In his May 28, 2009 Washington Post op-ed, How the Golden State Got Tarnished, the lovable and appealing (see his mugshot at the linked article) Harold Meyerson explains to the world California’s 30-year march to budget ruin: It’s all due to those troglodyte Republicans — “abetted by little local Limbaughs who inflame Republican brains” –- and their vendetta against the poor, starting with 1978’s Proposition 13 that instantly slashed property taxes and, equally significantly, slowed their galloping increase.

Meyerson used to be executive editor of the L. A. Weekly and thus should be at least dimly aware of how mass illegal immigration has pummeled California, budget-wise. But there’s no hint of that in his op-ed.

Of course Meyerson’s reticence on the subject really isn’t surprising. His Wikipedia entry makes it clear that he was the West Coast equivalent of a red diaper baby and it focuses attention on some election commentary by Meyerson last September:

[T]he GOP’s last best hope remains identity politics. In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. [See Peter Brimelow's comments at the end of this article. -– PN] Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem. This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power.

So problems with immigration wouldn’t find much purchase in Meyerson’s thinking process, such as it is. (more…)

Things were hopping in Aloha, Oregon, a southwest suburb of Portland, on Memorial Day:

For most folks it’s not a dilemma. Given a choice between “a day without sunshine” and a day without jail time, most people will skip the orange juice and stay out of jail.

But Raibin Raof Osman isn’t most people. The 20-year-old Aloha man had a sleep-over at the Washington County Jail on Memorial Day after calling 9-1-1 to complain that McDonald’s left out a box of orange juice from his drive-thru order.

Osman was booked Monday night on accusations of improper use of 9-1-1. He bailed out Tuesday. The offense is a Class B misdemeanor punishable in Oregon by up to six months in jail and a fine of $2,500.

(Aloha man calls 9-1-1 over botched fast-food order by John Snell, The Oregonian, Wednesday May 27, 2009)

Despite his farcical use of 9-1-1, I’ll guess that Osman could have avoided the slammer if he hadn’t tried to argue civics with the sheriff’s deputy who showed up. (See the article for point-counterpoint details.) Law enforcement’s exasperation is evident in a quote from sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. David Thompson:

“The deputy basically said, ‘You can’t use 9-1-1 for that reason,’” Thompson explained. “It’s not an emergency. (Osman) said he didn’t know how to get the non-emergency number. The guy had a Blackberry. He could have dialed 4-1-1 or got it off the Internet. There are payphones all over the parking lot, with phonebooks hanging from them.”

This has something to do with immigration? Well, yes. The article makes clear that at least some in Osman’s family aren’t native speakers of English, and a glance at Osman’s winning mug shot accompanying the article reinforces this.

But to get the picture of immigrant versus immigrant, you need to listen to the audio clip of the 9-1-1 call, available with the linked article. By this I really mean both 9-1-1 calls, there in the one clip: Osman’s call is followed by a call from McDonald’s employee Helen Velasquez, whose English is fluent but with the sing-songy rhythm and intonation characteristic of native Spanish-speakers.

The 9-1-1 dispatcher had to have Osman spell his last name several times. Not so with Velasquez, who didn’t have to spell hers at all. Oregon dispatchers apparently get lots of practice with Hispanic names, which won’t surprise our friends at Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

Velasquez saw fit to dial 9-1-1 after about a half hour’s harassment from Osman and crew, which would seem to take the edge off her call’s emergency status. She stoutly denied to the 9-1-1 dispatcher that there had been any food larceny on McDonald’s part.

Evidently, then, the missing orange juice isn’t a slam-dunk fact, so l’affaire Osman-Velasquez boils down to another case of he-said/she-said. But a reader named “withoutpity” admirably summarized the larger significance of the dispute with an online comment on 05/27/09 at 4:28 p.m.:

The Democratic party should be welcoming Osman with open arms. He passed the first vital test which is that all issues in life require governmental intervention.

VDARE’s Brenda Walker has frequently cited the work of Prof. Lawrence Harrison (Tufts University) on the relationship between culture and prosperity. See the chart here for an especially useful example.

Harrison repaired to the ivory tower after a career in the foreign-aid trenches in Mesoamerica. The Publishers Weekly blurb about Harrison’s 1993 book Who Prospers: How Cultural Values Shape Economic And Political Success starts out:

Why do some nations and ethnic groups prosper while others stagnate? Harrison, a former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, finds the answer in a culture’s values. In his diagnosis, Brazil’s hard-working, family-oriented European and Japanese immigrants spurred that nation’s dynamic growth, whereas Mexico’s economic disaster and failure to build solid democratic institutions are due to its “Hispanic value system” promoting passivity, mistrust of outsiders and an overemphasis on family.

Presumably spurred by what he saw during his years in Latin America, Harrison also has an enduring concern with mass immigration from points south. Colleague and admirer of the late Samuel Huntington, Harrison has proselytized for Huntington’s concept that preserving a livable American future depends upon our retention of “Anglo-Protestant values.” (At a conference I attended a few years ago, Harrison categorized himself as “an Anglo-Protestant Jew”!)

Although “Anglo-Protestant values” doesn’t explicitly appear in it, such concerns clearly undergird What will America stand for in 2050? The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants, an op-ed Harrison has today, 5/28/2009, at the (now online-only) Christian Science Monitor.

Harrison minces no words:

Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.

The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.

Importantly for the forces of immigration sanity, Harrison mentions that he comes from the Democratic side, having been an early supporter of Wonderboy and, now, being an enthusiast about Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. This is important because, in this op-ed, Harrison is saying these stern and sensible things in a fairly prominent forum as a Democrat.

He also writes,

The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.

“Self-declaration of status for Medicaid”! No wonder the American middle class would happily throttle most of our political class and the “helping professions” bureaucrats whom they hire to–very compassionately–disburse the taxes we pay.

Further,

[T]he same traditional values that lie behind Latin America’s difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.

[snip]

Latin America’s cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language’s growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America …

Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for “compromise” (compromiso means “commitment”) nor for “accountability,” a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts “I dropped (broke, forgot) something” into “it got dropped” (”broken,” “forgotten”).

Harrison says, straightforwardly, that our decisions about legal immigration must take into account “past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.” And he closes with a few policy recommendations, the second of which [italicized below by me] is a new one and a good one:

We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish-language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.

Of course, this concedes that immigration will continue. But why should it?

I’ve just read Mark Levin’s current book Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, whose publication fortuitously coincided with the advent of Wonderboy’s reign. Levin, a lawyer who worked in the rarefied heights of the Reagan administration, hosts a syndicated, weeknight radio talk show based in New York and, until recently, wrote for National Review Online.

It’s a solid book, a call for a return to the principles, now called “conservative,” of the American Founding. And it’s a sustained argument against the internal enemies of the nation’s future, those who call themselves “Progressives” — an appellation that’s always stuck in my craw — and whom Levin refers to as “Statists” throughout.

The book’s ten chapters have titles such as “On Prudence and Progress,” “On Faith and the Founding,” “On Federalism,” and “On the Welfare State.” I hadn’t known this when ordering the book, but there’s also a chapter (#9) “On Immigration.” Indeed, at about 8,000 words, it’s the third-longest chapter.

Upon reaching Chapter Nine, I embarked on it with some trepidation, thinking “When dealing with immigration, bigshots — even conservative ones — always indulge themselves in cliches, bungle rudimentary facts, and think everything is hunky-dory with immigration except for illegal entries at the border.”

I was dead wrong. Levin does such a superb job on the subject that if you want to give someone an up-to-date, concentrated primer about our immigration-insanity, something that will take them 30 to 45 minutes to read, copy the 28 pages of Chapter Nine and present them with that.

In his afterword to the paperback edition of Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow wrote:

I also had a simple test that I applied to every review: did it discuss the 1965 Immigration Act? Or did it instead just burble on about the glories of immigration in principle, missing Alien Nation’s key point—that the operations of [the] 1965 Act in practice have resulted in an influx far larger, less skilled and far more dominated by a few Third World sources than anything envisaged at the time. In other words, even if you want a million immigrants a year—and the American people overwhelmingly do not—why this particular million? [italics in original]

Early in the chapter Levin passes the Brimelow test with flying colors, laying out the core disaster (chain migration) of the Hart-Celler Act (even spelling those legislators’ names correctly!) and summarizing its consequence:

The historical basis for making immigration decisions was radically altered. The emphasis would no longer be on the preservation of American society and the consent of the governed; now aliens themselves would decide who comes to the United States through family reunification.

In fact, Levin passes test after test. Birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens? No way, says Levin, pointing out the salient fact that “Native Americans who were also subject to tribal jurisdiction” weren’t made citizens by the 14th Amendment. (See here for how all American Indians became U.S. citizens.) The importance of a common language? Levin provides pertinent quotes from St. Augustine and from the all-seeing Alexis de Tocqueville and adds his own to-the-point commentary.

It’s worth quoting one especially grand paragraph from late in the chapter on immigration:

For the Conservative, to say that America is a nation of immigrants and no more is to conflate society with immigration and treat them as equivalents. They are not. Immigration can contribute to the well-being of society, but it can also contribute to its demise. The social contract is a compact between and among Americans, not Americans and the world’s citizens. The American government governs by the consent of its citizens, not the consent of aliens and their governments. Moreover, American citizens are not interchangeable with all other citizens, American culture is not interchangeable with all other cultures, and the American government is not interchangeable with all other governments. The purpose of immigration policies must be to preserve and improve the American society.

The book’s Epilogue, “A Conservative Manifesto,” includes policy prescriptions on all of the chapter topics. Levin has three prescriptions for immigration, which I’ll summarize as:

1. End chain immigration;

2. Enforce all the immigration laws; and

3. End multiculturalism and bilingualism in public institutions; promote assimilation, including making English the official national language.

Do I have any criticisms of the book? Not on immigration, but, as an environmentalist, I think Chapter Eight, “On Enviro-Statism,” — the book’s second-longest chapter — is glib, and I think Levin, like many conservatives, has effectively forgotten that “conservative” and “conservation” are words with a common root.

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?

In one of Joe Guzzardi’s two columns on 3/27/09, he raised the familiar subject of “illegal alien” as a technically correct term that the delicate souls of the no-borders lobby can’t abide. Joe cited Title 8, Section 1325 ["8 USC 1325"] of the U.S. Code as an example of where “illegal alien” appears in official government documents.

However, 8 USC 1325 doesn’t actually use “illegal alien.” Nevertheless, a search of the entire U.S Code at the Cornell University Law School’s website yields 59 hits. So “illegal alien” is certainly there, copiously, within the Code.

Here’s one example, with the disputed-by-the-ninnies phrase italicized throughout:

Title 8, Section 1365. Reimbursement of States for costs of incarcerating illegal aliens and certain Cuban nationals

(a) Reimbursement of States
Subject to the amounts provided in advance in appropriation Acts, the Attorney General shall reimburse a State for the costs incurred by the State for the imprisonment of any illegal alien or Cuban national who is convicted of a felony by such State.
(b) Illegal aliens convicted of a felony
An illegal alien referred to in subsection (a) of this section is any alien who is any alien convicted of a felony who is in the United States unlawfully and—
(1) whose most recent entry into the United States was without inspection, or
(2) whose most recent admission to the United States was as a nonimmigrant and—
(A) whose period of authorized stay as a nonimmigrant expired, or
(B) whose unlawful status was known to the Government,
before the date of the commission of the crime for which the alien is convicted.

[I omit parts c, d, and e of 8 USC 1365.]

Links to most of the immigration-related sections of the U.S. Code, along with some commentary, are at this page of the Montanans for Immigration Law Enforcement website.

I’m not being sarcastic. Figuring that I would just sample the first few minutes of this video that Hal Netkin has archived at his very eclectic website, I wound up watching the whole thing.

The original was a serial of shorter, interrelated videos broadcast by ABC TV. We see interesting cases, apparently captured Candid Camera style, at two of our border crossings with Canada and several crossings on the southern border, along with enforcement activities in the desert between crossings.

With that lead-in, I’d like to express my admiration for Mr. Netkin. Hal is a retired electrical engineer who used his technical inventiveness to publicize and fight illegal immigration in many creative ways while residing in the San Fernando Valley. He moved to Sierra Vista, AZ several years ago because of the worsening climate in southern California, including explicit threats to his family.

You can sample Hal’s immigration-sanity resume by checking out — besides his website — VDARE items by or about him linked here.

Two of his specific areas of expertise are E-Verify and the Mexican matricula consular cards. For awhile, at least, Hal was the primary procurer of counterfeit matriculas for those of us who wanted to get them for illustrative purposes, since he knew the ropes of dealing with the counterfeiters hanging out in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park area. And his primer on the cards, besides being informative, is also quite amusing.

In his recent column Don’t Let Harry Reid Rent Space In Your Head! [January 30, 2007], VDARE.com editor and stalwart — and my good friend! — Joe Guzzardi wrote:

Reid has proven repeatedly that he can’t count votes. If he could, none of the proposed 2006 and 2007 amnesties would ever have come to the floor. All were soundly defeated—a total embarrassment to the Democrats.

Of course, we all hope Joe’s main prognostications in his article are dead on, but his paragraph above is not quite right, and it’s important. In fact, S.2611 — best described as comprehensive amnesty, with all the trimmings — handily passed the Senate on May 25, 2006. The country was saved, literally, by the House Republicans, who simply refused to take up the Senate-passed bill.

Instead, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), in his finest hour, organized a series of hearings by House committees around the country, including even one in Montana, to gauge public sentiment. Presumably Hastert knew what they would find, since that year he’d attained personal clarity:

Every state is a border state, and every town is a border town. I’ve just returned from a very informative trip to the southern border, but everywhere I travel around this country, illegal immigration is a top concern. It’s a top concern among Americans because they want our southern and northern borders to be secure.

After the round of hearings ended in late summer, we heard no more about S.2611. Because the Republicans controlled the House, the country was allowed to live (at least for awhile). But those same Republicans were too timid to actually campaign on their country-saving feat in the mid-term elections that fall and, thus, lost their majority, to the wonderment and disgust of many.

The Republicans’ fecklessness at this potential hinge-point in our national life was the subject of some memorable posts by writer Lawrence Auster, including this post, wherein he despaired:

Through all of 2006 I urged the House Republicans as strongly as I could from this tiny perch to publicize their opposition to the Senate immigration bill, S. 2611. They had heroically stopped the bill cold in the House, refusing even to go into a House-Senate conference, an almost unprecedented act of defiance. But they did not inform the voters that they had done this. In fact, they seemed ashamed of having done it. In a classic example of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory, they allowed the media to spin the story as, “Do-Nothing Congress Fails to Pass Immigration Reform,” instead of as, “House Republicans Stand like a Stone Wall against the Worst Bill in American History.”

Back to S.2611: The bill’s proponents (McCain, Kennedy, Martinez, Reid, and Specter being primary traitors) first had to invoke cloture, to end debate. That takes 60 votes, and they won 73 - 25. Then the bill actually passed the Senate 62 - 36.

This illustrates the ability of legislatures to put on a show for the mostly-inattentive public. The crucial vote was cloture. Then some senators who’d voted for cloture (a “procedural” vote) to shut down debate, thus assuring the bill’s passage, voted against the bill, proper. This would let them later claim to press and public that they’d been against amnesty and, in fact, had voted that way. (See this related discussion about our 2007 success against death-sentence-by-amnesty.)

I took those vote totals from the page for Montana’s Sen. Baucus [scroll down for year 2006 votes] at the Americans for Better Immigration website.

Here I bring up a further cautionary note on what Joe Guzzardi wrote: Baucus, who’s been in Congress since 1975 and the Senate since 1979, has had a generally lousy record on immigration votes. But, likely anticipating his 2008 re-election run, he got religion in 2007, voting against amnesty at every turn. (In fact, Montana was the only state with two Democratic senators who both stood strong against amnesty in 2007.) Now that he’s been resoundingly re-elected to his sixth term, whether we can count on Baucus’s vote going forward, as Joe does, is an open question.

Undoubtedly what was crucial last time was concerted pressure from constituents, as Baucus acknowledged here. Further, field staff members in Bozeman told several of us that the DC office and all seven field offices across the state were inundated with calls that were 100% against amnesty.

So read — and take heart from — Joe’s analysis of our prospects. But please don’t think he’s giving you leave to retire from the fray! A civilization is at stake.

(By the way, Montanans may be interested in this.)

In his article (Democrat Says Ramos and Compean Commutation Not Good Enough - And Immigration Reform Patriots Must Co-operate) of January 22, 2009, VDARE contributor Donald Collins mostly agreed with Antelope Valley Minutemen founder Frank Jorge regarding the pending commutation of sentences for railroaded Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean. But then Collins admonished Jorge:

However, you go on in your email, to finger the new President as a “Marxist” and a possible illegal alien. As a Democrat who supported Ramos and Compean, I find this hard to take.

My first reaction: What does supporting Ramos and Compean have to do with one’s views about the new President? Do most Democrats prefer that Ramos and Compean stay railroaded?

My second reaction: Let’s review the public record on Obama.

He certainly talks like a Marxist. Perhaps Don Collins is unaware, as so many of our fellow citizens are unaware, of voluminous material that came out during the campaign — in late October — but that the in-the-tank mainstream press wouldn’t touch. (Recall that when Joseph ["Joe the Plumber"] Wurzelbacher got Obama’s mask to slip just a bit during a campaign stop in Ohio, the press went all out investigating Wurzelbacher, leaving Obama as pristinely unexamined as before.)

The biggest smoking howitzer was Obama, on the radio, in 2001, as discussed by Bill Whittle. Here’s the key part of the transcript, reproduced by Whittle:

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

Whittle didn’t make that up. I’ve heard the recorded conversation myself, as anyone can. It’s Obama talking. And there’s a lot of additional explication in Whittle’s article, linked above. (The recording of the full ~50-minute radio program on Chicago’s station WBEZ on January 18, 2001 can be heard here. So if you’re worried that the YouTube clip is missing important context — it’s not — go to about the 70% point of the full recording to hear the smoking howitzer. Or listen to the whole, revealing program from its start.)

Regarding Obama’s status, I, too, find it far-fetched that he was born in Kenya, considering all the difficulties that would have been involved with third-world travel in 1961. But if he’s legitimate, why didn’t he simply release his claimed Hawaiian birth records to prove it and end the hassle, for surely he was aware of the controversy? The natural conclusion, employing Occam’s razor, is that he is, indeed, an illegal alien, or otherwise ineligible to be President.

Neither Jorge nor Collins referred to Obama’s Muslim background, but I might as well go for the trifecta. The important thing is that, as Daniel Pipes writes in Barack Obama’s Muslim Childhood, Obama was a Muslim as a child. And he has lied about it. This is really incontrovertible.

As an adult, he joined that infamous Christian church in Chicago, but judging from Obama’s denials that he ever heard Pastor Wright say the things that Wright so flagrantly said, it’s hard to credit Obama with really being of that church. His is, we can conclude, a Christianity of political convenience.

And Pipes had another article, Obama Would Fail Security Clearance, showing that Obama wouldn’t ordinarily qualify for a security clearance. A President obviously needs clearances at the highest level, and the issuing agencies will have to wink at all their rules to give this President such clearances.

I don’t mean in any of what’s above to suggest the slightest enthusiasm or respect for John McCain. I could vote for neither of these two horrors our system served up.

I predict, however, that many who voted for Obama will wind up wishing, as a matter of pride and guilt, that they hadn’t.

“Clasance Botembe?” you think to yourself. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

Actually, Clasance is a guy with tuberculosis who lives in Champaign, Illinois. Now his girlfriend has TB, too. Clasance, you see, hasn’t followed directions public health officials gave him to stay isolated. So the stakes are being raised, as indicated in this article, from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Masked judge orders TB patient isolated in Champaign, Ill.

January 22, 2009
FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A Champaign tuberculosis patient will be tracked by GPS and could go to jail if he violates court orders that he remain isolated while being treated.

Champaign County Circuit Judge John Kennedy imposed those conditions on 20-year-old Clasance Botembe (CLAY-sahnce bo-TEM’-bay) on Wednesday.

Health officials and prosecutors say Botembe failed to take precautions to avoid spreading the disease. Court records say his girlfriend has TB after being exposed to him.

Ventilation was closed in the room at the county Health Department where Botembe appeared. Botembe, the judge and others in the room wore masks.

Botembe will be isolated for 30 days. He could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor if he defies the judge’s order.

But you’re still shaking your head, going “Clasance Botembe?!?!” aren’t you? The Sun-Times, of course, doesn’t give you a clue, although they do, helpfully, tell you how to pronounce the name. It’s the same with the Boston Herald, the Kansas City Star, and Channel 10 TV in Tampa Bay, among the many media outlets running this Associated Press story.

Well, it turns out that the AP provided a bit of clarifying information that — surprise! — editors at all those places likely excised (or weren’t curious enough to look for), an example of long-distance groupthink. Here’s a very similar version of the story from the same source as published by the International Herald Tribune, with italics added by me at the key point:

US judge orders TB patient into isolation

The Associated Press
Thursday, January 22, 2009

CHAMPAIGN, Illinois: A tuberculosis patient who failed to take precautions to avoid spreading the illness will be tracked by GPS and could go to jail if he violates court orders requiring him to remain isolated.

Champaign County Circuit Judge John Kennedy imposed those conditions Tuesday on 20-year-old Clasance Botembe, who is originally from Congo.

Health officials and prosecutors say Botembe failed to take precautions to avoid spreading the disease. Court records say his girlfriend got TB after being exposed to him.

Botembe is being treated at home. He, the judge and others wore masks during the hearing.

Botembe will be isolated for 30 days. He could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor if he defies the judge’s order.

So … Clasance Botembe! Things turned out just as experienced VDARE readers suspected, right?

There’s a bit more. The American Bar Association covered the story, too, evidently not using the feed from AP. Reading their article, you don’t learn about the Congo connection or how to pronounce Clasance’s name, but there is this cherry atop the sundae:

The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District will pay for Botembe’s rent, food, medication and confinement in a motel or hotel.