After I reported yesterday that Bill Gates had given $1 million in 2001 to long-time Weatherman fugitive Rick Ayers (brother of President Obama’s extremely distant acquaintance Bill Ayers) to start “small learning communities” within Berkeley High to, among other things, take students to Cuba to study “social justice,” a reader who graduated from Berkeley High in the 1970s reported that the exact same idea had already been tried way back when the Ayers brothers were making bombs instead of agitating for “small schools.”

And it failed then in the 1970s, too, just as Gates has discoverd his couple of billion bucks he spent promoting the Ayers Bros. hobbyhorse has failed in the 2000s. From Time Magazine, April 10, 1972:

Now a few public schools are trying to create some alternatives of their own within the system, using wings of existing buildings, storefronts and lofts to house small subschools, each with a different educational emphasis. The intent is to break up the impersonal mob scene that many schools have become, and to give students choices—even if it sometimes means letting them choose racial separation.

… But the trend has gone farthest in Berkeley, Calif., which now has 18 such schools at all levels and plans to add six more next fall. … In 1968, Berkeley became the first city with more than 100,000 people to integrate its schools voluntarily by busing both whites and blacks (38% of the pupils ride to school). But Berkeley’s integration brought demands from minority groups for more attention to their particular learning problems and more emphasis on their cultures. At the same time, many of Berkeley’s middle-class white kids were in open rebellion against what they considered stultifying school rules and courses.

For both groups, “the melting pot never melted,” says Larry Wells, coordinator of the alternative schools. Instead of trying to submerge diversity, Berkeley is now trying to encourage it, replacing the image of a melting pot with that of a mosaic….

(more…)

The New York Times has now posted 142 responses to its blog The Nativists are Restless, Continued. The majority continue to be fine, well-reasoned statements of opposition to the NYT line. I was particularly taken with #129 (link) signed by David Seminara, “former immigration officer”

Yet another misleading piece on immigration by the Times. Several points the NYT’s obscures.
1. Providing a path to citizenship to the 12 million plus illegal immigrants currently in the country doesn’t bring a conclusion to the problem- it only opens the door for even wider scale immigration from the developing world. The average legal immigrant files 3 petitions for relatives back home to join them in the US, so once these 12 million have citizenship, they will file petitions for their spouses, children, parents, and siblings to join them here. So that 12 million will become 36 million in just a few years, and then that group will, in turn, file more petitions for their relatives. Its an endless cycle, the more you legalize here, the more you import from abroad….

3. The NYT’s makes it out as though the only options are amnesty- which has been tried before and did not work, but only served to encourage more illegal immigration, or the mass expulsion of 12 million people. The truth is that we don’t need mass expulsions- we simply need to enforce the workforce labor laws already on the books…. Over a period of several years, we can easily reduce the illegal population in half by attrition and stopping new arrivals.

4. Being a “nativist” and wanting to reduce immigration from its current unprecedented high levels are not one in the same.

Also #129 (link) from Charles Roland:

The NYT apparent stance on immigration is ignorant. The NYT continually harps on the extreme opposites in the illegal immigration emergency. According to the NYT, either you are a pro amnesty liberal or a nativists racist. As a left-leaning “liberal” I am against amnesty for illegal aliens and I feel that the boarders need strong protection. All illegals should be sent back and the practice of having anchor babies should be banned… I have never spoken with anyone born in this country who is for open boarders or total amnesty. I just can’t figure out where all these amnesty supporters are hiding. The NYT sure seems to know…. This is not the liberals vs. conservatives issue that the NYT and other big media makes it out to be. I would love to see the writer of this pro illegal alien article to live in or near one of the many neighborhoods overrun and devastated by illegal aliens.

The (quite infrequent) supporters of the NYT generally take a moral position: All who question mass immigration are evil, and native-born Americans have no right to influence immigration policy.

It has been a valuable thread.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

Sen. Gregg has now been formally announced as Obama’s choice for Secretary of Commerce. As I reported recently, Gregg is a hard-core supporter of H-1B. I also noted that McKinsey’s Diana Farrell, a promoter of offshoring, has also been appointed to the Obama administration. Enclosed below are several pieces on the details.

• Opinion: The Obama administration promotes outsourcing, By Ron Hira, EeTIMES, February 4, 2009
• H-1B, offshoring supporters get key Obama Administration posts Commerce nominee Judd Gregg believes H-1Bs help create jobs for U.S. workers, By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, February 3, 2009]
• Commerce Nominee Favors H1-B Visa Expansion By Roy Mark,eWEEK February 6, 2009

It is interesting to compare the Computerworld take on this situation with the Hira op-ed. Both note that the Gregg and Farrell appointments bode serious trouble for H-1B critics hoping that the Obama administration would bring Change. But Computerworld’s Pat Thibodeau sees Gregg as the bigger threat, while Professor Hira highlights Farrell.

I must say that Farrell may well end up just as harmful as Gregg, maybe even more so. Gregg is very open in his view that business interests must take priority. By contrast, Farrell, though clearly of the same school of thought, cloaks her writings in terms dear to the hearts of the Democratic Party–jobs training. Yes, offshoring of tech work produces some American victims, Farrell concedes, but that can be handled via job retraining programs.

This is exactly the pitch that got the first H-1B increase through in 1998. At the time, I and others (notably IEEE_USA, whith its excellent Misfortune 500 Web site) pointed out that many older (age 35+) highly-educated programmers and engineers could not get tech work despite the Dot-Com Boom. The industry claimed that this was due to a lack of up-to-date skills in those workers. In response, Congress imposed a user fee on H-1B employers, with the proceeds to go to retraining programs. I warned at the time that the skills issue was phony, just a pretext to replace the older workers by young H-1Bs, and that the retraining idea was thus a nonsolution: Given a choice between the older/more expensive American who has just learned the Java programming language, and a younger/cheaper American with newly-acquired Java skills–and an even cheaper young H-1B with Java–the 35-year-old American will not be chosen. Sadly, my analysis was later confirmed, both by a Dept. of Commerce study and a remarkably frank statement by Sun Microsystems to the press.

My point, then, is that Farrell speaks exactly the language that the Obama people want to hear, so she may actually be given more credence than Gregg, and thus present more of a problem to H-1B critics. But Gregg will be pernicious from the viewpoint of H-1B critics too, of course, and not just in advice he gives to the president. Under Gregg the DOC study I mentioned above may not have been undertaken in the first place. Or it may have been suppressed by DOC, as DOC did to its offshoring study during the Bush years; see here.

Gregg’s speech in the Cato video came right out of the industry lobbyists’ list of talking points. Among them is the notion that while there is some abuse in H-1B, “especially involving Indian-related companies and their basic flooding of the market in this area and then having people return to India with knowledge that they gained here…that can be corrected fairly easily with minor adjustments in the program.” By “minor adjustments” he means beefing up enforcement, and probably some cosmetic special rules for the Indian bodyshops. This strategy–blame the Indians–has long been employed not only by the industry but also by their allies in Congress. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of Silicon Valley, for example, actually ridiculed the Indian shops during a House Immigration Subcommittee hearing in 1998. All of this is designed to give the false impression that the big mainstream U.S. firms are using the H-1B and green card programs properly, and most importantly, to distract attention from the core issue in H-1B and employment-based green cards, which is the loopholes in the law.

I must say again that while emotionally I would like to see this young, inspiring president succeed, I’ve long predicted he would have a policy of Business As Usual on most major economic issues, and worse, he has a knack for symbolic gestures without substance. Every time I a remark of mine along these lines with “I hope I’m wrong,” Obama makes another move that shows I’m right.

Norm

Jonathan Rauch argues in the National Journal that Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment could have been considered “fundamentally antidemocratic.”

Suppose, at least for the time it takes to read the next several paragraphs, that the ousting of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was a political railroading. Suppose the intention, whether out of malice or opportunism or both, was to overturn the 2006 election. What, actually, would that have looked like? And how different would it have looked from what happened last week?

I think that Blagojevich is probably a crook, and so does everyone else, so the question may seem academic. But it’s not. Overturning an election is fundamentally antidemocratic and, in a democracy, potentially dangerous. When it needs to be done, the proceedings need to be objectively distinguishable from a railroading. In other words, the rules must be scrupulously fair. Otherwise, the process for removing corrupt politicians becomes, itself, indistinguishable from political corruption….

“Maybe one day it might happen to you,” Blagojevich warned the state senators. He called his removal “a dangerous precedent that could have an impact on governors in Illinois and governors in other states.”

[A Far From Unimpeachable Impeachment | Blagojevich's ouster was not a railroading, but it looked like one. by Jonathan Rauch Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009, via Volokh.com]

I already know what to think of this, because I thought about it during the Clinton impeachment. People, even conservatives, were arguing that it was wrong to impeach a president who had been “elected twice.”

Well, first of all, the only person who can be impeached is someone who’s been elected. No one ever tried to  impeach Harold Stassen, Pat Paulsen, or Strom Thurmond, because they were never elected president. Second, the only people who can impeach and remove the executive are the legislators, who are also elected. Third, a President (and to certain extent a Governor) is immune to other forms of legal action, so no one but the legislators can touch him. (Obviously Blago can be jailed by a federal prosecutor, and in fact it turns out to be easier to jail a Governor of Illinois than to impeach him.)

And finally, the only person who can replace an impeached Governor or President is the next in succession, usually a member of the same party who’s been elected specifically to for the purpose of filling out the term when the Chief Executive can’t. Vice-Presidents and Lieutenant-Governors don’t usually have much to do as long as the boss is still in office. So I’m not worried about the danger to democracy in Blagojevich’s impeachment, any more than I would have been if the Senate had voted to replace President Clinton with Vice President Gore.

Congressional candidate Rosanna Pulido isn’t exactly a dead ringer for Jefferson Smith, Jimmy Stewart’s character in Frank Capra’s 1939 classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Like Smith, Chicagoan Pulido has plenty of fire in her belly, but that’s where any similarity ends.  There is none of the naïveté shown by Smith early in the film as Pulido strives to sell her message of “common sense” to the residents of Illinois’ 5th Congressional District who, until recently, had been represented by Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff.  She is among 26  candidates vying for Emanuel’s seat in a March 3 primary.  A special election will be held April 7.

Born and raised in the district she hopes to represent, Pulido, who is of Mexican descent, is no stranger to the political maneuvering one encounters when it comes to major issues that have been dividing Americans for decades:  abortion (she’s pro-life) and the 2nd Amendment (she favors gun ownership).  She ’s also been active in the areas of veterans care and seniors issues, and she opposes same sex marriage.

“I’m not beholden to either party,” says Pulido, who is running on the GOP ticket. She said she preferred to run as an independent, but the Chicago Democratic Machine has made it difficult to stray from the two-party system.  Pulido says in Chicago  independent candidates must gather 1,700 signatures on their petitions compared with the 319 signatures she needed.

“I’ve done all my own leg work and used my own money,” Pulido says. ”I’m not afraid to knock on doors. My job is to give the voters what they want - the truth.”

The one issue that has put Pulido in the public eye is her tireless effort to educate Illinoisans about the illegal immigration crisis in her state.  She was among the first of the Minutemen to visit this country’s border with Mexico in April 2005 and is founder of the Illinois Minuteman Project.  She’s also the Chicago representative for “You Don’t Speak for Me,” a national organization of Hispanic-Americans opposed to illegal immigration.

“Don’t get me started,” she says on her web site. “Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. It hurts American workers and legal immigrants. It hurts the taxpayers of Illinois to the tune of 3.5 BILLION dollars a year. We must give American workers a break and demand that every business uses E-Verify which allows businesses to check if their potential employee is legal to work in the United States.”

Political campaigns, especially those carried out in freezing temperatures and on shoestring budgets, require great stamina and a sense of humor to deal with the unexpected.  In Pulido’s case, the unexpected came from Joshua Hoyt, Illinois’ leading anarchist and apologist for illegal aliens, who late last month challenged most of the signatures Pulido had submitted and calling her
a “bitter personal failure” and a “cynical bully.” Hoyt also talked out of the other side of his mouth when he noted in his challenge  that “we are a nation of laws.”

However, the Cook County Clerk’s Office Feb. 5 ruled in favor of Pulido.

“We are just glad that the democratic process prevailed, providing more choice for voters,” Pulido says.  “We look forward to running a strong, common sense campaign for the people of the 5th District.”

From the LA Times on the octuplets mother:

In 1999, she was injured during a riot at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk when she was hit in the back with a desk. She went on temporary disability and was paid nearly $170,000 in disability benefits between 2000 and 2008 for injuries to her back, neck and shoulder, the records show.

What kind of hospital has a riot? Oh, that kind …

The LA Times doesn’t explain, but Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, founded in 1915, is an old-fashioned 162 acre sanitarium for mental patients. So, Octomom was locked up for being crazy back in 1999 before she had any of her 14 kids.

Is there a policy issue here or are we just dealing with anomalous insanity? Perhaps. I think we’re seeing an extreme case of the reaction to pre-War eugenics in action here.

Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. has been relentlessly castigated for decades for opining in the 1927 case Bell v. Buck upholding a forced sterilization that “Three generations of morons were enough.” That was a classic Progressive-era busybody view.

In reaction, we’ve moved very far in the opposite direction. A couple I once knew wanted to have their extremely retarded daughter (non-speaking, non-toilet trained) sterilized so she wouldn’t get pregnant if some predator thought that the perfect rape victim would be a woman who couldn’t testify in court. The state wouldn’t allow it because the ACLU had sued over it.

Octomom appears quite capable of doing it again — she’s only 33 — but I haven’t heard any “respectable” calls for sterilizing her against her will (although plenty of ordinary citizens have called for it in Internet comment sections). It would be just so eugenicy, so Oliver Wendell Holmesy for anybody to even think of doing such a thing.

It’s an extreme case, and I don’t have an opinion on what the law should be, but it does provide a measure of the zeitgeist.

(For my opinions on eugenics, see here and here.

According to The Hill website, Michael Steele and his hand-picked team of perpetual losers are about to stage a massacre at the Republican National Committee:

RNC shakeup as Steele asks for resignations
By Reid Wilson
Posted: 02/05/09 10:28 PM [ET]

Top staffers at the Republican National Committee were told to submit their resignations today, with some being told they will not get their jobs back in what insiders call a top-to-bottom review of the entire organization…one RNC staffer who had to turn in a resignation letter today… quipped: “It is starting to feel like the Steele-your-job administration.”

This is going to be an acid test for Steele, because it turns out he is widely viewed as the candidate of a patronage-motivated clique. J.Peter Friere noted at The American Spectator blog the “rumor” that

Steele is the Consultant Candidate. His campaign, for instance, is being run by Blaise Hazelwood, former political director of the RNC, wife of Dan Hazelwood, one of the biggest voter contact mail vendors. During Bush’s term she steered nearly all RNC business to a very small cadre of firms.

What’s the Deal with Steele? AMSPECBLOG 1.29.09

(Friere also shreds Steel’s claims to be a Conservative. David Duke has collected some damning quotes too.)

But before attention shifts to watching if Steele behaves like a typical black politician with access to spoils, let us consider why Steele won, and why it is a disaster.

Steele won because a group of conservative RNC members were naïve enough to trust another Black, Ohio’s Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. When it became clear Blackwell could not win, according to The Washington Times:

Supporters of Mr. Blackwell, considered the most reliable social and religious conservative among the five contenders for chairman of the 168-member RNC, were stunned and in some cases angry that he endorsed his fellow African-American, Mr. Steele, after dropping out of the contest.

Religious conservatives constitute a bloc of about a quarter of the RNC membership…Some conservative state party chairmen had thought the logical choice for Mr. Blackwell was to endorse South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson, seen as the other leading conservative contender for national chairman.

Steele reassures GOP’s right flank Ralph Z. Hollow Sunday February 1 2009

(This is a strong contender for Most Misleading Headline of the Year.)

Why, after the humiliating Colin Powell betrayal, would experienced Republicans think a black would put principle before race? Or an Hispanic, for that matter? The only group that does that are Founding Stock Americans.

Those are not the people the Steele crowd care about. The Washington Times burbled on:

Mr. Steele’s election…marks the unequivocal end of Mr. Nixon’s domestic “Southern strategy” for an “emerging Republican majority,” as it was called at the time.

That strategy subtly appealed to growing antagonisms over forced busing, job quotas and the perception of reverse discrimination. It helped establish an image of the Republican Party in the minds of most black Americans as not friendly to their interests.

Some Republicans now say that era is decisively over…

Establishing the Republican Party in the minds of most white Americans as not friendly to their interests (and Affirmative Action America is a zero sum game) will mean low turnouts and losses in areas the GOP has no business losing. – for no gains elsewhere. It will be a disaster.

As Robert Reich and Charles Rangel have already gloated, the Obama Administration is about taking from whites and giving to minorities. The sort of flagrant injustices shamefully permitted under Bush will multiply. That is what Obama has been thinking about his entire life (Read Steve Sailer’s book!).

Whites will notice. They are likely also to notice Michael Steele Republicans don’t want to know.