The Bush-Obama Administration has pledged billions of dollars to build a “virtual fence” of sensors on the Mexican border to notify the Border Patrol when and where illegal aliens cross it. As a commenter suggested, if the ungrateful public turns out to be unmollified by that, the Bush-Obama Administration would no doubt be willing to consider making the invisible fence twice as tall.

Seriously, why not use satellites with infrared cameras? Sure, they don’t work in cloudy weather, but how much cloudy weather do you see on the Arizona-Mexico border?

A reader writes:

I was looking at a globe today as I dusted. If a satellite orbits over 32 to 35 degrees latitude, it flies over the Mexican border and also Iran, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. . . Do you suppose we have any satellites flying there?

A NY Daily News article by Richard Henry Lee looks over the Obama family’s tax returns. In brief, the First Family’s personal financial master plan in the 1996-2004 era resembles the business plan of the Underwear Gnomes on South Park. The Obama thinking appears to have been:

1. Borrow against home equity and consume.
2.
3. Get rich!

But, hey, it worked.

Lee writes:

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama’s book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate.

(more…)

In “Through Boom and Bust: Minorities, Immigration, and Homeownership,” The Pew Hispanic Center has run an interesting (but not terribly well specified) multiple regression analysis of foreclosure rates by county. The reports says, “foreclosure statistics by race, ethnicity or nativity are currently not available. However, the relationship between demography and foreclosure activity at the county level is discerned in this report through the marriage of different sources of data.”

Here are the last two paragraphs of the Pew report:

Of the several demographic attributes included in the analysis, the immigrant share of the county population is the one that emerges as the most important correlate with the foreclosure rate. And within the immigrant population, the share of foreign-born Latinos stands out as a more notable influence than the share of non-Hispanic immigrants (Appendix Table A5). This may mean exactly what it appears to be—the foreclosure rate among the immigrant population, especially immigrant Latinos, is higher than average.

(more…)

An article in the North County Times, serving San Diego County, (ESCONDIDO: Maher supports licenses for illegal immigrants, by Edward Sifuentes, May 11, 2009), is mostly about the feckless police chief in Escondido, CA, Jim Maher, urging that illegal aliens in California be allowed driver’s licenses.

Maher is supporting the latest attempt by state Senator Gilbert ["One-Bill Gil"] Cedillo (D - Los Angeles) to enact such legislation.

Cedillo’s driver’s licenses bills (always SB 60, in one legislative session after another) have passed in several previous legislative sessions, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, rare exceptions to the guv’s own adamant fecklessness. Apparently Cedillo would now settle for restricted licenses for his illegal-alien constituency:

The licenses for people who cannot prove that they are in the country legally would look different from the regular licenses, and they cannot be used for anything else than driving.

Near the article’s conclusion, it gives the American Civil Liberties Union’s take on the Cedillo bill. Surprisingly, the ACLU is on the same side as the forces of immigration-sanity. But not because the ACLU is against driver’s licenses for illegal aliens:

[Cedillo's bill] is opposed by several anti-illegal immigration groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, which says that the bill could lead to discrimination and racial profiling because the licenses for illegal immigrants would look different.

In a March 2002 City Journal article (The Racial Profiling Myth Debunked), Heather Mac Donald reported an experiment proving that, in traffic stops for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, black drivers weren’t being racially profiled. (The proof was statistical, but given the numbers of drivers involved, the results were definitive.)

Seven years later, the ACLU is evidently worried that racial profiling will involve not just drivers’ physical appearances but also cops’ intuition for the particular kinds of driver’s licenses to be found hidden away within wallets inside drivers’ pockets or purses!

I haven’t been able to independently corroborate this bit of dementia at the websites of the ACLU’s Southern California or Northern California chapters (readers are invited to nose around!). So I’m relying on the North County Times’s Sifuentes. But it is, after all, the ACLU: Why would we be skeptical?

I don’t like to mix my political and financial journalism - because the former usually causes diversity-loving liberals to try to get me fired from the latter - but Market Watch today has a column by me today discussing an idea I first proposed in Forbes years ago, which turned out to be my most unpopular article ever: that congressional salaries are very low by historic standards, and that congressmen should be paid the capitalized value of all benefits and staff costs in one lump sum at the beginning of each term.

I think (among other things) that this would attract more normal people, instead of the vain, power-hungry oddities you get in politics today. But most readers just can’t get past the idea of paying politicians more.

With the stunning courage (and intellectual integrity) which is his trademark The Kvetcher picked right up on our Kevin MacDonald piece last night about the Hate Crime Bill:

Jews and the Hate Crimes Bills

There are allegations coming from Dr. Kevin MacDonald that Jews, specifically the ADL, are the instrumental players in pushing these horrible Hate Crimes bills through Congress.

I don’t know the exact magnitude of the “defense” Jewish community’s exact role, but I have to admit, it seems massive, just as it was on immigration. I also can tell you anecdotally that my own views on Hate Crimes law — a strangely egalitarian idea that all unprovoked crimes should be viewed harshly–have proven quite unpopular in my discussions with the “affiliated,” from the Havurah crowd to the Modern Orthodox crowd, who want special punishment for targeting “minorities.

Is this mentality influenced by Jewish law, which is inherently unfair, in that it differentiates in punishment between Jew and gentile, the latter receiving harsher punishment for breaking Noachide Law?

(All but the first VDARE.com supplied links.)

These interesting reflections drew some illuminating responses, several relishing the prospect of expanded social controls. The Kvetcher was unflinching in his opposition:

themicah wrote,
If we consider crimes motivated by hatred more heinous than crimes with other motivations, why not dole out harsher punishments accordingly?

Because Hate Crimes determine that according to whether the victim is of a protected minority or not. It makes one person’s blood sweeter than another’s.

A Daniel come to judgment!