I’ve just finished reading Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue in the pathetic hope that I might make time to write about it and find this quote on p. 338:

“We got into this economic mess because of misplaced government interference in the first place. The mortgage crisis that triggered the collapse of our financial markets was rooted in a well-meaning but wrongheaded desire to increase home ownership among people who could not yet afford to own a home.

Politicians on the right and left wanted to take credit for an increase in middle-class home ownership. But the rules of the marketplace are just as constraining as human nature. Government cannot force financial institutions to give loans to people who can’t afford to pay them back and then expect that somehow things will all magically work out. Sooner or later, reality catches up with us.”

In other words, she’s bought Steve Sailer’s argument, in many VDARE.COM columns, that the Minority Mortgage Meltdown caused America’s first Diversity Recession. She even mentions two details Steve is particularly keen to stress: that the fatal policy was bipartisan; and that, as Steve concluded one recent column, “reality always gets its revenge”

I’m impressed.

3 bodies found in burnt apartment; roommate charged: Houston police suspect blaze was used to cover up a crime, by Anita Hassan, Houston Chronicle, Nov. 16, 2009.

Police are searching for a suspect who has been accused in the deaths of three men found dead Sunday night after firefighters extinguished a one-alarm blaze in a building just north of downtown a fire authorities said they believe was set to cover up foul play.

Ken Pham, 36, who was initially considered a person of interest in the case, has been charged with capital murder.

He was one of four roommates who lived in an apartment where the fire broke out.

Witnesses told police that Pham was seen leaving the building shortly after they heard gunshots and just before the fire started. Pham allegedly pointed a gun at one of the witnesses before fleeing the scene, police said.

He was dressed in a security guard uniform and driving a green Toyota Camry.

“All indications thus far are that foul play is involved,’’ said John Cannon, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department. “and that the fire was set to cover something up.’’

Hat tip, RC.

Right in time for the Obama Adminstration’s new amnesty offensive, our friend William Gheen is sponsoring Tea Parties against amnesty all across America today. Details here.

I met Mike Scruggs [Email him] at Stanford’s business school when he was only just back from Vietnam in 1970. In recent years, we reconnected through the miracle of the internet and he has written for VDARE.COM several times. (See here for his take on Ron Paul’s huge missed opportunity in the decisive South Carolina primary last year.)

Mike has now written Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, reflecting on his experiences in Vietnam, where he was an A-26 navigator, shot down and wounded in 1967. You can order from the publisher here, scroll down (Mike makes more) or through Amazon (VDARE.COM gets a commission) here. For an interview with Mike, see here. I’m not somehow not surprised to see there details of Mike’s ordeal that he never told me.

The Vietnam War made a huge impression on me, growing up in Britain. I still think it was a war the U.S could and should have won–as I argued here, in a review that earned me a congratulatory letter from Richard Nixon, to my great surprise. I know this annoys my libertarian friends. But what use are they on immigration?

Further to my post Did Affirmative Action Stop Army Stopping Fort Hood Shooter?:

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a “Muslim first and American second.”

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut, by Nick Allen, London Daily Telegraph, 8 November 09. (Thnx, EA)

White America’s Duncan Hengest, a former military officer, comments on reports that alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s supervisors had previously had problems with him:

I sympathize with the difficulty these supervisors faced: it is very hard for a white supervisor to weed out a troublesome non-white subordinate because of the army’s Equal Opportunity Office. The military has a fierce, well funded and staffed EEO bureaucracy. Although the office is officially racially neutral, everyone knows how the deck is stacked. Personally, I was never able to dismiss unsatisfactory non-white subordinates, and other officers of my acquaintance experienced the same problem. One officer made a valiant attempt to block the promotion of an incompetent Korean lieutenant by refusing to sign his promotion paperwork only to have a different officer sign it with the commander’s blessing. In such cases, it is easier to just promote the troublemaker and transfer him to a different post. This is probably what happened in the case of Major Hasan.

Affirmative Action is expensive, of course, but this means it’s also a security risk.

Hengest adds:

…the military has a great many non-white medical officers. Elite whites, who make up the majority of doctors, tend to avoid military service so the Army must recruit the dregs of the medical schools. When I was down with a case of bronchitis during my days in the service, I was advised by several NCO’s to avoid the closest on-post clinic because the black doctor there was incompetent. Later I saw a Sikh, with beard and turban, a violation of army regulations, working at a dental clinic with the rank of colonel. As I’ve written elsewhere, Sikhs have their own unique terrorist potential, and I was shocked at the folly of recruiting this man and giving him such a high rank.

Hengest is referring to his excellent earlier article, The Sikhs of Vancouver.

In other news, President Obama has chosen this moment to turn Veterans’ Day into a celebration of, guess what, diversity:

Veterans Day is our chance to honor those Americans who’ve served on battlefields from Lexington to Antietam, Normandy to Manila, Inchon to Khe Sanh, Ramadi to Kandahar.

They are Americans of every race, faith, and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They are descendents of immigrants and immigrants themselves. They reflect the diversity that makes this America.

We just found my article on the economist Gordon Tullock, published in the dead-tree version of Forbes Magazine in the pre-internet Dark Ages. Tullock has a remarkably fertile mind, very like (in this respect at least) Milton Friedman and I hoped to begin a series of annual interviews with him, as I already had with Friedman. But both projects were victims of the retirement of the great Forbes editor Jim Michaels: his successor, Bill Baldwin, said (or more probably echoed the advertising salesmens’ knee-jerk opinion) that we had to find younger economists.

Tullock’s concept of rent-seeking is more than ever relevant in the age of Obama—as is his view, as a trained Sinologist, that China, now even more lauded as the engine of the global economy, might well return to despotism, or even break up completely.]

October’s unemployment numbers came in this morning:

The unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 — and is likely to go higher.

Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though the worst recession since the Great Depression has apparently ended…

The Labor Department said Friday that jobless rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983, from 9.8 percent in September.

(Jobless rate tops 10 pct. for first time since ‘83, by Christopher S. Rugaber, AP, November 6, 2009)

Unemployment is generally regarded as a lagging indicator, so it will probably rise for several more months–even if the recession is ending, something which government and private sector economists usually have a surprisingly hard time establishing.

My question:Where are the calls for an immigration moratorium?

VDARE.COM has been exploring the immigration moratorium issue here. When the previous month’s numbers came out, Ed Rubenstein estimated that an immediate moratorium would reduce unemployment by about half a percentage point in a year. A moratorium enacted in 1998 would have tightened the labor market to the point where, in the depths of this recession, the unemployment rate would have been less than half of what it is now.

But when I googled “immigration + moratorium“ in News this morning, I basically got VDARE.COM, plus some intrepid private citizens posting to MSM comment threads. (A good idea, btw).

When I googled “immigration suspension“, which is the term favored for some mysterious reason by NumbersUSA, I did find a useful story by Roy Beck pointing out that the 650,000 jobs that the White House claims were created or saved by the Stimulus Bill were more than completely wiped out by the 1.125 million legal immigrants and temporary workers admitted in 2009. But nothing else.

Republicans are congratulating themselves on winning on November 3 by focusing on economic issues. Isn’t unemployment an economic issue?

With Dede Scozzafava’s coming out of the closet and endorsing the Democratic candidate in the NY-23rd special election, the humiliation of the RNC’s Michael Steele and much of the Establishment Right is now complete. The Wall Street Journal, usually part of the problem, editorializes:

The voter revolt ought to be a lesson to the GOP’s backroom boys…Beltway bigs misjudged public dismay against the Democratic agenda in Washington. Nominating a candidate who “can win” in the Northeast does not have to mean someone whose voting record is more liberal on taxes and unions than that of most Blue Dog Democrats.

Revolt in New York, November 1, 2009.

Sounds good — for a second. Then the WSJ Edit Page goes on:

But that lesson will be for naught if conservatives conclude that their victory is reason to challenge any candidate who doesn’t agree with them on every issue. The truth is that some conservatives are as bloody-minded and intolerant of all dissent as the hard left is at the Daily Kos. A majority political party requires a far more diverse coalition than the audience for your average right-wing blogger or talk show host….If conservatives now revolt against every GOP candidate who disagrees with them on trade, immigration or abortion, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will keep their majorities for a very long time.

In other words, it’s OK for peasants to revolt on “taxes and unions” but not on trade, immigration or abortion. Is the WSJ Edit Page trying to appear a mouthpiece for Big Business?

VDARE.COM does not take a position on trade or abortion. And as far as we can see, the Conservative Party challenger in NY-23 is wrong on immigration (although he certainly has all the right enemies and Minuteman PAC endorsed him, saying he opposes amnesty).

But the WSJ Edit Page is right to be worried. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg does interesting work - for example, he identified Affirmative Action as a key issue in the 1980s, something that both Democratic and Republican Establishments absolutely did not wish to hear. His recent report Why Republican Leaders will have Trouble Speaking to the Rest of America got some publicity because he found that “the self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party” and who drive current unrest are not “racist“.

In a little-noted passage, Greenberg wrote:

Asked about the issues of greatest importance to them in choosing a candidate for Congress, health care ranked sixth among the Republicans, below issues such as tax cuts, immigration, and a candidate’s personal values and faith

(VDARE.COM Emphasis added).

Greenberg went on:

And yet remarkably, these voters had virtually nothing positive to say about the Republican Party. They see their own party as weak, old, and out of touch. They feel it has lost sight of conservative values and conservative voters and is in desperate need of new leadership.

Of course, it’s not remarkable — the GOP leadership (which for practical purposes includes the WSJ Edit Page) is out of touch. That’s why it so stubbornly and savagely resists patriotic immigration reform.

You can complain to the WSJ Edit Page (scroll to end) and many readers already have. It won’t listen but, who knows, Rupert Murdoch might decide to end the Bob Bartley Edit Page hangover, as he has so much else since buying Dow Jones.

We can always find bad news to write about at VDARE.COM, so here’s some good news: Victoria’s Secret, which sells, well, everyone knows about Victoria’s Secret, has just come out with a CHRISTMAS 2009 CATALOG! With “CHRISTMAS 2009″ RIGHT ON THE FRONT COVER! (Inspect here).

Not only that, but the model on the cover has BLUE EYES and BLONDE HAIR! Isn’t that a Hate Crime, now that Obama has indeed signed the Matthew Shepard Free Speech Suppression Act?

Thank Victoria’s Secret. Seriously–the Christophobe crazies will be complaining.