.S. can’t be God’s children if they return to Mexico ?

Newsmax writes:

During his speech, Obama said, “A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year.”

Who is behind the rise in hate crimes?

Obama left no doubt who he believes to be the culprits. “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen,” he told the crowd.

I would look a bit more at the nature of where “hate crimes” are happening. Basically if you have an an area where those most inclined to leave go-you are left with an increasing concentration of those that are inclined to fight.

What we have here is a faux leftist candidate supporting a combination of supporting the wealth of market minorities and the interests of a coalition of minority groups. This is the kind of government Americans get when fund raising among the wealthy is the major prerequisite for playing on the national stage.

What needs to be looked at instead are the issues of jobs and personal autonomy. American disposable income has been falling for a generation. Corporate media dragged its feet in reporting this as long as they could–and finally we get a small part of the obvious story from folks like Dobbs and Limbaugh.

I would not be surprised if some patriotic immigration reformers privately feel some schadenfreude over Ted Kennedy’s terminal cancer. Kennedy, of course, was the chief sponsor of the 1965 Immigration Act where he falsely promised, “First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same… Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” In recent years, he has been one of the loudest and most prominent amnesty advocates.

I do not wish any harm to anyone due to their politics, but there is a more practical reason why we should not be happy about Kennedy’s turn for the worse. The 1965 Immigration Act was first introduced by John F. Kennedy in the summer of 1963. After his assassination, the bill was pushed as a memorial to the slain president. In the foreword to the 1964 edition of JFK’s book A Nation of Immigrants, Robert Kennedy wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” This helped mute much opposition to the Bill and it was passed with little debate.

With the surviving Kennedy brother now faced with an impending natural death, I would not be surprised if we are faced with two possible scenarios. The first would be an ailing Kennedy pressing to get his long sought after “immigration reform” before his passing.

The other would be if he dies and there’s  a call to pass amnesty as a form of memorial to the late Senator, just as there was with his brother and the 1965 Immigration Act. For this reason, I hope for two miracles: for Teddy to survive cancer and a quick, painful, and permanent death for his amnesty.

Blogger and software executive Jim Manzi (who, to my surprise, is not the software executive Jim Manzi who headed Lotus Development back in the days of the 1-2-3 spreadsheet) has a cover story in National Review rehashing the conventional wisdom, “Undetermined: there is danger in assuming that genes explain all.”[June 2, 2008 (Pay archive| free version) ] Unfalsifiability, eugenics, the Holocaust, etc etc

There’s much in it that’s true (e.g., “Correlation is not causality”), and maybe a thing or two that is new, but I didn’t see anything significant that’s new and true, and quite a bit that will be misleading to people who haven’t thought hard about the issues.

I’ll respond at length elsewhere.

From the Washington Post:

Despite peace, Belfast walls are growing in size and number
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
The Associated Press

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Lee Young, 8, and Cein Quinn, 7, live barely 200 yards apart, but they have never met, and maybe never will.

Lee is Protestant, Cein a Catholic _ and their communities in Belfast’s west inner city are separated by a wall called a peace line. It’s nearly 40 years old and 40 feet high.

Ten years after peace was declared in Northern Ireland, one might have expected that Belfast’s barriers would be torn down by now. But reality, as usual, is far messier. Not one has been dismantled. Instead they’ve grown in both size and number. … Instead, for dozens of front-line communities of Belfast, fences still make the best neighbors.

“The Troubles” began at these sectarian flashpoints in the late 1960s, and survive today in a legacy of mutual fear and loathing. The rate of sectarian killings has fallen to virtually zero thanks to cease-fires underpinned by IRA disarmament, and the feeling on both sides is that the barriers help keep that peace. …

In this city of 650,000, roughly half Catholic and half Protestant, only the university district and upper-class streets, chiefly on the south side, bear no clear-cut tribal identity.

There’s something quite similar in Beirut, where the one street open to all ethnicities runs by the American University.

A lot of ethnic struggles aren’t driven so much by mass hatred as by thugs, most of them young, who get into scrapes with the other side. In the meritocratic uplands, it all seems irrelevant. But down in the lowlands, where social ties are less determined by having unusually high IQs or particular talent, but by blood and neighborliness, the young thugs are nephews and cousins and neighbors’ nephews and cousins. While they may be sons of bitches, they’re our sons of bitches.

Catholic colleagues on occasion have invited him across the wall for an after-hours pint at their pub. He won’t go. “You’d be afraid that they might recognize you’re from the other side. Am I too tight in the eyes?” he said, referring to a stereotype of Protestant eyes supposedly being closer together.

That’s the first stereotype I’ve heard of Belfast Prods and Taigs being even theoretically distinguishable by sight. I’ve always described the Northern Irish troubles as a classic racial struggle between two partly inbred extended families. They haven’t been separated long enough to undergo much selection for different looks, but so what? Thinking of them like this helps you understand the situation better.

People tend to look at me like I’m crazy when I say this because everybody knows that race is only about skin color. So therefore, the Troubles have to be about religion (even though most of the active participants in the Troubles are too hung over to make it to church on Sunday morning).

The big raid May 13th on Postville, IA’s kosher abattoir had its origins several years ago at San Franciso International Airport in an interview of an arriving Chinese family by U.S. immigration inspectors that happened — this is important! — on a Jewish holiday. Craig Nelsen, who has been on this story since May, 2004, provides an account (Biggest immig raid ever much worse than you think) indicating that the immigration-fraud snakepit thus revealed is evidently just the tip of an iceberg, to mix metaphors.

The raid was discussed Tuesday, May 20, at an already-scheduled hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee’s subcommittee on workforce protections in Washington, DC. The Des Moines Register’s article (Advocates ask why owners aren’t facing any charges, by Jane Norman, May 21, 2008) on the hearing leads with the usual, reflexive bleating:

The immigration raid at a Postville plant is the most recent example of how the federal government has traumatized children and ripped apart families as it steps up enforcement, Democrats and immigrant advocates said Tuesday.

Although it was Chinese illegal aliens who accidentally started the ball rolling on the Postville raid, the 300-plus illegal aliens swept up in Iowa a week ago Tuesday were–surprise!–mostly Hispanic. Thus — surprise, again! — one of the leading bleaters was Janet Murguia, the hyper-obnoxious Executive Director of the National Council of La Raza [The Race]. (See Murguia’s 11-minute tangle with Lou Dobbs here, following about 45 seconds of inescapable preliminaries.)

Fortunately, Congressman Howard ["Buck"] McKeon, Republican of California and ranking minority member of the subcommittee, wasn’t having any of it:

“If we go back to where this first starts, a person that enters the country illegally or overstays their visa status, they are really the ones that are putting these children in jeopardy, by their own actions, and they should take those children into account,” he told Murguia.

He said his constituents are bothered that immigration laws are so routinely broken.

“If a person runs a red light and the police are there, I’ve never known of an instance where they don’t stop them and give them a ticket,” McKeon said.

Blunt talk to La Raza’s scourge-of-hate bully! And oh so rare in these prostration-before-the-ethnic-grievance-groups times.

So, no matter what state you live in, why not phone Congressman McKeon’s Washington office (202-225-1956) to thank him and let him know that we constituents from all over are delighted he’s speaking for us!

P. J. O’Rourke once read a week of a congressman’s mail “more than seven hundred letters. There were exactly two thank-you notes in the pile.” We can do better than that.

Here’s another bogus backlash story from the permissive, open-borders-loving press. A convicted cop killer gets a cushy sentence of life in prison and the MSM are worried that the case might cause citizens to reflect negatively on the crimes committed by illegal aliens.

Ya think?

Quintero was in the country illegally when he killed Johnson. He’d already been deported once after he was convicted for indecency with a child.

Rafael Perez, a Houstonian who became a naturalized U.S. citizen Wednesday, said he worried the verdict would negatively affect other immigrants.

“People are going to think that people who are trying to do things the correct way, that they shouldn’t have a citizenship,” Perez said.
[Could the Quintero verdict have damaging effects for immigrants?, By Courtney Zubowski  KHOU-TV, May 21, 2008]

How often do you hear conflation paranoia so elegantly voiced?! Anyway, it’s the press that has a hard time differentiating between legal and illegal immigrants, not the public.

Meanwhile, the stone-cold killer is surprised at his good fortune:

Almost two years ago, Juan Leonardo Quintero predicted in a jail house interview that he would be sent to the death chamber for shooting Houston police officer Rodney Johnson.

“I was wrong,” he said Wednesday from a Harris County jail a day after he was sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole. [Quintero didn’t expect to be spared after slaying, By Rosanna Ruiz And Brian Rogersm Houston Chronicle, May 21, 2008

The article included informative statistics about the frequency of the death penalty against cop killers in Harris County.

Since 1990, at least nine men have been sentenced to death in police officer slayings. At least four others have been sentenced to life in prison, although the law has continued to change regarding the minimum amount of time they have to spend behind bars.

A death sentence should be understood by criminals as automatic for murdering an officer. Otherwise the job of police will become even more hazardous than it already is.

Below, cop-killer illegal alien Juan Quintero at the time of an early court appearance (left) and after his trial make-over (right). It’s amazing what defense attorneys can do.