Jeremiah Wright, Pastor to the President, is back. Accuracy In Media writes

“A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S.

In an article in the socialist Monthly Review, “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle,” McChesney declared, “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”[Controversial New Video of Obama’s Pastor, By Cliff Kincaid, November 1, 2009 ]

Wright was speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. Videos below:
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Over at Taki’s Magazine, my new Wednesday column gets around, after last week’s preliminary throat clearings, to finally telling you what I think of the TV serial Mad Men:

Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better!

Read it there, and comment upon it here.

Lots of stories and speculations are circulating about India’s crackdown on business visas. In many cases H-1B activists are incorrectly concluding that this is an example of India’s restrictive policies on employment visas, and then drawing parallels to our generous H-1B program. A closer examination of India’s nonimmigrant visa programs indicates that the current issue has more to do with illegal immigration of Chinese into India.

The controversy in India began when violence broke out between Chinese contractors working in India (more…)

The dogs that haven’t barked for the last six months have been the Obama Youth, who turned out in large numbers for him in 2008. If you can trust the exit polls (which you can’t, but what else do we have to go upon?), in the two gubernatorial races tonight, both won by Republicans in states Obama carried in 2008, the under-30 share of the vote fell to about half what it was last year.

New Jersey
2008: 18-29 year olds cast 17% of votes, 67% for Obama
2009: 18-29 year olds cast 9% of votes, 57% for Corzine

2008: 73% white, 49% for Obama
2009: 73% white, 34% for Corzine

Virginia
2008: 18-29 year olds cast 21% of votes, 60% for Obama
2009: 18-29 year olds cast 10% of votes, 44% for Deeds

2008: 70% white, 39% for Obama
2009: 78% white, 32% for Deeds

Would Obama have had more legislative success if he’d kept the Kids interested by first emphasizing Saving the World through carbon capping instead of something boring and unsexy and will-never-happen-to-me like health care?

Or are young people always bored with day to day politics?

Or was Obama just a fad, like how my generation decided in 1982-83 that Men at Work was the greatest band in history?

From Slate:

What Ever Happened to the Amazon Rain Forest?
Did we save it or what?
By Brendan Borrell

We used to hear so much about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but lately not a word. So what happened—did we save it or not?

We didn’t save it, but we haven’t stopped trying. Environmentalists fret over the fate of the Amazon for good reason: It contains more than half of the planet’s remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world’s biodiversity. Saving all this was once a rallying cry for green activists, and a few early triumphs made that goal seem likely. But attention soon shifted away from the rainforest to issues like climate change and organic agriculture, and now the Amazon is disappearing at about the same rate it was in the 1980s.

They should have, like, Retro-Environmentalism, where everybody watches old Captain Planet episodes.

From the Associated Press:

Maine voters repealed a state law Tuesday that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed, dealing the gay rights movement a heartbreaking [no bias here!] defeat in New England, the corner of the country most supportive of gay marriage.

Gay marriage has now lost in every single state - 31 in all - in which it has been put to a popular vote. Gay-rights activists had hoped to buck that trend in Maine - known for its moderate, independent-minded electorate - and mounted an energetic, well-financed campaign.

Yet, you know we’re going to end up with gay marriage anyway, no matter what the voters wan

Tammerlin Drummond [Email her] has a column in the Contra Costa Times, in which she admits that the victim in the Richmond,CA gang rape is white, and then asks “What’s race got to do with it?“ [November 1, 2009] Race has everything to do with it, in cases like this. Ms. Drummond ought to know–she’s been writing about race on the LA Times, Time Magazine, and other magazines since she did an article on Barack Obama as the affirmative action head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. A picture of Tammerlin Drummond appears at right.

(Thanks to reader Roger Chaillet for sending this in.)

A Texas health clinic told a Muslim immigrant doctor that she couldn’t wear her hijab on the job because of a “no hat” policy, then immediately surrendered based on a letter from CAIR. I don’t understand why a health clinic has a “no hat” policy in the first place. Left, Dr Hena Zaki, right, the glamorous Julie London, as Nurse Dixie McCall, wearing a hat.

Texas clinic: Headscarf ban was misunderstanding

ANABELLE GARAY
Associated Press
November 2, 2009
DALLAS (AP) - A Texas health clinic operator said it regrets telling a Muslim doctor applying for a job that she couldn’t wear her traditional headscarf and will clarify its policy regarding religious accommodations for employees.

Dr. Hena Zaki has said she was shocked when CareNow officials told her last month in person and later by e-mail that a no-hat policy extended to her headscarf, also called a hijab.

Coppell-based CareNow, which has nearly two dozen minor emergency clinics in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, called the headscarf ban a misunderstanding and said it plans to train workers to prevent confusion in the future.

“We look forward to sitting down with Dr. Zaki and discussing potential job opportunities. Bright, young doctors like her are just what we’re looking for,” CareNow President Tim Miller said in a statement released on Saturday.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to CareNow, explaining federal law requires employers to reasonably accommodate religious practices of an employee.[More]

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