In the middle of the financial meltdown, Congress is taking Tuesday off, because it’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. So are a surprising number of American schools. If the same dynamic were at work that drives the War Against Christmas, everyone would also be carefully wishing each other Happy Michaelmas (technically, the Feast of Michael and all Angels), the nearest major Christian celebration, on September 29, just like Hanukkah at Christmas.

So - A happy Michaelmas, and Rosh Hashanah, to all our readers. We mean it.

This article considers the sometimes confusing information about the prevalence of illegal alien criminals: [Lack of data for tracking illegal immigrant crimes, KTAR 92.3 Radio, Phoenix AZ, September 27, 2008].

You’ve heard it from pundits and read it online: Illegal immigrants are clogging our legal system. They may come with the dreams of work and a better life, but they bring increased crime and strife.

But it’s anyone’s guess how many illegal immigrants enter the justice system, and how much it costs taxpayers. Neither the state nor the federal courts formally keep track.

“The data (are) terrible, and lead to entirely different conclusions,” said Steven Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter immigration controls. “No one has made it a priority. No one has ever wanted to know.”

Amen. The authorities don’t want the citizenry to know how badly they are failing in the basic responsibility of public safety.

It doesn’t take much investigation into the topic of illegal alien crime to find that the available information is not adequate.

That fact alone is an answer to the question. The political and business elites do not want the advantage (to them) of open borders to be ended merely because of a little associated violent crime. It’s an acceptable price of doing business for elites that a few thousand citizens are killed each year as a result of many criminals entering along with the exploitable workers.

America now has two systems of justice–one for citizens, who are required to obey the law, and a more permissive standrd for illegal aliens, who are routinely excused from criminal statutes.

The most extreme examples are the foreign criminals with long rap sheets who are released rather than deported or prosecuted. Unfortunately, these instances of politically correct policing are quite common, such as the murder of Jamiel Shaw II, who was killed by a known MS-13 gangster who was released from a Los Angeles jail despite his illegal alien status. Further north, San Franciscans were shocked to learn that a previously arrested illegal alien gangster took advantage of the city’s sanctuary policy to live freely and kill Tony Bologna and his two sons.

Sadly, there are many more crimes like these that could have been prevented if the government did its job.

Invited members of the Great and the Good had spent a few days in a conference room, where they decided to give the Treasury Secretary power to give away $700 billion dollars.

But then, this quaint body called the House of Representatives (which I believe is mentioned somewhere in the Constitution) had the gall to vote against it, 228-205. Don’t these mere elected representatives understand how many gallons of diet soft drinks the self-appointed authors of the bailout had consumed over the last two weeks?

With the financial crisis, we might start seeing a few more defaults in the Greenwich, CN area (we can all hope, can’t we?), but so far, the defaults have tended to hit very marginal areas hardest. Here in California, people in Santa Monica aren’t defaulting, it’s the poor bastards out in the high desert or even down in Bakersfield in the hot, smoggy Central Valley.

In these godforsaken places, all sorts of mini-McMansions have gone up on the theory, apparently, that, hey, they’re in California! Every peon in Guatelombia has seen Baywatch and wants to move to California (even though Lancaster, CA looks more like Death Valley Days). So prices can only go up, up, up!

Imagine you’re a homeowner in Santa Clarita in 2005, now a nice established exurb 35 miles north of LA. You bought your house in 1995 at the bottom of the market for $175,000 and a decade later it’s worth three or four times that much. You can take cash out with home equity loans, so why not find an investment property?

Of course, you’ll have to look farther out, deeper into the dusty high desert, like in Lancaster, 70 miles from downtown LA. They’re building many new 3,000 s.f. homes on culdesacs with all the amenities. You should buy one up now and resell it when new refugees from the LA Unified School District arrive.

(more…)

Rather than mention all the great performances Paul Newman gave, I’d like to recall a role he chose to give up.

One of my favorite movies is John Huston’s version of Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King.” It was in Development Hell for 20 years, going through multiple screenplays. Originally, Huston was going to direct Clark Gable as the majestic Daniel Dravot and Humphrey Bogart as the sly Peachy Carnehan. I’m not sure if the stars were going to attempt English accents, or if they were going to be turned into Canadians in the Indian Army, or what.

Then Bogie died. After his comeback in the “Misfits,” Gable wanted to revive the project, so Huston was looking for a new co-star, when Gable had a heart attack and died. In the 1970s, the project got relaunched, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford attached. (I’m guessing with Redford as Danny and Newman as Peachy, but Newman being older and almost as handsome as Redford would have made casting more flexible and/or confusing than with Gable and Bogart, where there was never a doubt who would play which role.) John Huston and his secretary, Gladys Hill, wrote a great fourth script.

From director John Huston’s autobiography “An Open Book:“

Screenwriter William Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade includes a fair amount of malicious gossip about the swelled heads of big stars he’d written for, such as Newman and Dustin Hoffman, but he only had praise for Newman as a human being.

Get out the ear plugs…the two right wing parties in Austria collectively took 29% of the vote in Sunday’s election. The Freedom Party gained a 7% share to have 18%, and the Alliance for Austria’s Future also added 7% to have 11%. The obvious (but unlikely) course would be a coalition with mildly conservative People’s Party, which shed an 8% slice of the vote but still got 26%: such a coalition would have 55% of the electorate behind it.

The far Right has made a grand return in Austria, emerging from yesterday’s elections as the second biggest parliamentary block, according to preliminary results.

The two parties that campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-European Union ticket have captured about 29 per cent of the vote, pushing the country’s traditional conservative party into third place

Far Right storms election as Austrians back anti-EU rhetoric Bojan Pancevski in Vienna
The Times September 29, 2008

Ear plugs are likely to be needed because when in 2000 the Freedom Party won 27% and entered the ruling coalition, Austria’s European Union partners had hysterics and actually imposed some sanctions on the country - a curious response to a democratic event.

The leader of the Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, is outspoken, as The Times noted:

Speaking at his final election rally in Vienna’s working-class district of Favoriten on Friday, he said that people were scared to see women in burkas running around “like female Ninjas”, and added: “Many decent people have come here and they integrated: Poles, Hungarians, Croats and also Serbs. We are all European brothers because we do not want to become Islamised.” His disdain for Islam extends to culinary matters. “One should not roast mutton in council flats. I would also not grill a wild pig in Istanbul,” he has declared.

Mr Strache has attacked the EU with equal venom, railing at “the capitalists and the neo-liberals” who were turning common people into “slave workers of the European Union”.

(In 2000, the Freedom Party was led by Jorg Haider, who was forced out as too moderate and consequently founded the Alliance for Austria’s Future, which he now leads.)

Both parties dislike both the EU and immigration, particularly non-European. Interestingly, the Social Democrats, the main liberal party, did slightly better that its coalition partner People’s Party, by losing only 7% of the vote to come slightly ahead of the combined right at 30%. This was by also adopting an anti-EU stance:

The social democrats (SPÖ), under a new leader, Werner Faymann… (were) supported by the main rightwing and fiercely anti-EU tabloid, Kronenzeitung, after he promised to put new EU treaties to a referendum in a country that matches Britain in Euro-scepticism.

Extreme right emerges as strong force in Austria Ian Traynor The Guardian Monday September 29, 2008

Austria’s neighbor Switzerland has been similarly unenthusiastic about being transformed as we have noted here and here.

Nations do not like being destroyed. Perhaps the inevitable isn’t inevitable.