It’s Independence Day, which John Adams said should be celebrated with “solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations.” The amazing thing is that he said this on July 3, 1776, just after they`d voted for the Declaration. He had faith that Independence would be achieved, and that it would be celebrated “from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward for ever. “

He went on

“You will think me transported with enthusiasm ; but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, blood, and treasure, that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States; yet through all the gloom I can see rays of light and glory ; I can see that the end is worth more than all the means; that posterity will triumph, although you and I may rue, which I hope we shall not.”

He lived to see the United States gain its independence, and died fifty years to the day on which the Declaration was proclaimed, the same day Thomas Jefferson died. If you’re stuck indoors, with no time for pomp, parade, and firecrackers, you can read my roundup from last year Independence Day—”Pomp, Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, And Illuminations “—But Not Immigration, and scroll down to the bottom for more Independence Day punditry. And if you see the Wall Street Journal reprint  any version of its In Praise of Huddled Masses editorial, let me know.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

BusinessWeek was originally going to do a piece on the various players in the H-1B reform movement, but decided to focus on me instead. The article is here: An Academic’s Labor Helps Fight H-1B Visas | Norm Matloff, a computer science professor with a Chinese-born wife, says the U.S. skilled-immigrant visa system exploits workers everywhere, By Moira Herbst, BusinessWeek, June 28, 2009.

Of course, I do have some comments.

As are most advocates on immigration issues, Matloff is a controversial figure. He’s admired by supporters–including activists on H-1B visa issues–but criticized by other academics who don’t share his views and who chafe at his often-abrasive rhetorical style. Critics also suggest there could be a xenophobic undertone implicit in his critique of the H-1B visa program. Matloff posts opinionated blog entries on the Web site of Numbers USA, a group calling for lower levels of immigration. His writing prompted one tech worker, Arthur Hu of Bothell, Wash., to create a Web page criticizing Matloff, whom he calls the “Hatchet Man of Asian Immigration.”

Some of the reader comments on this article take BusinessWeek to task for giving a voice to “Kevin, the IT Grunt,” who is obviously some fringe guy on the H-1B issue. I might say the same for Arthur Hu. With hundreds of millions of Web users, there is likely to be one that rants against any topic under the sun, and it happens that one of Arthur’s topics is me. That’s fine, but some readers of the article may mistakenly take this to mean that Asian-Americans agree with him on the H-1B issue, which they don’t. Every time I’m invited to speak to an Asian-American conference, such as the Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy at Harvard and the Asian-American Out of the Silence Conference at Stanford, I get solid support from the audiences. This should be no surprise–with so many Asian-Americans in engineering, H-1B puts their jobs at risk. My support from my own students, two-thirds of whom are Asian-American (not Asian foreign students), is also quite strong. I’m proud to say that they’ve nominated me for various teaching awards, some of which I’ve been fortunate to win.

(more…)

First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh writes

Anti-Defamation League Regional Director Asserts That “Freedom of Speech Does Not Extend to Racist Groups”:

That’s the view of Alan Potash, the ADL’s regional director for Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. Pretty appalling, it seems to me — simply false as a statement of current free speech law (which it sounds like it is), and deeply misguided as a matter of what the law should be.

And in the wake of attempts to condemn Israeli policies as racist, it should be pretty clear to American Jews that such a position could easily be turned around them. After all, any university administration that takes the view that Israeli actions towards the Palestinians are racist could easily conclude that defenders of those actions are racist as well, and therefore suspended or driven off campus. Or how about Orthodox Jews (and perhaps quite a few other Jews as well) who believe that homosexuality is against God’s will? Once “racist groups” lose their free speech rights, it’s hard to see why “homophobic groups” wouldn’t equally lose them.[More]

Volokh ends his post by hoping that the “national ADL promptly condemns Mr. Potash’s statements.” Seeing as how the National ADL is in the middle of a campaign for the hate crimes bill, this seems unlikely.

This is from Doug Ross @ Journal, quoting a woman named “Suzanne” who was on Mark Levin’s show

I want to tell you that last week I attended a conference on health care reform sponsored by La Raza. And I will tell you that what they had to say, Mark, is scarier than anything that’s been said so far on the health care plan.

The kind of comments that were made and the notes that I took… they started the conference out by saying “America does not need health care reform, but Latino immigrants need health care reform.”

And someone from Menendez’ office [Ed.: Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ] promised that he would make sure that “the useless barriers of citizenship would not be in this bill” and that he would make sure that they would use keywords like “streamline”…

It was La Raza, the Childrens Defense Fund and Senator Menendez from New Jersey, a representative from his office…

…Yes [they said they would get free health care for illegal aliens], these are my notes, Mark. They actually got up and said “Latino children need health care more than whites“. And then they would say things like “you must go out into your communities, use words like ’streamline’, use phrases like ‘all workers’ and ‘all families’,” because they said — and I quote — “If the American people find out that this bill is about giving health care to non-citizens, they will rise up against it.”

…One of the quotes they said was, “We want to make sure we take care of barriers like verification, but we can streamline programs to the more affluent” and, quote, “Useless treatments for the elderly can be gone because we don’t need to spend money for people who are going to die anyway.”[More]

That’s going to be a popular idea–we need to let elderly Americans die so we can spend money on illegal immigrants. If any of you are wondering if it’s possible Suzanne is making this up, and no one could have possibly said anything so frank and unguarded at a a La Raza conference, then you need to read CCIR’s Greatest Hits: The Reconquista Rant Audio Clips, and listen to the audio clips. It’s amazing what people will say when they know the MSM won’t hold it against them.

From Overlawyered.com:

Springfield, Mass.: The parents’ suit charges that the chain wrongfully sent Corey Lind out to deliver pizza to dangerous and unknown addresses; he was ambushed and murdered in 2007. Noteworthy angle:

According to the suit, prior to 2000 Domino’s had a policy of not making or of limiting deliveries to certain areas.

As a result of discrimination claims against the company, the federal Department of Justice investigated the policy. The result was an agreement between the government and Domino’s establishing procedures Domino’s could use to limit or stop deliveries to certain areas based on safety.

The suit said that Domino’s required all stores to implement a Limited Delivery Service Policy which, among other things, would evaluate each store’s delivery and service area and provide for the safety of delivery workers.[Parents of murdered delivery man Corey Lind sue Domino's Pizza for $15 million, By Buffy Spencer, MassLive.com, June 17, 2009 ]

Another case of “Civil Rights Law Doesn’t Care If You Die”–the Justice Department insisted that Domino’s deliver to dangerous areas where their drivers could be robbed and killed because in the nature of things, such areas are largely black and Hispanic areas. (Lind was killed by a man named Alex Morales.)Also a case of  “Disparate Impact.” Now Domino’s is being sued, in effect, for following the Justice Department’s diktat. (more…)

Via Ann Althouse, Slate has a piece that says

As black, white, and Hispanic firefighters in New Haven brace for the Supreme Court’s decision, they’re keeping their heads down and doing their jobs. But they’re also tired and apprehensive. Almost no matter what the court decides, the ruling will mean more hard feelings and strife. No one we talked to can really imagine a way to resolve fairly who will get the promotions—which have been frozen now for six years. In this city at this moment, it’s hard to imagine what fair would possibly look like.

No, it’s not. Fair means promoting the people who passed the tests. It’s not the fault of the white guys (and one Hispanic)  who passed the test that no black firefighters passed it. Nor is it the fault of the people who devised the test. It’s the fault of the people who didn’t pass. I’ve written repeatedly that “The message of Griggs and “disparate impact” theory: if minorities fail tests at a higher rate than whites, it’s the test that’s wrong.” But of course it isn’t.

There’s a saying, popular with members of Alcoholics Anonymous, that “Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.” Kipling, following  Proverbs 26:11, preferred “That the Dog returns to his Vomit,” which refers to the habit of some dogs of trying to re-eat something they couldn’t keep down in the first place.

As an example of this kind of behavior,  two stories highlight the fact that the Obama administration is still trying to get bankers to lend more money to minorities–minorities who by definition aren’t credit-worthy, or the bankers would want to lend to them. (Japanese-Americans, by contrast, have little difficulty getting mortgages.) Hans Bader writes at Examiner.com that

Obama backs corrupt status quo in financial rules overhaul

The mortgage crisis was caused largely by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates. But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie and Freddie, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.” Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort pay-offs from banks.

(Fannie Mae engaged in massive fraud and political bullying to thwart reform. It and Freddie Mac lost so much money gambling on the housing market that they were taken over by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which took them over in the name of ending their risky practices, but instead actually increased their purchases of risky mortgage loans in an effort to artificially prop up the housing market. Obama made Freddie Mac lose $30 billion more after the takeover in order to write off mortgage loans to delinquent mortgage borrowers.)[More]

In the American Spectator, Matthew Vadum writes

Financial Affirmative Action Returns

We need more bureaucrats to strong-arm banks into doing the stupid things that got America and the rest of the world into this colossal financial mess in the first place, argues the Obama administration.

Well, the administration didn’t use those words exactly, but in the interests of greater governmental transparency maybe it should have.

That’s because there is no doubt that the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and other boneheaded government policies helped to create the subprime mortgage bubble that violently burst and that continues to wreak havoc on the world’s financial markets. CRA allowed activists to blackmail lenders into handing out mortgages to people with little regard for their ability to keep up payments.

Yet the Obama administration is now demanding that the bank-killing CRA, which in practice has been used to emphasize a largely race-based version of financial so-called social justice at the expense of sound banking practices, be strengthened.

The administration laid out its counterintuitive position in the Treasury Department’s new white paper, “Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation,” which calls for the creation of a new super-duper-regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

My American Spectator colleague Joseph Lawler, who has his own doubts about the destructive power of the CRA, has a delightfully simple way of summing up the problems with the law:

“[T]he CRA was either potentially harmful or useless. Does it make sense to include provisions for expanding a harmful or useless measure in a regulatory overhaul?“[More]

So while  the government’s push for minority lending has brought down the world financial system, the Obama administration wants to do it again, because they’re still worried about racism in the mortgage industry. It’s like what Talleyrand said about the French royal family after the Revolution was over:“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

“Four masked men with rifles and handguns,” probably from someplace in South America, rushed into a Denny’s in Albuquerque in an armed robbery. They shot and killed a teenage girl. What for? How much money could they expect to get from even a high-traffic Denny’s?

At least 2 more sought in fatal Denny’s shooting Police arrested two suspects within minutes of Albuquerque incident, AP, June 21, 2009

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — Police on Sunday were searching for at least two more suspects they believe killed a teenage worker during a robbery at a packed Denny’s and committed 10 more armed robberies in Albuquerque this past year.

Two suspects were arrested within minutes of the crime Saturday on suspicion of murder, kidnapping, robbery and child abuse because there were at least five children in the restaurant, Albuquerque Police Officer Nadine Hamby said.

Hamby said the men who were arrested are in their late 20s to early 30s and are from South America, but she did not know where specifically. She said police were working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to verify the men’s identities.

Hamby said at least four masked men with rifles and handguns rushed into the northwest Albuquerque Denny’s around 9:30 a.m. Saturday and demanded money.

A teenage female employee was fatally shot during the robbery. Police have not yet identified her. [More]

People who forwarded this are appalled at the murder of a Sikh convenience store clerk in Gary, Indiana, in an armed robbery, and also appalled at the behavior of the customers:

June 16, 2009
Store Clerk Murdered; Customers Keep Shopping
Reporting
Pamela Jones
GARY, Ind. (CBS) –

A 26-year-old convenience store clerk was shot and killed in broad daylight in Gary, Ind., and police say witnesses stood by and did nothing. CBS 2’s Pamela Jones reports there are critical clues that may help crack the case.

Police say one of the four men caught on surveillance video bursting into the clerk’s booth at the convenience store was about to commit murder. The video shows a man in red run up an aisle and kick in the door to the booth. Within seconds, the clerk, Gurjeet Singh, was shot in the neck.

“It was senseless. And really all homicides are senseless but what we gather from this, there was very little resistance,” said Gary Police Department Commander Anthony Titus. “It didn’t have to end the way it did.”

But Titus says what’s even more senseless is the apparent inaction of bystanders standing near the front door almost the whole time.

Police say there were several customers walking around the store after the crime. But only one called 911 for help.

When asked what he finds most disturbing about the surveillance footage, Titus said, “The fact that people went in and out of the store and didn’t call police. There is a man laying there. Nobody thinks to dial 911 or check to see if he’s OK or anything.”

I’m still appalled at the reporting. The video shows that the suspects were all black. (So is Commander Titus and Pamela Jones, the reporter.) Probably the callous shoppers were black, too. But here’s how the robbers are described in the story:

Investigators say two suspects were dressed in black shirts, like one man on the tape who looks to be holding a gun. The other two had red shirts. Police think they were driving a burgundy compact car.

The only thing you can gather from this is the presumption that everyone in Gary, Indiana is black, so they don’t have to say. In fact, Gary is about 84 percent black. This is partly due to the closure of the steel mills, partly due to white flight. As a result, parts of Gary look like a ghost town. And police, as is usual in these cases, aren’t getting a lot of cooperation from “the local community.”

Police want to talk to people who saw the four men at the mini-mart on 15th and Grant just before 5:20 p.m. Sunday.

At a news conference on Wednesday, community organizers demanded Gary police offer a reward for information about the case. They said the people of Gary needed financial incentive to come forward.

Right.  But the other point is that this looks like a classic hate crime. Three men of one race burst into a store and shoot  a man of another race dead. Meanwhile, people apparently of the same race as the shooter ignore the crime, don’t call the police, don’t render first aid, won’t cooperate with the investigation, and continue shopping. The hatred of African-Americans for convenience store owners is well known, and there’s even been “hate rhetoric” about it, not only from rappers like Ice Cube, but from Andrew Young, who was Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the UN.

So where are the headlines? Where are the calls for new laws for the prevention of rap music and editorials blaming  Andrew Young? Don’t hold your breath.

Clayton Cramer describes this as being like “a really bad Monty Python skit”

He writes

The British police were given sweeping new powers to deal with terrorism a while back–including the ability to stop people in certain designated areas without probable cause for search. The problem was that because the left runs British policing, they apparently decided that it would be unfair to disproportionately stop people based on racial profiling.

Of course, the impetus for this was the London Bombings, which were committed by UK-born Muslims who looked like Muslims. But the police aren’t concentrating  on anyone who looks like he might  commit terrorism:

Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’

• Watchdog says officers misuse terror law
• Home secretary to issue new guidance

Alan Travis, The Guardian, June 172009
Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-­terrorism powers – simply to ­provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government’s official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had “ample anecdotal evidence” of it happening, adding that such a practice was “totally wrong” and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

“I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice,” he said. “But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches.”

He said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism..

..
Examples of poor use of section 44 abounded. “I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest ­possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop.”

He later said that while the police should not discriminate racially, it was equally important that they should not balance the statistics.
“If, for example, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near any intelligence-led terrorism profile, it’s a gross invasion of the civil liberties of those 50 blonde women. [More]