It was a really bad idea for California to give taxpayer-subsidized in-state tuition to illegal alien students starting in 2001. Now the state has thousands of college-educated foreigners who believe they should have a right to work here. After all, Sacramento has always encouraged them to have an attitude of unlimited entitlement–why should they expect anything different now?

There’s plenty of boo hooey as well. Some illegal alien students complain that they have to take public transportation to classes. Others are so distraught by their employment situation that they are attending graduate school. [Well-educated and undocumented, By By Jessica Terrell, Orange County Register, December 8, 2008]

Maria is one of thousands of students in Orange County who have been able to attend college through AB 540, a California law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, rather than the higher fee charged to non-California residents. [...]

Undocumented students are ineligible for state or federal financial aid, but do get help under a policy that allows them to pay the same fees as California residents. For example, non-California residents pay an additional $20,608 a year at the University of California; up to $10,170 at the California State University: and up to $170 per unit at community colleges.

Since AB 540 was enacted in 2001, a growing number of undocumented students in California have been able to pursue college degrees. There are no statewide numbers on how many undocumented students receive help through the program or how much they receive.

While the bill has opened doors to some undocumented students, it has also created a big debate about the legality and merit of subsidizing education for illegal immigrants. And for students like Maria, who would not otherwise have been able to afford higher education, AB 540 has created a huge unanswered question: What happens after graduation?

Every year an estimated 50,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools. About five percent of those students continue on to college, according to Roberto Gonzales, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Washington, who conducted several studies about undocumented students in Southern California.

If it’s really true that “There are no statewide numbers on how many undocumented students receive help,” that fact indicates a serious problem of Sacramento’s lack of oversight, particularly given California’s $11.2 billion budget deficit. Assembly Member Chuck Devore put the price tag at $117 million annually on the tuition scheme when he proposed legislation to end it last January, so there must be some estimates of numbers at least.

Far from sniffly news articles about suffering student foreigners on the bus, the case brought by pro-sovereignty attorney Kris Kobach is moving forward in the courts after a successful round in September, where the California Court of Appeals found AB 540 to be in violation of federal law.

As Nicholas Stix remarked yesterday, following Ron Smith’s courageous Anti-Southern Poverty Law Center column:

Smith received mostly supportive letters from around the world, yet the four letters that the Sun published …were all from hostiles, two of whom—our old friend, Mark Potok, and Peter McCullough, a name new to me—work for the SPLC.

(Actually, I think McCullough is just a financial supporter.) In fairness to the Baltimore Sun, the outrage which publishing Smith’s heresy triggered must have been awesome: no wonder it is trying to make amends to the Left.

Mark Potok’s letter is worth inspecting for the quality of its reasoning.

There is none. All Potok does is assert that

What Mr. Smith declines to say is that Mr. Stix is a well-known white nationalist who recently prepared a lengthy introduction to an article, published by the National Policy Institute, that paints “a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America.”…

Many of Mr. Stix’s articles, which dwell heavily on what he sees as a huge wave of anti-white hate crime committed by black people, are archived at the VDARE Web site.

There is no explanation of what the National Policy Institute is, or why having articles archived on VDARE.com is such a sin.

This from the director of the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project”, - the SPLC, which makes a major project of swamping schools with brainwashing materials laughably entitled “Teaching Tolerance”.

In reality, Potok and his colleagues are hate-filled bigots interested only in repressing opposing views, not in understanding them - and certainly not in tolerating them.

(I see the National Policy Institute offers two free essays on the SPLC, which I have not read.)

Thanks to those who responded to my bleg and looked at the SPLC’s 2006 Form 990.

At October 31 2007 the SPLC had $193.5Mm in cash and securities. It had $20.2Mm in real estate (net of depreciation). Total liabilities were only $21Mm.

Clearly, at various times in its 37-year history, income has substantially exceeded expenditures. (In 2006, the SPLC reported total revenue of $44.7Mm and expenses of $29.9 Mm).

One wonders why the SPLC needs to own “Residential rental property”? And who lives in it? Net rental income was $4.5Mm, indicating the market value of the property was far above the depreciated book (which would be normal).

The five officers of the SPLC were paid an aggregate of $1,225,000 – including $326,825 to the appalling Morris Dees. The top five non-officer employees were paid an aggregate $714,035, including $138,707 for Mark Potok (who on this showing deserves a raise). Poor Heidi Beirich does not place.

Obviously the SPLC is extremely wealthy. From the point of view of practical philanthropy, it is not in need.

The biggest obvious puzzle is upon whom the 81.2% of the payroll not accounted for above (a matter of $8.34Mm) is spent? Total employees were 138 at year end. This implies the other 128 averaged $65,278. The SPLC does run a significant direct mail operation and reviewing the many small grants for the so-called “Teaching Tolerance” indoctrination program must be labor intensive, but surely mainly at the clerical level. The median income in Montgomery Alabama, the SPLC’s home, is $31,877 (male) and $25,014 (female).

The “Middle Management” of the SPLC must be an interesting group.

The hard-copy version of Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story Of Race And Inheritance”, available through the print-on-demand service Lulu, has been plagued by a dismaying series of technical glitches. Glitch # 6 has now allegedly been resolved. Go ahead and place your order! - and inform us of any more problems.

I haven’t managed to finish Malcolm Gladwell’s new #1 bestseller, Outliers, yet, because it’s so full of snarkworthy goodness. Here’s a taste from p. 80:

“What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play on that level, and all things being equal, it’s probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter. (Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player only has to be tall enough — and the same is true of intelligence.”

So that explains Yao Ming’s career! See, he’s at least 6′-6″ — so he’s over the NBA threshold … by 11 inches, granted, but once you are over the threshold, according to The New Yorker’s expert on everything, it doesn’t much matter how much taller you are than 6′-6.”

Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.

Barack Obama
Youtube address, 12/7/08

Help me out here. I’m a little lost on how having the federal government change all the lightbulbs in government buildings is going to massively stimulate the economy.

Don’t government agencies pay people to routinely change lightbulbs anyway? And don’t incandescent bulbs notoriously burn out in a year or so? And aren’t we constantly told by the Great and the Good that Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs will save us money (that was the justification given when Congress recently outlawed incandescent bulbs as of 2012). So, wouldn’t government agencies have changed anyway?

By the way, my impression of government offices is that they have been lit, overwhelmingly, by fluorescent light rather than incandescent light for many decades–cold, clammy-looking fluorescents have been considered good enough for government work lighting for my entire life.

Or is there some problem that was keeping the government from changing as a matter of course … like they don’t always fit in fixtures, and (perhaps less so in the last couple of years than earlier in the decade) they sometimes seem to burn out in very short periods, and that they are ugly and cast ugly light?

I think Obama should pledge to have all of his personal television and video appearances lit solely by Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs. And he should get all the Democratic movie stars in Hollywood to pledge that their next movies will be lit only by CFLs.

The efforts of the Obama team to get the perfect blend of diversity and consolation prizes in the cabinet has served to pick at least one old scab which many had forgotten, showing up in the anger of Chinese against Hispanic political gadfly Bill Richardson. Some Chinese residing in America are still miffed about what they consider his mishandling of the Wen Ho Lee spy case of a decade ago. Lee was acquitted, after squawking loud and long about the “racist” nature of the prosecution. The guy’s actions looked guilty as hell to me, but I have a suspicious nature.

For some Chinese residing in America, it’s their tribe uber alles, with the national security of this country taking a back seat to the interests of the global Chinese.

Anyway, there’s not much rainbow kumbaya in the recent episode, where angry Chinese are making unkind remarks about one of the Beltway’s top Hispanics.

In a move bound to create political tension between Latinos and Asian-Americans, a group of Chinese-American activists in Silicon Valley has launched a nationwide grass-roots movement to fight President-elect Barack Obama’s nomination today of Bill Richardson as commerce secretary.

The group is upset at the New Mexico governor for his handling of the nearly decade-old case of Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. U.S. officials once suspected Lee of giving nuclear secrets to China when Richardson was President Clinton’s energy secretary.

The Chinese-Americans say they realize that challenging the nomination of Richardson, 61, the nation’s most high-profile Hispanic politician, will ruffle the Latino community, many of whose leaders felt he should have been named secretary of state instead of Sen. Hillary Clinton.

But the Chinese-American group insists that Richardson’s refusal to acknowledge making serious errors in the case makes it a moral imperative to oppose his nomination to Obama’s Cabinet. They say their criticism of Richardson has nothing to do with him being Latino but everything to do with his lack of judgment in the case.

“This was the major Chinese-American civil rights case in the last 30 years,” said Albert Wang, a Fremont physician. “And there was a feeling among many Chinese-Americans, particularly in Silicon Valley, that Bill Richardson did a lot to promote the notion that all Chinese-Americans are potential spies.”
[Chinese-American activists oppose any Bill Richardson cabinet nomination, San Jose Mercury News, By Ken McLaughlin, Dec. 2, 2008]

The Wen Ho Lee case was a criminal spy prosecution and had nothing to do with civil rights. The loud complaints about racism served to distract from the merits of the case, and always made me more suspicious of the accused rather than sympathetic.

Let’s consider the facts about the real danger of spies from Red China. As Lou Dobbs Tonight has reported, there are more than 3000 front companies acting as agents for the PRC. Chinese immigration has brought spies like sleeper agent Chi Mak and Dongfan Chun, who noted that he spied out of love for his Red China homeland.

A 2007 article in the London Times noted that in the previous two years the FBI arrested nearly 30 Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans in spy cases involving US technology.

When national security expert Bill Gertz was asked in 2006 what country’s spy operations were the most dangerous for this nation, he answered, “By far, China’s intelligence services pose the greatest threat.” [Q&A: Bill Gertz Explains How America's Enemies Are Infiltrating Our Government, Human Events, Nov 16, 2006]

And while the US parcels out hand-slap sentences to the enemy spies, Red China doesn’t hesitate to mandate the ultimate punishment, e.g. the November execution of Wo Weihan, accused of spying for Taiwan.

For reasons so far unexplained, the Lulu.com service which manufactures Steve Sailer’s Obama book has obscured the usual method of placing a book order in the case of this particular item.

The solution (at present)

• On VDARE.com page http://www.vdare.com/half-blood_prince/ click on Buy $29.95.
• Click on “Preview This Book.”
• This gives you the chance to click on “Add to Cart”.

• Proceed to Checkout

Lulu wants you to create a free membership account, but after all so does Amazon.

Please buy!