ABC News reports:

The California woman who gave birth to octuplets on Monday, although once married, apparently had all 14 of her kids out of wedlock by artificial means–and various public records raise questions about the family’s ability to support them.

ABC News has learned through San Bernardino Superior Court Records that the 33-year-old California woman, whose name is Nadya Doud or Nadya Suleman (she filed to have her name changed to Nadya Suleman in 2001–though it was not clear if the request was granted), divorced her husband, Marcos Gutierrez, in January 2008.

Okay, “Doud” is both a British name (e.g., Ike’s mother-in-law) and an Arab name. Since her father says he used to be an Iraqi military man and that he was born in Iraq, I’m assuming that it’s Arab. The grandfather is very Iraqi-looking.

Suleman is a Middle Eastern name–King Solomon, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, tennis player Harold Solomon.

Gutierrez is a Hispanic name.

Whittier, where Angela lives with her parents, is now the suburb of choice in the LA area for affluent Mexican-Americans.
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James Q. Wilson writes in City Journal on The DNA of Politics: Genes shape our beliefs, our values, and even our votes (the picture is of Polish president Lech Kaczyński, right, and former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczyński, who are identical twins):

Children differ, as any parent of two or more knows. Some babies sleep through the night, others are always awake; some are calm, others are fussy; some walk at an early age, others after a long wait. Scientists have proved that genes are responsible for these early differences. But people assume that as children get older and spend more time under their parents’ influence, the effect of genes declines. They are wrong.

Identical twins tend to get more dissimilar looking as they age due to random wear and tear and a desire to assert one’s individuality (e.g., the Kaczyńskis style their hair differently). But they often get more similar in behavior as they spend less time together. For example, say one identical twin is at the 92nd percentile in dominance / leadership while the other one is at the 90th percentile. Growing up together, the second twin will tend to see himself as having a subordinate personality, but when they stop spending all their time together, he will start to realize that other people tend to defer to him and expect him to lead. (Robert A. Heinlein’s novel “Time for the Stars“ provides a detailed example of this in action.) (more…)

The New York Times frontpages a long and peculiar story on the Kenyan election a year ago: Secrecy Surrounds Kenyan Election Poll. As you’ll recall, controversy over the vote-counting ended with a 1000 people getting killed before a powersharing agreement in which the Kikuyu president gave the Luo tribe’s paladin, Raila Odinga, the #2 job in the government.

The main point of interest to Americans in this whole story is, of course, that President Obama is half-Luo. Indeed, Odinga claimed during the fighting he launched, after one of Obama’s calls to him, that Obama is his first cousin (which is dubious). But the New York Times never mentions the words “Luo” or “Obama” in the entire 1900-word article!

I suspect this is the beginning of a trend. We’ll continue to hear more and more about the inner workings of Kenyan politics without ever being told why they are so important, kind of like how the New York Times devotes more coverage to Israel than to Mexico, without explaining why Israel is more interesting than the country next door.

This octuplets story really puts the capstone on the Bush years. It’s beyond the powers of parody. It’s got everything that made the Bush Years the Bush Years: Iraqis, immigrants, illegitimacy, and insolvency.

The hospital is claiming it expects to spend $3.2 million on care for the eight babies.

By the way, here’s my 2006 article on the LA illegal immigrant woman with six kids who had fertility treatments, but she only then had quadruplets, so she’s a piker compared to this lady.

From the LA Times:

The family of octuplets born in Southern California this week has a history of financial problems, including a bankruptcy, tax liens and a foreclosure, according to court records.

The 33-year-old Whittier woman, who has not been publicly identified, gave birth to the octuplets at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower on Monday and already has six young children, including a set of twins, said her mother, Angela Suleman.

She lives with her parents in a 1,550-square-foot home in Whittier, where television trucks and camera crew continued to roam the quiet cul-de-sac Friday. This afternoon, the children’s grandfather returned to the home with four toddlers and did not speak to the throng of media, other than to ask for privacy.

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Tedious Day-job considerations have kept me from noticing The Kvetcher’s valiant anti Muslim immigration posting on the mainstream Jewish website Jewlicious. I understand this was the first immigration/dissident voice raised on this site. (Applaud Jewlicious)

The Kvetcher’s point was derived fromthe Geert Wilders atrocity. He inferred that when Muslim immigration into America reaches critical mass, similar repression can be expected here:

we can risk our own demise, both our domestic position, and Israel’s favored status in the U.S., by welcoming millions of Muslim immigrants with strong and vastly different and conflicting P.O.V.s (VDARE.com: Point of Views) than our own. But why?

The Jewlicious comment thread rapidly degenerated to a brutal brawl, with quite a bit of Muslim participation. But a couple of important remarks were posted by “Ephraim”:

a lot of the people in the forefront of the fight against the Islamazoids in Europe are European atavists with strong Nazi, fascist, and racist tendencies. However, they seem to be the only people who have the sense to see the danger that the Islam poses to the West.

(and much later in the thread:

• the plain fact of the matter is that where the rubber meets the road, only the European nativists are sticking up for Europe and “European values”. I put that in quotes because I’m sure that there are various definitions. For now, let us accept that they are what Wilders says they are: dedication to an open, tolerant, secular, pluralist society. With this charge against Wilders, it is clear that for whatever reason, there is a strong strain in Holland that is determined to quash any discussion of the issues Wilders raises. So much for pluralism and tolerance.

I expect a racial/religious war to erupt in the not-too-distant future [VDARE.com: in Europe], and I believe it will be very bad. I hope the jews have the sense to leave before that happens.

(P.C.: Sometimes, in the dark of the night, one longs for a world where reasonable people could agree.)

What about the rest of us?

PS Showing what can only be described as a VDARE.com spirit, The Kvetcher has started a False Holocaust Memoir Competition.

DK - we have refuges!

From my time as a journalism student and newspaper reporter, I can vouch for Peter Gadiel’s description of the “corporate gypsies” who populate the profession. Working for small-town newspapers was seen as a way to get “real” experience until you worked your way up to bigger papers — and, for the lucky, talented (or black) few, The New York Times. In other words, suffer these patriotic hicks for a while, then get out of town.

A few years back (and maybe still), unknowns (i.e., people who hadn’t won Pulitzers or gone to Yale) had to apply through an African-American woman named Sheila Rule to beg for a job at the Times.

Needless to say, Ms. Rule’s rule probably didn’t help white applicants much.

I share some of Mr. Gadiel’s happiness about the death of newspapers. Yes, they are evil, and they are supreme sinners on the topic of immigration. What I find amusing is that the open borders they champion are likely hastening their death: immigrants don’t read newspapers, and if they do, it’s one in their native language.

The profile of your average newspaper reader today is probably old and white — and much less liberal than the producers of the product. Thanks in part to the Sex in the City attitude the papers promote, new whites aren’t replacing old whites. There is something particularly delicious about newspapers’ own hatreds helping to bring them down.

Even the Washington Times (Vdare.com readers will recall it fired Sam Francis), which I understand to be a big money-loser, is slipping further into irrelevance with the hiring as editor of a weasel named John Solomon who’s said to be enforcing political correctness in coverage.

But I can’t be completely enthusiastic about the death of newspapers. Atrocious politics aside, newspapers are a great joy to me, and a part of what made the once-great America great. The written word, carefully crafted, is a high point in a civilization. As we descend into Third World madness (ever notice how newspaper boxes aren’t found in ghettos, and increasingly, suburbs?), we’re losing that.

The Internet is great. But somehow, it doesn’t replace the warmth of a newspaper, big town or little town. I should point out that there some fundamentally conservative things about newspapers: they (can) hold officials accountable, tell of local sports, deaths, births and marriages, bounce around the latest controversy, and, horror of horrors, enforce community norms. And the thing’s on paper. Unlike fleeting ones and zeroes on our screens, it’s got some tangibility.

The death of newspapers is a part of the death of America. On a personal level, that’s painful to me, because I’m forced to watch whites being sharply shoved aside to make room for the sprawling Idiocracy our country is literally becoming. I put newspaper death in the same category as “Press One for English,” a president whose preacher damns America, illegal alien gatherings at 7-11, the “diversity recession” and all the rest.

So while the thought of America-hating journalists out of work makes me smile, the bigger picture is a little sadder.

From a New York Times story, “The Great Gay Hope,” on the latest Portland, Oregon mayor who can’t keep his hands off the teenage help:

Portland is The City That Works, a slogan not just emblazoned on official vehicles, but taken to heart by its citizens. It is perhaps the most European of American cities, literate and small-scale urban, a pleasant surprise around every corner. And it is often a city of firsts, doing things well and sensibly before any other.

Could Portland being the most European of American cities have anything to do with it being, by far, the most European-American of cities?

Nah, it’s got to be just a coincidence.

In his article (Democrat Says Ramos and Compean Commutation Not Good Enough - And Immigration Reform Patriots Must Co-operate) of January 22, 2009, VDARE contributor Donald Collins mostly agreed with Antelope Valley Minutemen founder Frank Jorge regarding the pending commutation of sentences for railroaded Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean. But then Collins admonished Jorge:

However, you go on in your email, to finger the new President as a “Marxist” and a possible illegal alien. As a Democrat who supported Ramos and Compean, I find this hard to take.

My first reaction: What does supporting Ramos and Compean have to do with one’s views about the new President? Do most Democrats prefer that Ramos and Compean stay railroaded?

My second reaction: Let’s review the public record on Obama.

He certainly talks like a Marxist. Perhaps Don Collins is unaware, as so many of our fellow citizens are unaware, of voluminous material that came out during the campaign — in late October — but that the in-the-tank mainstream press wouldn’t touch. (Recall that when Joseph ["Joe the Plumber"] Wurzelbacher got Obama’s mask to slip just a bit during a campaign stop in Ohio, the press went all out investigating Wurzelbacher, leaving Obama as pristinely unexamined as before.)

The biggest smoking howitzer was Obama, on the radio, in 2001, as discussed by Bill Whittle. Here’s the key part of the transcript, reproduced by Whittle:

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

Whittle didn’t make that up. I’ve heard the recorded conversation myself, as anyone can. It’s Obama talking. And there’s a lot of additional explication in Whittle’s article, linked above. (The recording of the full ~50-minute radio program on Chicago’s station WBEZ on January 18, 2001 can be heard here. So if you’re worried that the YouTube clip is missing important context — it’s not — go to about the 70% point of the full recording to hear the smoking howitzer. Or listen to the whole, revealing program from its start.)

Regarding Obama’s status, I, too, find it far-fetched that he was born in Kenya, considering all the difficulties that would have been involved with third-world travel in 1961. But if he’s legitimate, why didn’t he simply release his claimed Hawaiian birth records to prove it and end the hassle, for surely he was aware of the controversy? The natural conclusion, employing Occam’s razor, is that he is, indeed, an illegal alien, or otherwise ineligible to be President.

Neither Jorge nor Collins referred to Obama’s Muslim background, but I might as well go for the trifecta. The important thing is that, as Daniel Pipes writes in Barack Obama’s Muslim Childhood, Obama was a Muslim as a child. And he has lied about it. This is really incontrovertible.

As an adult, he joined that infamous Christian church in Chicago, but judging from Obama’s denials that he ever heard Pastor Wright say the things that Wright so flagrantly said, it’s hard to credit Obama with really being of that church. His is, we can conclude, a Christianity of political convenience.

And Pipes had another article, Obama Would Fail Security Clearance, showing that Obama wouldn’t ordinarily qualify for a security clearance. A President obviously needs clearances at the highest level, and the issuing agencies will have to wink at all their rules to give this President such clearances.

I don’t mean in any of what’s above to suggest the slightest enthusiasm or respect for John McCain. I could vote for neither of these two horrors our system served up.

I predict, however, that many who voted for Obama will wind up wishing, as a matter of pride and guilt, that they hadn’t.

A reader forwarded me this story from the New York Times by Kirk Semple:

During her one term in the House of Representatives, from a largely rural, traditionally Republican district, Kirsten E. Gillibrand was on safe political ground adopting a tough stance against illegal immigration.

Ms. Gillibrand, a Democrat, opposed any sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants, supported deputizing local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws, spoke out against Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses and sought to make English the official language of the United States.

But since her appointment by Gov. David A. Paterson last week to fill the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ms. Gillibrand has found herself besieged by immigrant advocates and Democratic colleagues who have cast her as out of step with a majority of the state, with its big cities and sprawling immigrant enclaves.[Gillibrand’s Immigration Views Draw Fire, January 27, 2009]

Ms. Gillibrand is hardly an immigration restriction fire breather. Her House votes are somewhat more restrictive than the average congressmen. However, her appointment does mark a clear move towards greater sanity compared to Hillary Clinton.

What I see this appointment as marking, is the difference between a political regime that is on its way up vs. one that has arrived. On their way up, many black politicians have had to cater to monied interests who are pro-immigration. However, now that Paterson is Governor, he can afford to cater more to the interests of his core constituency–who are working people in places like Harlem.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, I say Al Sharpton on CSPAN getting questioned by some of his constituents on the topic of immigration. The issue was simple: jobs. All the campaign donations in the world won’t assure Patterson re-election if he can’t deliver jobs for the kinds of folks likely to volunteer for his campaign–or the if black press were to seriously turn against him.

There is no reason other than sentimentality for the Democratic party to show particular loyalty to the Kennedy clan just because Joe Kennedy bought a bunch of politicians back in the FDR era. The immigration policy Teddy and his family supported has been an utter disaster for almost all Americans except the very rich.

I personally applaud Patterson’s sensible appointment and look forward to more from him in the future.

Robert Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator:

“There is a passage in Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation where a foreign-born friend talks about the difficulty of bringing over his mother, and Brimelow advises: “Just get her a tourist visa and let her overstay.” It’s very practical advice. The enforcement mechanism is broken and, even if La Migra came for Mum, the appeals process can delay deportation almost infinitely. It’s easier to break the law than to obey it. “

That’s not quite correct, The Other McCain is quoting from memory. On Page 81 of Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow wrote:

Some country queues are astonishingly long. Applicants now receiving permission to enter the United States have waited in some cases for as long as sixteen years.

Obviously, from these countries, no skilled would-be immigrant without family connections need apply.

But even immigrants who do apply with family connections have trouble, because of those country queues. Talking about immigration on David Newman’s KXYT Detroit-area radio show, I once had the heart-rending experience of a call from an elderly European widow in great distress because she couldn’t bring her sister, also widowed and her only family in the world, to America to live with her. How could this possibly be, when the borders plainly were out of control?

Ever since, I have regretted that I flinched from saying on air what I believe immigration lawyers say in private: bring her in as a tourist and overstay, no one will do any thing. It’s the Great American Immigration Paradox again—the law is enforced against those who obey the law.