The resurgence of left-wing extremism

The resurgence of left-wing extremism

By Michelle Malkin  •  April 23, 2009 10:26 AM

Well, DHS isn’t going to be issuing alerts about it any time soon. But it’s here: the resurgence of left-wing extremism.

Data point – MoveOn.org wailing about torture and indulging in Cheney Derangement Syndrome:

Data point – Hillary cackles at serious questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation.

Data point – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ups pressure for ‘truth’ panel on torture

Data point – Soros acolyte Rosa Brooks, al Qaeda apologist and military-basher, now ensconced at the Pentagon.

Data point – Radical Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh’s Senate confirmation hearing for a key State Department legal adviser slot set for next Tuesday.

Data point – Department of Haplessness and Stupidity Secretary Janet Napolitano — fresh from pooh-poohing terrorism and illegal border-crossings, botching 9/11 history and issuing hit jobs on limited government conservatives and veterans — is now pushing for repeal of Real ID Act:

A post-9/11 law that sets federal standards for state driver’s licenses and identification cards is under fire from the head of the agency enforcing that law, the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week said she is working with governors to repeal the Real ID Act, which was passed in 2005 and went into effect last year.

The bill is popular in Washington, but is scorned by many governors who bear the responsibility and cost of validating that holders of driver’s licenses are citizens or legal residents of the United States.

Napolitano, former governor of Arizona, said she has met with governors of both parties recently “to look at a way to repeal Real ID.” She said she wants to substitute the federal law with “something else that pivots off of the driver’s license but accomplishes some of the same goals. And we hope to be able to announce something on that fairly soon.” Napolitano made her remarks Tuesday in response to a question at a conference of the Anti-Defamation League.

On Wednesday, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, a sponsor of the law, said he was “angered” by Napolitano’s comments. “Real ID is a necessary program for keeping America safe. It is the will of Congress and also a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission,” Sensenbrenner said.

“When the Democrats took over the majority in the 110th Congress, they said they wanted to implement all of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. I am highly disappointed that they are going back on their word by repealing this important recommendation, and substituting it with a weaker, less safe program that provides terrorists with too many avenues to attack.”

We have lost our war footing. Welcome back to the Sesame Street school of national security. Feel safer? Me neither.

***

IrishSpy comments: “The Sesame Street School of National Security goes with their Hundred Acre Wood foreign policy. Honey for all!”

Indeed.

Photoshop: American Elephant

Sri Lankan Army Systematically Raping Women Fleeing from War Zone

Sri Lankan Army Systematically Raping Women Fleeing from War Zone

Generational dynamics in action people, its coming to a community near you.  America will rebel and revolution will become reality.

April 23, 2009, 2:44PM

Though there have been numerous reports indicating that the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) has been systematically raping Tamil women fleeing the country’s war zone for the past four months, the Sri Lankan government’s brutal methods of media censorship have almost entirely prevented these stories from being publicized. The most notable exceptions are two articles in the Tamil media, one that reported “130 women were taken for sexual abuse” after fleeing the war zone by SLA soldiers, and one that described “shocking stories of sexual violence meted out” to Tamil women civilian detainees in military-run detention camps. However, the untold personal accounts from witnesses and victims of these crimes are countless.

In February, a doctor in the Vavuniya hospital, speaking on the condition of anonymity, reported that he had an entire ward full of women who had been raped by soldiers, many of whom had bite marks “all over their bodies.” In March, a woman who is being forcibly held in a female-only “transit camp” reported the soldiers had raped virtually every detainee in the camp while taking them outside individually to “interview” them about possible connections to the rebel Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Another anonymous source, who is involved in disposing dead bodies from the conflict zone, said that the majority of bodies of women who the army claims were LTTE members had been raped.

The Sri Lankan military has a long history of raping Tamil women with complete impunity. A 2002 Amnesty International report said there had been “a marked rise in allegations of rape by police, army and navy personnel” and that “not a single member of the security forces has been brought to trial in connection to incidents of rape in custody.” In 2000, the Asian Human Rights Commission issued a statement that “impunity continues to reign as rape is used as a weapon of war in Sri Lanka”.

However, the current level and pattern of rapes is likely unprecedented, suggesting that they may be acts of genocide. Rape has historically been a trademark of genocide, with Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia being prime examples. According to Former US Ambassador for War Crimes David Scheffer, “rape can be so well planned and done on such a mass scale as to wipe out much of an ethnic group just as thoroughly, if more slowly, than large-scale murder”. He explains that for

women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo…the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men…mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitutes genocide.[1]

The UN Genocide Convention requires its parties – which include Canada, Australia, the USA, the UK and 136 other countries – to “prevent and punish” genocide, “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war”. Classifying the rapes and other atrocities currently being committed in Sri Lanka as genocide is therefore crucial to stopping them.

……

[1] According to international law, acts that cause “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group or deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” constitute genocide.

The Electoral College Superpowers: California Versus Texas

The Electoral College Superpowers: California Versus Texas

By Steve Sailer – April 22, 2009, 5:36AM

Andrew Gelman wrote on Tuesday: “I like Sailer’s theory–which is why I featured it in our book–partly because it fits into another fact we emphasized, which is that the much-remarked-upon red-state, blue-state, rich-state, poor-state pattern of Democrats in the coasts and Republicans elsewhere is relatively new, having arisen in the past thirty years or so, with the key transition occurring during the brief period from 1980 to 1992.”

Consider the two most important states in the Electoral College. California voted Republican in nine of ten Presidential elections from 1952 through 1988, but has gone solidly Democratic in the five contests since. In contrast, Texas had been a swing state in Presidential elections, voting for JFK in 1960, LBJ in 1964, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Richard Nixon in 1972, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Texas, though, has now voted Republican eight straight times.

Why the change?

There are many popular theories for this. Most are designed to appeal to either Democrats or Republicans, with explanations often invoking either the Southern racism of Texans or the Hollywood decadence of Californians.

Having lived in both states, I have developed a much more boring theory based on geography: California ran out of its best real estate, while Texas still has plenty of its typically mediocre land. So, housing prices in California got extremely expensive (even before the Housing Bubble of 2004-2007), while they stayed affordable in Texas. And that has had far-reaching social, cultural, and political consequences.

In California, proximity to the Pacific Ocean means a superb climate, so the land between the beach and the coastal mountains is now either extraordinarily expensive or hopelessly encumbered by environmental restrictions on development. In Texas, proximity to the Gulf of Mexico means humidity and hurricanes, so Texans mostly congregate around inland cities in the gently contoured and well-watered (but rather boring-looking) Eastern half of the state.

During the Golden Age of Suburbanization (very roughly 1920 through 1980), the private automobile made the cost of land a relatively small part of the cost of a house, even in the narrow Mediterranean climate zone of California. Before cars, it was worth paying a lot to live fairly near your job because commuting by buggy was time-consuming. With a car, however, huge expanses of land became accessible by homebuyers.

Thus, when buying a house in Southern California up through about 1975, you mostly paid for the replacement cost of construction of your house because there was such an abundance of flat empty dirt all around you, ripe for development.

From the mid-1970s onward in California, however, land prices rose as suburbanization started to bump up against topographical and political limits. For example, in 1977, I recall, Los Angeles’s suburban San Fernando Valley still had a few hundred acres of farmland left in its extreme northwest corner of Chatsworth, but that was soon paved over. All further conversion of farmland to backyards had to take place in distant exurbs on the far side of sizable mountain ranges.

In addition, in California, the home of the Sierra Club, the environmental movement was increasingly enlisted by existing homeowners in their fight against increased development and density. In Texas, in contrast, environmentalism never was as popular, in part because the natural environment didn’t arouse as much enthusiasm. Texas just isn’t as beautiful as the best parts of California.

In the 19th Century, when Americans moved farther out toward the frontier, they often disassembled their houses and took the pieces with them. Land was cheap, but nails were expensive. Around 1980, you started to see the opposite phenomenon in California: the tear-down, in which a perfectly good house was thrown away because the land had become so expensive. For example, when Ronald Reagan sold his very nice house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood between Santa Monica and Malibu to move into what he jokingly called “government housing” in Washington in early 1981, the new owner demolished the President’s old home and replaced it with a mansion more suited to the now extremely valuable land.

This restriction of supply, combined with increases in demand from immigration, easier mortgage credit standards, and the like, set off a rise in California home prices that lasted from 1976 through 2006, topping out at heights that would have seemed insane in 1976 (and that seem fairly nuts from the perspective of 2009).

I don’t want to sound like a total Malthusian, but the relationship between population density, land prices, age of marriage, and number of babies was pointed out by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, 47 years before Malthus wrote. (Malthus gave Franklin credit in his second edition). In the founding document of American social science theorizing, “Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind,” Franklin pointed out, with an 18th-century surfeit of capitalization, “For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.”

In the American colonies, a limited population led to both low land prices and high wages, which made affordable early marriage, which led to abundant children. In contrast, “Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry.” Franklin concluded, “Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.”

The Industrial Revolution lifted the Malthusian limit on population, but the cost of land never quite ceased to influence decisions to marry and have children. As America’s coastal regions filled up, affordability of family formation began to differ sharply from state to state. In 2005, the median Dallas home only cost 2.8 times the local annual income, while the median Los Angeles home cost 12.7 times what the median Angeleno was making.

As Franklin noted 258 years ago, people in expensive locales tend to delay marriage and have fewer children. The 2000 Census found that 18-44 year-old non-Hispanic white women in California were less likely to be married and had fewer babies than their counterparts in Texas. And the culture follows along. GOP campaigns on “Family Values” sell better in states where more voters have spouses and children.

Indeed, the Marriage Gap is much more potent in influencing voting than the celebrated Gender Gap.

Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg’s report “Unmarried Women in the 2004 Presidential Election” found that:

“Unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent), while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin (55 percent to 44 percent)…

This was true of all age groups… Unmarried 18- 29 year olds gave Kerry a 25 point margin, while younger married women, like their older counterparts, gave President Bush an 11 point margin.”

Greenberg built a multiple regression model of the exit poll results and found:
“Marital status was a statistically significant predictor of likelihood to vote for Kerry…This is true even when controlling for other demographic and behavioral factors such as gender, age, race, gun ownership, union household membership, party identification, education, income, and church attendance.

“Controlling for all these other variables, the odds of voting for Kerry were 1.56 times greater if the voter was unmarried than if the voter was married.

“In contrast, once other demographic and behavioral factors were controlled for, a voter’s gender had no significant effect on their likelihood to vote for the Democrat.” [Italics are Greenberg's.]

Thus, in 2004, Bush carried the 26 states with the least home price inflation since 1980.

As I said, mine is a rather boring theory that sees the political differences between the two biggest states not as originating in the innate horridness of one kind of people or another, but as the natural outcomes of natural differences in geography.

Still, political strategists ought to be able to come up with some interesting ideas based on my perspective.

Dispatch From Pakistan: Headed For A Failed State?

Dispatch From Pakistan: Headed For A Failed State?

April 22, 2009 1:50 PM

Lauren Sher

Perhaps no news from Pakistan should surprise us anymore; this large and oh-so-critical nation in the struggle against militant Islam is teetering in many ways. And yet, Nick Schifrin’s note from Islamabad this morning packs a wallop. Here it is:

There is a saying in Pashto that translates as “Every passing moment is better than the next one here.”
Never has that been a more accurate description of the country’s security situation.

Law and order in Pakistan has deteriorated to the point at which people in Islamabad are openly questioning whether the writ of the state will soon fail in the capital.

The peace deal recently signed by the government that places a third of the Northwest Frontier Province under Islamic law has given the Taliban free reign to expand their influence.

As we’ve reported before, the Taliban moved into an area south of Swat known as Buner, where locals were finally overpowered a few weeks ago after managing to hold off the Taliban. The police have closed up shop, staying in their stations. Residents from Buner now living in Islamabad, fewer than 100 miles away, tell horrific stories of fleeing an unstoppable force of foreign militants:

“First my marble factory in the area was captured and then my house and now they all were on the loose to destroy everything in the village,” says one. “I lifted my aging mother in my arms along with my son and wife to cross the mountains to reach the nearby road and hired a taxi to reach Islamabad. I cannot sleep as the families of my brothers, sisters and their children were still trapped in the village.”

In Swat itself, militants have begun patrolling the streets again, disregarding the premise of the sharia law agreement: that they would lay down their weapons in return for imposing Islamic law. The Taliban have kidnapped a handful of people in the last few days, and if anyone doubted their true intentions, the person who negotiated the deal on behalf of the government recently called democracy and the country’s Supreme Court “un-Islamic,” saying that under the new rules in the Northwest, supreme court decisions no longer applied. The Taliban spokesman also welcomed Osama bin Laden to settle in Swat: “Osama can come here. Sure, like a brother they can stay anywhere they want. Yes, we will help them and protect them.”

The police, despite receiving more than $300 million under President Musharraf, are woefully unequipped to do anything. And the army, as of now, has decided not to step in.

And then there’s Islamabad.

Two women dressed in burkas were walking the streets of the capital today, stopping at random houses asking who lived inside — presumably looking for diplomats, NGOs, foreigners, etc. We’re not sure who they were.

Diplomats who used to drive around in regular cars are now switching to armored SUVs with armed escorts.

Western officials who read intelligence reports have rarely sounded more scared. “It’s all very depressing,” one said. “It’s hard to stay optimistic about the place.”

World Bank President Admits Agenda For Global Government

World Bank President Admits Agenda For Global Government

Bilderberg elitist Zoellick calls for IMF, WTO & World Bank to regulate national policy

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

World Bank President and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit.

Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”

In other words, give global institutions the power to regulate national policy as part of the creation of global government.

What Zoellick is outlining is essentially the end of national sovereignty and the reclassification of national governments as mere subordinates to a global authority that is completely unaccountable to the voting public of any country.

The more cynical amongst us would call this a global dictatorship. Zoellick couches the plan in flowery rhetoric of helping the poor and alleviating poverty, but as we have documented for years, the global elite’s goal of world government has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with creating a global fascist state.

Zoellick, former Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae and advisor to Goldman Sachs, is a top elitist who was intimately involved in the Enron scandal and the 2000 presidential election debacle. He was also a signatory to the Project For A New American century document that called for invading Iraq as part of implementing a brutal world empire in 1998. He was later a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush.

As to be expected, Zoellick is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. He also attended the annual invitation-only conferences of the Bilderberg Group in 1991, 2003, 2006 and 2007.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will use the G20 summit in London to extend an olive branch to China, offering them a central role in the construction of a new world order and a global government, according to reports.

“Brown will hold talks with Hu Jintao, China’s president, following discussions with Barack Obama, amid signs that developing countries see the G20 summit as a chance to impose a new world order and end the era of Anglo-European dominance,” reports the Guardian.

Under the proposal, China will vastly increase its IMF funding in return for more voting rights.

A central focus of the G20 summit will be the proposal to supplant the dollar with a new global currency. Both the IMF and the United Nations threw their weight behind the implementation of a new global reserve currency system to replace the dollar, in the same week that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CFR globalists that he was “open” to the idea.

China and Russia brought the issue to the forefront of this week’s G20 when they jointly called for a new global reserve currency a week ago.

Brown has consistently called for global regulation of the financial system as a means towards global governance. In a speech at St Paul’s Cathedral in London yesterday he again called for a new “global society”.

Charlie Gibson from London: A ‘New World Order’?

April 02, 2009 1:42 PM

<!–

Lauren Sher

–>There will be a great deal of analysis of this meeting of the G-20.  The impact and effectiveness of what was done here may not be immediately apparent. It may take months to fully judge whether the nations represented will commit enough stimulus spending to really make a difference, whether these countries are serious about free trade, whether regulations discussed might prevent further economic crises.

But the fact that this meeting could even take place is remarkable and to someone whose history is based in the last century — pretty amazing.

The class photo of the world leaders is symbolic, but it says a great deal.  In the last century we talked of the Sino-Soviet split.  We talked of the iron curtain.  We talked of enmities left over from World War II.

But here in London Chinese leaders negotiated with the Russians.  Russians with Americans.  Germans,  English, French all together.  It was the world as one facing a problem with which every nation — no matter their system of government — must confront.

Not every nation agrees. Each leader faces his or her internal political pressures, but the deep divisions of the last century were pretty much forgotten here.

Does the class picture represent a new world order as some were boldly suggesting today?  Maybe.  How the world emerges from the present crisis will be a good litmus.  It seemed taken for granted that these leaders — some from countries that were recently bitter enemies — could agreeably meet — and that none would leave aggrieved.  Extraordinary — in and of itself.

March 2009: Top 26 foreclosure rates all in 4 Sand States

March 2009: Top 26 foreclosure rates all in 4 Sand States

Here we are, a couple of years into the mortgage meltdown, and foreclosures are still concentrated in the four Sand States. Normally, spikes in foreclosure rates are caused by recessions, but this is the first time in memory when a recession (or worse) was caused by foreclosures.

Foreclosure leaders focused on 4 states in new metro list

By Catherine Clifford, CNNMoney.com staff writer

The 26 cities with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation are all located in four hard-hit states, with Las Vegas topping the list, according to a report released Wednesday.

Metro areas in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona topped the foreclosure filing list for the first quarter of 2009 in a report from RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. A foreclosure filing includes default papers, auction sale notices and repossessions.Las Vegas had the highest rate of foreclosures of any city, with one in every 22 homes subject to a foreclosure filing in the first three months of the year. The rate of foreclosure filings was 4.5%, seven times the national average.

Merced, Calif., had the second highest rate, with Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., Stockton, Calif., and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif., rounding out the top five.

“The metro areas with the highest levels of foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2009 paint a picture of concentrated problems in a relatively small number of hard-hit areas,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, in a written statement.

Foreclosure rates have been very high in the 4 key states throughout the bursting of the housing bubble, and so it was to be expected that cities from those states would pepper the top of the list.

However, it was a surprise to see the list so top heavy, according to Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac.

“The concentration of troubled metro areas within the hardest-hit states, candidly, was even more severe than we expected it to be,” Sharga said. “The degree to which those four states dominated the rankings surprised even us.”

The economic downturn set off by the Sand States’ mortgage meltdown has spread enough that foreclosures are finally trickling down to other regions:

New problem cities: Meanwhile, some metropolitan areas had a surge in foreclosures. Boise City-Nampa, Idaho, in 27th place, Provo-Orem, Utah, in 37th, and Charleston-North Charleston, S.C., in 51st were examples Sharga gave of areas that had particular strong gains in filings.

Sharga said the rise of foreclosures in additional regions indicates new factors influencing the housing market as the recession drags on.

“What we believe we are seeing is some of the areas with unemployment problems,” said Sharga. “These are people living paycheck to paycheck and, when the paycheck is gone, suddenly they can’t afford to make their mortgage payments.” …

But, mostly, it’s still the damn Sand States:

The national report also found that the worst of the foreclosures were centralized in a handful of worst-hit states. California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois accounted for nearly 60% of the total foreclosure activity in the first quarter, with 479,516 properties received foreclosure filings in those states.

So, if nearly 60% of the newly foreclosed homes Q1-2009 are still in the four sand states, where home prices and Loan to Value ratios were higher, then those states must account for the huge majority of the defaulted dollars.

What was it about the Sand States that set them on the path to bring down the national economy? All that sand?

Nobody seems to want to know.

The Guns of Singapore (Cont.)

As I’ve repeatedly noted, America has a huge data-collecting and data-interpreting infrastructure serving a political and media juggernaut designed to make sure that minorities get plenty of mortgages. In contrast, we have virtually no infrastructure to let us know whether minorities are getting too many mortgages to pay them back.

Our system for making sure minorities get enough lending is like driving a car rigged up with a complex safety system that warns you loudly and incessantly to make sure you don’t drift too far in your lane to the left, and that makes it hard to turn to the steering wheel to the left, but totally ignores any drifting you do to the right. Not surprisingly, you are eventually going to wind up in a ditch on the right.

So, social scientists are still debating last century’s question — are minorities being discriminated against by lenders? — while largely ignoring this century’s big questions about minorities and mortgages.

Here’s a new study from economists at the New York Fed on the question that the media has been much more up in arms over: did minorities get charged higher mortgage interest rates? You’ve read plenty of articles complaining that minorities who deserved prime mortgages were selectively discriminated against into getting subprime mortgages. Are they true?

A new study by economists at the New York Federal Reserve says “No.”

Subprime Mortgage Pricing: The Impact of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender on the Cost of Borrowing
Andrew Haughwout, Christopher Mayer, and Joseph Tracy

Some observers have argued that minority borrowers and neighborhoods were targeted for expensive credit in 2004-06, the peak period for subprime lending. To investigate this claim, we take advantage of a new data set that merges demographic information on subprime borrowers with information on the mortgages they took out. In a sample of more than 75,000 adjustable-rate mortgages, we find no evidence of adverse pricing by race, ethnicity, or gender in either the initial rate or the reset margin. Indeed, if any pricing differential exists, minority borrowers appear to pay slightly lower rates, as do those borrowers in Zip codes with a larger percentage of black or Hispanic residents or a higher unemployment rate. Mortgage rates are also lower in locations that previously had higher rates of house price appreciation. These results suggest some economies of scale in subprime lending. Yet there are important caveats: we are unable to measure points and fees at loan origination, and the data do not indicate whether borrowers might have qualified for less expensive conforming mortgages.

They looked at 75,000 subprime loans with 2-year teaser rates handed across the country out in August 2005 for which they were able to match the race/ethnicity info in the federal government’s Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database with the expensive creditworthiness data from LoanPerformance, which is considered the gold standard of mortgage creditworthiness. With this breakthrough in data, they found:

“In contrast to previous findings, our results show that if anything, minority borrowers get slightly favorable terms, although the size of these effects are quite small.”

Bloomberg reports on the study:

The authors said they were not able to determine whether minority borrowers were forced to pay higher upfront costs in points or fees, or whether the subprime borrowers might have qualified for less expensive conforming loans.

From what we know about car-buying — blacks tend to be poorer negotiators, perhaps because they don’t want to look like cheapskates to the salesman, perhaps because they have less information — I would have thought it’s inevitable that blacks and perhaps Hispanics would, on average, be more likely to get stuck with loan terms less favorable than, say, Armenians or Koreans would manage to extract. I mean, if you were Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide or Roland Arnall of Ameriquest or Bill Cook of of ConquistAmerica, why wouldn’t you hire a whole bunch of Spanish-speaking mortgage peddlers to pursue the burgeoning Uneducated and Innumerate Latino Market?

On the other hand, there are vast government and NGO resources devoted to fighting discrimination against legally-protected minorities. So, maybe they just tried even harder to market subprime loans to dumb whites to make their race numbers balance out. Who knows?

As Peter Brimelow pointed out in 1992 after the inane Boston Fed study about mortgage discrimination kicked off this whole catastrophic cycle, the researchers shouldn’t be focusing on the inputs (e.g., FICO scores) but on the outputs (i.e., default rates).

The claim that blacks and Hispanics took out so many subprime loans because they were discriminated against when they were really highly creditworthy borrowers who should have been getting prime loans is, in effect, claiming that black and Hispanic subprime borrowers should have been, on average, more creditworthy than white borrowers because a lot of minorities of prime creditworthiness had been forced down into the subprime ranks by The Man.

This prevalent theory is hard to reconcile with the facts of higher default rates among blacks and Hispanics.

Obviously, the gigantic default losses in heavily minority regions such as Southern California’s Inland Empire (where about 9% of all defaulted dollars lost in the country went down the drain) suggest that subprime borrowers weren’t charged enough interest to make up for the risk. But, we’re not supposed to talk about that.

We know from the Boston Fed’s recent study of subprime foreclosures in Massachusetts that foreclosure rates have long been significantly higher for blacks and Hispanics, at least in that state:

Similarly, FHA loans, which served, more conservatively, the least creditworthy, saw much higher default rates among blacks and Hispanics in the 1990s, when there wasn’t a housing bubble, suggesting that we are dealing with a deeper pattern extending back before the recent housing follies.

So, either high quality black and Hispanic borrowers were being forced into the subprime category, as the conventional wisdom holds, which implies that blacks and Hispanics should have had lower default rates. Or, the NY Fed economists were right, and the system worked in a colorblind fashion, which should give us equal default rates among Non-Asian Minorities.

And yet, we still see higher default rates among NAMs.

What all this default data suggests is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: that colorblind systems of assessing creditworthiness tend to overestimate the creditworthiness of black and Hispanic applicants. Apparently, if a lender wants equal default rates among his white, black, and Hispanic borrowers, he needs to hold the blacks and Hispanics to higher standards — i.e., to attain equality of outputs, he needs to discriminate against NAMs in terms of inputs.

Of course, he’s not allowed to do that.

Another insight is the wisdom of anti-usury laws that set some sort of upper limit on interest rates. These can serve to prevent loans likely to go bad, which tend to impose widespread economic liabilities. Of course, in the giant push to get more lending to minorities from 1968 onward, these laws were in bad odor because they have a “disparate impact” — the tighter the caps on interest rates, the fewer NAMs will get mortgages.

Playing With Fire: The Obama Administration Backs Anti-White Discrimination in Ricci

Playing With Fire:

The Obama Administration Backs Anti-White Discrimination in Ricci

(See also: Quotas in the San Francisco Fire Department—A report on ten years of mischief, by Ray Batz, American Renaissance, September 1998)

By Steve Sailer

I’m often asked: Why do I bother writing about racial gaps in test scores? How can such an arcane subject be of any importance?

And yet test scores are at the heart of what may be the most important upcoming Supreme Court case, Ricci v. DeStefano. The issue: reverse discrimination against white firemen.

Ricci provides a valuable window onto what affirmative action imposes upon American organizations. Typically, the contortions our institutions go through to avoid federal discrimination lawsuits are hidden from public view, but the Ricci case exposes the bizarre, convoluted, and insane way the game is played.

There’s been much talk recently about how the government can stimulate the economy, how it can make our institutions more efficient. The President has been coming up with expensive suggestions—starting with his December call for the government to screw in more fashionable light bulbs.

But the surest way for America to become more productive is for the government to unsnarl itself from institutions that actually do things.

Most obviously, affirmative action is a hugely expensive 40-year-old hairball. Can we still afford it?

For example, our society needs to hire and promote competent firemen, because they keep buildings from burning down and citizens from dying horrible deaths. And firefighting now requires not just bravery but also a wide variety of technical expertise—that is, ultimately, intelligence.

In the Ricci v. DeStefano case, however, the Obama Administration is intervening on the side of incompetence. As David G. Savage reported in the Los Angeles Times:

“The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had ‘gross exclusionary effects on minorities.’” [Firefighters' civil rights case could reshape hiring policies, By David G. Savage, April 6, 2009]

This might come as a surprise to the various pundits who argued that electing Obama would somehow bring an end to racial quotas. But it won’t surprise readers of my book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.”

And don’t assume that this case is too trivial for Obama’s attention. To the extent that the President has a field of expertise, affirmative action law is it. That’s what he taught at the University of Chicago: “Current Issues in Racism and the Law”. And he ran hard on this when addressing black audiences.)

Frank Ricci, pictured above, is the lead plaintiff of a group of New Haven, Connecticut firemen (17 whites and one Hispanic) who took the city’s fire department promotion test in late 2003 and earned advancement to the rank of lieutenant or captain.

No blacks scored high enough to qualify for promotions. On the Lieutenants’ exam, the mean black score would have fallen at the 20th percentile among whites. (Hispanics scored the same as blacks). On the harder Captain’s exam, the mean black score fell at the 10th percentile for whites, while the average Hispanic scored at the 18th percentile. (You can see the individual test results at Adversity.net.)

There is nothing surprising or anomalous about these percentiles. They’re almost identical to blacks’ and Latinos’ results on professional school tests such as the LSAT used by law schools and the MCAT employed by medical schools.

(New Haven, by the way, is home to the Yale Law School, which enjoys the highest LSAT scores in the country. But punditry by Yale Law professors on this backyard case has tended to be muted. Perhaps they are torn between their liberalism and their desire not to die needlessly due to inept firefighters.)

A prominent black supporter of New Haven mayor John Stefano objected to the racial hue of the fire department’s results. So in 2004 the mayor talked the Civil Service Board into throwing out the test on the grounds that otherwise the city might get sued by blacks for using a test with “disparate impact” on protected minorities.

And the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission does indeed enforce a guideline that a “selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths . . . of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded . . . as evidence of adverse impact”.

In other words, if, say, 50 percent of whites pass your test, then 40 percent of blacks darn well better pass or the federal government will want to know the reason why.

Of course, everybody involved more or less knows the reason why: on average, blacks aren’t as smart as whites. But, at all costs, you must act like you don’t know that. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll wield Occam’s Butterknife instead of his Razor.

New Haven hasn’t bothered to hold another exam since 2003—presumably because it knows that any reasonable test would produce roughly the same results. Instead, it just hasn’t promoted anybody in five years. Instead, it has filled posts with “acting” lieutenants and captains of the politically desired colors.

Not promoting anybody may seem ridiculous, but it’s become quite common in America’s cities. For example, Chicago spent $5 million dollars devising an absolutely bulletproof non-discriminatory police sergeant’s test in 1994, only to have 109 of the 114 top scorers turn out to be whites. So Mayor Richie Daley just refused to promote anybody for several years, until he could push through his alternative system of promotions based on “merit” (“merit” being defined, in effect, as whatever the finely honed political instincts of Richard M. Daley found to be least trouble for his career).

The cities find themselves in an absurd legal position. They are subject to civil service rules and civil rights laws that outlaw favoritism—and, simultaneously, to EEOC and Department of Justice regulations that mandate it.

This leads to even more pretzel logic. Thus New Haven claimed that it wasn’t discriminating against white firemen—it was just trying to avoid being sued for discriminating against blacks!

And, incredibly, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals bought that rationale by a 7-6 vote (with potential Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor one of the seven).

The Second Circuit’s decision was all the more incredible because the distinguished judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit had already shot down the same circular logic in 2004, when Chicago tried it the Biondo case involving testing for promotion of Chicago firefighters.

Easterbrook incredulously asked:

“[T]he premise of the City’s argument is that [the EEOC] regulations supply a compelling governmental interest in making decisions based on race. How can that be? Then Congress or any federal agency could direct employers to adopt racial quotas, and the direction would be self-justifying: the need to comply with the law (or regulation) would be the compelling interest. Such a circular process would drain the equal protection clause of meaning.”

(Sorry about all the Chicago examples—I used to be a Chicagoan so I can make more easily make sense of the contorted history of public safety employment testing in the Windy City. But you can find similar cases in most cities.)

Many assume that firemen just have to be brave, but here’s a very simple question from an entry-level practice test:

When coupling hoses together, ___ 50-feet hoses and ___ 75-feet hoses will result in a length of 575 feet.

a. 5, 4
b. 4, 4
c. 5, 5
d. 4, 5

Now imagine having to solve that while burn victims are screaming for help.

(Here are some more free practice exams.)

For leadership positions, the intellectual demands are much greater. (Here are Wikipedia links to over 100 different issues involved in basic firefighting.) Hence, the New Haven plaintiff Ricci reports studying 8 to 13 hours per day for three months to take his promotion exam.

The promotion exam Ricci aced was no off-the-rack quiz. New Haven paid a reported $100,000 to I/O Solutions to devise a nondiscriminatory test. It wound up being 60 percent written, 40 percent oral. To judge the candidates’ oral responses, New Haven paid to bring in 30 veteran fire department managers from around the country, two-thirds of them minority.

The consulting firm’s website explains:

“Many of our public safety clients came to us while struggling to meet the demands of the U.S. Department of Justice. Developing solutions for them has made us keenly aware of the steps that must be taken to ensure the validity, reliability, fairness and defensibility of every examination process.”

(In case you are wondering, the actual test used in New Haven is not available online.)

I was surprised to learn that devising firefighting tests is a booming industry. For example, I/O Solutions boasts that its entry-level firefighter test was chosen by the City of Chicago’s consultant over eight competitors.

Why is business so good?

Ricci’s brief gives a clue when it explains the lavish attention the firm devoted to devising New Haven’s test:

“Aware that New Haven, like other cities, routinely experiences racial disparities in outcomes of qualifying exams, IOS went to great lengths in collaboration with city officials to mitigate that impact to the greatest extent possible without compromising the integrity of the exams. It engaged in a painstaking process of job analyses, employing questionnaires, interviews, and ride-along exercises with incumbents to identify the importance and frequency of essential job tasks. “

The firefighting business doesn’t really differ much from town to town, so why all the hand-holding? The brief continues:

“There was a deliberate overrepresentation of minority incumbents in this process. IOS identified professional texts and other source material in collaboration with NHFD Chief Grant and Assistant Chief Dumas, who is black. “

It took me a while to figure out the reason for the custom testing. You have to remember the rules of the game that produce this Kabuki-like ritual that provides so much work for these psychometric consultants: Everybody involved must pretend that the reason Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs) do worse than whites in virtually every other city in America is because of some undiscovered flaw in the testing system.

For example, when federal District Court trial judge Janet Arterton Bond upheld New Haven’s treatment of Ricci and company, she opined:

“It appears that the reasons for testing disparities remain elusive. Dr. Helms [the city’s “expert” witness] testified that many theories exist, but experts on standardized testing nationwide have been unable to satisfactorily fully explain the reasons for the disparity in performance observed on many tests.”

But ignorance is strength for the diversicrats—because, as the Judge claimed,

“Notwithstanding the shortcomings in the evidence on existing, effective alternatives, it is not the case that defendants [New Haven] must certify a test where they cannot pinpoint its deficiency explaining its disparate impact under the four-fifths rule simply because they have not yet formulated a better selection method.”

In other words, we’re all going to pretend that—although in several decades of trying, nobody has come up with a “better selection method” (i.e., one that promotes more NAMs without too many innocent victims suffering fiery deaths)—that doesn’t mean one can’t be found Real Soon Now.

Hope and Change!

And that’s a big part of a test design firm’s implicit sales pitch. Sure, they imply, everybody else has always failed to find the Holy Grail of a valid test that will produce racially equal results. But this time, doggone it, we’re going to try extra hard and get it right!

So the consulting firm comes to town and laboriously asks anybody who is likely to later raise a stink over the results what they think should be on the test. They get as many NAM fire department figures as possible to okay the content.

Eventually, when the NAMs sue the city for discrimination because they didn’t score well on the test, the consulting firm comes back to testify (presumably at its usual per diem rate) about all the NAMs who signed off on the test.

It’s a repetitious way to make a living. But it’s a living!

Alternatively, as in the New Haven case, the city caves in to racial pressure and throws out the test results.

Whatever. The city’s check cleared!

If the client really wants to rig the test, well, that can be arranged, too. For example, Chicago has apparently attempted to get around the EEOC’s fourth-fifth’s rule by having I/O Solutions devise tests so easy that practically everybody passes them. Mayor Daley boasted in a 2006 press release:

“The City of Chicago today announces that over 17,000 applicants passed the Firefighter/EMT entry-level exam … Nearly 20,400 applicants took the exam …”

Hilariously, this is a pass-fail exam that was passed by 85 percent of the people who walked in off the street because they wanted a job. The city then hired individuals “randomly” from among those 85 percent.

Similarly, in 2007, Chicago gave its first police sergeants exam in years … and seven out of eight passed.

My advice to Chicagoans: Remember that old 1960s joke about “Next time you need a cop, call a hippie”? Well, keep in mind this idea of calling a hippie. As the old cops and firemen retire, it may be your best chance.

Why do controversies over reverse discrimination against white firemen trying to get promoted generate a fair amount of favorable publicity? For instance, last month a court awarded $6 million dollars to the last 75 of 175 white firemen discriminated against on the City of Chicago’s 1986 promotion test—a 23-year struggle, but one the white firemen finally won.

Are white firemen particularly discriminated against?

Not necessarily. I suspect you just hear more about injustices done to white firemen than to other white workers.

Why? Because firemen have friends. They’re connected—to each other, and to their communities.

People like firemen. Firemen risk their lives to save our lives. And on 9/11/2001, a stunning 343 New York firemen gave their lives—a number that deserves to be inscribed in our culture as indelibly as “300” was engraved in the memory of Ancient Greeks.

Now note this irony: the Bush Administration later sued the heroic FDNY for discrimination over its entry-level test. Newsday reported:

“In the 1999 test, about 90 percent of white applicants had a passing score, but only 61.2 percent of black and 77 percent of Hispanic test-takers passed, according to the complaint.”

That’s a 1.0 standard deviation difference between whites and blacks, which is typical for most kinds of cognitive tests. It’s what we see nationally on the LSAT (1.15).

(Hey, I’ve got an idea—let’s abolish the LSAT and not let anybody be admitted to law school for five years!…Wait a minute, clearly we can’t do that, because the LSAT is taken by the right kind of people, the important people, the kind of people who do sophisticated things like look up citations and place conference calls. It’s not taken by the peons who merely rescue citizens from burning buildings. Sheesh, how smart do you have to be to do fight fires?)

You’ll note that, unlike reverse discrimination against white firemen on promotion exams, which can go to the Supreme Court, discrimination against unemployed whites taking fire departments’ entry-level hiring exams is routine and passes little remarked outside of local newspapers. For example, on March 26, 2009, Jen McCaffery in the Virginian-Pilot reported:

Portsmouth Settles Discrimination Lawsuit

“Portsmouth, VA—The city has settled a racial discrimination lawsuit contending that a test used to hire entry-level firefighters rejected a disproportionate number of African American candidates. … As part of the fire department settlement announced Wednesday, Portsmouth will no longer administer the written entrance exam the Justice Department found discriminatory.

“Since 2004, the test has been administered four times. White applicants passed at a rate of 85.9 percent, while the rate for African American applicants was 42.4 percent, according to documents filed Wednesday in federal court in Norfolk.”

The reporter isn’t oversimplifying the federal government’s case. That’s all there is to it: blacks did bad on a nationally-used standardized exam. You can read the feds’ complaint for yourself and see if they presented any actual evidence of discrimination.

Portsmouth saw about the typical white-black gap (1.27 standard deviations).

The Virginian-Pilot’s McCaffery continued:

“Portsmouth City Attorney Tim Oksman wrote in an e-mail that the city was ‘very pleased’ to reach the agreement with the Justice Department.

‘It will increase diversity within our workforce—a goal we all support——and it will do so in ways that do not diminish professionalism, and at a very acceptable cost,’ Oksman wrote.”

A very acceptable cost … as long as you don’t count the people who burn to death because you didn’t hire the best.

But note that future white Portsmouth firefighter applicants who get turned down by whatever cockamamie selection system the city rigs up to avoid the wrath of the Justice Department will never know the reason why. Because applicants are just a bunch of random white guys, they can be pushed around. You can’t fight City Hall.

In contrast, once white guys are in the Fire Department, they have rights and connections, so they can’t as easily be shooed away.

This doesn’t mean that Ricci and friends will win in the Supreme Court. The last time the Supreme Court considered affirmative action (the Grutter and Gratz cases of 2003), it just made things worse.

It didn’t help that Solicitor General Ted Olson’s forthright briefs were rewritten by affirmative action beneficiary and long-time Bush crony Alberto Gonzales.

In contrast, we can be sure that the Obama Administration will speak with one voice on this topic so close to the new President’s heart.

Last year, I pointed out that GOP nominee John McCain could readily defeat Obama by getting tough on his radical record, especially on affirmative action—but I also predicted, correctly, that McCain wouldn’t have the necessary “Right Stuff” to do so.

But in the end, New Haven’s firefighters, and white Americans generally, will be forced to turn to political leadership that will defend them.

In that sense, by backing anti-white quotas, Obama’s Democrats are truly playing with fire.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

California G.O.P. Aiming At Own Foot (Again) With Immigration Enthusiasts Whitman, Fiorina. But What About Chuck DeVore?

California G.O.P. Aiming At Own Foot (Again)

With Immigration Enthusiasts Whitman, Fiorina.

But What About Chuck DeVore?

By Joe Guzzardi

When Californians go to the ballot box come November 2010, they’ll choose between a rock and hard place on their two most important votes, for governor and for U.S. Senator.

In my March column “Governor Dianne Feinstein: The Horror!”, I gave Meg Whitman, former E-Bay chief executive officer, the inside track for the Republican gubernatorial nomination to run for the seat vacated by termed-out Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the upcoming Senate race against the formidable three-term incumbent Barbara Boxer, ousted Hewlett-Packard chief executive officer and Whitman’s Silicon Valley neighbor Carly Fiorina now looks like the Republican favorite.[Ex-HP Chief ‘Seriously Considering’ Challenging Boxer, by Shane Goldmacher, Sacramento Bee, April 1, 2009]

Whitman and Fiorina have much in common—all of it bad—besides their doomed candidacies.

Both campaigned actively on behalf of open-borders fanatic John McCain. Fiorina was eventually appointed the Republican National Committee’s Victory ’08 Chairman.

Both Whitman E-Bay and Fiorina’s HP relied heavily on H-1B visas as well as promoted outsourcing. During her no-job-is-safe dictatorship, Fiorina fired people left and right.

Of the two aspiring politicians, Fiorina is by far the most dangerous.

Under Fiorina, HP’s acquisition of Compaq led the company into disastrous financial set- backs. Yet, she somehow emerged as an advisor to both former President George W. Bush and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on economic issues.

Watching the red ink flow from the federal and California state budgets, whatever her input might have been was useless at best and, at worst, damaging.

Since HP canned her, Fiorina actively promotes what she calls the “California Agenda”. She’s formed the egomaniacally named “Carly Fiorina Enterprises” to focus on globalism. (Take a close look at her picture on her home page to see how highly Fiorina thinks of herself.)

Fiorina says she wants to “build a bridge” between Silicon Valley and Washington. Her wish is to use her extensive political connections on Capitol Hill to help the technology industry fulfill its anti-American mission. To that end, Fiorina was recently named to lead the board of directors for the Technology Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

The bottom line: Fiorina wants more immigration and no cap on H-1B visas. [Learning from Her Past, by Jessica Guynn, San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2006]

I’m amazed at how California’s GOP continues to want to shoot itself in the foot.

Not only does Whitman stand no chance against either of the two leading Democratic prospective gubernatorial nominees, Dianne Feinstein or Jerry Brown, but moreover Boxer, according to current polls, would bury Fiorina by 30 points, 55 percent to 25.

Boxer’s projected cakewalk comes despite her lukewarm ratings among voters in general. In March, only 42 percent of California voters indicated they were “inclined” to vote for Boxer with 43 percent “unlikely to support her” again.[Fiorina Seriously Considering Senate Run in 2010, by Juliet Williams, Forbes, April 1, 2009]

So I ask the California G.O.P.—hasn’t history taught you anything?

Let’s look back.

In 2004, the GOP nominated Bill Jones to take on Boxer. But by early November, Jones joined a long list of California Republicans who blew their chance at high office and now rest on the political ash heap.

Jones received a pathetic 39 percent of the total vote. Even more telling is Boxer’s vote tally hit 6.9 million, the highest for any Senate candidate in American history.

Because Jones ran a predictable RINO campaign–commenting only in politically correct terms on out-of-control immigration—his name was added to California’s rogue’s gallery of other challengers who ignored the illegal alien crisis: Bill Simon (vs. Gov. Gray Davis, 2002), Dan Lungren (vs. Davis, 1998), Tom Campbell (vs. Dianne Feinstein, 2000) and Matt Fong (vs. Boxer, 1998).

A high-visibility, second-generation California rancher who wrote the 1994 “Three Strikes Law” and who had been California’s two-term Secretary of State, Jones squandered any chance he might have had by running such an ineffectual campaign.

And, in fact, Jones did indeed have a chance.

Jones showed early signs of life by defeating his primary opponent, Bush’s Mexican-born White House darling and former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin, by 23 points. That should have encouraged him to go on the attack about California’s out-of-control immigration invasion—because the harsh reality was that Marin’s incessant chatter about the wonderfulness of her immigrant background irritated non-Hispanic voters.

But the clueless Jones failed to capitalize.

Now Fiorina, a political neophyte, wants to go head to head against Boxer.

If I were California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring, I would be asking myself who exactly could Fiorina’s audience be and on what platform will she run?

See if you can find anything in Fiorina’s thumbnail resume that might compel you to vote for her

• In the state that has the country’s highest unemployment rate, 10.5 percent, Fiorina callously terminated thousands of workers and imported thousands more on non-immigrant visas.
• Fiorina defended her position with this public statement: “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs as a nation.”[ Tech Bosses Defend Overseas Hiring, by Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2004]
• As Californian’s struggle to pay their daily bills and watch their home equity disappear, Fiorina walked away from HP with a severance package estimated at between $20 and $40 million. Fiorina was paid nearly $180 million during her five-year tenure at HP. After she was forced out, shareholders sued claiming that the board of directors should have let them determine her final pay package.
• Consistent with Fiorina’s position on her own wages, she opposes President Barack Obama’s proposal to cap executive salaries at $500,000 annually, even though working class Californians are disgusted by corporate excess.

That’s a lot of dirty laundry.

Seriously, who outside of her closest friends and family would vote for Fiorina? From Boxer’s perspective, running against Fiorina is the same as running unopposed.

The tragedy of this situation: since Pete Wilson—one of California’s most successful Republicans who at various times served as Mayor of San Diego, a State Assemblyman, a U.S. Senator and finally Governor—the Republicans have literally run away from legal and illegal immigration as a campaign issue even though it is one of their strongest.

Amazingly, party officials have been duped by the other side into believing that offending California Hispanics leads to political disaster despite overwhelming evidence that refusing to go on the offensive is the kiss of death, e.g. read the political obituaries of Jones, Campbell, Fong, Simon and Lungren.

But since 2010 is a long time away, hope remains. While Fiorina gets all the press about her pending Senate bid, another potentially strong candidate and patriotic immigration reform ally lurks.

California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore is also in the hunt for Boxer’s Senate seat. DeVore once challenged Vicente Fox on the Mexican president’s support of illegal immigration, led a Republican Taskforce on Illegal Immigration that concluded it costs the state $10 billion annually and co-authored a bill to end in-state tuition for aliens.

For those of you who have never heard of DeVore or think he has no chance, here’s something to chew on.

As of today, DeVore stands at 9 percent in a recent Field Poll. Interestingly, that’s exactly where then-Congressman Boxer polled in 1991 when she was considered the longest of shots because of her radical left-wing politics.

We all know what happened.

Boxer beat out Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy and her fellow Congressman Ted Levine in the primary before edging out Republican Bruce Herschensohn (now the DeVore campaign honorary chair) in the general election. Boxer has been in the Senate ever since.

What happened is simple. The Democrats joined forces behind Boxer to push her candidacy to the front.

The Republican Party could do they same for DeVore. The question is will it? Or will it instead endorse Fiorina, a sure loser?

The GOP holds DeVore’s fate in its hands. As T. E. Lawrence, more commonly known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” said: “Nothing is written”—at least it shouldn’t be in politics.

If the Republicans are resigned to losing, at least let them go out with their guns blazing.

Who knows? This time they might actually hit something.

Joe Guzzardi [email him] is a California native who recently fled the state because of over-immigration, over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the growth rate stable. A long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It currently appears in the Lodi News-Sentinel.

The Big Business/Big Government Axis Of Evil

The Big Business/Big Government Axis Of Evil

By Chuck Baldwin

Self-proclaimed “conservatives” love to tout themselves as ardent supporters of the “free enterprise” system. In the name of “capitalism,” they support any and every piece of legislation or governmental decision that caters to business—especially Big Business. Favorite policies of these folks include anything and everything that calls itself “free trade.” Furthermore, these same “conservatives” will support just about anything and everything that is said to advance the so-called “global economy.”

Needless to say, in the name of “free trade“ millions of American jobs and thousands of American manufacturing plants have been outsourced to foreign countries and interests. And leading the charge for “free trade,” outsourcing, and the “global economy” is the international cabal known as Big Business. But Big Business does not play this game alone. Joining Big Business is its pernicious partner, Big Government.

Together, Big Business and Big Government form a tyrannical tandem that is squeezing the breath out of our once-great republic. In fact, people need to understand that what is passing for “capitalism” in America today is nothing more than “Corporatism.”

Corporatism has little to do with genuine capitalism or free enterprise. Freedom and federalism thrive when true capitalism and free enterprise are at work. But Corporatism has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with tyranny.

Corporatism is the marriage of Big Business with Big Government. Corporatism uses the force and weight of government to create giant monopolies, which strangle competition and freedom. Rules and regulations are enacted that make it impossible for “little” guys to compete. The trade laws of nations are pitted against each other, forcing free nations to sacrifice their own peace and security to accommodate the economies of totalitarian regimes. And, of course, Big Business is the recipient of gargantuan profits in the process.

Please understand that the movers and shakers of Big Business have no national loyalty. They claim no country, salute no flag, and recognize no independence but their own. They are the travel companions of the bloodiest butchers on the planet. They have homes in every corner of the globe and are happy to share the beds of the vilest people on earth. They would gladly sell the heart and soul of America to the highest bidder, and have long ago sold their own hearts and souls to the devil.

And there is no limit to how intimately Big Business and Big Government can collaborate to steal people’s liberties. A classic case in point is the burgeoning effort to control and regulate private, homegrown gardens.

In the face of a growing recession, thousands of people across America are planting and growing their own gardens. And this is not lost to Corporatism. Remember, Corporatism’s great goal is to create monopolies and crush freedom, leaving the cabal controlling both Big Business and Big Government alone atop the world of prosperity and power. Therefore, it will use every tool at its disposal to protect any and all of Corporatism’s favored players. And when it comes to America’s food supply, Big Agriculture is that favored player.

Even as Michelle Obama plants a White House garden and encourages Americans everywhere to do the same thing, her husband is creating a brand new tool for the Big Business/Big Government powerbrokers: a new “Food Safety Administration” (FSA).

At the same time, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) has introduced H.R. 875 to “protect the public health.” But it is not the public health that Ms. DeLauro wants to protect. It is the health of the demonic duo of Big Business and Big Government. Two other bills with similar machinations are S. 425, introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and H.R. 815, submitted by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado).

In a nutshell, when these bills become law, every homegrown garden in the country will be regulated, inspected, controlled, and taxed by the federal government. (No, I am not making it up.) In addition, small, independent farms would most certainly be put out of business. In effect, the great Nanny State is posturing itself to completely take over the food business in America.

First, the Big Business/Big Government Axis of Evil began taking over the banking and financial institutions. Next, it was the automobile business that was in Corporatism’s crosshairs. Now, it is energy, healthcare, and even the food business—down to the smallest backyard, homegrown garden—that Corporatism is plotting to plunder.

It is an ingenious system: first, Big Government regulates legitimate business to the point that it can no longer function in a free and open market. Then it paves the way for foreign investors to gain influence or even seize control of those same businesses. Then it forces the mergers of smaller entities into international monstrosities. Then it passes laws making it impossible for the remaining small, independent businesses to compete. Meanwhile, the newly created super-wealthy collaborators in Big Business are more than eager to share their bounty with their fellow miscreants inside Big Government.

The obvious result of all this chicanery is the creation of a superior ruling class and the destruction of a free and independent middle class. If all this sounds familiar, it is because Corporatism used to be known by another name: fascism! And this is exactly what is being created right in front of our very eyes, here in the good old U.S.A.

If “conservatives” were more cognizant of and diligent to protect the U.S. Constitution and principles of liberty contained in our Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, they would be able to see through the façade of modern Corporatism that masks its totalitarian agenda under the guise of “free trade.”

So, in the meantime, go ahead and grow your garden, because you are going to need it. But, at the same time, be prepared to give an account to your local FSA agent. He’ll want to know how much you’ve grown, how much you sold or gave away, and to whom you sold or gave it. He’ll want to inspect it; he’ll expect you to fill out the appropriate government forms, including names, addresses, amounts, prices, etc. And this goes for all those church and social club potluck dinners as well. Oh, yes! He’ll also expect you all to pay taxes on it.

Either that, or convince your State legislators and governor to do what the Thirteen Colonies did: tell King George to go to Hades! But if you don’t have—and cannot get—a State legislature and governor willing to do that, you’ll need to either move or start turning your entire life over to the new fascist America that Big Business and Big Government are creating, because the die has been cast, and it doesn’t appear that there is any going back.

Dr. Chuck Baldwin is the pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. He hosts a weekly radio show. His website is here.

The Curse of the Withholding Tax

The Curse of the Withholding Tax

Did you have to write out a check to the IRS for $5,581 this past April 15? If you had to do such a thing next year, would you think of it as your civic duty or would you consider it a crime that only the government could get away with?

A Typical Taxpayer

This figure of $5,581 is not an arbitrary one. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, real median household income was $43,318 for 2002 and 2003. A taxpayer with an income of that amount who was single with no children would, after his standard deduction of $4,850 and his personal exemption of $3,100, owe $5,581 in federal income tax for tax year 2004. If this same taxpayer was married and his spouse did not work, he would be entitled to an extra personal exemption, thus lowering his tax liability to $3,399—still a huge sum for most Americans to come up with.

If this same couple were to have a child, they would gain not only another personal exemption, but also a $1,000 child tax credit. However, their tax liability would still be $1,934—an amount that the typical American does not have in his checking account. The addition of another child would lower this couple’s tax liability down to $469.

The Withholding Tax

But regardless of the amount of federal income tax that one ultimately pays, the fact that the U.S. government seizes the wealth of its citizens slowly over the course of the year via the withholding tax means that the typical taxpayer is comfortable in each of the above scenarios because he doesn’t actually have to write out a check to the government on April 15 of each year.

The withholding tax makes it possible for the government to silently steal the wealth from its citizens with little or no outrage about the loss. And even in the case where the citizen receives a refund of all the taxes he has paid in, the withholding tax still serves two evil purposes. First, getting a refund of all the taxes one pays in amounts to an interest-free loan to the government. The government gets money to continue its spending orgy, and the citizen loses the ability to receive a return on money that could be invested. And second, getting a tax refund fosters the notion that the government is benevolent. Never mind that the money is yours. If the government sends you a check in the mail then the government can’t be all that bad.

If the $5,581 were gradually taken out of one’s paycheck over the course of the year and no money was owed on April 15, the pain of the theft would be greatly diminished, but for two entirely different reasons. Obviously, it is less painful to have $107.33 taken out of one’s check every week for fifty-two weeks than writing a check to the government for that amount every week or a check for the whole amount once a year. The second reason the pain of the $5,581 loss would not readily be felt is that very few people pay any attention to the amount of taxes that are withheld from their pay. They are concerned only with their take-home pay. This is unfortunate because if the people who pay taxes actually realized how much the government was taking from them they would be outraged.

The Origin of Tax Withholding

So where did the withholding tax come from? It was not part of the original income tax that resulted from the sixteenth amendment in 1913. Very few people paid any taxes back then anyway. The income tax did not directly affect the average American until World War II.

On the eve of the war, few Americans paid income taxes. Those that owed taxes paid them in one lump sum on March 15 (later changed to April 15). To pay for the war, the Revenue Act of 1942 lowered exemptions and raised income tax rates. But it also did something even more insidious—it instituted a 5 percent “Victory Tax” on all wages above an exemption of $624. The tax was to be collected by the employer and deducted from the employee’s paycheck—just like the Social Security tax that began in 1935.

The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 then revolutionized the income tax by making withholding taxes universal. The withholding tax was part of the new tax plan offered by Beardsley Ruml (1894–1960), the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and treasurer of R.H. Macy and Co. By 1945, about three-fourths of Americans were paying federal income taxes. And although the withholding tax was sold as a wartime emergency, like most expansions of government instituted during wartime, it has been a way of life for most Americans ever since.

The Curse of the Withholding Tax

The income tax allows the government to confiscate the wealth of its citizens. The curse of the withholding tax is that it allows the government to commit this crime systematically, effortlessly, painlessly, and benevolently.

Surprisingly, it was a free market economist who helped the federal government implement the withholding tax in the first place. As was pointed out by the Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), in his 1971 article “Milton Friedman unraveled“:

One of Friedman’s most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during World War II in the Treasury Department, in foisting upon the suffering American public the system of the withholding tax. Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15. It is obvious that under this system, the Internal Revenue Service could never hope to extract the entire annual sum, at current confiscatory rates, from the mass of the working population. The whole ghastly system would have happily broken down long before this. Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America.

Conclusion

The definitive anti-tax history by Charles Adams ($30), and see also his 10-hour audio course on tax history.

Ideally, the elimination of the withholding tax would force the American people to see exactly how much of their income is being confiscated by the government to fund its trillion-dollar budgets. This would, of course, have to be followed by sufficient outrage on behalf of the American people to reduce those budgets. The elimination of the withholding tax is also sometimes seen as freeing businesses from being tax collectors. But this would only be true if businesses also ceased to collect Social Security tax for the government.

But on a more practical note, there are two reasons why even if the withholding tax were eliminated it might not result in sufficient enough outrage at the level of government wealth confiscation and spending. First, the majority of the population presently pays little or no income tax. It is of no consequence to them if the “rich” have money withheld from their paychecks or not. And second, many out of this majority are not only not taxpayers, they are taxeaters who benefit from the redistribution of the wealth of those who actually pay taxes. The continued expansion by the Republicans in Congress of refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit will ensure that the number of taxeaters will increase.

There is also one significant practical consideration that cannot be ignored. The chance that Congress would ever eliminate that which provides the government with a continual flow of revenue is zero. There is, therefore, nothing short of dramatically rolling back income tax rates (good) or eliminating the income tax altogether (better) that will even begin to tame the federal leviathan.

94 Years of Serfdom

94 Years of Serfdom

By Paul Craig Roberts

This April 15 is the 94th year that Americans have had to file an income tax.  For most Americans, the day is a non-event.  The federal and state governments have already collected the taxes due by withholding from each paycheck over the course of the calendar year.  Most Americans never saw the money and have no real idea that they earned it.

Some Americans have their incomes over-withheld as a form of forced savings.  They look forward to tax time as it means they will receive a refund check from the government that they can use for a summer vacation, a big screen TV, a new appliance, or a down payment on a new car.

Few Americans realize that over the last 94 years they have been enserfed and have no more rights to their own labor than medieval serfs or 19th century slaves.

The 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified because the income tax was only for the rich.  Some states ratified the amendment because no one in the state had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

According to the US Department of the Treasury’s history of the income tax, less than one percent of the US population was subject to the income tax.  A progressive structure was applied to this less than one percent of rich Americans, with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent on incomes over $500,000, a great sum of money in those days.

In the first year of the income tax, the world’s richest person, John D. Rockefeller, paid $2 million in income tax, almost 3 percent of the total income tax collected.

People were happy.  They had finally gotten the rich.

And themselves as well.  Exemptions were reduced and tax rates were raised in rapid succession in 1916, 1917, and 1918.  Within five years the tax rates ranged from 6 percent to 77 percent, and people whose incomes were initially exempt now paid tax at more than double the initial top rate that had applied to John D. Rockefeller.

In “free” America today, despite the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush tax rate reductions, ordinary Americans have no more claim to their own labor than a medieval serf.  Most are content, however, with handing over 30 percent of their income as long as they can hope to tax the rich at 50 percent, the tax rate on 19th century slaves.

Some 19th century slaves, whose skills were worth more in towns than on plantations, were leased by their owners to businesses in towns.  The businesses would remit half of the slave’s wages to the owner.  Out of the remainder, slaves could save enough to purchase their freedom.

Today, we cannot purchase our freedom from the IRS.  The only free Americans today are those who can work off the books or who can live on public welfare.

People who reject my analogy can test the analogy by refusing the government’s claim on their labor.  They will find that the IRS can be just as ruthless as the worst feudal lord or slave owner.

For many Americans freedom is not as important as “fairness,” by which is meant a more equal distribution of income.  However, a number of studies indicate that a progressive income tax doesn’t achieve the kind of leveling that some desire. Moreover, rich and poor are not static groups. Studies have discovered that there is a great deal of movement between the income quintiles. Some people rise, some people fall, and some rise again. The same people do not inhabit the same quintile year after year.

Government does not seem to be the answer.  Indeed, some of the largest incomes result from collusion with government, such as the Clinton/Bush financial deregulation that produced the world’s first annual incomes of $1 billion.

The desire to tax the rich has caused a concentration of less accountable power in the United States as national and global corporations took over from local businesses.  The estate tax, created in 1916, has forced family businesses, media, and farms into large corporate conglomerates.  The corporate media, animal, chicken, and egg farming, with its inhumane conditions, antibiotics, and waste concentrations that pollute the environment, and large scale chemical fertilizer farming that pollutes rivers and oceans are, in part, unintended consequences of taxation aimed at the rich.

Today the income tax serves our interest less than ever before.  The collapse of socialism and the rise of the high speed Internet has opened vast under-utilized foreign work forces to first world corporations.  The consequent loss of jobs and careers by Americans cannot be rectified through the corporate income tax.

Ralph Gomory, coauthor with William Baumol of the most important work in trade theory ever published, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests. (MIT Press, 2000), has suggested that jobs would flow back to America instead of continuing to leave if the corporate income tax were replaced by taxing corporations on the basis of whether the value added to their products occurs at home or abroad.

The ecological economist Herman Daly has suggested that the tax base be moved off of income and on to the use of increasingly scarce natural capital.  Non-renewable resources are being depleted, and the over-use of nature’s waste absorption services is resulting in pollution and environmental destruction.

Taxing the use of natural capital would conserve it and lead to its more rational use.

These promising tax ideas directly address the most pressing economic and environmental problems of our time, but they cannot be considered because people are still absorbed in class warfare.

A mainstay of class war is the propaganda that “the rich don’t pay taxes.” This myth lives on despite the annual release of IRS data that proves the contrary.  In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans whose tax returns placed them in the top 1 percent earned 22.1 percent of adjusted gross income and paid 39.9 percent of all federal individual income taxes.

The top 5 percent, defined as rich by President Obama, paid 60.1 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 10 percent paid 71 percent.

Those Americans whose earnings placed them in the bottom half of the income distribution paid less than 3 percent of the individual income tax collected.

The immunity of many Americans to facts is impressive. Just as many Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and hid them in Syria, Russia, or Iran, many Americans will continue to believe that “the rich don’t pay taxes.”

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

The Apologists

The Apologists

By Patrick J. Buchanan

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts.

“I thought it was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought.”

Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: “I thought the cultural performance was fascinating,” she cooed.

Pressed again on Ortega’s vitriol, Hillary replied: “To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed.”

Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.

Nor was this the only unanswered insult. Hugo Chavez, who has called Obama an “ignoramus” and Bush “El Diablo,” walked over to a seated U.S. president and handed him the anti-American tract “ Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.“

The book blames Latin America’s failures on white Europeans.

It opens, “Renaissance Europeans ventured across the oceans and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”

Civilizations? Before Pizarro and Cortez, the Inca and Aztec empires these conquistadors overthrew were into human sacrifice.

Evo Morales, the Aymaran president of Bolivia, who is using the race card against Bolivians of European descent, implied a U.S. role in an assassination plot against him.

Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who allegedly received black-bag money from Chavez, ripped into America for its role in the 1980s. Under Reagan, America aided Britain in the Falklands War, after the Argentine junta invaded the islands, and assisted the Contras in their war of national liberation to oust Ortega’s Sandinistas.

Again, Obama offered no defense of his country.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who blames the world financial crisis on “white, blue-eyed bankers,” told Obama that any future Summit of the Americas without the Castro brothers was unacceptable.

Perhaps Obama believes in turn-the-other-cheek diplomacy, though it is hard to find much success in history for such a policy. Perhaps pacifism is in his DNA. Perhaps he shares the indictment of America that is part of the repertoire of every Latin demagogue.

Whatever his motive, in Trinidad, there were not two sides to the story. There were the trashers of America on the Latino left and a U.S. president who wailed plaintively, “I’m thankful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was 3 months old.”

But, the Bay of Pigs, had it succeeded, would have given Cubans 50 years of freedom instead of the brutal dictatorship they have had to endure. And it took place four months before Barack was born.

Obama’s silence—signifying, as it does, assent—in the face of attacks on his country is of a piece with the “contrition tour” of his secretary of state.

“Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Past U.S. Errors,“ was the headline over Saturday’s New York Times story by Mark Landler:

“It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: She says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

“On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said … that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. …

“The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.”

Sandler wrote that Hillary brought to mind Bill Clinton:

“On a single trip to Africa in 1998 … Bill Clinton apologized for American participation in slavery; American support of brutal African dictators; American ‘neglect and ignorance’ of Africa; American failure to intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide of 1994; American ‘complicity’ in apartheid … .”

Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in God in the Dock, “The first and fatal charm of national repentance is … the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others.”

Bewailing the policies of Bush as failures and standing mute in the face of attacks on his country and predecessors may come back to bite Obama.

For when Jimmy Carter assumed a posture of moral superiority over LBJ and Richard Nixon, by declaring, “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism,“ it came back to bite him, good and hard.

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Rendering Unto Caesar

Rendering Unto Caesar

By Patrick J. Buchanan

At the request of the White House, Georgetown University covered up all the symbols in Gaston Hall, before the Great Man spoke, including IHS, the millennia-old monogram for the name of Jesus Christ.

Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, had adopted the monogram in his seal and it became an emblem of the Jesuit order.

When it comes to rendering unto Caesar, Georgetown is not going to be outshone by Notre Dame, which stole a march by offering the nation’s avatar of abortion a doctorate of laws degree, honoris causa.

Actually, it is regrettable the IHS in Gaston Hall was not covered up in shame the first week of Lent. For that week Georgetown’s feminist and homosexual clubs, such as GU Pride, put on a Gomorrah festival about alternative lifestyles called “Sex Positive Week.”

Monday, according to The Newman Club, featured a speaker for Black Rose, which “provides a forum for many different expressions of power in love and play. This can include dominance & submission, bondage and discipline, fetishism, cross-dressing, to name a few.”

Ash Wednesday’s talk was “Torn About Porn,” advertised as a “discussion about arguably alternative forms of pornography that are not supposed to be exploitative, but rather radical and empowering.”

Saturday’s talk was by a pornographic film director and was titled “Relationships Beyond Monogamy.”

At Loyola of Chicago that week, the Student Diversity and Cultural Affairs Office presented “Brother to Brother,” a film the Newman Society reports, about “a homosexual African-American who is transported in time to cavort with the allegedly homosexual Langston Hughes.”

The movie is said to be part of “a semester-long ‘Color of Queer Film Series,’ sponsored by the university.”

At Catholic Seattle University, that first week of Lent was “Transgender Awareness Week,” featuring a “session on allegedly transgender Bible heroes and heroines and ‘Criss-Cross Day’ where students are encouraged to ‘come dressed for the day in your best gender-bending outfit.”

This is surely anecdotal evidence to confirm Newsweek in the conclusion reached in its cover story of Holy Week, “The End of Christian America.”

Indeed, not only are many once-Catholic colleges and universities now wandering in what Pope Benedict XVI calls a “desert of godlessness,” Catholic belief and practice are not remotely what they were before Vatican II. Where three-fourth of Catholics attended mass weekly in the 1950s, today it is one-fourth. A third of all Catholics raised in the Faith have fallen away.

One in ten American adults is a lapsed Catholic. Catholicism’s quarter of the population is maintained only by mass immigration and, secondarily, by conversions.

Self-identified Christians in the United States have fallen from 86 percent of the population in 1990 to 76 percent today. Those who say they have no religion have doubled as a share of the nation from 8 to 16 percent. Where 69 percent of Americans said we are a Christian country in 1990, only 62 percent say that today.

America is being systematically de-Christianized and secularized.

For the social, moral and cultural revolution of the 1960s, rooted in non- and anti-Christian beliefs and values, has captured the culture, and converted many of the young. Among Americans 18 to 29, a fourth profess to be atheist, agnostic, or of no religious faith.

The figure is surely higher among the college young.

Second reason for the triumph of secularism is that it long ago captured the Supreme Court. Since the Everson decision of 1947, justices have expunged Christianity and all its books and symbols from the public square and public schools.

Voluntary prayer, the Ten Commandments, Bible reading, Christmas plays and carols, Nativity scenes, Easter vacation, before-game prayers, benedictions at graduations—all have been ordered terminated by unelected judges—against the will of the majority.

Abortion on demand, too, was imposed by judicial fiat.

Thus, as America ceases to be a Christian country, it is ceasing to be a democratic one.

Consider. In every referendum in 16 states, where homosexual marriage has been on the ballot, majorities ranging from 52 to 86 percent have voted to outlaw it as an absurdity and an abomination.

Yet, in Massachusetts, California and Iowa, unelected judges have imposed it, as they will in other states, regardless of what the people want or how the people vote. For secularism has become the established religion of the American state and judges are the high priests of the new order.

Yet, one wonders if they know what lies at the end of the road upon which they have set the nation.

For five decades, Americans resisted Godless Communism. If they come to realize they did so to save Godless Capitalism, or Godless Socialism, what happens to loyalty and love of country?

To love one’s country, said Edmund Burke, one’s country ought to be lovely. If this is not God’s country anymore, whose country is it?

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The Million Taxpayer March

The Million Taxpayer March

By Michelle Malkin

Let’s use liberal math to calculate attendance at this week’s nationwide Tax Day Tea Party protests. When left-wing activists make crowd estimates, the algorithm is: six figures = one million. An incomplete survey of newspaper accounts and organizer estimates pegged the Tea Party protest population at a (SET ITAL) minimum (END ITAL) of 250,000. We can now, therefore, officially call it the Million Taxpayer March.

Or the Million Right-Wing Extremists March if you work for the Department of Homeland Security.

To George Soros-funded grievance professionals, 250,000 is an insignificant number. But unlike recent anti-war and pro-illegal immigration rallies padded with union workers, college students and homeless people, the Tax Day Tea Party demonstrations featured small-business owners, working taxpayers and families. This wasn’t a weekend or holiday, mind you. A quarter-million people took time off in the middle of the workweek to raise their voices against reckless taxing and bipartisan spending.

Multimillionaire jetsetter Nancy Pelosi scoffed that the Tax Day Tea Party movement was nothing more than “Astroturf” politics to protect the “wealthiest people” in America. Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky called the peaceable assemblies “despicable.” Other bitter, clingy Tea Party-bashers grumbled that activists only showed up where Fox News cameras were. But tens of thousands more came out in rain, snow and cold — in Bozeman, Mont.; Eau Claire, Wis.; Carson City, Nev.; White Plains, N.Y.; Bend, Ore.; Lansing, Mich.; Hilo, Hawaii; Nashville, Tenn.; and everywhere in between — with no media personalities or celebrities in sight.

If only the condescending cable TV anchors at CNN and MSNBC had paused from wallowing in gutter puns about tea bags, they might have reported an even more significant phenomenon: Tea Party protesters were as vocal in their criticism of Republicans as they were of Democrats. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a crowd of 2,000 repeatedly booed GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, who both supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, and protested GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman’s decision to accept $1.6 billion in porky stimulus funds.

In Sacramento, Tea Party organizer Mark Meckler singled out California GOP Chair Ron Nehring for waffling on proposed $16 billion tax hikes. The crowd of 5,000 greeted Nehring — who unsuccessfully tried to hitch his wagon to the Tea Party movement — with a roar of boos and catcalls. Speaker after speaker lambasted Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for abandoning fiscal-conservative principles. The loudest chant of the day: “Throw them out.”

In Madison, Wis., GOP Rep. Paul Ryan — hyped as a conservative “rock star” — was well received. But I heard from staunch fiscal-conservative constituents who refused to be silent about Ryan’s complicity. He gave one of the most hysterical speeches in the rush to pass TARP last fall; voted for the auto bailout; and voted with the Barney Frank-Nancy Pelosi AIG bonus-bashing stampede. Milwaukee blogger Nick Schweitzer wrote: “He ought to be apologizing for his previous votes, not pretending he was being responsible the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of regret for what he did previously. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it.”

Other Tea Party participants pointed out that Newt Gingrich, who jumped aboard the bandwagon, flip-flopped on TARP in the space of a week last September and made common cause with Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi in ads calling for immediate action on “climate change.”

Before the grassroots Tea Party movement took them by surprise, Beltway GOP strategists argued fervently that the party’s traditional focus on taxes and spending had become outdated. The re-branders pitched their own expansive ideas to replace the anti-tax-and-spend agenda and inspire new voters. These included Gingrich’s “green conservatism,” David Frum’s proposal to raise carbon taxes, and open-borders Republicans’ plans for alternative forms of amnesty.

Newsflash: Eco-zealotry and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens didn’t bring out thousands of first-time activists on the streets. Stay-at-home moms weren’t up all night making signs that read “Tax me more, please!”

What resonated on Tax Day were nonpartisan calls to roll back pork, hold the line on taxing and spending, end the endless government bailouts, and stop the congressional steamrollers that have pushed through mountains of legislation without deliberation. This is a teachable moment for GOP public relations peddlers in Washington. While they search for the Holy Grail of Re-branding in tony salons and country club conferences, the agenda for 2010 is smacking them in the face. It’s the three T’s, stupid: Too Many Taxes, Trillions in Debt, and Transparency.

The GOP path to reclaiming power lies with candidates who can make a credible case that they will support and defend fiscal responsibility. That means acting on fiscal-conservative principles now, not paying lip service later. The reckonable forces of the Tea Party movement didn’t let opportunists escape accountability on Tax Day. The GOP shouldn’t assume they’ll get a pass on Election Day, either. As one of the most popular Tea Party signs read: “You can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out.”

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You Might Be a “Radicalized Right-Wing Extremist” If…

You Might Be a “Radicalized Right-Wing Extremist” If…

By Michelle Malkin

What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.

Department of Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano has turned her attention away from acts of Islamic jihad on American soil (which she now refers to as “man-caused disasters”). Instead, her department is sounding the alarm over an unquantified “resurgence” in “right-wing extremism activity.” On April 7, DHS sent a nine-page warning memo [PDF]to law enforcement offices across the country titled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

The report includes a sweeping definition of the threat:

“Right-wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

You cannot ignore the context or the timing of this DHS report. It’s no small coincidence that Napolitano’s agency disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests. The grassroots events organized by fiscal conservatives, independents, Libertarians and, yes, even some Blue Dog Democrats were fueled by the “current economic and political climate” of bipartisan profligate spending and endless taxpayer-funded bailouts. The growing success of the loose-knit movement has invited scorn, ridicule and fear-mongering from Obama’s supporters. Liberal bloggers have likened the Tea Party movement to neo-Nazis, militias and even Weather Underground terrorists.

These attempts to demonize the Tea Party movement come on the heels of widespread conservative-bashing over the recent shooting sprees in Pittsburgh and Binghamton, N.Y. Taking Hillary Clinton’s advice to “never waste a good crisis,” left-wing pundits and analysts have blamed the tragedies on everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to the NRA.

The DHS spokespeople I talked to on Monday insisted that the report was not a politicized document and that DHS had done similar assessments on “left-wing extremism” in the past. But past domestic terrorism reports have always been very specific in identifying security threats—such as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front—and very specific in identifying their methods and targets, including repeated physical harassment, arson and vandalism against pharmaceutical companies, farms, labs and university researchers.

By contrast, the Obama DHS report is an overarching indictment of conservatives. “Right-wing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures,” the assessment warns. When I asked DHS spokeswoman Sara Kuban to explain who was responsible for this “extremist chatter,” she could not and would not name names.

Moreover, the report relies on the work of the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center to stir anxiety over “disgruntled military veterans”—a citation that gives us valuable insight into how DHS will define “hate-oriented” groups. The SPLC, you see, has designated the venerable American Legion a “hate group” for its stance on immigration enforcement. The report offers zero data, but states with an almost resentful attitude toward protected free speech: “Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.”

“Potential to turn violent”? So did the hysterical fervor whipped up by Capitol Hill over the AIG bonuses, which prompted ugly death threats from across the country. No mention here, though. Not “right wing” enough. Nor will you see Obama DHS warnings to police and sheriff’s departments about self-proclaimed bank terrorists such as Bruce Marks of the aggressive Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America or the mob activists of ACORN who have committed burglary, stormed corporate executives’ homes and vowed to conduct “civil disobedience” by “any means necessary” in response to the “current economic and political climate.”

If you can redefine dissenting opinion as “hate,” you can brand your political opponents as “extremists”—and you can marginalize electoral threats. “Antigovernment”? “Pro-enforcement”? “Disgruntled”? Feeling taxed enough already and “recruiting” and “radicalizing” your friends and neighbors through “chatter on the Internet”?

We are all right-wing extremists now. Welcome to the club.

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