In a brilliant example of American Jurisprudential efficiency, a court in Atlanta has just spent six weeks deciding that an enterprising black criminal who seized a guard’s gun in a court room there in February 2005, shot his way out killing a Judge, a court reporter and a deputy sheriff, then hijacked a car and killed a federal agent in the ensuing chase, should be considered guilty of murder. Escapee convicted of killing judge in courtroom Reuters Fri Nov 7, 2008

His defense?

DR. MARK CUNNINGHAM…said Nichols was driven by this delusional compulsion and believed he was launching a slave revolt. He said Nichols did not know right from wrong, though he did realize he was breaking the law. Nichols viewed himself as a soldier and all the people he killed as enemy combatants.

Doctors’ testimony key Nichols evidence By Jeffry Scott, Steve Visser The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, November 01, 2008

Applaud Dr. Cunningham, who practices in Texas.

Other than the contemptible insanity of the American judicial system, the interesting issue here is that this was an affirmative-action-facilitated crime. As James Fulford pointed out at the time

…the fact that police forces are required by various laws to hire women who can’t handle the physical requirements of the job, is thanks in large part to the legal activities of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This because, in this case, as Steve Sailer put it

“…the 6′-1″ 200 pound defendant […] shot up an Atlanta courtroom after overpowering the 5′ grandmother assigned to guard him and stealing her gun. ‘Women are capable of doing anything men are capable of doing,’ the D.A. proclaimed after the killings when questions were raised about having women guard bad dudes.” Real-Life Babes Not as Buttkicking as in Movies

Now, the question is, will our new President, the living embodiment - with his wife - of Affirmative Action, adhere to such wise and enlightened policies when his own Presidential guard is selected?

U.S. unemployment bolted to a 14-year high in October, as another 240,000 payroll jobs were cut–stark evidence that the economy is in a recession. The “other” employment survey, of households rather than business establishments,[PDF] confirmed this with an even steeper decline of 297,000 positions.

The employment market is much weaker than economists expected. They were forecasting the unemployment rate to climb to 6.3 percent in October and for payrolls to fall by around 200,000.

But October was one of those rare months in which Hispanic job growth (which we use as a proxy for immigrant job growth) lagged that of non-Hispanics. Here is the job action by ethnic group:

• Total: -297,000 (-0.20 percent)
• Hispanic: -243,000 (-1.18 percent)
• Non-Hispanic -54,000 (-0.04 percent)

The unemployment rate for Hispanics rose a full percentage point, to 8.8 percent in October. By comparison, white unemployment rose by half a percentage point, to 5.9 percent, and Blacks enjoyed a 0.3 percentage point reduction, to 11.1 percent.

The ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth since the start of the George W. Bush era, expressed as an index that we call VDAWDI (the VDARE.COM American Worker Displacement Index), fell by 1.14 percent in October. There have been only two months since Mr. Bush took office in which non-Hispanics managed to displace Hispanics as vigorously. Unfortunately, October’s reversal occurred because a sinking economy was displacing both groups – albeit non-Hispanics at a lower rate.

Hispanic job losses are undoubtedly concentrated in the illegal alien labor force, reflecting both the shrinking of opportunities and the expansion of federal enforcement efforts. The long-run displacement of American workers is still quite intact, as seen in the following graphic (click to enlarge):

From January 2001 through this October Hispanic employment increased by 4,170,000, or 25.9 percent, while non-Hispanic employment grew by 3,012,000, or 2.5 percent.

Bottom line: Hispanic (=immigrant) employment has grown more than 10-times as rapidly as non-Hispanic employment during the Bush years. Immigrants took almost half of all new jobs created under Bush.

My wife raises an interesting point that I’ve never heard anyone discuss. Many of the single women of a certain age who are still actively in the husband-seeking market spend a fortune on themselves to look good and be in the right (i.e., expensive) places to meet Mr. Right. Thus, an awful lot of them have a lot of debt, especially credit card debt, which they keep rolling over to the tune of many thousands of dollars in interest each year.

The question is: when she finally meets a suitable guy, does her debt tend to discourage the fellow from popping the question? I mean, if a couple has gotten pretty serious, but then he finds out she has $40,000 in credit card debt, which she’s paying $5500 per year of interest on, does the idea of a joint checking account start sounding kind of expensive? Especially, if they’re thinking about having kids and he knows she’s going to have to de-emphasize her career for awhile. If she can’t pay off her credit cards now while she’s working full time, she’s not going to pay them off either when she downshifts her career to raise kids. So, marriage is going to cost him $40,000 right off the bat that he hadn’t thought about before.

That can kind of put the damper on romantic impulsivity.

This trend is the opposite of the European tradition of the dowry, in which the bride’s family gives the groom money in return for a lifetime of his work supporting their daughter. (Here in America, we have a quasi-dowry system in which the bride’s parents pay the for the wedding reception and the guests give the couple gifts equal to about their share of the cost of the reception. Thus, when we got married, we received gifts roughly equal to the wedding reception’s cost to my in-laws, which was a nice little haul–maybe four or five months of my after tax salary.)

In contrast, this emerging system in which two thirtysomethings are interested in getting married, but the potential bride is heavily in debt, so her would-be husband is likely to end up on the hook for it, is more like the African “bride price” system in which the groom pays the bride’s father (or maternal uncle in some societies) fifteen head of cattle (or whatever) for the woman. The groom pays in Africa because he’s going to get a lifetime of hard work hoeing the fields out of his wife. (According to Borat, in Kazakhstan, the going price for a bride is 15 gallons of insecticide.)

But, certainly, the African system is less conducive to monogamy, paternal investment in children, and other socially beneficial things than the European dowry system.

So, maybe this explains some of the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate in America?

Here’s an excerpt from Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson’s massive Vanity Fair article explaining it all: “Wall Street Lays Another Egg:”

The Lessons of Detroit:

In July 2007, I paid a visit to Detroit, because I had the feeling that what was happening there was the shape of things to come in the United States as a whole. In the space of 10 years, house prices in Detroit, which probably possesses the worst housing stock of any American city other than New Orleans, had risen by more than a third—not much compared with the nationwide bubble, but still hard to explain, given the city’s chronically depressed economic state. As I discovered, the explanation lay in fundamental changes in the rules of the housing game.

I arrived at the end of a borrowing spree. For several years agents and brokers selling subprime mortgages had been flooding Detroit with radio, television, and direct-mail advertisements, offering what sounded like attractive deals. In 2006, for example, subprime lenders pumped more than a billion dollars into 22 Detroit Zip Codes.

These were not the old 30-year fixed-rate mortgages invented in the New Deal. On the contrary, a high proportion were adjustable-rate mortgages—in other words, the interest rate could vary according to changes in short-term lending rates. Many were also interest-only mortgages, without amortization (repayment of principal), even when the principal represented 100 percent of the assessed value of the mortgaged property. And most had introductory “teaser” periods, whereby the initial interest payments—usually for the first two years—were kept artificially low, with the cost of the loan backloaded. All of these devices were intended to allow an immediate reduction in the debt-servicing costs of the borrower.

In Detroit only a minority of these loans were going to first-time buyers. They were nearly all refinancing deals, which allowed borrowers to treat their homes as cash machines, converting their existing equity into cash and using the proceeds to pay off credit-card debts, carry out renovations, or buy new consumer durables. However, the combination of declining long-term interest rates and ever more alluring mortgage deals did attract new buyers into the housing market. By 2005, 69 percent of all U.S. householders were homeowners; 10 years earlier it had been 64 percent. About half of that increase could be attributed to the subprime-lending boom.

Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.

Here, surely, was the zenith of the property-owning democracy. It was an achievement that the Bush administration was proud of. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” President George W. Bush had said in October 2002. Having challenged lenders to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade, Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003, a measure designed to subsidize first-time house purchases in low-income groups. Between 2000 and 2006, the share of undocumented subprime contracts rose from 17 to 44 percent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also came under pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to support the subprime market. As Bush put it in December 2003, “It is in our national interest that more people own their own home.” Few people dissented.

As a business model, subprime lending worked beautifully—as long, that is, as interest rates stayed low, people kept their jobs, and real-estate prices continued to rise. Such conditions could not be relied upon to last, however, least of all in a city like Detroit. But that did not worry the subprime lenders.

Although the number of defaults in the Greater Detroit region (MI, OH, IN, IL, but, oddly enough, not PA) have been high, I suspect the dollars lost are small compared to Greater Los Angeles (CA, NV, and AZ).

The other item I would add is the effects of political correctness and discrimination lawsuits on financial institution’s ability to perform reality checks on their own actions. Nobody can send a memo to their colleagues saying “We lent a billion dollars to Detroit?” without being in severe danger of it turning up in the discovery of a redlining discrimination case.

Beyond that, it was just totally uncool to point out that Detroiters, where the high school dropout rate is, what, 75%, couldn’t really make enough money over the next 30 years to pay for all that bling they were buying with home equity lines of credit. Who wanted to hear it? Everybody else at Washington Mutual was bringing home fat bonus checks for buying up no money down mortgages from Detroit storefront mortgage brokers. For most of this decade, money and social conformity/political correctness were marching arm in arm toward the brave new dawn, and only evil old bastards were doubting it.

In summary, though, the idea of a “diversity recession” that I introduced in August of 2007 is on its way from a scurrilous fringe idea to being a standard part of how economic historians will explain what happened.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents held a modest return engagement at the now-bankrupt Agriprocessors kosher abattoir in Postville, Iowa this past Tuesday, November 4. You can read the Des Moines Register’s account [Postville streets empty as immigration officials return, by Grant Schulte, November 5, 2008] of this mini-raid for all the scintillating details.

To my mind, the most memorable item in the Register’s story was their quote from Marissa Graciosa of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement [send them mail]:

It’s appalling that the federal agents chose today, Election Day, to spread fear amongst the residents of Postville.

Perhaps the raid distracted Postville’s remaining illegal aliens while they were voting?

Ms. Graciosa was, uncannily, echoing a reaction to the ICE raid at the Swift beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado on December 12, 2006, as reported in the Greeley Tribune:

“This is an insult to us as Mexicans because today is El Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe,” said Lupe Tapia of Greeley, in reference to Dec. 12, which is celebrated as a religious holiday recognizing the birth of the Virgin Mary. [Latino community outraged at timing of ICE raid, by Vanessa Delgado, December 13, 2006]

It would be an interesting experiment to determine what dates might be OK for immigration raids. How about June 19? Probably not, I’ll guess, as that’s a mere five days after Flag Day. April 21? Heaven forbid–that would be precisely two weeks before Cinco de Mayo! (And regarding April 21, a friend points out “[This] is the wrong day to enforce immigration law because that’s the day after Hitler’s birthday, and we all know ICE is a legacy agency of the Gestapo. It sends a very bad message!”

But “uncannily” probably isn’t the appropriate word, as the Graciosa and Tapia objections seem to fit a larger pattern documented by the Pew Hispanic Center’s 2008 National Survey of Latinos. From the report:

More than four-in-five Hispanics (81%) say that immigration enforcement should be left mainly to the federal authorities rather than the local police; 76% disapprove of workplace raids; 73% disapprove of the criminal prosecution of undocumented immigrants who are working without authorization; and 70% disapprove of the criminal prosecution of employers who hire undocumented immigrants. A narrow majority (53%) disapproves of a requirement that employers check a federal database to verify the legal immigration status of all prospective hires.

So, to summarize, most Hispanics think only the feds should be enforcing America’s immigration laws. But, really, the feds shouldn’t be doing it either.

Manhattan’s Upper West Side has perhaps the highest concentration of influential news media types in the country. For the last 48 hours, they’ve engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over electing Obama. But, now it’s time to get back to what they, personally, are most concerned over: keeping their kids away from Non-Asian Minority kids. From the New York Times:

As Schools Grapple With Crowding, Prospect of Rezoning Angers Manhattan Parents
By JENNIFER MEDINA

At Public School 199 in the heart of the Upper West Side, a music teacher who once had her own classroom now keeps her instruments in a small closet, stacking cymbals and drums onto a cart as she visits more than two dozen classes each week. Students who need tutoring in reading or math sit behind a makeshift wall of metal cabinets in the hallway. There are seven kindergarten classes this year, up from three in 2000.

And on a recent Friday afternoon, it took six staff members 15 minutes to find a room for a training workshop. P.S. 199 has 663 students in kindergarten through fifth grade this year, nearly 200 above its capacity in the West 70th Street building it has long shared with the Center School, a middle school that draws students from the Lincoln Center area north to Harlem. Public School 191, just nine blocks south, draws largely from the nearby housing projects and has more than 107 empty seats available.

It might seem that there are easy solutions to the overcrowding in District 3, which encompasses the Upper West Side and parts of Harlem. The district has neighborhoods facing a burgeoning school-age population, in part because of a high-rise building boom, with pockets where the number of children are in decline. Why not send some of P.S. 199’s overflow to fill the seats at P.S. 191, or move the Center School and let the popular P.S. 199 expand to take up the whole three-story building?

But in New York City, where real estate and access to good schools often lead to Olympics-level competition, even the specter of changing school boundaries can raise the hackles of parents who chose their high-priced homes precisely because of those boundaries. The topic of rezoning is so sensitive that education officials have referred to it as the “third rail” — and no one seems to remember the last time a significant boundary change was enacted.

For months now, officials and members of District 3’s Community Education Council, the elected board that must approve any rezoning plans, have gone back and forth on painstaking negotiations and proposals. At a meeting on Wednesday night, the council is expected to introduce its resolution, which members would vote on later this month.

The heated debate dividing neighbors is likely to repeat itself across town later this month, when city education officials begin discussing the rezoning of parts of District 2, which encompasses the Upper East Side and much of Lower Manhattan. District 2 is plagued by some of the city’s worst overcrowding, particularly in TriBeCa and on the Upper East Side.

In the debate over the fate of P.S. 199 and the Center School, there have been accusations of racism, and a flier calling one school administrator who opposed a move a dictator. Parents — and prospective parents — of P.S. 199 have set up an elaborate campaign against changing the school boundaries, using the Internet and old-fashioned petitions on clipboards to protest.

“You move to a neighborhood in no small part because you are attracted to the school — it’s a core decision you are making,” said Eric Shuffler, who is among the parents of 4-year-olds fighting for kindergarten spots in 2009 at P.S. 199. “Something that you had planned on is now being taken and it’s compounded by the fact that you don’t know what happens to your children once the decision is made.”

It’s not like Mr. Shuffler and his friends are prejudiced or anything. I mean, they’d love to have Obama’s daughters go to P.S. 199.

All those folks who thought they had elected the Dalai Lama to be President are slowly starting to realize they actually elected a man whose driving ambition from age 25 to 40 was to become Mayor of Chicago because that job gives you what Obama has always wanted: power. By my count, the word “power” or its variants appears 82 times in Dreams From My Father.

Obama has appointed as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Israel Emanuel, fixer-fundraiser-bruiser extraordinaire who started out with the Daley Machine.

Poor Philip Weiss, who had convinced himself from all the time Obama spent hanging out with Palestinians before he became famous, that Obama’s election meant a fair shake for the Palestinians, is distraught. (As if Obama ever cared about Palestinians …) Emanuel spent the 1991 Gulf War volunteering at an Israeli military base.

Joshua Green writes in Rolling Stone:

There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.” Of the three stories, only the second is a myth …

The second of three sons born to a pediatrician father and a civil-rights-activist mother, Rahm was raised in a middle-class family that stressed competitiveness and achievement. His older brother, Ezekiel, is a leading medical ethicist. [Ah, yes, the medical ethics profession ...] His younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood talent agent who served as the inspiration for Ari Gold, the fast-talking agent played by Jeremy Piven on HBO’s hit series Entourage. (In a recent episode shot at a Lakers game, the lead actors sat in Ari Emanuel’s $2,000 courtside seats.) “After about the sixth episode, I finally caught it,” says Rahm, who himself was the model for the character Josh Lyman on The West Wing. “I called Ari the next day and said, ‘Hey, I finally saw the show, and you know what? I like that guy better than I like you.’”

Emanuel got his political education working as a fund-raiser for Mayor Richard Daley’s re-election campaign in Chicago, where he learned how to twist arms and knock heads. Donors were used to giving $5,000 — but Daley needed more. “Rahm took it up a notch,” Daley’s brother William recalled several years ago. “He told many of them they easily had the ability to give twenty-five grand.” When contributors didn’t pony up, Emanuel would tell them he was embarrassed that they’d offered so little and hang up on them. The shocked donor would usually call back and sheepishly comply. In thirteen weeks, the thirty-year-old raised $7 million — an unprecedented sum at the time. His fund-raising skills eventually earned him a job in the Clinton campaign.

Emanuel was an Iraq War hawk. His father was a member of the anti-British Irgun terrorist organization in Palestine in the 1940s.

In an interview with Ma’ariv, Emanuel’s father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son’s appointment would be good for Israel. “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,” he was quoted as saying. “Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, chiefly owned by Sheldon Adelson, recently #3 richest man in America and a prime funder of neoconnery in the U.S. and Israel, announced it was in danger of going broke. Adelson was a small time hustler who got insanely rich off the Housing Bubble as Californians took out home equity loans and drove to Vegas and off the Chinese mania for gambling by somehow getting the Beijing to give him something of a monopoly on casinos in Macao. His second wife is Israeli, and late in life he developed a passion for Likudism, spending a fortune on putting Netanyahu back in office.

As a convenience for all the neocons out there, here’s the District of Columbia form you have to fill in to change your party registration from Republican to Democrat.