The New York Times produces a story about federally commissioned studies into voter fraud and manages not to mention the most egregious voting fraud in America: aliens, illegal and otherwise, voting in American elections. [Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud By Ian Urbina April 11, 2007] The Timesman could have asked “B-1 Bob” Dornan how he lost his once-safe Orange County, California seat to an agent-of-influence of Mexico, Loretta Sanchez. However, at the Times one does not ask questions when one knows one will not like the answer.

The Times is more interested in how two researchers, with the All-American names of Job Serebrov and Tova Wang, purported to find less evidence of voter fraud than the Bush Administration was expecting. The conclusion, bolstered by quotes from Democrats with names like Serrano and Martinez, is presumably that in Post-America no hay ningún problema in the elections department.

What really caught my eye, though, was this:

In a speech last April, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, told a group of Republican lawyers that election integrity issues were an “enormous and growing” problem.

“We’re, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” Mr. Rove said. “I mean, it’s a real problem.” [Emphasis added]

If that is what Rove, who is half of Bush’s brain (isn’t Condo-icantspellit Rice the other?), really thinks, then why on earth are he and the man he advises so Hell-bent on importing the populations of just those kinds of countries? Especially when Rove’s statement – assuming it isn’t just a smart-ass wisecrack - makes it crystal-clear that he knows what repopulating America with the Third World – especially Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians and, increasingly, black Africans – is already doing to the American polity.

This amnesty and “guest”-worker mongering isn’t just negligence or typical wishful liberal thinking. Karl Rove knows what his boss’s pet project will do to America, yet he continues to push for it. Traitor is the only word that fits. As it is for the un-Prodigal Son in the Oval Office – only more so.

Has NRO’s Thomas E. Nugent been reading VDare.com? If so, bully for him and good start. But he needs to read more�

In this column, Mr. Nugent talks tough about how to solve America’s illegal alien crisis. He puts a lot of the blame right where it belongs: (i) on the criminally negligent, lazy and corrupt Mexican establishment that does nothing to address the many social problems of what should be a fairly prosperous country, and (ii) on the timid or (although Nugent doesn’t say this) bought-off American politicians who will not criticize the aforementioned Mexicans for their misdeeds. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, though, while Tom Nugent has a reasonable - although incomplete - diagnosis, he proposes to solve the problem by acting like � well, Mexicans. Nugent says America needs to give Mexico an incentive to clean up its shabby national act:

[W]e should � be willing to offer some financial incentives that will get the Mexican government to take action. Whether that action is the creation of more job opportunities in Mexico, the establishment of new educational facilities for younger Mexicans who are trying to make a life for their families, or simply the implementation of a larger social safety net that squelches the impulse toward exodus, U.S. politicians should make every effort to give the Mexican government a good reason to act. .[ Our Illegal-Immigrant Problem Isn't Terminal | A recent film instructs on how to fix it. By Thomas E. Nugent February 22, 2007]

Sounds like Mr. Nugent proposes to get the Mexicans’ minds right by bribing them. But isn’t that just how Mexico’s very own mordida works in practice, with results with which we are all drearily familiar?

America cannot solve America’s Mexico problem by acting like Mexico. America can only solve America’s Mexico problem by having a border between the United States and Mexico, for starters.

As is usual when establishment conservatives address immigration, they cannot or will not look at the whole problem. Mr. Nugent writes as if the illegal alien invasion of America were only a Mexican problem. Ah, if only that were true� Buying the Mexicans a welfare state is not going to keep the next Mohammed Atta out of the United States.

And, of course, Tom Nugent [send him mail] says not a word about the flood tide of legal immigration, our national transformation through federal policy that has only increased under NRO’s beloved Bush administration despite the blindingly obvious dangers (see reference to “Atta” above). Unless we sharply restrict and strictly control legal immigration - including the huge portion of it from Mexico - all the bribes in the world to keep Mexicans from coming to America illegally will be beside the point.

Perhaps, though, Tom Nugent cannot bring himself to think about restricting legal immigration. If this line is any indication, Mr. Nugent is a paid-up subscriber to the “Nation of Immigrants” fable:

We are, in a way, a country of Victor Navorskys. If we want Victor to go back home, or not be forced to come here in the first place, we must do all we can to get his homeland in order.

Victor Navorsky is the fictional protagonist of Stephen Spielberg’s movie Terminal, about a foreigner stuck in stateless no-man’s-land at Kennedy Airport. So, is America nothing more than a catchpool for the economically discontented of all the world? Also, just how are Mexicans being forced to come to America illegally?

Mr. Nugent really does need to keep reading VDare.com�

Supreme Court Accepts Second-Class Religious Status for Christianity

VDare.com readers who follow our War Against Christmas Competition may remember that I wrote about the case of Andrea Skoros v. City of New York last December. Mrs. Skoros, after failing to get the attention of New York City Department of Education bureaucrats, finally took the city and the Dept. of Ed’s chancellor, former Clinton Administration lawyer Joel Klein, to federal court. Mrs. Skoros’s complaint is that the Dept. of Ed’s policy that permits “holiday” display of Menorahs and Moslem moons and stars while forbidding Christian nativity scenes or cr�ches of any sort violates the Establishment Clause (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof) of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which the Supreme Court applies against the states through its incorporation doctrine of the 14th Amendment. Assuming the incorporation doctrine is good law (which all federal courts do although that is a very dubious proposition), Mrs. Skoros is surely right.

Unfortunately, being right on the law is no guarantee that our federal courts will vindicate a citizen’s rights - they prefer putting Border Patrolmen in jail for doing their jobs. After a U.S. District Judge found against her, [Decision in PDF ] and a divided Second Circuit appeals panel upheld the district judge’s ruling,[PDF ] Mrs. Skoros petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her case.

That the Supreme Court has now declined to do. [Denial of Certiorari PDF ] This is very bad news on several levels. On the technically legal level, the Court had a good, one might say Heaven-sent, opportunity to resolve a split among the federal appeals courts, that legally irksome state when different circuits reach different conclusions about constitutional issues. Most constitutional lawyers would argue that resolving such splits is a primary Supreme Court function. While a federal appeals judge on the Third Circuit, now-Justice Samuel Alito participated in a ruling that display of a nativity scene on government property did not violate the Establishment Clause. The Second Circuit’s Skoros decision is clearly in conflict with the Third Circuit’s interpretation. Evidently, even with President Bush’s new appointees on the Court, and Sandra Day O’Connor mercifully gone (is it mere happenstance that stripping the Cross from William and Mary’s Wren Chapel coincides with her arrival in Williamsburg?), ruling that Christianity is a faith on a par with Judaism and Islam in America is too hot an issue for the Supreme Court to take on.

And that is the really bad news, transcending legalisms. In the post-Constitutional republic we live in, the Supreme Court has succeeded (often with the collusion of responsibility-ducking Congressmen) in making itself the final arbiter of social issues in America. Just on the face of it, in denying certiorari to Andrea Skoros the Court seems to be saying that it has no opinion or is neutral on the questions she raises. In effect, though, by upholding the Second Circuit decision, which accepted most of the NYC Dept. of Ed’s specious excuses for discriminating openly against Christianity, the Supreme Court has tacitly ratified them.

So now promoting pluralism through multicultural holiday displays is a valid excuse for banishing the symbols of the nation’s founding, traditional and still majority faith, Christianity, while featuring those of a minority faith, Judaism, and an upstart religion in America, Islam. NYC’s Dept. of Ed, America’s largest school district, is clearly engaged in multicultural propaganda and programming of the unfortunate children entrusted to its care, and that is no problem for our Supreme Court.

How can one avoid the conclusion that a majority of the justices are sympathetic to this anti-Christian farrago of deconstruction? I and others had hoped that justices such as Scalia, Thomas and Alito would want to tackle these issues. If they did, they were outvoted by the Court’s militant secularists.

And so piece-by-piece the abolition of America, the dismantling of the country our colonial ancestors founded, that their descendants and so many immigrants who followed them built into a great nation, proceeds apace.

It was probably na�ve to think that today’s Supreme Court would acknowledge that the Christian religion is an essential element of our national life, and has been since long before independence. But it should not have been too much to ask the Court to check this ACLU-style abuse of the faith and good will of New York City’s Christians.

Their refusal to do so means that the Dept. of Ed’s anti-Christianity policy will now become an acceptable standard for any school district that wants to drive any mention of the Christian faith out of its schools - and we are all the poorer for it.