The Katie Couric interview to which James Fulford linked in his Taranto/Xenophobe blog is highly significant. Obama says:

She’s my father’s half sister who I know but probably haven’t seen in 2 years. I have seen maybe 4 times in the last 10 years so it’s not somebody that I’m particularly close to. My assumption had been that she is in this country on a tourist visit.

(VDARE.com emphasis)

“It” has been under a court order to leave America for four years, having attended Obama’s Senatorial swearing in. Therefore, apparently “it” and Obama have met – not had a phone conversation – long after the crime of ignoring this order was committed.

And what did the Senator and “it” discuss? Apparently the conversation went well enough for “Auntie Zeituni” to movingly struggle with her budget to denote $260 in small amounts to her nephew’s campaign.

Doubtless, as I noted this morning, AndrewO’s comment is correct:

Auntie Zeituni will obviously not be going back to Kenya. The Obama campaign statement has already said that it “believes that any and ALL appropriate laws be followed”. More doublespeak, I assure you. I’m sure a President Obama will figure out something… Indeed, Aunt Zeituni has been counting on it all along!

(A symbol of the new Obama immigration policy, no doubt.)

Lying to cover up a felony…can anyone spell “Watergate”?

Good comment on US MSM malfeasance here. The Times discusses its professional triumph here.

More and more, it is obvious STEVE SAILER’S OBAMA BOOK IS INDISPENSIBLE!

It’s Old Home Week here on VDARE.com. Having mentioned David Frum and Jonah Goldberg in the previous post, I now turn to the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who has a post called  “Beloved Aunt,” in which he quotes Obama as saying that the laws have to obeyed.

“Obama suggested in a television interview to be broadcast Monday that his Boston-based Kenyan aunt, who was found to be living illegally in the United States, should be deported if she broke the law.

CBS News released an advance transcript of the interview late Sunday.

“If she is violating laws, those laws have to be obeyed,” Obama told CBS when asked if he would support deporting his late father’s sister, Zeituni Oyanango, to Kenya.[
Obama says US laws apply to his aunt living illegally in US]

Taranto [Email him]isn’t happy about the idea of US immigration laws being obeyed, and says “Good heavens, he wants to deport his own aunt? That’s just cold.” Later, he accuses Obama of “pandering to xenophobes.”

Obama told Katie Couric in an interview that he had believed his aunt was in the US on a tourist visit.

On Bloggingheads.tv Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg [Email him] talk about various elitist conservatives who have been attacking Sarah Palin. Douthat briefly quotes from a Redstate.com editorial that says

We have been treated in recent weeks to an unfortunate procession of people on the Right lending their assistance to Barack Obama against the Republican presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. These people should never be listened to or employed in any responsible or prominent position by anyone in the Republican Party or the conservative movement again.

One group–including Colin Powell, Ken Adelman, Charles Fried, Scott McClellan, and Christopher Buckley–has explicitly endorsed Obama. Like hostages giving forced confessions, their statements doing so seem to repeat the same basic list of 3 or 4 talking points aimed at swaying wavering moderates. Members of a second group–Chuck Hagel, Paul O’Neill–have declined to formally endorse but have nonetheless made numerous appearances with Obama and lent their good names to his policy initiatives. A third group–David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, David Frum, George Will, Kathleen Parker–has remained nominally on the side of the McCain-Palin ticket but exerted far more effort tearing down that ticket than on addressing the problems presented by the Obama-Biden ticket, often using the terms and tone reserved for full-throated opposition to a candidate’s election.[RedState: Conservatism's Sunshine Patriots Will Never Live Down Their Collaboration With The Obama Campaign]

Jonah Goldberg calls the idea of reading people out of the conservative movement “absurd” and says  it reminds him of the Klingon ceremony of discommendation, where the Klingon council all stood in a circle around Lieutenant Worf, and then turned their backs on him. (Jonah is a big Star Trek fan.)

If you’re not a Star Trek fan, the whole idea of shunning within the conservative movement is more likely to remind you of David Frum’s notorious attack on what he called “Unpatriotic Conservatives“:(Including Pat Buchanan and VDARE.com.)

“War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”["Unpatriotic Conservatives", By David Frum, [Email him]National Review, April 7, 2003]

That’s the kind of thinking that’s absurd.

Thanks to all your proofreading, we have a version of my book online with about 800 fixes of problems of the first version. (Although about 500 involved curly quotes, em dashes, and other things that are hard to notice on screen, but look bad in print.) A couple of hundred more involved one letter typos that are particularly hard to fix. But that still leaves about 100 lulus fixed, such as getting maternal and paternal grandparents confuses, which is kind of show stopper with Barack Obama.

You can read it online here.

I’ll try to send up a system for wiki proofreading tonight.

We’re sending it off to the printer tomorrow, so soon you’ll be able to buy an actual physical book to give everybody you know (perhaps especially the people you don’t want to know anymore).

By the way, the counter shows only the number of zip files downloaded (currently 2600+). I imagine most people prefer to read it online, so total readership is probably a few times higher.

The good news: assimilation is taking place in Los Angeles. The bad news: the culture being internalized is that of Mexico, not America.

Many jobs are so dominated by Mexicans that they feel they can keep out any uncool Salvadorans, etc. who would mess up the little Mexico vibe that is apparently so important. Some Central Americans feel they have to pretend to be Mexicans to get work. The Salvadoran man featured in this article feared he might be beaten up if his Mexican workplace colleagues discovered his true nationality.

Teddy Roosevelt warned us against “squabbling nationalities” but Washington thought it knew better.

Juan Carlos Rivera knew that if he wanted to get a dishwashing job at the MacArthur Park hamburger stand, he would have to pretend to be Mexican.

But the thought of lying made the Salvadoran anxious. He paced outside the restaurant, worried that his melodic Spanish accent, his use of the Central American vos, instead of the Mexican tu, would give him away.

Resolving to say as little as possible, Rivera remembers steeling himself and stepping inside — into the world of Mexicanization. [...]

Rivera and thousands of other Central and South American immigrants have left their native countries only to arrive in an American city dominated by Mexicans, who comprise L.A.’s largest Latino group and have access to most of the jobs sought by immigrants. The metropolis drives many to Mexicanize, to degrees big and small, often before they start to Americanize.
[Central American immigrants adopt Mexican ways in U.S., Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2008]

Since the story is published in the LA Times, no friend of traditional assimilation, the tone is one of intellectual curiosity only. The idea that immigrants should accept the values and language of the national community — as desired by the majority of citizens — doesn’t enter in at all.

Below, Salvadoran kiddies residing in Los Angeles celebrate their flag on Central American Independence Day at MacArthur Park.

I keep getting emails doubting if Obama is a natural-born citizen, something you have to be to be President. As Steve Sailer said a while back, of course he is. His mother’s family has been American, as Colby Cosh recently pointed out, since the seventeenth century.[See family tree] Furthermore, he was born in the State of Hawaii, which would make him an American citizen even if both his parents were from Kenya.

The fact is that it’s easier to be a “natural born citizen” than you probably think, which is a problem in itself. McCain has citizenship through both his mother and father, though born in the Canal Zone.

The question for voters isn’t if Obama is an America–the quesion is, “Does he feel like an American?”

As I write this in the early hours of Monday morning, the Obama/Illegal Immigrant Aunt scandal has gone from the front page of Google News. This of course is largely due to the stupid and cowardly decision of the McCain campaign to avoid the issue.

This is a pity. No doubt they are too embarrassed by McCain’s appalling immigration record to raise the key public policy issue beautifully illustrated by the case: Why does America need a 56 year old unskilled black woman to come here to take subsidized housing, welfare and sheltered employment away from the native born - and to defy immigration law as well?

But a little thought should also have suggested the story sheds unflattering light on Obama’s character. It really is not plausible that he knew nothing about an Aunt he featured so extensively in his book and invited to his Senate swearing-in. Probably this is a lie. It is plausible he callously lost interest in her as his MSM Canonization got under way. Maybe this shows Obama is not Mr. Nice after all.

FIND OUT THE ANSWER TO THIS VIA THE FREE DOWNLOAD OF STEVE SAILER’S OBAMA BOOK

Generally, the comment threads on the news stories about this are swamped by hysterical Democrats suggesting the story was planted or leaked (both totally irrelevant to truth and significance). But the posting by Andrew O on the story
Customs Officials Refer Leak of Obama’s Aunt’s Immigration Status to Inspector General Jack Tapper ABC NEWS November 02, 2008 5:49 PM

is so incisive as to deserve remembering – quite apart from revealing the lady is in the White Pages!

Incredible… my contribution to this blog just got censored! Let me try again.
This whole affair is just too strange.
1) Knowing how people will do anything to stay in the States, I simply do not believe that Obama’s aunt did not have contact with her nephew. Trust me… even distant family will find you, if there’s a chance you can help their case. And we’re talking about a friggin U.S. Senator!
2) What kind of doublespeak is the statement: “Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status…”. What does that statement even mean? It doesn’t say that Senator Obama did not know that she was in the States. It does not say that he was unaware of her living in public housing in deplorable conditions. It doesn’t say that he did not know that her application for refugee status was denied. It simply says that he doesn’t know what her status is AT THIS MOMENT! (Gee, I forgot how much I missed Clintonesque semantics!)
3) By the way, if Obama did not have contact with his aunt, it’s only because he NEEDED not to have contact with his aunt. For God’s sake, she’s listed in the White Pages (online): Zeituni Onyango / XXX Bowen St / XXXXXX, MA XXXXX-XXXX / (XXX) XXX-XXXX. (I hope that the XXX addresses the concerns of the ABC censor)
4) Noting how easy it was for me to find the listing, explain to me how the media, so determined to leave no stone unturned in its “journalistic service” to the public, never even bothered to look. How embarrassing for the US press to be outsleuthed by the Times of London. “White Pages… online”… my, how clever!
5) Senator Obama is poised to be elected President of the United States… so let’s not spoil the historic moment by actually expecting truthful answers to real questions.
6) Sure, now we’re concerned with a possible violation of an illegal alien’s right to privacy… and yet the press practically drooled watching Joe the Plumber get roto-rootered up his…
7) Auntie Zeituni will obviously not be going back to Kenya. The Obama campaign statement has already said that it “believes that any and ALL appropriate laws be followed”. More doublespeak, I assure you. I’m sure a President Obama will figure out something… Indeed, Aunt Zeituni has been counting on it all along!

Posted by: AndrewO | Nov 2, 2008 7:41:32 PM

What other debts will “Big Man” Obama be called on to pay? - and how many ethnic scores will he be called on to settle?

Mickey writes:

Went to a Halloween party dressed as The Bradley Effect. The elemental conceptual simplicity of my costume somehow failed to terrify, even in a Dem heavy Hollywood crowd. … This may be the first election where average Web-surfing, procrastinating liberal comedy writers know more about the last Insider Advantage poll in Pennsylvania than Howard Fineman does…. Unfortunately, they thought the photo of George Deukmejian on my costume** was Robert Rubin.

**–Pinned to the red half of the costume under a blue flap that–easier to show than tell–flopped over to obscure a photo of long-serving L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, whom they mistook for an Asian man. They had been drinking. …

As a summer job in 1981, I worked for a lady who worked for Mayor Tom. I shook the Mayor’s hand once: A tall, impressive man with an unusual look to him. I thought he looked quite American Indian, much like basketball player Scottie Pippen does. Oddly enough, he also looked much like Anwar Sadat, who was half-Sudanese. (more…)