No doubt some leaders of the Louisiana GOP are maintaining the Stupid Party tradition and celebrating the upset victory of Anh Cao over felony-Democratic Congressman William J. Jefferson (he of Cash-in-the-Icebox fame.)[Anh 'Joseph' Cao beats Rep. William Jefferson in 2nd Congressional District, by Michelle Krupa and Frank Donze, The Times-Picayune, December 6, 2008.]

The Louisiana GOP leadership has some kind of phobia about race. Despite being totally dependent on white votes, overwhelmingly of Confederate heritage, it opens its Facebook page with an effusion about Lincoln that is historically questionable and a direct insult to the traditions of its key support:

“Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Americans who had gathered to protest the expansion of slavery gave birth to a political Party that would save the Union–the Republican Party.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois carried the Republican banner in the Presidential election and was elected the Party’s first President. He became our nation’s greatest leader … and one of our Party’s greatest heroes…

Today, the Republican Party continues under Lincoln’s vision to elect men and women who carry on the best traditions of our Party.”

Over the past few years, the State GOP has favored a series of minority candidates, with poor results–it only regained the Fifth Congressional District, lost in 2002 when the Republican ticket was lead by a woman of Armenian extraction, because the winning Democrat subsequently switched parties.

It did succeed at last in electing the ultimate Affirmative Action beneficiary, Rhodes Scholar Bobby Jindal, to the Governorship in 2007. This unfortunately allows the Louisiana party’s kind of anti-white discrimination to be projected onto the GOP national stage.

Although Anh Cao came to the US when Viet Nam was conquered in 1975 at the age of 8, he married a Vietnamese woman and makes his living as…an immigration lawyer, presumably acting mainly for his own community.

“Cao went to Washington to advocate for refugees. Recognizing he lacked necessary legal skills, he returned to New Orleans to attend Loyola University’s law school. He worked for an immigrant advocacy group, then opened a law practice with a similar focus.

Though Cao described himself as a longtime Republican — he opposes abortion, supports school vouchers and wants to shrink the size of government — he ran as an independent. He concedes it a matter of “political maneuvering” in an effort to appeal to the district’s mostly Democratic electorate…

Cao, vying to become the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress, said that if he wins, he’ll join the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.” [Newcomer Joseph Cao hopes to unseat U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, by Michelle Krupa, The Times-Picayune, December1, 2008]

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus is, naturally, an ethnic Asian special interest pressure group.

Probably the most sagacious comment on the election comes from the rabidly-Open-Borders Greg Siskind’s Blog

“He is set to become the first Vietnamese-American ever elected to Congress. He’s also likely to be one of the most pro-immigration Republicans in Congress. Given the make up of the district and the enormous advantage a scandal-free Democrat will have in 2010, I’m wondering whether Cao will remain a Republican. He’s run previously as an independent. If I were Nancy Pelosi, I’d invite Congressman Cao out to lunch.”

(Against Cao’s likely 2010 loss, the neocons over at American Spectator are already promoting him for state wide office.)

The neoconservatives, of course, have long wanted Southern white votes, but not Southern men.

It is nice that the Vietnamese community now has a ethnocentric Congressman to promote their community interests. From the first Times-Picayune article above:

“In his closing, Cao offered thanks to the local immigrant community, and he made a special plea for peace in the country of his birth.
“I’d like to thank my Vietnamese community,” he said, “and I’d like to encourage young Vietnamese in this country to work peacefully for a free and democratic Vietnam.”

But why should the white Louisianans not have the same? After the State’s Jeremiah Munsen atrocity, perpetrated by a Black and another Asian “American”, they clearly need them.

The Louisiana GOP leadership needs to wake up.

On Saturday, Barack Obama announced that he hoped to sign a bill to create the biggest expenditure on infrastructure and public works since Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System. Obama did not give an exact figure on the costs, but estimates are in 700 billion dollar range to spend on roads, bridges, broadband access, school buildings, and rewiring public buildings to make them more energy efficient.

While Obama says these are necessary investments, the main purpose of this bill is not so much what gets built, but the fact that the expenditures will create jobs. Leaving the economics of this aside, if the government needs to spend money to employ jobs building stuff, why not start with the border fence? After all Obama voted for the Secure Fence Act to construct the fence, but then voted against Jeff Sessions’ resolution to fund it, because he thought it was too expensive.

Now that we are looking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for the purpose of “job creation,” even if it costs the 49 billion dollars its critics claim, there’s no reason not to build it, since it is, after all, necessary for border protection.

Yet strangely, the refrain from the Left is that we can’t afford to build the fence. A group of Democratic Texas politicians sent an open letter to Obama calling the fence an “irresponsible expense while the country is in the midst of a recession.” I hope Obama will write them back to say that its construction will help create jobs for Americans…which brings me to my next question.

Will these jobs actually go to Americans? One of the few proactive things Bush did in office was to sign Executive Order 12989 requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify to ensure that no illegal aliens get hired. Unless his stimulus plan is to create “jobs that Americans won’t do,” I hope Obama will honor Bush’s executive order and make sure that E-Verify is reauthorized in March with no strings attached.

The conventional wisdom is that our economic woes are due to a credit crunch, and the credit crunch is due to the inability of financial institutions to figure out what mortgage-backed or derived financial instruments are actually worth. “Securitization” (a.k.a., “secretization” in Travis Talk) makes it hard to figure out whether the entity asking you for a loan is bankrupt or not. So, financial institutions are reluctant to lend money to each other.

If this really is the problem, then there is a potential solution. During the credit crunch of 1907, J.P. Morgan had the leaders of all the major corporations bring their books to his mansion, where his men reviewed them and then J.P. told the executives what they must do — you and you merge, you sell your Midwestern rail lines to him, etc.

The books are a lot more complicated these days, but our technology is better too.

What if the government posted all the details of all financial assets online and encouraged citizens to post comments on the assets, such as mortgaged properties.

This is a desperate step since it would involve colossal invasions of privacy. (”The Jones have a $600,000 mortgage! Are you kidding? There’s no way their income is $180,000 like they claimed. She drinks and got laid off from her last job. And the house if full of termites. Plus I hear he has cancer. Their son is supposed to be a drug addict so you won’t see that money. You won’t get paid a dime back on this one.”)

But, maybe there is some way to work this idea out so that it would work?

One of the oddities of the standard narrative of the Housing Bubble is how it glosses over just how regional it was. In large expanses of America, there wasn’t much of a Bubble at all. The New York Times reports on the economy in North Dakota, where there was no Housing Bubble, no subsequent Mortgage Meltdown, and no Financial Catastrophe … so far.

I suspect that North Dakota is, like everywhere else, in for hard times and that it’s current prosperity is an afterglow of the now vanishing Commodities Bubble of 2007. When the Fed discovered in the middle of 2007 that the economy had become a house of cards built on subprime and/or pay option mortgages in the “Sand State” (FANC — Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California — as in “FANCs for the mortgages, suckers!”), it created a lot of money to try to head off recession. That new money, with nowhere else to go, flooded into commodities, causing oil to hit ridiculous prices last summer (so ridiculous that even I wrote about them), and inflating a lot of other commodities such as grains.

Nonetheless, North Dakota still has a big long-run advantage: a high ratio of land and resources to people. Ben Franklin pointed out in 1751 that this is exactly why life was happier for the average person in America than in Europe.

More than anything else, the Housing Bubble was a bet that rapid Hispanicization of the population of the Sand States was compatible with high and continually rising home prices. This meant, in effect, that either Hispanics could earn enough money to pay off these huge mortgages or that they could find Greater Fools willing to pay even more money to live amidst ever increasing numbers of Hispanics.

As we can see now, neither assumption has proven valid. Home prices in the Sand States are dropping like a stone back to levels at which the increasingly Latino population might possibly be able to afford.

On Wednesday, I was honored to speak with Ron Smith on his WBAL Baltimore radio talk show about the Winchester Atrocity and the SPLC, both of which he had discussed in his Baltimore Sun column that day.

Smith had read my two VDARE.com columns on the robbery-torture-murder of interracial newlyweds, Marine Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak, 24, and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, whom the killers had also gang-raped (see my November 11 and November 24 articles).

VDARE’s Patrick Cleburne was kind enough to blog about the show on Friday.

Smith received mostly supportive letters from around the world, yet the four letters that the Sun published, and which were also simultaneously published by its sister newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, Long Island Newsday, and the Hampton Roads, VA Daily Press were all from hostiles, two of whom—our old friend, Mark Potok, and Peter McCullough, a name new to me—work for the SPLC.

(All of the aforementioned daily newspapers are owned by the Tribune Company.)

I have not been in touch with Smith since appearing on his show, but I urge you to read his December 3 column, if you haven’t already, and if you agree with it, to send a letter to the editor, saying as much. The Baltimore Sun’s letter guidelines appear below.

To Our Readers: The Sun welcomes letters from readers. All letters become the property of The Sun, which reserves the right to edit them. Letters should include your name and address, along with day and evening telephone numbers. E-mail us: letters@baltsun.com; write us: Letters to the Editor, The Sun, P.O. Box 1377, Baltimore 21278-0001; fax us: 410-332-6977

And when you do write to the Sun praising Smith, please cc him a copy, just in case the letters editor continues to “forget” to run any of the pro-Smith letters.

Smith then discussed the brouhaha on his WBAL Web page, which contains audio links to his December 3 show, including his intro, our conversation, and callers he conversed with during the show.

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