We recently reported on Dr. John Tanton’s new website. It was set up just in time. This “citizen who has taken up arms for his country”, as I called him in Alien Nation, echoing Robert E. Lee on one of his generals, has been smeared yet again by the disgusting Heidi Beirich of the revolting leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (“a shakedown scam that preys on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich” - P Brimelow, 2005.)

Beirch has been reading 30 years of Tanton’s papers which he deposited with the University of Michigan. Obviously, this is not something he would do if he had anything to hide. And he hadn’t. All Beirich can say is that Tanton has “corresponded with” people and institutions the SPLC has smeared earlier, such as Professor Kevin MacDonald and the Pioneer Fund. It’s smear by association.

The SPLC commissars are Stalinists and they want to repress thoughtcrime. For example, Beirich quotes with theatrical horror Tanton’s comment to NumbersUSA’s Roy Beck (a political herbivore if ever there was one):

I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society, but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.

But there’s nothing wrong with Tanton raising this question. The Census Bureau has just confirmed that public policy will abolish America’s founding white majority by about 2040. When is he supposed to raise it?

The answer, of course, is not at all if it’s up to the SPLC. Beirich continues to use “white nationalist” as a debate-killing pejorative (one of the prolific and polymathic Tanton’s correspondents was Jared Taylor). But of course, as I’ve repeatedly argued, white nationalism as a movement to defend the interests of American whites is as natural as Hispanic nationalism and Zionism - and inevitable as whites move into a minority. Get used to it, SPLC.

I make a cameo appearance in Beirich’s broadside (my links):

What may have been most remarkable of all was Tanton’s endorsement of a proposal from another friend — Peter Brimelow, who would later start a racist anti-immigration website — that FAIR hire Sam Francis to edit its newsletter. That proposal, which Tanton sent to FAIR’s Dan Stein on Nov. 3, 1995, was made two months after The Washingon Times fired Francis for racism.

I certainly did make this proposal. And Francis, who had a Ph.D. in history and a distinguished career as a writer and editor, would have been an excellent choice for FAIR. But it didn’t happen, exactly because the organization was foolishly afraid of the likes of Heidi Beirich. Tanton is being blamed for something which, in his collective capacity as a FAIR director, he didn’t in the end do.

The real issue here, of course, is not Tanton’s “racism“ but the SPLC’s treason. The SPLC hates the historic American nation and wants to destroy it.

I want to see what 30 years of Beirich and Morris Dees‘ private letters would reveal.

Remember the Fort Dix Six? The group was a terrorist cell of Muslims who plotted to kill as many soldiers as possible on a New Jersey army base in 2007. The scheme was foiled when a video store employee became suspicious when he processed film clips of the men doing assault weapons training.

There has been little interest from the MSM about immigrant terrorists and consequently little reporting on national news, so it’s easy for Americans to forget that entering the country illegally remains easy and open borders welcome killer Islamists as well as tomato pickers.

Today’s news is that the Muslim immigrants had bigger plans than merely murdering a few hundred American troops [Feds say Fort Dix suspects sought other targets, Google AP, September 20, 2008]:

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) — One of the five men awaiting trial on charges alleging they plotted an armed attack on soldiers training at Fort Dix discussed other targets including the White House and Capitol, prosecutors claim in court filings.

The allegations, contained in a motion filed Friday in U.S. District Court, stem from wiretapped conversations between defendant Mohamad Shnewer and Mahmoud Omar, an FBI informant.

According to prosecutors, Shnewer spoke on Aug. 11, 2006, of targeting FBI and CIA headquarters as well as the Army training base. They also said another defendant attempted to buy an AK-47 automatic weapon in 2005.

Incidentally, a plot against the CIA is not without precedent: the CIA was attacked in 1993 by Mir Amal Kasi, a Pakistani who shot five employees at a stoplight as they waited at the agency entrance. Two were killed. He was captured in Pakistan in 1997 and returned to the US, where he was executed in 2002.

From last year: Brothers Charged in Terror Plot Lived Illegally in U.S. for 23 Years [Fox News, May 9, 2007]:

FORT DIX, N.J. —  Three brothers charged in the alleged Fort Dix terror plot have been living illegally in the U.S. for more than 23 years and were accepted as Americans by neighbors and friends who had no idea they would scheme to attack military bases and slaughter GIs.

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan “Anthony” or “Tony” Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir “Elvis” Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in “sanctuary cites,” where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

The source said there is no record of them entering by way of a regular border crossing, so they are investigating whether they were smuggled into the country.

Funny how that “sanctuary city” thing is helpful to terrorists.

Below is an interview of Rep. Tom Tancredo by Tucker Carlson after the arrest of the six Muslim plotters last year.

Economic news gets worse by the hour. Yet Congress continues to pursue an additional half a million immigrant worker visas per year.

Unemployment in California rose sharply to 7.7% in August, continuing at a 12-year high with few signs of improvement in the months ahead.

The rate jumped from a revised 7.4% posted for July and 5.5% level a year earlier, the Employment Development Department reported. [...]

In August, California’s unemployment rate was the third-worst in the nation, tied with Mississippi. The Golden State trailed only Michigan at 8.9% and Rhode Island at 8.5%. U.S. unemployment for August was 6.1%. [...]

Unemployment in most of Southern California exceeded statewide levels. It reached 7.9% in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, up from a revised 7.5% in July and 5% in August of 2007.

The Inland Empire was hit even harder, with joblessness at 9.2% in August compared to a revised 9% in July and 6.4% in August 2007. Only Orange County fared relatively better, posting unemployment of 5.8% in August, just slightly more than July’s 5.7%. Unemployment in Orange County was 4.2% a year earlier. California unemployment rate rises sharply to 7.7% [September 19, 2008]

In another sign of the times: Homeless pitching tent cities across U.S.

There is a lot of talk about how we need more governmental regulation of today’s enormously complex financial markets, but the obvious problem with that is that barely anybody understands how today’s enormously complex financial markets work, and those that do generally have better things to do than get paid at civil servants’ salary levels.

So, what we need are a few new but simple regulations. But those are hard to come up with. Let me toss one idea out there: We shouldn’t permit financial institutions to get too big to fail.

The analogy to antitrust legislation is obvious: we don’t permit businesses to get too big to compete, so why let financial firms get too big to fail?

For example, in 1987 the Reagan Administration Department of Justice vetoed the acquisition of the marketing research firm I worked for by Nielsen because it would leave only two competitors in the consumer packaged goods sales data industry. You didn’t even know there was an industry that measures whether Crest or Colgate has higher market share? Well, it’s not much of an industry, but the Reagan Administration considered it important enough to insist that it be a three company industry rather than a two company industry. This decision may have cost me, say, $100,000 or more in paper profits on my stock options in my employer, which went from worth $20 per share to below water, but I don’t recall too many being outraged by my loss. That’s how the antitrust laws work, going back to 1911, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Standard Oil Company should be broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Standard was split up into three separate competitors.

Why not do the same thing to firms threatening to be too big to fail?

First, once this crisis is over, don’t approve mergers that would create firms above a certain threshold in too-big-too-failness.

Second, firms that are already over the threshold would be given, say, three years to split themselves up into firms under the limit. Fast growing firms could plot out their futures and make plans to voluntarily divest themselves of some units, or split like amoebas before they reached the penalty threshold.

This doesn’t penalize stockholders unduly (other than that they lose their too-big-too-fail premium). Instead of holding one share of TooBigtoFail Inc, they hold one share each in PrettyBig Inc. and FairlyLarge Inc. Are there enormous economies of scale in the financial industry that would be lost? Perhaps, but how do they compare to all the other losses we’ve seen due to too-big-to-fail moral hazard? If you want FDIC insurance on your million dollars in bank savings, the government doesn’t let you keep it all in one bank, even though there would be economies of scale in doing that. It forces you to diversify among ten banks.

We already know how to do this in antitrust law. We’ve been doing it for 97 years, and it’s not all that controversial anymore.

Consider the alternative, as we’ve seen it this week, to having written laws and regulations explaining in black and white ahead of time how big a financial firm can be before it must split itself up: government bureaucrats and contractors, in a caffeine-fueled frenzy, deciding which firms are too big to fail (AIG) and which ones aren’t (Lehman).

Why let them get that big in the first place?