Law Professor Tino Cuellar [Email him] was named head of BHO’s transition team for immigration. Anyone who is praised by MALDEF is terrible, by definition.

“He’s brilliant beyond his years,” said John Trasviña, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who met Cuéllar when he was a law student at Yale and encouraged him to go to work in Washington.

At 36, Cuéllar already has an impressive resume. Raised on the U.S.-Mexico border in Calexico (Imperial County), he earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University before going to Yale Law School and finishing up with a doctorate in political science from Stanford, where he’s now a full professor specializing in administrative law.

Along the way, he spent two years at the U.S. Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, where he worked on fighting money-laundering operations.

Cuéllar has been described as a close adviser to Obama on immigration, and the American Bar Association recently suggested he could be on the short list to head the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. [Stanford professor leads Obama immigration team, By Tyche Hendricks, San Francico Chronicle, November 22, 2008]

BHO’s immigration team is full-bore anti-sovereignty. Here’s an open borders blog gloating “Obama Has A Pro-Migrant Transition Team“.

On Tina Cuellar (Source: The National Journal, March 2008)

He believes that comprehensive immigration reform must go beyond addressing border security and the status of the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants to confronting the current system’s bureaucratic failings, providing job opportunities for American workers, promoting economic development in Latin America, and determining “how our immigration policy reflects our values and needs as Americans. “Having grown up near the Mexican border — first in Brownsville, Texas, and later in California’s Imperial Valley – the Mexican-American Cuellar opposes the controversial southern border fence, which Obama has voted to construct. Cuellar, who joined the Obama campaign in April 2007, brings expertise on the regulatory side of immigration and international security, as well as what he calls a “passion” for refugee policy.

T Alexander Aleinikoff in a paper (Source: The Salon, 2006):

“It is time to think seriously about a future when travel within North America is largely unrestricted. For some, such a plan appears unthinkable. Removing the border patrol from our southwest border, they will say, will flood the United States with unskilled workers, overburden the infrastructure of localities, and wreak havoc on our welfare system. But in years ahead what is now viewed as a threat will be viewed as a benefit: because the U.S. population is aging and the ratio of workers to retired persons is decreasing, new immigrant workers will likely be the key to the economic growth necessary to sustain social security systems and our standard of living.”

See the Stanford Law page of Mariano-Florentino [Tino] Cuellar.

I keep reading articles trying to explain the mortgage meltdown, but the mainstream media’s coverage almost utterly ignores George W. Bush’s war on down payments in his effort to boost minority homeownership by 5.5 million. On Google News, the only reference over the last month to Bush’s 5.5 million household goal are columns by Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat, both of whom no doubt heard about it from me.

It’s like that Star Trek episode where an evil computer takes over, but Kirk and Spock make it overload its circuits by posing logical conundrums for it to figure out like:

The next thing I will say is a lie.

The last thing I said is the truth.

Or maybe not exactly that (it’s been 40 years since I watched that episode), but close.

Anyway, in regard to Bush’s plan to expand minority homeownership by debauching traditonal credit standards, the media reason (read with Stephen Hawking-style computer accent):

Bush is evil.

Minorities are good.

DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Best not to think about it or smoke will come out of our brains. Let us never mention it again.

I did notice that James Bovard figured out what was going on over three years ago in a June 11, 2005 column for Lew Rockwell entitled “Bush Profiteering from Housing Defaults.” It also explains what the Nehemiah Corp. is up to:

President Bush is determined to end the prejudice against people who want to buy a home but don’t have any money. Since he became president the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has spent more than $120 billion. HUD public-housing projects continue to devastate poor neighborhoods. HUD largesse to local governments continues to finance the confiscation and demolition of private homes, and HUD programs continue to spur fraud and corruption around the nation.

(more…)

You hear a lot of debate about whether or not it’s possible for this economic downturn to be as deep as the Great Depression.

I’m just wondering: Why does everybody assume that the Great Depression marks the all-time rock-bottom worst that human economic history will ever witness?