Amanda Marcotte Thinks White People Should Have No Objection to Dying Out

That's the message I get from this post.

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What Ails the American Health Care System

Well, the state, for one thing. The cartels, for another.

Lew Rockwell is always so much more interesting that Michael Moore could ever hope to be.

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What We Need

We need a PAC or something that will make certain that there are immigration restrictionist candidates running in every district, similar to what Emily's List does for pro-choice women. For example, we need someone to put up a challenge to Susan Collins in the GOP primary.

Pleae, please, if you read this and blog about political issues, make this point in your blog. Once we get this talked about, maybe we'll find someone who can do it.

Because we need such candidates to exist, both in order to be able to vote for them, and to be able to threaten wayward Senators with electoral loss should they vote the wrong way.

That is all.

Three Cheers for Derek Copold

For arguing against a more open border in the comments at Unqualified Offerings.

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Separation of Church and State Is a Two-Way Street

But not, apparently, in Europe.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Lawrence Auster.

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Some Things Need to be Ridiculed

Like this.

I AM ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT I AM NOT ALWAYS IN DENIAL

I am a bigot. I have not yet learned to ignore differences in crime rates between blacks and Latinos on one hand and Asians and whites on the other. For example, when I see a young black man dressed up like a gangmember, I do not always suppress my survival instincts. Not only do I try to correct these assumptions when later data contradicts them, I also correct them even when they are spot-on accurate.

My whiteness has many benefits, including the fact that I cannot be considered property, as people of other races can. Oh, if only someone had outlawed slavery in this country!

Also, because of my white privilege, people take me seriously as an intellectual, even though most of my intellectual output consists of navel-gazing self-flagellation, where I pat myself on the back for how much I cirticized myself for being a privileged white person. I am used to be taken seriously, despite my bet attempts to make an ass of myself.

I am anti-racist because I believe that race is a social construction. It has absolutely nothing to do with biology or with the obvious physical differences between human human populations. Despite the fact that race is nothing but a social construct, and despite the fact I want to abolish it, I still think we should maintian the construct when figuring out how much people who are not constructed to be white ought to take from those who are socially constructed to be white.

I am an evil, evil person from an evil, evil race (albeit a race that does not exist in an objective sense, as it is a social construction). I am proud of myself for admitting this.

As an evil racist person, I need to realize that anyone who is not white is automatically morally superior to me, and that whenever they criticize me, I must grovel at their feet.

I also believe that by labelling everyone a bigot of some sort, particularly myself, and I enjoy writing long pieces bemoaning the universal bigotry of people. I do this because it makes it seem as if I have some special knowledge not shared by the majority of humanity, which it makes me feel morally superior. I also enjoy it because a bunch of other people who like to feel morally superior will pat me on the back in a mutual admiration society.

That is all.

Thought for the Day

What bothers me about secular liberals is not their commitment to the separation of church and state; what bothers me is that they see it as a one-way street.

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I Must Admit

"Homophobic" as I may be, I found this article to be extremely funny, if only because I love seeing people say what's on their mind to self-absorbed annoying people.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Sully.

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H.R. 2755

Apparently, Ron Paul has proposed a bill to abolish the Fed.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to the Lew Rockwell Blog.

I encourage all of you calling your Senators about the Bush-Kennedy amnesty to also call your Congressman and tell them that you'd like to see a floor vote on H.R. 2755.

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Excellent Article on the "Foreign Fighters in Iraq" Claim

In Chronicles magazine.

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Some Thoughts out of the Lew Rockwell Blog

This comment by Mike Tennant about Joseph Farah's column against Ron Paul for President says a lot of the things that I think.

Two things, though, that I would point out to Mr. Farah:

Paul did certainly say that we were "scapegoating" illegal immigrants. Yes, he did say that eliminating the welfare state would make it easier to allow people in. However, he, unlike many other libertarians, is smart enough to realize that until you get rid of the welfare state, you don't open your borders (many libertarians seem to think that if you can deregulate immigration first, then do so, and you'll get rid of the welfare state when all of those poor, illiterate, uneducated minorities with a chip on their shoulder against the "gringos" that they should support the free market rather than use the government to get as much money out of the wealthy whitefolk as possible.

Paul also believes that we ought to be more stingy with citizenship, which I would hazard to guess to mean that those who are not here on a permanent basis do not get to be citizens merely by being born here. This would reduce a lot of the problems associated with illegal immigration if enacted.

For myself, I also cannot help but notice that Farah does not really address the issue of the resentment that the Iranians have at us for overthrowing their democratically elected leader in 1953 and replacing him with the Shah. He indicates that he thinks the Iranian revolution could have been prevented had we not "undermined" the Shah in the 1970s, but he never really addresses the issue of whether or not we had the right to depose Mossadeq in the first place, or whether or not this produced negative effects. Farah does imply that if we had just kept imposing the Shah on Iran, everything would have been fine.

This is in keeping with previous writings, where he asserts that under the Shah there was a level of freedom in Iran (although it is not clear whether he is asserting this just in juxtaposition to the current regime or whether he is saying that putting the Shah in power and keeping him there gave them more freedom than they would have had if their democratically elected leader had been kept at the helm) and that the Iranians are nostalgic for it (no mention of whether old Iranians are nostalgic for Mossadeq).

But, c'mon, what do you expect from Osama bin Farah?

There's also a link to a sympathetic article by Brian Doherty in Reason

Also, some much-needed bad-mouthing of Establishment Man Joe Klein, and a really funny statement about why 9/11 could not have been an inside job.

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I Hate Dubya (Language Warning)

That type of thing gets conservatives like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh asking: "how come on immigration, Busdh doesn't get it?"

The answer is simple.

BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE.

(Actually, that applies to him on a whole lot of issues).

That is all.

Wow.

According to this article,

The US is considering introducing a limited military draft if it is to keep its present force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon advisers have warned British colleagues.

If this is true, it is scary. The only good news (if the story is true) is that it is unlikely that the Congress would pass any draft legislation until at least Bush is out of office.

Unless, of course, Bush insists that as commander-in-chief, he has absolute power to start a draft - but that would likely mean impeachment, or failing that, draft age kids shutting down the country with protests.

Still, most of the article is not about a potential future draft, so this claim is not exactly well-supported (plus I know nothing about The First Post or its track record).

So I wouldn't bet that there will be a draft in the near future. Although, of course, if we get both a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress, knowing the Democrats they would be fully capable of arguing against the Iraq War and for a draft to support the war (or a different war in, say, Darfur) at the same time. (If we get a GOP Congress and a GOP President - other than Ron Paul, that is - there would be less chance of a draft, but a greater chance of a tactical nuclear strike against Iran, so anything other than a divided government (or Ron Paul) could be risky.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Lew Rockwell.

That is all.

Racism?

While normally I am skeptical of claims of "institutional racism" and "white privilege," the Genarlow Wilson case does seem to me to be an example, unless there are some important facts that I am missing.

Not that this could not happen to a white person, but I would not be surprised if his race were a factor in the apparent fanaticism to keep him behind bars.

(I would also concede this in the Cory Maye case, which I have previously blogged about).

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Conventional Wisdom

Andrew Sullivan posts a letter from a reader that is full of the usual B.S..

According to the reader, the illegal aliens are "the cream of the crop" because they are "adapting as best possible to their environment." The assumptiuon here is, of course, that those who do not immigrate do not do so because they are not ambitious, not because they have found ways to succeed in Mexico.

Certainly the statistics do not assert that the Mexican immigrants, or more importantly their descendants, are more particularly successful. Indeed, they have more problems than the composite average of Americans (look at Ed Rubenstein's many articles on the subjext).

The next statement, "If Hispanics were listening in on these shows, they are hardly likely to vote Republican for years to come," ignores the fact that the people we are importing are likely to vote overwhelmingly Democratic anyway.

Certainly California seems to show that increasing the Latino population makes a state more Democratic, despite the attempts to blame this on Proposition 187.

That is all.

McElroy on Ron Paul

Note: My goal in posting this is (a) to explain why I do not think that the points brought up on Wendy McElroy's blog would make me hesitate to vote for Ron Paul, and (b) to acknowledge that Ron Paul has flaws in order to neutralize his flaws as issues (I don't want any Paul supporters to create such a perfect picture of him and to expect such perfection that any mistake he makes causes them to desert him). So please do not think that I am nitpicking Mr. Paul. I support him for President 100%.

Wendy McElroy questions Ron Paul's libertarian "purity" linking to this discussion on her bulletin board.

While some of the facts presented seem a little disturbing, some of them do not bother me at all. For example, I am not an advocate of open borders, so voting for building a fence is in my opinion a point in his favor.

Other things, like the partial-birth abortion issue, are somewhat disconcerting, in that if Paul voted for regulating it, it would go against his commitment to the enumerated powers of the federal government, unless he was using some fourteenth amendment argument for equal rights for the fetus - but that seems unlikely, as he has publicly said that abortion should be a state issue.

His vote for the price controls ("negotiation") on the Medicare bill is less disturbing in my opinion when you hear his explanation, which was "if we're going to spend it, we might as well get a good price"). It is also possible that he hoped that this would lead to large nunmbers of prescription drugs not being funded under Medicare (as the pharmaceutical companies might refuse to offer their drugs under the Medicare program if they couldn't get a good price) and thus weaken the program.

Remember, without the "price negotiations" the bill is largely a way for the drug makers to pocket huge profits from the federal government. Letting a private company take more taxpayer money is not inherently more libertarian than regulating its participation in a government handout program (assuming that the program itself is going to exist whatever you do).

The one thing that really disturbed me, of course, was Paul's comments that:

Bush ran on a platform of a humble foreign policy, no nation-building, not policing the world. Instead we’re spending a trillion dollars a year to maintain the power of our empire around the world. We need that money for education and medical care here. (Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Austro-Athenian Empire for the transcript).

Unlike this Freeper, I am certain that he did not intend to say that the government should be spending money on education and health care (although in regards to health care, Paul has said that Medicare would have to be transitioned out, it could not just be ended instantly). Previously in the debate, he alluded to the fact that publicly-funded health care and education were one of the problems in regards to illegal immigration:

We subsidise illegal immigration with amnesty, birthright citizenship, and publicly-fund education and health care. We do need immigrant workers, but if we had a genuine free market they wouldn’t be the scapegoat.

Presumably he meant that the taxpayers needed the money to pay for their own education and health care. In previous debates, he has often misspoken (in the famous remark at the Fox debates about our policy being part of what motivated the 9/11 hijackers he said "Non-intervention was a major contributing factor" when he clearly meant to say that intervention was a major contributing factor). In any case, I really think that he ought to clarify himself on the "education and healthcare" statement quickly.

That is all.

Attrition, not Amnesty

What to do with the 12 million illegal aliens already in this country.

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Thoughts on the G.O.P. Debate

I think that it went quite well in some ways.

The one highlight of the evening was when Tom Tancredo said that there would be no place for Dubya in a Tancredo administration. In that statement he spoke for all of the beleaguered cnservatives who are fed up with El Presidente.

As with most of the debates, Ron Paul's performance improves in hindsight. The secret of Paul is that he brings up topics that no one else will deal with. But he got shafted with little attention and with bad questions. On the Iraq War, Blitzer simply asked him more or less does he want us to get out (allowing him to state a position he has stated many times before), rather than asking a far more interesting question such as what does he think of the fact that Rudy Giuliani has never before heard of "blowback," or something else that could have really gotten the ball rolling or could have allowed him more elaboration.

It was good, though, to hear Paul bring up the issue of birthright citizenship, so that Tancredo didn't have to do all of the heavt lifting on the immigration issue.

The one big error Paul made is when he said something toward the end about the money for Medicare and education coming from the Iraq War. Presumably he meant that the taxpayers would have more money to pay for these things himself (although in the case of Medicare he could be talking about the transitional costs as he phased it out), but it sounded as if he supported these as federal government programs, which he does not.

Here are the Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo official sites. I encourage my readers to visit both and to consider making donations to one or both of these candidates.

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Good Articles

Lawrence Auster on Bush the liberal.

There are some good comments (including one by me) at this post at Creative Destruction.

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Interesting Piece on Ron Paul

Here.

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I Need to Argue Against This

Nathan Newman argues that letting in indigent, unskilled foreigners because they happen to be related to someone who is here is a good thing! That is, he wants family reunification without skill testing.

This strikes me as ridiculous, but I'll need time to work up an argument.

A few ideas:

(1) The built-in support system that the families supposedly give (safety net and loans) requires that someone in the family actually has capital.

(2) The networks he so lovingly praises also serve to keep the immigrants foreign. That is, to obviate the need for assimilation.

If anyone else would like to chime in on why Nathan Newman is wrong, please feel free to do so.

That is all.