I knew it was coming…but in the first week of September??

In my email inbox today, there is was:

“Free Shipping on Holiday Sneak Peak” from Smith and Hawken.

There are no menorahs, or kwanzaa kitch. Only what normal people would identify as traditional Christmas decorations. Clearly though we’re not supposed to identify them. They’re “holiday” decorations, not Christmas, duh!

At least they have the decency to sell prelit “Christmas” trees, unlike purveyors of “holiday” trees elsewhere.

Email them here, or, if you’re needing some more one-on-one catharsis, call them at 1-800-940-1170.

Craig Nelsen of ProjectUSA has strong op-ed in a Florida paper about the census and the likelihood of whites becoming a minority if immigration isn’t brought under control.

Immigration and the pending white minority

By CRAIG NELSEN
Ocala tar-Banner

August 24, 2008

By 2042, the Census Bureau says, whites will be a minority in the United States, and among children under 18, whites become the minority in just 15 years.

How long is 15 years? Fifteen years ago, Bill Clinton was president.

So, just around the corner, whites in America are going to be disempowered, assuming we remain a democracy, through a radical and rapid transformation of the nation’s demography on a scale unprecedented in world history.

In response to this news, individual whites — the proper, polite ones — will affect (or, if particularly ignorant of the world around them, evince) an attitude, at the least, of indifference and calm assurance, at the most, of celebratory enthusiasm.

For the sake of clear, adult thinking, let’s dismiss these proper, polite whites as a bunch of panglossian ninnies and adopt a position more in line with everything we know about humans.[More]

Craig was kind enough to quote from my piece on the first “Thirty Years War” for immigration restriction.  In the timeline section, I had this note:

1920 September. 500 pound dynamite bomb exploded in front of 23 Wall Street. Wall Street support for immigration takes sudden drop.

A few days back, the big Long Island paper Newsday published an editorial [Immigration a key campaign issue, August 29, 2008] wherein they gave the usual “We were born yesterday, so don’t confuse us with facts” party-line for amnesty:

[We] should lay out a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country. That’s just too many people to realistically detain or deport.

While pondering the Newsday editors’ collective wisdom, I happened to notice one of the ads gracing the same web page (maybe not still up when you venture there):

Fight Deportation/Removal
Law Firm fights for those facing deportation. Free Consultation
www.Fight-Deportation.com

Turns out the ad is for a small (I hope!) immigration-law firm, Rion Latimore Esq. LLC, with offices in Cincinnati (513-293-1119) and Minneapolis (612-605-3203), or email address Information@removalappeals.com for both. Among other things, the home page breezily informs us that, “It is important to be educated when fighting for your right to remain in the United States.”

The somewhat grammar-and-punctuation-challenged firm summarizes its inspiring mission as follows:

Our mission is simple, to help people. If an immigration judge has found that you are properly removable or deportable from the United States we can help you. If you have been convicted of a crime and the Department of Homeland Security is attempting to have you deported then we can help you. If you overstayed your visa, are here illegally, or were deported but you are looking to return to the U.S., then we can help you.

We practice mainly in the areas of Immigration appeals in front of the Board of Immigration Appeals, United States Courts of Appeals, and defending people appearing before Immigration Judges who have been convicted of crimes or who have immigration law violations, and who the government is seeking to have deported. We also now are aiding aliens who have been deported file waivers to return to the United States and their families, as quickly as possible.

Mr. Latimore provides his heart-warming personal story here. Highlight: “Mr. Latimore fell in love with defending criminal deportees and immigrants who were facing removal.” One wonders, from both the story and its accompanying photo, whether he has ever had a serious thought in his life.

Why not see for yourself, using the contact information above? Ask young Rion to expound on aliens’ “right to remain in the United States”!

Over at The American Scene, the always sensible Noah Millman returns from the Labor Day Weekend to make some sensible comments about Sarah Palin: e.g., she might have made a better Keynote speaker, like Obama in 2004, than VP candidate. (By the way, though, how often do you think Democrats have kicked themselves since 2004 that they didn’t let themselves get carried away at that convention and nominate Obama for Veep by acclamation back then, instead of what’s his name, that loser with the hair? John Kerry might be President today.)

But Noah then added this postscript, after he realized that we’re in the middle of a full-blown national freak-out over the various Palin Pregnancy stories, true and false, that have obsessed attention since he left for the weekend.

UPDATE: You know, I wrote this post, and made my little points, and then I started working back through some of the comments (not on my posts, actually – I haven’t gotten back that far, and I’m not sure I will). People are seriously losing their minds here, in a way that I’ve never seen before on this site. And not just people who have obviously wandered over here for the first time: regular readers are going off their rockers. I’m really not sure what we all ought to do about this. I wrote a little sermonette but I just deleted it because I can’t imagine anyone who’s gone off their rocker reading it and doing anything but getting angrier. I’m open to suggestions on what to do. Myself, I swear my next post will about Canadian theater.

Right.

And here’s the fundamental reason underlying all the rage on one side and amusement on the other over Sarah Palin: it’s all about … female fertility.

Human beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of fertility. It’s an obsession — look at the celebrity gossip columns these days. The who is sleeping with whom stuff bores people now compared to the pregnancy news. Thus, celebrities auction off rights to pictures of their new babies for millions, even though all newborns look alike. The top breeding stock parents — Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt — were looking to snag something like $6 million for the exclusive rights to the first photos of their twins.

Now, the Breeding Wars have moved into the political arena. Barack Obama launched his Presidential run at the 2004 Democratic convention by devoting the first 380 words of his speech to describing in great detail the two stocks from which he was crossbred. His message is that by uniting in his DNA the two races, he will end the racial conflict that has long plagued this land. (Noah should take a look at Henry VII’s speech ending Shakespeare’s “Richard III” for the classic expression of the logic of dynastic merger, in this case between the Lancasters and the Yorks.) Obama left out the part about his mom being 17 when she got pregnant and his father already being married with a kid and another on the way.

Palin has horned in on all that subliminal symbolism with her own. She’s had five kids while shooting caribou (a picture of her and a daughter standing over a huge beast she shot is the LA Times most emailed article of the day even though it’s not an article, just a picture) and throwing the crooks out, and now she has a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and will marry a handsome hockey player.

The Blue Whites are alarmed and outraged to be reminded that the Red Whites can afford to outbreed them and are outbreeding them. Modern people tell themselves they don’t care about stuff like that, but they do, oh, they do.

Congratulations to Steve Camarota of CIS, who has managed to get through the PC filter at the Washington Post, and get an Op-ed piece published on the immigration issue (How Many Americans? September 2, 2008)

The article at first glance is focused on the issue of the impact of immigration on population numbers:

…projections show that the U.S. population will grow by 135 million in just 42 years — a 44 percent increase. Such growth would have profound implications for our environment and quality of life. Most of the increase would be a direct result of one federal policy — immigration. If we reduced the level of immigration, the projections would be much lower. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to be a much more densely settled country?

But, stealthily, it gets round to the key economic issue:

While immigration does significantly increase economic activity in the receiving society, almost all of that increased activity go to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits. The gain to natives is tiny…

Moreover, this tiny economic benefit was entirely erased by the fiscal drain immigrant households imposed on taxpayers. Perhaps worst of all, the researchers found that to generate this small gain, immigration reduced the wages of the least educated and poorest American workers.

When will the Pro- Immigration fanatics at The Wall Street Journal show similar fairness?