New Tribe Rising?

A very interesting post from http://www.vdare.com/ about Americans self realization. This follows this post about the dangers of AMNESTY passing because of these two people and this post which shows that there are 30,000 openly illegal immigrants in the border town of El Paso across from the recent Juarez shooting. For more interesting stories like this click here to follow this blog.

New Tribe Rising?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
"Is white the new black?"
So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of "Beyond the Pale," his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing "the slow birth of a people."
Sanneh is onto something. For after a year of battering as "un-American," "evil-doers" and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as "the real Americans," Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.
Ethnonationalism—the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart—is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.
Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his "Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society" , Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.
It has happened before—and here.
In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama.
In 1754, the 13 colonies consisted of South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king.
But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act and the Quebec Act, by 1775 a new people had been born: the Americans.
In 1770, New York colonists had erected a statue of George III in Bowling Green in grateful tribute for his repeal of the Townshend taxes. In July 1776, they pulled it down and melted it for lead bullets after Washington read his soldiers the Declaration of Independence portraying George III as another Ivan the Terrible.
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people," said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.
Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other.
Obama in the campaign of 2008 recognized that "out there" in Middle America existed another country, far from the one he grew up in, far from the privileged Ivy League community to which he belonged.
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Palin and Tea Partiers now repeat Obama's disparaging line about their clinging to Bibles and guns—with defiant pride.
As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically.
Sioux gather at Little Bighorn to celebrate the massacre of Custer's command. Hawaiian natives demand a new ethnically based government—and receive Obama's blessing. Hispanics march under Mexican flags in Los Angeles to demand citizenship for illegal aliens.
Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding.
In 2004, when Howard Dean reached out to "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," Shelby Steele wrote that this was "absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America" because of their history and white guilt.
This, Sanneh suggests, is changing. The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them.
When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there was no hesitation in blistering her for showing contempt for the rights of Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven, cheated of the promotions they had won in competitive exams.
When black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by Cambridge cop James Crowley, most Americans, despite Obama and media suggestions of racial profiling, sided with Crowley.
Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?
First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.
Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Crist. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal. Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.

Redefining Hate Speech

An article about our right to speak up from www.wponline.org!

Redefining Hate Speech
Hate speech—it can incite racism, prejudices and even violence. But is it hate speech to disagree with others in the public arena on important moral issues? The debate over what is and is not hate speech is much more important than you may realize. There may come a time in the near future when it may be illegal to promote biblical standards concerning abortion, homosexuality or marriage.
by Gary Petty

Do you remember this childhood comeback? "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That old saying just is not true. Anyone who has suffered ridicule, slander or verbal attacks knows that words are powerful and can be used as weapons to hurt others.
Tell a child long enough that she is stupid or that he is ugly, and eventually he or she will begin to believe you. Parents and children, husbands and wives, the dearest of friends have been separated for a lifetime because of hurtful words spat out in a time of anger.
Words have been used to incite riots and wars, promote racism and ruin the reputations of good people. Hate speech is a term used for words used to denigrate and hurt others.

Christian hate speech?
Sometimes Christians are accused of hate speech because of their positions on abortion and gay rights. Some opponents claim that Jesus said that we should not judge one another. This becomes an excuse to accept almost any behavior as Christian. In reality, not only nonreligious people but also most religious people would be terribly offended if they read the Bible and knew what Jesus really taught.
Here is the heart of the problem. A person, if he or she is to be a true Christian, must not only accept Jesus as Savior, but also accept the teachings of Jesus and live by them. The hard truth is that many professing Christians don't know or have outright rejected the teachings of Jesus. It is these teachings that provide a moral compass, a direction finder on how to deal with life's problems. Without this moral compass, a set of rules that define right and wrong for everyone, people simply make up their own definitions of morality.
Christ expects Christians to influence society through example. He told His disciples that you cannot hide the light of a city on a hill. True Christianity isn't meant to be lived in the shadows. When one takes a stand for the good of family values, sexual morality and the human dignity of a fetus, one will draw the criticism of detractors.
However, how can Christianity have a positive impact on society when so many of those who claim to follow Christ do not live by what He taught? Christianity is losing the public battle because we are losing the private battles inside our own lives. All too many Christians would rather "trust their hearts" than actually follow the teachings of the Founder of their religion.
The result is that in many churches what passes for the teachings of Jesus is based more on postmodernism or New Age thought than the Bible.
Then there is the inevitable accusation, "Christians just want to force their ways on others, and they're a bunch of hypocrites who don't live by what they preach." We need to face these detractors and admit that there are no perfect Christians, but there is a perfect way of life taught by the Creator of life. That way of life is worth striving to achieve because it is the only way to universal peace and happiness.

The positive message
Christians who understand the teachings of Jesus do not use words to incite violence, but they must speak out against issues like racism, abortion, dishonesty and injustice.
Because Christians are sometimes noted for what we stand against, it is easy to forget what Christians support—family, the basic value and dignity of every human life, the message of the Creator's desire to change our lives for the better, the eternal meaning found in suffering and death, and the promise of an afterlife. What good is it to claim that something is wrong without presenting solutions to the problems?
True Christianity is about change—change at the very core of who you are. Human beings naturally want to live a way of get—"get what is mine," "defend my rights," "blame my problems on someone else." Jesus Christ taught a way of give, personal responsibility and dedication to standards of behavior established by the Creator.
Be honest with yourself. How different would everything around you be if you, and everyone else, approached every situation with the simple idea of, "What can I do that is good for the other person?" Don't use the excuse, "No one else will live that way, so why should I?" The world changes one person at a time. Let it start with you.
The way of life taught by Jesus isn't easy. It is the only way that will bring real happiness, meaning and peace into your life.

The message of Jesus
Nearly 2,000 years ago Jesus of Nazareth walked the dusty roads of Judea promoting a message of God's love. His entire message hinged on two main ideas of how human beings should respond to God: love toward God and love toward neighbor. The way of give. It's really a simple concept—treat your neighbor as you wish to be treated and commit your life to loving, obeying and worshipping the Creator.
You might wonder why such a simple message would get the Messenger killed. You see, Jesus also was quick to point out the moral weaknesses of society. He openly denounced religious practices that were not acceptable to the worship of the Creator. He avoided political entanglements and criticized leaders who were unjust. He told people that they had to take responsibility for their lives and be willing to admit when they were wrong.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said that it's not just immoral to commit murder, a truly moral person learns to control anger. He even condemned real hate speech. Jesus also taught that a truly moral person not only avoids sexual relationships outside of marriage, but avoids sexual thoughts about someone who isn't his or her spouse.
This may seem like an impossible standard, but Jesus taught that it is one worth striving to achieve. It is time for Christians to stop being intimidated by those who attack the teachings of Jesus and the Bible as hate speech. In the arena of debate about the meaning of human life, the only workable answers come from the Creator of life. WNP

Angry White Men

A very interesting post about Obamacare from Pat Buchanan. Please also click the links in this article!

Angry White Men

By Patrick J. Buchanan
To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are "mobs" of "thugs" whose rage has been "manufactured" by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the "Brooks Brothers riot" during the Florida recount.
But is it wise for the White House to denigrate and insult scores of thousands with the fire and energy to come to town meetings in August, and who appear to represent millions? Is this depiction fair or accurate?
Most K Street lobbyists could not organize a two-car funeral. They don't storm meetings. They buy friends with $1,000 checks. And if GOP operatives are turning out these crowds, why could they not turn them out for John McCain, unless Sister Sarah showed up?
The Obamaites had best wake up. Opposition to health-care reform is surging, and Barack Obama's campaigning has gone hand-in-hand with collapsing support, just as George W. Bush's barnstorming did for Social Security reform.
There is an anger out there unseen since Ross Perot was leading Bush I and Bill Clinton in the presidential trial heats in 1992.

Who are these folks? Why are they angry?
In his essay "Decline of the American Male" in USA Today, David Zinczenko, editor of Men's Health, give us a clue. "Of the 5.2 million people who've lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have jobs than men."
Ed Rubenstein, who has written for Forbes, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, blogs on VDARE.com that if one uses the household survey of job losses for June-July, Hispanics gained 150,000 positions, while non-Hispanics lost 679,000. Guess who got the stimulus jobs.
Going back to the beginning of the Bush presidency, Rubenstein says that "for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 122.5. ... (But) for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 98.9."
Since 2001, Hispanic employment has increased by 3,627,000 positions, while non-Hispanic positions have fallen by 1,362,000. For black and white America, the Bush decade did not begin well or end well, and it has gotten worse under Obama.
African-Americans remain loyal, but among white folks, where Obama ran stronger than John Kerry or Al Gore, he is hemorrhaging.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, which showed him falling to 50 percent approval, whites, by 54 percent to 27 percent, felt Obama behaved "stupidly" in the Sgt. Crowley-professor Gates dustup.
Fifteen straight months of job losses by non-Hispanics explains the anger, but columnist Lowell Ponte raises an issue that may explain who is protesting health-care reform and why.
Under the civil rights legal doctrine of disparate impact, used in the New Haven firefighters case, if tests for hirings and promotions consistently produce results disadvantageous to minorities, the tests are, de facto, suspect as inherently discriminatory, and the results are tossed out. New Haven canceled the promotions for firefighters when all but one of the firemen who passed the test were white, and not a single African-American made the cut.
The city argued that New Haven was acting true to the letter of the Civil Rights Act, which says that tests that consistently produce a disparate and unfavorable impact on African-Americans must go.
Ponte applies the disparate impact doctrine to the trillion-dollar health-care reform.
Who are the principal beneficiaries? The 47 million uninsured who will be covered. Who are the principal losers? The elderly sick who, in the name of controlling costs, are going to lose benefits, be denied care at the end of their lives and have their lives shortened. For half of all health-care costs are in the last six months of life, and cost control is priority No. 1.
Here is where the disparate impact hits. Among those who benefit most—the uninsured—African-Americans, Hispanics and immigrants are overrepresented. Among the biggest losers—seniors and the elderly sick—well over 80 percent are white. [Obamacare Imperils Caucasian Seniors, July 17, 2009] Ponte quotes Fox News' Dick Morris:
"The principal impact of the Obama health-care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered." [OBAMA WILL REPEAL MEDICARE]
Under Obamacare, adds Morris, "the elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access."
America is already divided ideologically and politically on health-care reform. And with seniors having to sacrifice care, while the young are all insured, a generational divide is opening.
Now Nobel prize-winner and New York Times pundit Paul Krugman writes in his "The Town Hall Mob" column that, as did Richard Nixon's men, "cynical political operators are ... appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites."
Pulitzer prize-winning black columnist Cynthia Tucker says 45 percent to 65 percent of all vocal opponents of Obamacare are motivated by racial hostility to a black president.
We are headed for interesting times.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.

After Gatesgate: Why Can`t Republicans Start “National Dialogue On Race”?

A very interesting article from the sage Steve Sailer of www.vdare.com!

After Gatesgate: Why Can`t Republicans Start “National Dialogue On Race”?
By Steve Sailer
President Barack Obama’s Beer Summit has conclusively demonstrated the cowardly ineptitude of John McCain’s strategy of running away from race in 2008. Police officer James Crowley, a man who simply had too much self-respect to allow himself to be racially bullied by the President of the United States, has done more political damage to Obama than all the GOP politicians and their myriad consultants combined.
The Mainstream Media is finally getting around to admitting that the farcical Gatesgate brouhaha was as politically disastrous for Obama as anything that trivial and self-inflicted could be. Despite the press’ overt bias, they are drawn like moths to the flame of the high ratings that Stupidlygate generated. For example, Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press wrote on Saturday:
“The success of President Barack Obama's ambitious agenda—from health care and climate change to education—could depend on how quickly he recovers from the sharp drop in support among white voters after criticizing a white policeman's arrest of a black Harvard scholar.” [Analysis: Obama must regain momentum after Gates By Jennifer Loven, Associated Press, August 1, 2009]
AP’s Loven quotes a liberal actually using the D-Word to describe Obama’s self-inflicted wound:
“Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, said he was stunned at how poorly Obama, normally so controlled, handled what Jacobs called ‘the first major personal debacle for the president.’”
Obama’s self-exposure of his racial prejudices raises obvious questions about his drive to take control of the health, energy, and education industries. It raises the central question of all politics: Is he on your side?
The reason Obama made a fool of himself at his news conference about health care reform by devoting 445 words to implicitly accusing Crowley of racism is because … that’s what he’s good at. His eagerness to jump into a minor race fray after all the technical tedium about health was palpable.
The two topics that excite Obama are power and race. He spelled this all out at vast length in his amazon Dreams from My Father, which is why I wrote a reader’s guide to the President’s memoir, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.” (Book $30, PDF download $10, Kindle download $7.95.)
Do you think Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee in 2003 because of his lifelong fascination with health finance? Did he subtitle his autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Health and Finance?
Let’s be frank. Mr. and Mrs. Obama got involved in the health care game for the same reason their good friend Tony Rezko did: because, these days, that’s where the money is.
Why didn’t Obama reveal his racial biases in interviews before? Because almost nobody asked him any tough questions about race during his entire 20 month campaign.
If there are any Republicans out there unwilling to throw the next election the way McCain threw the last one, they should take up the invitation of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder: stop being “a nation of cowards” and engage the President and his friends in his “national dialogue on race”.
For example, ask the President questions like these, over and over, until he can’t avoid answering them:
How can the majority afford to continue to provide racial preferences to minorities as it stops being a majority?
You’ve said that you don’t think it would be fair for your daughters to benefit from racial preferences. What have you done as President to make sure they don’t?
The Fire Department of New York lost 343 men on 9/11. Last month, a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton ruled that the Fire Department of New York racially discriminated on its 1999 hiring exam by asking questions about firefighting that blacks and Hispanics found hard to answer. In case of an appeal, will your Administration side with the Fire Department of New York or against it?
It might also be amusing to extend the national conversation to the First Lady, who is not as heavily nicotined as the President, and thus is more prone to reveal her insecurities and racial resentments:
If, as you repeatedly claimed during the campaign, your highest priority has always been the care of your children, how could you have earned $317,000 in 2005 at the U. of Chicago Hospitals as the community outreach and diversity coordinator?
The medical center eliminated your old position when you left it to become First Lady. Was this because the chief duty for which you earned $317,000 was being the spouse of a U.S. Senator?
Obama’s handler David Axelrod will likely try to keep the President and First Lady as tightly muzzled as he had poor Sonia Sotomayor on clampdown during her Senate testimony. But, hey, they’re only human.
Moreover, there’s a substitute for the Obamas readily at hand: Obama’s “friend” Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the great scholar. As Gates has demonstrated in his non-stop interviews since throwing his hissy fit, Gates is a professional motormouth who never met a microphone he didn’t like. He always has another PBS documentary on race to promote, so he’s always selling.
Yet Gates’ lacks the Machiavellianism that Obama aspires to. Because Obama has anointed Gates, anything Gates says is now fair game to ask Obama about.
It would be particularly fruitful to get Gates talking about one particular interest of his, which has all sorts of ramifications.
In 2004, Gates and Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School pointed out that only about one-third of blacks admitted to Harvard College “were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves”.
In other words, most of the beneficiaries of affirmative action for African-Americans at Harvard are either not American at all, or are the children of non-Americans, or have recent white parents or grandparents, or some combination.
Gates told the New York Times, ''This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids''. [Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? By Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, June 24, 2004]
Some questions for Dr. Gates suggest themselves:
Is the First Lady an example of the kind of descendent of slaves whom most people assume affirmative action at Harvard is intended to help?
But, did you find that that racial preferences at Harvard instead seem to mostly help people like, say, the President?
Is it fair for the son of a foreigner and a white person, somebody who no doubt has ancestors, both black and white, who were slaveowners, but who doesn’t have any ancestors who were slaves in America, to benefit from racial preferences intended for the descendants of slaves?
Yet, the First Lady says she wasn’t a beneficiary of affirmative action at Harvard Law School, while the President says he was. Which one is telling the truth?
Wouldn’t it be fairest to provide affirmative action to the descendants of slaves and American Indians, but not to those whose ancestors chose to come to America?
If there is something dubious about the fairness of black immigrants and their children enjoying racial preferences in the U.S., isn’t that at least as true for Hispanic immigrants and their children?

I think you can see now why Gates’s logic is TNT for Obama’s coalition.

The worst nightmare of Hispanic politicians is something that is almost never talked about, but that makes a fair amount of sense: that whites and blacks would cut a deal at the expense of the Latino elite by agreeing to cut down on immigration and restrict affirmative action and disparate impact laws to just blacks and American Indians.
This would make racial preferences demographically sustainable for much longer than under the current system where new arrivals, even illegal immigrants, immediately qualify for preferences.
There was a chance that Congresswoman Barbara Jordan would have used her position as chair of Clinton’s immigration reform commission to midwife a compromise like this in the 1990s if she hadn’t died prematurely.
Unfortunately, at present, there are no black politicians as statesmanlike as Jordan. Still, the point of getting Gates talking is not to drive a Grand Bargain between blacks and whites right away, but to put it on the table, to air it in public, and thus set the diverse elements of Obama’s diversity brigade, black and Latino, to battling amongst themselves.
Of course, there’s always the alternative: the Republicans could once again choose to lose.
With the modern GOP, failure is always an option.

[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.]

Presidential Pronouncement Premature

A commentary about the Beer Summit by http://www.verticalthought.com/ !


Presidential Pronouncement Premature

A commentary by Frank Dunkle

On July 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his own home in an incident that quickly became world famous. Yet, what U.S. President Barack Obama said about the arrest—and what he attempted to un-say—have become an even bigger spectacle.
The allegations
Police responded to an emergency call from a neighbor who heard that someone was forcing open a door at Professor Gates' house. There is more than one version of what exactly happened next, but it seems that the African-American professor became rather irate at being asked for identification by a European-American police officer. When Dr. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, questions quickly arose about racial profiling and racism in general.
The press conference
At a press conference a few days later, a reporter asked President Obama about the incident and related issues. The president's answer included the comment that the police had "acted stupidly." His offhand comment provoked a storm of protest, including a demand for an apology from the union representing Sergeant James Crowley, the principal police officer involved.
Two days after the press conference, Mr. Obama went to reporters to retract his statement. "I could have calibrated those words differently," he said. While the president did not quite apologize, he certainly took a long step back from his first position.
A vertical thinking lesson
Much of the ongoing discussion about this incident is focusing on alleged racism and police brutality. Neither of those represents vertical thinking. But there is another lesson here—one perhaps so obvious that we could take it for granted, but let's not do so.
The lesson that President Obama will almost certainly learn from this—and one that all of us should learn—is this: Find out all the facts about a situation before you make a decision, and before you criticize anyone involved. In biblical times, King Solomon of Israel was inspired to say it like this: "He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him" (Proverbs 18:13).
Judging from his backtracking, the president appeared to feel a little foolish when he learned that there was more to the story of Professor Gates' arrest than he first thought. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that the police made no mistakes in the case, but it was certainly a mistake to jump to conclusions. That he acknowledged this and is working to make things right is to the president's credit.
Have you ever?
Have you ever had one friend tell you something terrible about another person that you know? It's natural to believe your friend and to say things about the supposed wrongdoer or even to take action against him or her. However, this is when a vertical thinker realizes that he or she has only heard one side of the story. King Solomon wrote about this, too, saying: "The first one to plead his cause seems right, until his neighbor comes and examines him" (Proverbs 18:17).
What's the value of learning this life lesson? Read "Priceless…" and I think you'll see.
We would all do well to heed the words of the ancient king—and to learn from the example of this modern president. Mr. Obama's "Beer Summit" last night with both Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley to talk things out seems to have been a good step in defusing the situation. Hopefully they'll all give more effort to listening than to judging—and hopefully so will all of us. VT



Comments or Questions
If you have any comments about this article or vertical-thinking questions we can help you answer please send them to info@verticalthought.org.

Non-Blue Dogs Also Oppose Health Care

A big hat tip from Erick Erickson of www.redstate.com on other Democrats who oppose Obamacare.


Target these Representatives on Healthcare
Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)

We know that most of the Blue Dogs are going to oppose healthcare. But what about the non-Blue Dog Democrats who live in districts McCain won? They seem to be good targets in addition to the Blue Dogs.
So here’s the list of targets for today. As the week progresses, we’re going to update, add to, and subtract from it. Start calling. And if your Congressman is not on the list, go here and find your Congressman. Start calling now.

Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-1) http://kirkpatrick.house.gov/(202) 225-2315
Vic Snyder (AR-2) http://www.house.gov/snyder/202-225-2506
Betsy Markey (CO-4) http://betsymarkey.house.gov/202-225-4676
Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24) http://www.kosmas.house.gov/202-225-2706
Ike Skelton (MO-4) http://www.house.gov/skelton/202-225-2876
Harry Teague (NM-2) http://teague.house.gov/202-225-2365
Michael McMahon (NY-13) http://mcmahon.house.gov/202-225-3371
Eric Massa (NY-29) http://massa.house.gov/202-225-3161
John Boccieri (OH-16) http://boccieri.house.gov/202-225-3876
John M. Spratt Jr. (SC-5) http://www.house.gov/spratt/202-225-5501
Chet Edwards (TX-17) http://edwards.house.gov/202-225-6105
Tom Perriello (VA-5) http://perriello.house.gov/202-225-4711
Rick Boucher (VA-9) http://www.boucher.house.gov/202-225-3861
Alan B. Mollohan (WV-1) http://mollohan.house.gov/202-225-4172
Nick J. Rahall Jr. (WV-3) http://www.rahall.house.gov/202-225-3452

"Are Cops Racist?"

A very interesting book recommended by Thomas Sowell.

His review is below.

If you have heard that the police are engaging in racial profiling, take a look at the evidence cited by those promoting that conclusion — and discover how flimsy and misleading that evidence is. When you finish reading "Are Cops Racist?" you may have your own question: Are the people who keep making that charge dishonest?

You can also get the book from your library here

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50333645&referer=brief_results

Read more here http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2003/12/09/christmas_books

Henry Louis Gates Inc.

A very interesting article by Steve Sailer of www.vdare.com!


Henry Louis Gates Inc.
[Steve Sailer]
I’ve been writing about Henry Louis Gates for 14 years, going back to this passing mention in a National Review article. Here, for instance, is a blog post about Gates’ televised adventures with genetic testing. And here’s my post on Gates’s sensible campaign to restrict affirmative action at Harvard to the descendants of American slaves, such as, say, Michelle Obama, and deny racial preferences to the children of immigrants and whites, such as, oh, Barack Obama.
Granted, Gates is, as we’ve seen in recent days, a race hustler. It’s completely in character for Gates to try to make money off his unfortunate temper tantrum by whipping it into a PBS documentary. Yet, for most of his long career he’s been the classiest race hustler in the racket.
But, my goodness, does he ever hustle.
I touched on his indefatigability in my 1997 book review, “The Ebony Tower,” in National Review of the (purportedly) Gates-edited Norton Anthology of African-American Literature:
Although anthologies of black American writing have been published by the score over the last 150 years, this enormous tome is sure to attract much attention, due to the authority of the “Norton Anthology” brand name and the well-deserved celebrity of co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The multitalented Dr. Gates somehow manages to be a master political operator in the growth industry of multicultural studies, an impressive researcher into the history of black literature, and a graceful writer for general audiences.
Franklin Foer explained this mystery the next year in Slate in “Henry Louis Gates Jr.: The Academic as Entrepreneur.”Gates does so many things at the same time that you have to wonder how he makes sure all of them meet the same high standard. The answer is, he can’t. In 1997 alone, according to his curriculum vitae, he wrote four long pieces for The New Yorker, published one book, and edited two more. He also supervised doctoral dissertations, taught two undergraduate courses, ran Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research (raising funds, balancing budgets, recruiting professors, planning conferences), served as director of editorial content for a publishing imprint he co-founded, was a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, scripted and hosted a Frontline documentary on the black bourgeoisie, and developed a six-part BBC-PBS documentary on Africa–the entire continent. He continued as an editor of Transition magazine; the Black Periodical Literature Project; the Zora Neale Hurston Library series; the 30-volume African-American Women Writers, 1910-1940; and the 2 million word Encyclopedia Africana. Nominally, at least, he sat on the board of editors of 29 other journals and on 82 advisory committees for museums, theaters, institutes, literary prizes, and universities.
This month’s Boston Magazine takes a hard look at Gates. It gives you an exhaustive account of his career, marred by a deeply unfortunate headline: “Head Negro in Charge.” [That's Gates' own joking term for himself.] The Du Bois Institute site details Gates’ many projects, including the Encyclopedia Africana. If you’re interested, it says it’s hiring.
Gates works very hard. Most days, he starts writing at 5 a.m. A 9,000-word New Yorker profile that would take most journalists weeks or months flows effortlessly from his pen. An incisive piece on Louis Farrakhan was reported Monday afternoon, written Tuesday, edited Wednesday, and closed Thursday. Gates drafted his 216-page memoir, Colored People (1994), in six weeks, though some critics thought the final result reflected the hasty composition.
But hard work alone doesn’t explain Gates’ output. He also understands a fundamental maxim of capitalism: Don’t do yourself what you can pay others to do for you.
It is a time-honored perquisite of senior professorship to have students act as minions, fetching books from the library and doing grunt research. Many scholars have figured out how to turn this somewhat feudal tradition into an industry. In the 1980s, for example, Yale Professor Harold Bloom served as the “editor” of 160 anthologies of literary criticism, even though it was graduate students (and a few undergraduates) who actually waded into the library and picked out the selections. But Gates pushes the envelope. He may be the only academic with a self-designated “chief of staff” who handles day-to-day details and deals with reporters. An assistant edits his writing. Another conducts research, keeping him abreast of the latest developments in hip-hop and digging up quotes for New Yorker pieces. Dozens of other writers and editors are hired to help produce his various projects. To put together one volume, The Dictionary of Global Culture, for instance, Gates used 32 research assistants and 32 fact checkers, in addition to 27 writers. (For this piece, I spoke with 17 current and former Gates employees.)
The last large-scale reference work Gates co-edited, also with Appiah, was The Dictionary of Global Culture, published last year. The book was meant to be the multiculturalist rebuttal to E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s controversial The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988); the idea was to highlight the accomplishments of non-Western societies and their contributions to Western culture. But it was too weirdly conceived and poorly edited to do all that. As a response to Hirsch, it is irrelevant, appearing long after most had forgotten Hirsch’s book. It is also filled with easily dismissable PC agitprop. As a reference work it fails, because entries are shorter and less informative than most entries for the same subjects in even the Encyclopedia Britannica. And it is embarrassingly error-ridden.
Why would Gates allow the publication of such a book with his byline and photo on the dust jacket? He had no idea it was so bad. After coming up with the idea for the project and appointing an “associate editor” to run it, he says, he was only minimally involved. According to those who edited the Dictionary, Gates read entries only just before they were sent to press, then looked closely only at items within his area of expertise, such as the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston. The book’s introduction was drafted by Appiah [who, by the way, is the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps, the famous Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain in the late 1940s]. …
Gates’ 29-page CV is packed with other projects to which he devotes scant energy. Between 1992 and 1998, for example, he contributed not a single word to 28 of the 29 magazines where he is listed as an editor. He does none of the line editing of articles for Transition, even though it proclaims his editorship in ads. For the 40 volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers he edited, he appointed others to put together the books and write their introductions. Ten other editors helped put together The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, even though it was his byline that appeared on the cover. …
The problem is, the work that comes out of his scholarly chop shops isn’t nearly as good as it should be.

David Axelrod’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

A very interesting article from Steve Sailer of www.vdare.com. Check out his book at the bottom of the article.

David Axelrod’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
[Steve Sailer]
I’ve got to bet that David Axelrod’s blood pressure is high at the moment, what with his prize pupil slipping the leash at yesterday’s news conference and letting everybody know what’s really on his mind. And now, Obama’s getting a second day of headlines over GatesGate.
From ABC News:
President Obama today stood by his comments that the Cambridge, Mass., police department acted “stupidly” in its arrest of Henry Louis Gates, telling ABC News that the Harvard University professor should not have been arrested.
President says he doesn’t regret his criticism of Cambridge police department.
“I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement, because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home,” Obama said.

In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Terry Moran to air on “Nightline” tonight, Obama said it doesn’t make sense to him that the situation escalated to the point that Gates was arrested.
“I think that I have extraordinary respect for the difficulties of the job that police officers do,” the president told Moran. “And my suspicion is that words were exchanged between the police officer and Mr. Gates and that everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed. That’s my suspicion.”

At this point, Axelrod must have been feeling a bit better about Obama getting back on script.
The president said he understands the sergeant who arrested Gates is an “outstanding police officer.”
Good, thinks the President’s handler, Now just wrap it up, get back to health care, and you can go smoke a whole pack of Lucky Strikes.
But he added that with all that’s going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, “it doesn’t make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he’s not causing a serious disturbance.”

Oh, noooooooo! What with all that’s going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, what doesn’t make any sense is for my client, the President of the United States of America, to get publicly obsessed over a local police incident!
Cambridge Police Department Commissioner Robert C. Haas said in a press conference late Thursday that his department was “deeply pained” by the president’s comments yesterday.
Watch “Nightline” Tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET for Terry Moran’s full interview with President Obama

By the way, if you want to understand why Obama slips loose from Axelrod’s master plan and does these kind of self-destructive things every now and then, please buy my reader’s guide to the President’s memoir, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance.”