From New York magazine (via NRO):

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I blogged here on April 2:

So, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he’s going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he’s going to do about it.

He’ll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won’t take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn’t you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright’s memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Update: Now, Rev. Dr. Wright’s daughter says that isn’t true. She asserts her father is in an electronically inaccessible region of Ghana and will issue a statement when emerges from “email hell.”

I must say, the news Rev. Wright is currently hanging out with Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Kurtz makes Obama look much more Presidential than did the endless Obama-Wright psychodrama of last spring. As I blogged on April 29:

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Vince Weiguang Li, the Chinese immigrant accused of beheading, mutilating, and cannibalizing a Canadian bus passenger, is reported to have said “please kill me” during his court appearance.  Although he’s an obvious case for capital punishment, he won’t get his wish. Canada doesn’t have capital punishment, and can, at times, be almost as uncooperative as Mexico in refusing to return killers to America to face justice.

Canada abolished capital punishment, de facto, in 1962. De jure, it continued to exist until 1976, but Canada’s Liberal government always commuted the sentences to life imprisonment.
In the Eighties, a nominally Conservative government ran on a promise to allow a free vote on the restoration of capital punishment, but the nominally Conservative Prime Minister, is believed to have “arm-twisted” MPs from Quebec to vote against it. In spite of this horrible recent killing, Canada’s nominally conservative National Post, (I know I keep saying that, but actual conservatism is rare in Canada) included a paean to abolition in an article about a Toronto jail:

Moving indoors: Public hangings were abolished in Canada in 1869. In Toronto it was moved indoors from the Don Jail yard in 1905. The indoor chamber was a converted washroom.
Infamous fact: The last execution in Canada took place here, on December 11, 1962.
The last men executed: Arthur Lucas, 54, and Ronald Turpin, 29. Turpin had shot and killed a police officer after fleeing a robbery that netted him $632.84. Lucas, an American, was accused of coming to Canada and murdering an informant in an FBI drug trial. Both men were hanged on the jail’s indoor gallows. It was one of three double hangings in the jail’s history.["but at least there are no hangings, August 6, 2008]

In fact, Arthur Lucas was an African-American–during a historical  period when Toronto’s black population was measured, perhaps,  in the hundreds, one member of the black community was hanged for murdering two of the others,.

Something to think about, when thinking about the race riots that happened recently in Montreal, in what the Globe And Mail calls a “downtrodden” immigrant neighborhood. Before modern immigration, Quebec was a distinct society of two kinds of white people who almost got along. Then came mass immigration.

Steve Sailer wondered a while back why contractors are hiring illegal alien fire crews. Follow the money, folks. Steve is correct that there is no shortage of American males who love to fight fires.

I used to work for a public jurisdiction. The problem for public jurisdictions in recruiting is that too many folks, mostly men, apply to be firefighters. It takes a good body and a mind. That’s it and they apply by the hundreds.

Warm bodies required to establish fire perimeters are a dime a dozen and taking the time to screen them, test them, deal with workers comp, etc. is a big expense so they have taken to contractors to fill these positions.

Contract organizations hire illegal aliens because they have bodies and minds. (Read what you will into this and you are probably correct.) They also are seasonal workers who get laid off after the fire season and they cannot apply for unemployment benefits. Actually, they can apply but they cannot receive benefits because they are illegal so they don’t apply.

Employers must pay to support the unemployment system. Their premiums are variable depending upon how many of their workers get laid off and then get unemployment insurance. So, it’s as simple as can be. . .illegal aliens do not get unemployment insurance and, therefore, the employers’ rates are low as opposed to hiring Americans and then laying them off. They apply for unemployment and they are qualified and the employers’ rates goes up.

That is not the end of the story, however. Illegal aliens who have U.S. citizen children qualify for welfare benefits (TANF) for these children. The parents get laid off and they apply for welfare for their kids who share their benefits with their parents, right?

It is not just confined to firefighters and strawberry pickers but it also applies to millions of temporary workers such as those hired by hotels during the Christmas rush. The illegal aliens bus tables, wash dishes and then they get laid off. The hotels love illegal aliens. They are cheap labor. Unfortunately, they cost taxpayers a bundle in welfare benefits, medical costs, education for their kids. . .ad nauseum.

Isabel Reynolds writes for Reuters:

“With more than a quarter of Japanese expected to be aged over 65 by 2015, the country faces serious economic consequences, including labour shortages that could weigh on GDP.’

“A group of ruling party politicians see immigration as a possible solution and have presented Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda with a radical new proposal that seeks to have immigrants make up 10 per cent of the population in 50 years’ time. Government figures show the workforce is on course to shrink by eight million in the next 10 years.”[Japan gets serious about immigration, August 09, 2008]

Now, of course, what could be considered instead are immediate economic incentives that would make it easier for young Japanese to have families. Sweden has done that-and has a higher birth rate than Italy–which hasn’t followed that path.

That won’t solve the immediate problem–but it would create the possibility of a longer term stabilization.