In another blog entry today, Steve Sailer mentions that Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, may become Secretary of Commerce in Wonder Boy’s administration. Importantly for the story, three of Richardson’s grandparents were Mexicans.

Just on the basis of government experience, such an appointment seems plausible: Richardson — at least on paper–had the most impressive resume (sitting governor, former congressman, former UN ambassador, and former cabinet secretary) of all the Democrats who ran for their party’s 2008 presidential nomination.

Likely of more interest to VDARE readers is a brief conversation with Richardson reported on page 3 of a Center for Immigration Studies backgrounder, Immigration and Usurpation: Elites, Power, and the People’s Will, by Fredo Arias-King:

Bill Richardson, who had served in Clinton’s cabinet and later became governor of New Mexico, kindly stopped to speak to our delegation at the [2000] Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He commented favorably to us: “What do Hispanics want? Fully funded government programs!”

Put another way, Hispanics, as a class, are natural Democrats.

(Although VDARE’s Thomas Allen had used this memorable Richardson quote in 2007, it was buried in a long article. I think it’s worthwhile to call specific attention to it.)

To complete the picture, then, what don’t Hispanics want? For most of them, enforcement of U.S. immigration laws is apparently high on their anti-hit list.

Cinram is in trouble again. In May I reported that about 100 Nepalese workers at Cinram vanished. That raised some questions by the Dept. of Homeland Security, but not much happened.

See this newsletter for the May story: “Nepalese H-2Bs go poof, while Baca and Pelosi push for more visas“, No. 1830 — 3/05/2008

Now Cinram has another problem. Cinram wanted to hire about 800 H-2Bs to wrap DVDs at their Huntsville plant. The USDOL denied their request for visas on the basis that the housing provided for the workers was substandard.[WSFA 12 News Montgomery, AL |DVD maker denied visas for workers at Alabama plant, November 19, 2008]

The H-2B program requires that employers provide housing. Usually it’s nothing more than a dumpy trailer or a run down motel with 5 workers per room. H-2B forest workers called Pineros often have no more for housing than a truck bed or a tent.

To read about Pineros go here:The Pineros: Men of the Pines.

Considering the low threshold considered acceptable in the H-2B program, it would be interesting to see what Cinram was providing for housing. If any activists in Huntsville have a camera I would be happy to host whatever pictures or videos you could find.

Obama says today in his weekly Youtube message:

I have already directed my economic team to come up with an Economic Recovery Plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011 – a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon after taking office. We’ll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy. We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.

How much of this can actually be done in 24 months?

It’s crucial to understand that this isn’t December 8, 1941 anymore. The people who voted for Obama have spent decades making it extremely difficult to do quickly anything physical. For example, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sponsored a bunch of bond initiatives that passed in 2006. But, I am told by a Sacramento insider, that, two years later, no dirt has been turned. I’m sure that a lot of environmental scientists, lawyers, and administrators have been pulling down paychecks, but in the physical world, nothing has happened in 24 months.

So, let’s look at Obama’s suggestions one by one:

(more…)

I always thought that it was ironic that Barack Obama was running on “hope” and “change” because those two vague mantras are exactly what Bill Clinton ran on in 1992, what with being from Hope, Arkansas and all. (A couple of months after Clinton’s election, I got an invitation to a marketing convention whose theme was “The Power of Change.”) But the lack of “change” in the public facade of the nascent Obama Administration is getting pretty funny.

Obama’s problem is that he’s so inexperienced that he barely knows anybody other than a bunch of thuggish Chicago political operators like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and a lot of unpresentable far leftists with whom he hung out in the 1980s and 1990s. So, for lack of a better idea, he’s just plugging in Clinton Administration retreads in the top jobs. The “change” part applied to who gets to be President (and who will get the lower level jobs after the public loses interest).

Besides wooing Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, the Obamas announced today that they were sending their daughters to Sidwell Friends School, the same pricey ($28,000+) school where the Clintons sent Chelsea. Although Michelle Obama claimed publicly that public schools were under consideration, she never bothered to tour any.

As I wrote in VDARE.com a couple of years ago:

In 1977, when Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter arrived in Washington D.C. from Georgia, they had to subject their daughter Amy to a D.C. public school to prove they weren’t Southern racists.

But by 1993, when Billy and Hillary Clinton rolled into town from Arkansas, everybody who was anybody accepted that the D.C. public schools were awful (even if you had Secret Service bodyguards).

So when the Clintons enrolled Chelsea in an expensive Quaker private school, Sidwell Friends Academy, they didn’t pay a political price for their hypocrisy.

Howard Kurtz wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 1994:

“Equally revealing was media response to the Clintons’s announcement that they were sending their daughter, Chelsea, to Sidwell Friends, an $11,000-a-year private school in northwest Washington. When columnist Mark Shields praised Sidwell on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, he had to note that his children went there, as did Jim Lehrer’s and Judy Woodruff’s. Woodruff’s husband, Al Hunt, made a similar disclosure while defending Clinton on Capital Gang. Carl Rowan touted Sidwell on Inside Washington, pointing out that his grandchildren attended the school. Howard Fineman, whose daughter was in kindergarten at Sidwell, said he “shamelessly lobbied” the Clintons to choose the school.”

So don’t worry about being duplicitous. Do what the Clintons and all those media liberals, white and black, did—put your children’s welfare first!

But, don’t you dare put the welfare of your fellow citizen’s children ahead of those of people who want to sneak into our country.

By the way, all this talk about Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State reminds me of conversations that must go on these days when they’re trying to cast superheroes’ girlfriends in big Hollywood movies:

“How about Maggie Gyllenhaal?”

“She looks like a sad cartoon turtle. Why would the hero fall for her?”

“Okay, what about Kirsten Dunst?”

“Have you looked at her teeth?”

“Well, how about Katie Holmes?”

“Yeah, she looks okay. Let’s give her agent a … Oh, wait, no, this is too big a production to risk that her husband will stay out of the way. He’s got too much energy. Better cross her off the list.”

By the way, the rumor is that Bill Richardson, who had a couple of cabinet posts in the Clinton Administration (where his duties included considering Monica Lewinsky for a job) is in line for Secretary of Commerce. The reason Richardson is always up for Cabinet jobs is because he’s 3/4th’s Mexican (his grandfather was a raffish WASP from New England who fit in better in Latin America, where he had several families. His more straight-laced dad opened Citibank’s Mexico City office long ago). So Democrats figure that appointing Richardson is a good way to pander to the the tsunami of Mexican voters that is always about to arrive.

The problem with Richardson as the perfect Hispandering Ploy is that unlike the Beltway political junkies who are always talking Richardson up, Mexicans don’t pay much attention to politics, so most of them don’t notice Richardson’s 3/4 Mexicanness because he doesn’t have a Spanish surname. So, it’s a waste.

Moreover, when Richardson is actually indoors working, like he was when he spent months campaigning last year in Iowa and New Hampshire, his tan fades and then he just looks like another white guy with a WASP name, so even the few Mexican voters who watch the political news on TV won’t notice they are being pandered to.

After Richardson dropped out of the Presidential race, he disappeared for a long time and suddenly re-emerged, presumably from some beach somewhere (Spring Break in Cancun?), looking like an Aztec sun god and sporting the goatee that makes him now look like the head of the nefarious villainous organization in a big budget action movie. So, unless Obama intends to let Richardson spend most of his time as Secretary of Commerce focusing on increasing American industry’s sun tan lotion exports to Cabo San Lucas, he’ll end up with just another paleface with an English name. (Actually, permanently stationing him in Cabo seems like an ideal use of Richardson’s talents.)

Here’s a wonderfully clueless New York Times letter to the editor in response to that amusing NYT article “Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage” about how Mormons hijacked the gay marriage initiative in California. (By the way, gay marriage only got 48% in California, while Barack Obama got 61%. What fraction of that 13% of the Californian electorate who voted for Obama but not for gay marriage was Mormon? Eensy or teensy?)

To the Editor:

As a California resident who voted no on Proposition 8 [i.e., supported gay marriage], I am a little confused as to why money from outside the state is allowed to affect the outcome of our elections. If I wanted to live my life according to the rules of the Mormon Church, I would move to Utah.

Barbara Davilman
Studio City, Calif.

You have to feel sorry for the poor villagers of Studio City whose indigenous folkways are under constant mass media assault from all those rich city slickers in Provo. Mormons grow up knowing all about how to make snazzy TV commercials, while the innocent Studio Citians only learn from their elders how to communicate via smoke signals and notches carved in tree trunks by the side of the trail.

And nobody in Studio City would ever donate money to a political campaign taking place outside of the state.*

———-
* I’m kidding. I grew up in Studio City and had to put up with a lot of guff when I went to college in Texas about having a hometown called “Studio City,” which I admit sounds like it was made up for parodistic purposes.

It was like the slums of Beverly Hills. The man across the street had a dozen Emmy awards in technical categories and another neighbor appeared in several hundred commercials.

Everybody is talking about “fiscal stimulus” and “infrastructure projects” (i.e., public works, like FDR’s WPA). Larry Summers says that there is a “multiplier effect” and every dollar of government spending generates more dollars of overall economic activity in the American economy.

But nobody is talking about the obvious: Will the public works jobs be restricted to American citizens? To American citizens plus legal residents? Or will they just suck in more millions from south of the border as the Housing Bubble did, who will send tens of billions back home, depriving America of Larry’s promised Multiplier Effect?

The real economic collapse is happening in the four sand states, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. Sending billions to them for infrastructure projects would mean a large fraction of the public works payroll would go to illegal and legal aliens.

The one sure way to keep the unemployment rate in California (now 8.2%) from growing so fast is to have illegal immigrants go home. It’s a lot cheaper for all concerned if ex-construction workers are unemployed in Mexico or Guatemala than if they are unemployed in California. But nobody is mentioning that.

Next, Obama’s big goal is to set off an Alternative Energy Bubble to inflate the economy in time for the 2012 election. But, those kind of infrastructure projects (e.g., erecting a massive number of ugly windmills that chop migratory birds to shreds) take forever to get off the ground in Blue States due to environmental restrictions. In Red States, it’s faster to get going. Will Obama want to send most of the money to Republican states? Or will he override the environmental dogmas of his base?

The kind of thing we can spend a lot of money on within 2009 are projects like freeway resurfacing–exactly the opposite of what all the Save the World types who voted for Obama want.