In the comments a reader makes an excellent point:

Among the innumerable interesting things about Obama’s candidacy is the lie that it puts to some of the most tired myths about black/white relations in America.

In particular, the myth that the historical marginalization of blacks has given them particular insight into the dominant (i.e., white) culture. This may have had some truth when black women frequently worked as “domestics” for upper-crusty whites and had to look the other way at the wife’s pill-popping and junior’s porn collection, but no more.

Obama has spent much of his adult life establishing his black bona fides in the armpit of South Side radicalism, but he’s successful as a candidate because he was raised by and around whites and has developed a very keen instinct for Stuff White People Like. Your typical inner city ward heeler, however, has no idea. With the atomization of popular culture, poor, inner city blacks are probably more insulated today from nonblack culture than they ever have been in history.

For example, interviews with inner city American blacks now frequently need to be subtitled on TV - unthinkable 20 years ago, unless it was someone born in the 1800s and had lived his whole life on the Delta (white speech, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much - so I don’t think that’s it).

I always figured the first black Presidential nominee would be a Republican or quite conservative Democrat, probably from a military background, or perhaps a sports background (or both, e.g., former Naval officer and basketball hall of famer David Robinson). I assume Colin Powell could have won the GOP nomination fairly handily in 1996 as a war-winning general, if only he’d wanted it.

In contrast, white Democrats haven’t seemed to like black candidates much. They’ve looked down upon non-racialist pragmatic black politicians like former LA mayor Tom Bradley as Uncle Toms, yet also looked down upon racialist politicians popular with blacks like Rev. Jesse and Rev. Al as buffoons. So, Obama is the unexpected answer to their fantasies. A black candidate who has worked hard to establish a career for himself as a South Side racialist, but who is really a lit fic novel reading white man in a semi-black skin.

Eight days later, New York Mets’ general manager Omar Minaya’s dead-of-night firing of manager Willie Randolph reverberates.

As an assistant Mets GM during the late 1990s, the Dominican-born Minaya proved himself an astute judge of talent, and the Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals) hired him away in 2002 as their GM.

When the Mets signed Minaya as their GM following the 2004 season, his first free agent signing was of an aging but still talented Pedro Martinez ($53M/four years). In spite of Martinez’ racist past, I welcomed the signing, which gave the Mets the credibility they needed to sign that year’s top free agent, outfielder Carlos Beltran ($119M/seven years).

Though the Mets had only two Latin regulars, a Hispandering, 2005 New York magazine article spoke of “Los Mets.” But beginning in 2006, Minaya would create a Latin-dominated team.

Randolph, who is black, had no managerial experience, and the Mets had just endured two years of failure with Art Howe, an experienced, white manager. I wanted them to go after a heavyweight, like Lou Piniella or Dusty Baker.

But Randolph did a great job. In 2005, the Mets had their first winning season, 83-79, since 2001. In 2006, they won the Eastern Division, with a league-best record of 97-65, and came within one inning of going to the World Series. But in 2007, the club had the worst September collapse in baseball history. Minaya announced, with apparent distaste, that Randolph would be back. Before firing Randolph, Minaya tortured him, making his job status day-to-day.

The troubles went back some. In July 2006, reliever Pedro Feliciano publicly called Randolph’s management of the bullpen “stupid.” Nothing happened to Feliciano, who is still with the Mets.

One year earlier, when Japanese Washington Nationals pitcher Tomo Ohka had publicly disrespected black manager Frank Robinson, he was fined, and traded days later. A general manager may not tolerate any player disrespecting his manager. Similarly, the clubhouse is the manager’s domain, but Minaya would often visit, giving the players mixed signals about whom they had to answer to.

Most Shea Stadium fans were white, and some of the Latin stars—2006 acquisition Carlos Delgado, in particular—would refuse to honor fans’ cheers for curtain calls after home runs. When Minaya acquired Delgado, owner Fred Wilpon had to order him to stand for “God Bless America.”

For whom was Wilpon building the team?

Randolph’s interim replacement, his bench coach Jerry “Fertilizer” Manuel, is black.

A man in Kentucky shot six co-workers and then shot himself. [Man in Kentucky Kills 5 Co-Workers, By GRAHAM BOWLEY New York Times, June 25, 2008] There’s no reason to suspect that this is an immigrant type mass murder crime, or an interracial hate crime–but there’s also no reason to suspect that the media will tell us.

Write me if you find out anything specific about this crime.

UPDATE: The shooter appears to have been white–see picture. The victims’ names include three Hispanics. They were factory workers from nearby Sebree, KY,  a town that the 2000 census figures say is 11 percent Hispanic.

Does this mean that it was a nativist attack? Not that I know of. Apparently the real target was his supervisor, a man named Kevin G. Taylor, who seems to be a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Bill Gates is now working full time at his foundation, helping his wife make sure that every child in America gets a college education.

Of course, Bill, himself, didn’t bother getting a college education. He dropped out of Harvard.

Indeed, his generational peers–Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell — all dropped out of college, too.

Wouldn’t the whole world be better off if Italy weren’t so damn Italian? I mean, what has Italian culture ever contributed to anything? When will the Italians get with the program and adopt the Universal Globoculture? The New York Times wants to know!

Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial.

Ponder that for a moment.

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.

Italian children in Italy eat Italian food? The horror, the horror …

And isn’t it about time they tore down the Florence Cathedral and put up a Frank Gehry building made out of sheet metal? How come there’s not a Hello Kitty logo anywhere on Michelangelo’s “David”? Shouldn’t La Scala dump Verdi and stage a tribute to the Spice Girls?

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere more so than here. …

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

“We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.”

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles to make them prove his theories correct?

It might be interesting for somebody to go through the Obamas’ tax returns from 1997-2004 and try to figure out where all the money went. This isn’t a Davos Man Mystery like with the Clintons’ tens of millions; this is just the kind of yuppie personal finance that most readers of this blog can identify with.

Before the Obamas got rich in 2005, they still averaged over $200k in income annually from 1997-2004, but did they save much? For example, even though they made $3 million in 2005-2006, Sen. Obama didn’t start sheltering income from his books in a Self Employed Pension until 2007, presumably because they couldn’t afford to set cash aside. Obama has said he had a hard time renting a car at the 2000 Democratic convention because his credit card was maxed out.

Mrs. Obama complains frequently about the burden of having to pay off their law school loans, but she got out of law school 20 years ago and he got out 17 years ago.

My vague impression is that Mrs. Obama is quite high maintenance (e.g., she works out with a personal trainer four times per week, which must chew up $10k or $15k per year right there), so that might account for where the money went.

Despite massive elite denial, it’s always been obvious that eventually the immigration issue would break into politics, probably in an unexpected way. Well, it’s happened at last: Cannon Ousted In Republican Primary, by Josh Kraushaar, CBS News, June 25, 2007

Immigration was the driving factor behind Cannon’s unpopularity with the district’s Republican base. Despite sporting a near-perfect score from the American Conservative Union, Cannon alienated border security hawks over the past several years with his belief that illegal immigrants should be eligible for certain government benefits.

(“The driving factor” - remember that when the spin starts!)

Our friend “An Economist” comments:

Chris Cannon was a key Bush Amnesty proponent for years. At one point he rather foolishly stated “we love immigrants in Utah and we don’t care if they are legal or illegal”.

What is the significance of this election? Hard to say. Tamar Jacoby once wrote that if Chris Cannon was defeated no Congressmen would ever dare vote for Amnesty (roughly). True? Of course, not. However, the defeat of an incumbent (7 term) Congressmen in a primary is rare thing. It won’t show up in the national press. However, folks in Washington will notice the forced departure of Chris Cannon.

VDARE.COM presaged Jason Chaffetz’ defeat of Cannon here and here.

The Christian Science Monitor, if it can be considered a Main Stream Media component, has far and away the most respectable record of MSM coverage of America’s immigration disaster. This was further sustained on Monday by IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN MAY BOOST US JOB PROSPECTS
By David R. Francis June 23 2008

What’s needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.

Amazingly, that is happening now – to some degree… Immigration prosecutions reached an all-time high in March, reports the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research and distribution group at Syracuse University in New York. Using data from the Justice Department, it calculates that prosecutions were up 49 percent from February and 72.7 percent from March of last year…

If current moves to restrain illegal immigration trim that growth by 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants, it should have some effect on the nation’s labor supply, notes University of Chicago economist Jeffrey Grogger. He’s coauthor of a paper calculating that a 10 percent increase in the supply of a particular skill group caused by higher immigration prompted a reduction in the wages of similarly low-skilled black men by 4 percent between 1960 and 2000, lowered their employment rate by a huge 3.5 percentage points, and increased their incarceration rate by almost a full percentage point.

A intelligent article about Grogger’s work is here.

Apparently the logic of this has even occurred to the Socialist Government of Spain, which when it came to power in 2004 irritated other EU partners by legalizing huge amounts of illegal immigrants (which meant they could go anywhere in the European Community).

Now, the Spanish, faced with a huge property market slump and soaring unemployment, have proposed paying immigrants to go home!
Spain will pay unemployed migrant workers to leave By Lisa Abend and Geoff Pingree Christian Science Monitor June 20 2008

The incentive program signals a shift in Spain’s famously lenient immigration policy. In 2005, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government sparked the ire of other European countries when it gave work and residence visas to 800,000 immigrants. Now the government has not only supported the European Union’s Return Directive for undocumented workers but has taken a more skeptical approach to legal migrants who fill construction and domestic jobs. The Labor Ministry is studying a plan to restrict family immigration to parents and their children under 18. Currently the law allows grandparents and in-laws to join their families.

This idea has received very little attention in the orthodox US MSM, with the honorable exception (for once) of The Wall Street Journal

Spain Proposes Paying Jobless
Immigrants to Return Home
By JONATHAN HOUSE
June 20, 2008; Page A8

In a year when Presidential candidates are proposing huge bounties for scientific invention, which will be the first to propose relieving working class Americans with this idea?

VDARE.com advises not holding your breath.