Douglass K. Daniel writes at AP:

Days after he cracked that being rich in the U.S. meant earning at least $5 million a year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain acknowledged that he wasn’t sure how many houses he and his wealthy wife actually own.

Later, the McCain campaign told Politico that McCain and his wife, Cindy, have at least four in three states, Arizona, California and Virginia. Newsweek recently estimated the two owned at least seven properties.

The question I have about these houses:just how much were illegal aliens involved in their construction? Use of illegal aliens is rather common in construction jobs in California and Arizona these days. I’d be real surprised if these houses are newer if they didn’t involve substantial use of illegal workers in their construction.

It’s always good to have a mug shot to go with statistics. This character, Eric Antonio Uc-Cahun of Mexico, is one of the vicious illegal alien criminals who have been protected by San Francisco’s sanctuary policy. His rap sheet is lengthy and includes violent offenses, but ever-gentle San Francisco released him onto the streets to do more crime — he is now under arrest in San Mateo County for attempted murder, where the victim had been “gutted, like you gut a pig.”

Uc-Cahun’s criminal history as a juvenile dates at least from Aug. 13, 2006, when San Francisco police reports show that he was arrested along with two other suspected gang members in the assault on a man at Dolores Park. The victim was hit in the head and threatened with a gun after the group demanded to know whether he was a gang member, according to the reports.

Uc-Cahun did not cooperate with police, refusing even to say where he lived, authorities said. The police report on the attack says Uc-Cahun was a Sureño gang member known as “Tweety” who had “numerous prior contacts” with law enforcement.

Uc-Cahun, then 17, was taken to juvenile hall and eventually was found to have committed felony assault. A San Francisco juvenile court placed him on probation and freed him from juvenile hall.

On Oct. 18, 2006, shortly after his release, Uc-Cahun was arrested again, this time for allegedly being part of group that accosted a stranger on the street and ripped a chain from his neck.

He spent four months in juvenile hall before being found responsible for a single charge of felony assault. He turned 18 by the time he was freed in February 2007 and put on a year’s probation.
[Protected by S.F., youth offender now a suspect in attempted murder, by Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 2008]

In my hopeful moments, I imagine that the local United States Attorney Joseph Russoniello might charge some of the implicated City Hall officials with harboring. He keeps being quoted in tantalizing ways.

Russoniello said the arrests of Uc-Cahun and Ramos raise the question of whether other juvenile offenders who were kept from deportation in San Francisco went on to become criminal suspects as adults.

“These attacks demonstrate that these people are acting with impunity, because they have little to fear,” Russoniello said.

He was a little more direct in an August 9 KCBS report, Sanctuary City a Federal Matter.

Federal investigators are looking into San Francisco’s sanctuary policy which sent illegal juvenile offenders back home, or in some cases to Southern California group homes, backed by city funds.

“Very close to it,” says United States Attorney for Northern California Joseph Russoniello when asked if San Francisco is harboring fugitives.

Russoniello’s office is looking into whether laws were broken. He says criminal charges are a possibility.

Also, you can hear Russoniello being interviewed on the John and Ken radio show in LA August 4 about the San Francisco criminal protection policy: Listen here.

Just a couple days ago, the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission recommended the continued protection of illegal alien felons who claim to be juveniles (Panel urges S.F. to help teen immigrant felons). What a city!

The BBC reports:

The United States has suspended a programme aimed at reuniting refugees from Africa with relatives in the US because of widespread fraud.

The US state department said DNA tests showed the majority of those applying had no family relationships in the US.

Thousands of Africans have been allowed to settle in the US under its P3 family reunification programme.

Massive fraud will surround US immigration practices until immigration policies are designed with attention to the true value of US residency rights in today’s world.

One contributor to the unwieldy giganticism of the Olympics is the perceived need to hold a women’s event for every men’s event, no matter how unpopular the sport is with women, or, in many cases, with both sexes. For example, modern pentathlon (in which you pretend to be a courier during the Napoleonic Wars and swim, horseback ride, run, shoot, and fence your way to delivering your secret message–okay, in theory, it sounds pretty cool, but in practice, nobody cares) hasn’t been all that big since George S. Patton finished fifth in it back in 1912, but, nonetheless, the Olympics added women’s modern pentathlon in 2000.

Likewise, walking is the all-time dorkiest-looking sport, but sure enough, we’ve had a women’s walking race in all the Olympics of this decade.

Weightlifting is a fun sport to attend, with a professional wrestling vibe as the big galoots try to psyche each other out, but it’s hopelessly snarled up by steroids. Nonetheless, the Olympics added women’s weightlifting in 2000. Women’s wrestling was introduced in 2004.

Of course, gender equality in sports almost always means “separate but equal.”

Shooting at the Olympics became sexually integrated in 1968. Women won a number of medals over the next few decades, although men won the great majority. By 1996 it had split into segregated men’s and women’s events.

The only Olympic sports where men and women compete against each other is in equestrian (where the horse is doing most of the work) and some of the sailing events.

For years, I’ve been idly wondering what happened to all the tall white Americans, the kind who used to play basketball. There are lots of tall white Europeans doing well in the NBA these days, such as Dirk Nowitzki and Pau Gasol, but few white Americans at the All Star Game level. Granted, there are more white Europeans than white Americans, but still …

Watching the Olympics, however, it’s clear that other sports are absorbing tall, athletic white guys: the two kinds of volleyball, swimming, water polo, soccer goalies, baseball pitchers, and so forth.