As I’ve pointed out before,the fact that a growing percentage of Hispanics are Evangelical Protestants does not necessarily mean they are assimilating.

A recent article in La Opinion (Evangélicos Latinos Entre la Espada y La Pared Electoral, La Opinion, By Pilar Marrero, Aug. 10th, 2008) reports a meeting of Hispanic Evangelicals held on August 7th in California:

…in a conference room of Vanguard, a Christian university in Costa Mesa, some 50 pastors and evangelical leaders wrestled with a difficult question: ‘What values are more important when it´s time to choose the president of the nation?’

Here is how Samuel Rodriguez, president of the NHCLC (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Coalition) put it:

Both presidential campaigns have asked us, “What is it that you want? What are your priorities?” We are definitely divided…What is more important, life and marriage or the subject of immigration?

The article says that

Traditionally, the evangelical vote has gone to the Republicans, principally for the moral issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues… Nevertheless….Evangelical Latinos also have other pressing concerns : education, health and immigration, said various of the pastors in attendance.

The article reports that in 2004, 63% of Evangelical Hispanics voted for Bush. However,

This year… both campaigns… have Evangelical Latinos in their sights. Both sent representatives to the meeting who were questioned by various pastors.

This year´s political tendencies aren´t as clear as one might imagine. ….two leaders of the NHCLC, evangelical pastors, have advisory roles in the campaigns. Wilfredo de Jesús, pastor of a mega church in Chicago, is an Obama advisor, and Mark Gonzalez, the NHCLC’s vice-president of governmental affairs, is on McCain´s advisory committee.

One of those who came to appeal to the Hispanic pastors was Juan Hernandez, McCain’s Hispanic outreach director, of whom I’ve written before

Juan Hernandez, McCain’s representative, said to the pastors assembled at Vanguard that the Republican is not only aligned with them on the values of abortion, gay marriage and the naming of conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

Hernandez defended McCain for his role in the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty:

“…McCain was with us when it was necessary”, said Hernandez repeatedly, referring to the leadership of the Republican in 2006 in co-sponsoring a project of migratory reform together with Democratic Senator Kennedy. “I know how his heart is and how he feels about Hispanics and immigrants.

However, …some pastors questioned McCain’s representative about his migratory reform position. “Isn’t it true that McCain has backpedaled on this issue?”, asked Alejandro Mandes, director of Hispanic ministries of the Evangelical Free Church of America.

Hernandez said that was not true, that it was a “lie” of the media.

Kathy Shaidle suspects Andrew Sullivan’s increasing strangeness (which she’s been following for some time) is caused by AIDs finally affecting his mind. Sullivan’s latest thing is spreading Sarah Palin rumors. Sullivan’s wackiness is more likely to be related to the testosterone he takes, (legally) to control the lack of testosterone caused by long-term HIV. That is, his disease would make him less hyperactive, with a tendency to take naps in the daytime. It’s the cure that makes him weird.

Steve Sailer: Andrew Sullivan, a prescription testosterone user, has written a long article in theNew York Times Magazine (The He Hormone, April 02, 2000) about the powerful effect of his prescription testosterone injections on his behavior.

Andrew Sullivan: Then there’s anger. I have always tended to bury or redirect my rage. I once thought this an inescapable part of my personality. It turns out I was wrong. Late last year, mere hours after a [Testosterone] shot, my dog ran off the leash to forage for a chicken bone left in my local park. The more I chased her, the more she ran. By the time I retrieved her, the bone had been consumed, and I gave her a sharp tap on her rear end. “Don’t smack your dog!” yelled a burly guy a few yards away. What I found myself yelling back at him is not printable in this magazine, but I have never used that language in public before, let alone bellow it at the top of my voice. He shouted back, and within seconds I was actually close to hitting him. He backed down and slunk off. I strutted home, chest puffed up, contrite beagle dragged sheepishly behind me. It wasn’t until half an hour later that I realized I had been a complete jerk and had nearly gotten into the first public brawl of my life. I vowed to inject my testosterone at night in the future.

And of course, you can avoid going out in public under the influence, just as you can with alcohol, but if you’re a blogger, your computer is there 24 hours a day.

From Norm Matloff’s H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter.

Norm Matloff writes:

Obama And Tech Job Offshoring

Given my Subject line above, I must make my usual disclaimer that I am a lifelong Democrat, and that my criticism of Obama here should not be construed to mean that McCain is any better on issues like H-1B and offshoring; despite McCain’s (largely deserved) reputation as a maverick, he’s definitely no maverick on H-1B/offshoring.

Having said that, I must say I’ve been very disturbed by a tendency I’ve observed in Obama–and these days Democrats in general, and probably politicians in general–to deliberately deceive voters by using subtle wordings that technically say X but are intended to be understood as Y.

The first instance of this that I noticed was Obama’s statement during the primaries that he did not have any ties with federal lobbyists. Well, guess what–he was then exposed as having ties with STATE lobbyists, including his New Hampshire campaign co-chair, who lobbies for the pharamceutical industry on the state level. (See for example Obama co-chair a state lobbyist - First Read - msnbc.com) Clearly Obama intended that voters would not notice his qualifier word “federal,” and would assume that he was renouncing all ties with lobbyists.

Thus while watching Obama’s nomination acceptance speech last week, I picked up immediately on his statement that he opposed tax breaks for firms that offshore. Again, this was clearly calculated to imply that Obama would take strong action against offshoring in general, instead of merely doing literally what he said–close a tax loophole, one which in fact plays almost no role in offshoring.

Hillary Clinton has made the same deceptive statements (see for instance here). Worse, this was exactly the same deceptive tack that John Kerry took in the 2004 election. I wrote about this extensively at the time; see in particular here and here.

Indeed, Kerry was thoroughly exposed on this in one of the televised election debates with George W. Bush. The moderator was ABC’s Charlie Gibson. Here is the exchange:

GIBSON: Senator, I want to extend for a minute, you talk about tax cuts to stop outsourcing. But when you have IBM documents that I saw recently where you can hire a programmer for $12 in China, $56 an hour here, tax credits won’t cut it.

KERRY: You can’t stop all outsourcing, Charlie. I’ve never promised that. I’m not going to, because that would be pandering. You can’t.

No, technically Kerry had never promising to stop all offshoring, or even a substantial portion of it. But he had definitely given the impression that he would do so, famously calling them “Benedict Arnolds.” So yes, he was indeed pandering, and dishonestly doing so.

And note that up to that time, Kerry had basically been given a pass on the offshoring issue by the press, other than a couple of isolated articles not noticed by many people. Indeed, if I recall correctly, the only reason Gibson had asked the question in the first place was that it had been suggested to him by one of the anti-offshoring organizations.

The valuable article enclosed below goes into these issues in detail. Obama touts desire to keep tech jobs in the U.S.|
Though he points to offshore outsourcing, his plan needs specifics,
By Patrick Thibodeau,Computerworld, September 1, 2008 I have a few comments:

Joe Greco, director of California State University-Fullerton’s Center for the Study of Emerging Markets, discounted the impact of tax code changes on the broader offshore trend. “Any plans for a tax code change are like trying to plug a hole in a leaky dam with your finger — to believe the U.S. government tax code promotes outsourcing is a major misconception of the fiery debate around outsourcing offshore,” he said.

Yes, but always remember the source of that misconception–John Kerry. To my knowledge, tax issues had never been brought up in the offshoring debate prior to Kerry’s statements. It was a “misconception” deliberately created by Kerry to deceive.

But Obama could have more success fighting the shift of jobs overseas through the second half of his point — by creating incentives for companies to add jobs in the U.S, said Greco. “If you want to be a magnet, you can be a magnet,” he said.

Again, this is a great way to deceive people. Creating jobs in the U.S. means nothing if they are filled by H-1Bs and L-1s, which is what has happened in New York state under Senator Clinton. See here,
and the links therein. Moreover, one must ask what kinds of jobs are created (it’s common to send tech jobs abroad while creating lower-paying non-tech jobs here). And most importantly, as noted in the article below, there is the point that firms save so much money by offshoring that a mild tax break won’t be enough to keep the jobs here.

Speaking of misconceptions, here’s a common one:

Firms in India, in particular, aren’t just competing on low cost but on the increasing quality of their services, said Stephanie Moore, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. The cost of doing work in India is increasing, but users are gaining through the better efficiencies these firms offer, which can deliver savings in their own right.

This is referring to the Indian firms’ use of the Capabilities Maturity Model (CMM). But CMM merely assesses a project’s management techniques, not the quality of its personnel. As one official in the CMM project at Carnegie Mellon University noted, “You can be an [highest CMM-rated] organization that produces software that might be garbage.” Another red herring.

Norm

From the indispensable PalinFacts.com

Sarah Palin knows the location of DB Cooper’s body because she threw him from the plane.

Sarah Palin can divide by zero.

Global Warming doesn’t kill polar bears. Sarah Palin kills polar bears, with her teeth.

Sarah Palin knows how old the Chinese gymnasts are.

Russia sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not bow to autocracy.

Alaskan wolfpacks give Sara Palin first dibs on their kills.

Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity’s war against the machines.

Sarah Palin drives a Zamboni to work.

Sarah Palin begins every day with a moment of silence for the political enemies buried in her yard.

We’ll never know who would win a cage match between Chuck Norris and Sarah Palin because no cage ever constructed can hold her.

The Alaska governor’s instant ascent to Frontier Folk Hero explains much of the unhinged rage among Obama supporters. They’d been fantasizing about their genetically nuanced man of the future, their political Tiger Woods, when suddenly they get blindsided by a figure seemingly out of America’s buried past, a joyously comic tall tale character in the tradition of Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, Mike Fink, and Paul Bunyan.

I haven’t checked any out of these shocking rumors being heavily flogged by anti-Palin parties such as Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos for factuality, I just want to give you my impression of how they’ll strike average Americans (especially average American women):

- Palin was already pregnant when she got married two decades ago!

Let’s see, you’re saying the beauty queen/point guard and the oilfield roughneck/Bering Strait fisherman couldn’t keep their hands off each other, got pregnant, got married, had lots more kids, and are together 20 years later? Wow, that’s the most appalling thing I ever heard.

- The governor didn’t really just have a baby at 44, it’s actually her teenage daughter’s, but she’s raising the baby as her own!

Gee, that never happened before in the history of the world … except that’s how Jack Nicholson, Bobby Darrin (see Kevin Spacey’s nice biopic  Beyond the Sea ), Thomas Sowell (in a slightly more complicated version), and a quite a few less famous people were brought up. It lets the inexperienced teen finish her education and find a husband unencumbered by another guy’s kid. The girl escapes being a “single mom” while maintaining a close relationship as an “aunt” with her child, as her experienced and better-financed mom oversees raising the kid. I’m not saying it’s the only or ideal way to handle such matters, but more than a few people have chosen it as the best solution in a difficult situation. Indeed, it might help get Palin off the hook with the more maternal women who are uncertain about her going on the campaign trail so soon after having a baby.

As I said, I haven’t checked into the facts regarding these rumors. I’m all in favor of as many people as possible checking out rumors as soon as possible (in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s 20-year-relationship with Jeremiah Wright, which the media paid almost no attention to until March 13, 2008 when the primaries were largely over). What I am saying is that a lot of Primarily Political People are clueless about how most people think.

Overall, what we can say for sure about Palin is: she Has A Life. In contrast to undersexed Hillary Clinton’s cautious, cramped biography, Palin’s life story just makes you feel sorry for poor Hillary.

The unanswered question, though, is whether, being a woman, Palin has too much of a life to have mastered her career skills enough. With a male executive with four or five kids, like, say, Mitt Romney, nobody worries about whether his having a life means he can’t also rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics. We just assume that he has a wife who takes care of domestic concerns while he focuses on his career. But with a female executive with such a rich home life, can she really have been devoting enough of her attention to public life?

But, of course, while that’s a good question, it’s also a sexist one. I look forward to Obama and Biden trying to figure out how to handle it.

In the 1990s, a time of rapid evolution in thinking about the Immigration issue, the post of chief cheerleader for continued influx was accorded to Julian Simon, a University of Maryland business school professor who had published a book on the subject at the beginning of the decade. As Peter Brimelow noted in his 1998 obituary, Simon’s principle method of dealing with new and uncongenial data and arguments was simple–he just ignored them. He was usually able to get away with this because in those days dissent on the immigration question was so repressed that he was often presented as an impartial witness. He rarely had to defend himself.

The Wall Street Journal published on Saturday what might be seen as a Julian Simon Memorial editorial: Immigrants and the GOP , August 30 2008. Apart from current dates and references, it could have been any time in the last several years: absolutely no notice is taken of well-known counter arguments and inconvenient facts: and there is nothing new in it.

The Journal can get away with this, of course, because of its rigid policy of suppressing any counter-argument to its fanatical enthusiasm for reconstructing America. This is a disgrace for a periodical which used to function as an intellectual clearing-house for conservative/free market thought. Interestingly, and in keeping with this attitude, the “Comments” section has been hidden away and does not follow on the article itself, as is conventional with other newspapers. This was not the case some years ago.

Starting off with the lie–which has been repeatedly refuted–that

more than 40% of Latinos supported George W. Bush in 2004.

The WSJ piece essentially advocates acceptance that the country is to be ruled by “ethnics and racial minorities” in the future because they

will comprise a majority of U.S. residents by 2042, thanks to higher minority birth rates, especially among Hispanics…A party that thinks it can win elections by alienating Latinos is going to be in the minority for a very long time.

It skates over the fact that trend could be stopped cold if America policed its borders and workplaces–rich targets as last week’s raid on Howard Industries showed–and more particularly if the Anchor Baby loophole in the citizenship law was closed. The WSJ reports that at the Republican platform writing,

some of the more extreme proposals, such as denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, were defeated.

Maybe the WSJ does not want to draw attention to this jugular of the America-destruction monster, but the fact is that citizenship acquired by birthplace location is very rare nowadays internationally. Switzerland, with a proportion of foreign-born higher than to America, is able to entirely exclude them from the political process because of its extremely tight citizenship rules.

But then, the Swiss establishment likes being Swiss.

As for the WSJ discussion of the ebbing and flowing of Hispanic support for Republicans, it is severely marred by a failure to grasp elementary arithmetic: never once has Hispanic support ever come near a majority. The real question is how strong a landslide amongst this group the Democrats get.

Reading this strange document, the realization dawns: to the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, White Americans don’t count. Why else remark

In the 1990s, Republican support in California for Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that denied illegal immigrants access to social services, not only hurt the party with the Hispanic electorate. It also led to a drop in GOP support among the state’s Chinese and Koreans voters, even though many of them are small-business owners with a history of voting Republican.

Proposition 187 won state-wide with 59% of the vote and saved the political career of Governor Wilson. If the Republicans had seized the chance, they could have energized the white vote and held the state. Why should a few Asians be more important?

Apparently historic America, its culture and traditions, is of no importance to the WSJ Editors. They would prefer a majority-minority situation.

It is time for them to realize that the Upper West Side is not a microcosm for America: and that Americans do not wish it to be.