We expect a Holly Jolly War Against Christmas this year. We’ve already noted an early anti-Christmas atrocity. But here are two early victories:

Melbourne, Australia, has declared itself the “City of Christmas” for its annual celebrations. This matters, because the Anglosphere is a cultural unity and the War Against Christmas rages just as fiercely throughout it (completely discrediting the argument that it’s something to do with America’s much-touted separation of church and state).

And we’ve just received a a catalog from L.L. Bean labelled “Christmas 2008″ with the cover slogan “Making Christmas…brighter”. Quite like old times!

L.L. Bean’s website isn’t quite as brave. But congratulate them anyway.

Blog reactions to Steve Sailer’s book can be read here. Mostly positive, and I thought this one was funny:

The good news is that  Steve Sailer has finally written a book. The better news is that you can read it for free. The bad news is that it’s about Barack Obama…

Andrew Sullivan noticed it in the Atlantic, saying “The VDare right tackles Obama.” Well, we can’t spend all our time attacking Andrew Sullivan.

and we’re just living in it.

From the NYT:

Following the Script: Obama, McCain and ‘The West Wing’
By BRIAN STELTER

When Eli Attie, a writer for “The West Wing,” prepared to plot some episodes about a young Democratic congressman’s unlikely presidential bid, he picked up the phone and called David Axelrod.

Mr. Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, and Mr. Axelrod, a political consultant, had crossed campaign trails before. “I just called him and said, ‘Tell me about Barack Obama,’ ” Mr. Attie said.

Days after Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, delivered an address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the two men held several long conversations about his refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide. Mr. Axelrod was then working on Mr. Obama’s campaign for the United States Senate; he is now Mr. Obama’a chief strategist.

Four years later, the writers of “The West Wing” are watching in amazement as the election plays out. The parallels between the final two seasons of the series (it ended its run on NBC in May 2006) and the current political season are unmistakable.

Italics are mine.

Isn’t it remarkable that 20 months into the Obama campaign, the New York Times doesn’t pay any attention to the candidate’s own 460 pages about “a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American;” and how “I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny …” and instead prints as fact the talking points of his hired gun spinmeister: “his refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide”?

Kathy Shaidle has a book! Shaidle, who wrote First They Came For… Canadian “Hate Speech” Totalitarianism Is Not New, for us, has an entire book on the subject of Canada’s Human Rights commissions. It’s in ebook form, or you can get it in paperback:

The ebook isn’t a free download, unlike Steve Sailer’s new book. The difference is that we’re a foundation, surviving on the generous donations of readers, while Kathy Shaidle is freelance writer who is self-supporting through her own contributions. She’s also being sued by a Canadian bureaucrat over things that would be lawsuit proof in the US under Sullivan v. New York Times, so if you do pay the ten dollars for the download, you’ll be helping a good cause.

One of the oddities of Presidential races is that so little actual information about the candidates is generated by the press. Reporters seem to envision their role not as digging up facts, but as rather like that of theater critics. Their job is to evaluate how well the campaigns mount their little fantasies, and that’s about it.

One of the things the press fails to do is to get together and demand facts. For example, consider the candidates’ health. The leading news-gathering institutions should pool their money and make it a tradition to offer to pay for each candidate to visit during the dog days of summer the Mayo Clinic for a full check-up to be then published.

Similarly, the press should push to make it traditional to release academic records and test scores. Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of campaign spin and conventional wisdom. In 2004, we heard all the time about how bright Kerry was, but then it turned out the year after that we learned he had an even lower GPA than Bush at Yale two years earlier, taking similar courses.

I suspect McCain isn’t the kind of guy to remember what he got on the SAT 55 years ago. But Obama is exactly the kind of guy to remember what he got. (Joe ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do” Biden is the kind of guy who has been trying to forget his SAT scores for 50 years. Anybody want to guess who would score higher if they took a test today, unadjusted for age: Biden or Palin?)

Now, here’s my guess about how Obama did on the verbal half of the SAT and on the LSAT:

He aced them.

(more…)

This week, everybody who is anybody has started demanding a huge increase in government infrastructure spending to prevent the country from falling into recession.

Doesn’t anybody have any idea how long it takes these days to get started on major infrastructure projects? I’m familiar with golf courses in California, which are pretty small potatoes, and yet they take 8 to 15 years of environmental and other hearings before any dirt gets turned.

Is the Democratic Congress really going to suspend the Environmental Protection Act and all the rest of the environmental impedimentia?

I do know of one current infrastructure project, however, that the government is currently piddling along on, doing a half-assed job, that it would make perfect sense to triple in size and go immediately to three shifts U.S.S. Yorktown-style: the Border Fence.

By the way, would it be too much to ask that jobs on these FDR-style public works projects be open only to American citizens?

We spent the first 8 years of this decade having foreign nationals build the exurbs of Las Vegas–how’s that working out for us lately?

Hard on Ilana Mercer’s lucid summary here of the upcoming South African disaster: Black Rule Brings Inevitable To South Africa. New York Times Reports It, Sort Of. October 19 2008 comes high-quality proof: South Africa’s Jews have accelerated their rate of departure.

The euphoria that permeated all sectors of the South African population with its first democratic election in 1994 has degenerated into widespread pessimism with the forced resignation of President Thabo Mbeki….With the election of the controversial Jacob Zuma as president of the African National Congress at the party’s national congress at the end of last year, many young Jews are thinking about emigrating.

Amid political turmoil, emigration from South Africa is again on rise By Suzanne Belling JTA 10/23/08

After leveling off for several years, Jewish emigration from South Africa again is on the rise…While no exact statistics figures are available — emigres generally do not make their permanent departure official — the Israel Center at the South African Zionist Federation sees a 300 percent increase in aliyah over last year’s 178 emigrants…. From a peak of 120,000 in the 1970s, the South African Jewish population has declined to approximately 75,000 today

From the American point of view the interesting and significant point is that the South African Jewish community was crucially involved for many years in the effort to overthrow Apartheid. This was the system of racial political control by which the Dutch-descended Afrikaners, the majority of the white community, endeavored in the latter half of the 20th Century to entrench their domination of the country. For example, Helen Suzman was for 13 years the only anti-Apartheid member of the South African Parliament. Joe Slovo, a life-long Communist, was a decisive influence in the main Black political movement, the African National Congress, which today effectively monopolizes political power in the country.

In their optimistic view of what Black rule would do for South Africa, these people and their community were totally wrong, and the Afrikaners totally right – for obvious and well-known reasons.

Ironically, the South African Jewish community is and has always been ardently Zionist, supporting the Israelis in building the type of ethnocentric community they denied to their Afrikaner hosts.

This is food for thought in contemplating the overwhelming support the Hedge Fund community is giving Barack Obama. As I have pointed out, to a large degree this arises from the heavily Jewish nature of this “industry”.

Unfortunately, as the example of the dying South African Jewish community shows, consensus Jewish political enthusiasms have a history of being disastrously ill judged–and even lethal to themselves.

Let alone to the rest of their countrymen .

A young Phoenix police officer was killed a few days ago, and  a previously arrested illegal alien  has been charged with his killing. The alien is Salvador Vivas-Diaz, who had been sent home on several occasions under voluntary deportation (under which the illegal accrues no serious penalties if he returns), but had returned every time. Shane Figueroa was only 25 and had a wife and three-month old girl.

A suspected illegal immigrant accused of causing the death of Phoenix Police Officer Shane Figueroa in a traffic crash has been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault and forgery.

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced the charges against Salvador Vivas-Diaz on Tuesday.

Court documents said Vivas-Diaz showed major signs of impairment after his pickup truck slammed into Figueroa’s patrol car in southwest Phoenix early last Saturday.
He allegedly gave officers a fake name and was carrying forged documents.

Vivas-Diaz has had several brushes with the law for DUI and other violations.
He was arrested by the Tempe Police Department in May 2004. Since 1998, he has voluntarily returned to Mexico three times. He was deported on June 29, 2004 following an arrest by DPS in Pinal County.

There were warrants for his arrest in both Tempe and Pinal County for previous run-ins with police.[Charges filed in death of police officer, by Sandra Haros/KTAR.com, October 29th, 2008 ]

In a follow-up to their story about Barack Obama’s half-brother who lives in a Nairobi slum, the London Times reports that Obama’s Aunt Zeituni now lives in one of Boston’s oldest public housing projects.[Found in a rundown Boston estate: [British for "Project"]Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango, October 30, 2008]

In Dreams from My Father Obama fondly describes meeting Aunt Zeituni as she waited for him at the Nairobi Airport during his first trip to Kenya. Today, Zeituni lives in the shabby West Broadway Housing Projects–the same project mobster James “Whitey” Bulger grew up in. I have been there and can confirm that it is not a very nice place to live.

Obama has visited Boston many times during his campaign. He even chose to celebrate his 47th birthday in Boston last August, turning the event into a fancy $5 million dollar campaign fundraiser featuring Harry Connick, Jr. singing “Happy Birthday Senator Obama.”

According to the Times, Aunt Zeituni donated $260 of her meager earnings to his presidential campaign. So why didn’t Obama invite Aunt Zeituni to his Boston birthday party? Or at least make an attempt to visit her when he was in town?

With California very deep in a financial hole this year (Governor warns of possible $10 billion deficit), wasting the taxpayers’ money on services for illegal aliens must stop. It would be easy enough to pull the plug on in-state tuition for illegal alien students taking slots from citizens in universities–it costs an estimated $117 million per year.

But a real budget buster is the medical bill for illegal alien medical moochers–some of whom come here for the free care they can’t obtain at home. California taxpayers get it in the neck.

Roughly 2,000 times over the last 17 years, Marguerita Toribio, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, has climbed into a cushioned recliner for the three-hour dialysis treatment that keeps her alive.

She has never seen a bill.

U.S. taxpayers have covered the entire cost of her treatment in California: more than $500,000 and rising, not including a kidney transplant in 1993.

The kidney failed when Toribio briefly moved to North Carolina, which refused to pay for her anti-rejection drugs. She needed to go back on dialysis three days a week to clear toxins from her blood, but North Carolina didn’t cover that either.

The best a social worker could offer was a prepaid plane ticket back to California. [...]

The number of patients is not large. In California, illegal immigrants account for about 1,350 of the 61,000 people on dialysis. Their treatment cost taxpayers $51 million last year.

But dialysis stands out because it is often a lifetime commitment. The investment in a single patient over time can easily top $1 million. [Citizenship often determines who gets medical care, By Alan Zarembo and Anna Gorman , Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008]

The story goes on to explain medical elites’ reasoning for continuing dialysis–that regular treatment is less expansive than emergency room care for failing kidneys. As if that were the only option.

Instead of screwing citizens with higher taxes and healthcare costs, California should be sending these foreign medical parasites along to ICE for immediate repatriation.