Author: VD

The Elder provides an MP3 download of Saturday’s NARN show.

And yes, Virginia, the Red-and-White will be in full E-F-F-E-C-T otherwise known as effect, the Amaretto will be flowing like water and there will be a live blog of Arsenal attempting to finish off the Yellow Submarines this afternoon.

As if the five yellow cards last week weren’t enough, Villareal’s Pelligrini, aka The Guy Who Looks Like a Low-Rent Version of the Special One, (if you have to ask, you don’t need to know), has accused St. Arsene of being a hypocrite insufficiently dedicated to fair play.

Prediction: Arsenal 2-1, 3-1 on aggregate.

The NY Times on a hellish new concept in air travel:

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only “seats.”

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

Obviously the Pentagon will be interested in the concept, as this would render the need for renditions obsolete. Why fly the torturee-to-be to Afghanistan when you can simply provide an in-flight service on the way to Guantanamo Bay? No doubt Northwest Airlines will also be investigating the possibility of making a special “sub-economy” service optional to its customers, as its stewardesses are already known to be sadistically-minded dominatrices.

Bruce Bartlett bolsters his view of a coming split between conservatives and Republicans:

Another important critic of Bush is Georgetown University government professor George W. Carey, long one of the leading conservative intellectuals in America. Writing in the fall 2005 issue of Modern Age, the nation’s most important conservative academic journal, Carey finds nothing conservative about Bush’s policies. “To apply the word ‘conservative’ to Bush and his administration, as the media routinely does, not only is misleading, but also debases conservatism,” he says.

Carey lambastes Bush for moving the Republican Party further away from conservative principles than it already was. He is appalled that Democrats are now able to argue, “not without substantial justification,” to being the party of fiscal responsibility. Carey calls Bush’s foreign policy “Wilsonianism on steroids” and argues that it would be strenuously opposed by conservative icons Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet and Richard M. Weaver.

Both Hart and Carey are disappointed by the younger generation of conservatives who run National Review and other conservative journals for subordinating conservatism to transitory politics.

I like National Review and NRO. But I let my subscription lapse about 18 months ago since I got tired of the intellectual gymnastics in which the younger generation of neoconservative and semi-conservative writers were so often inclined to engage in defense of their Dear Leader, Jorge the Younger.

It will be interesting to see how NRO gang reacts to a voter backlash against the very faux conservatism for which they’ve been so staunchly apologizing over the last six years. (Yes, I’m aware of the many various criticisms that have been aimed at the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans by all of them at one time or another, but with the exception of Derbyshire and Ponnuru, they tend to be of the “but you have to understand it’s not really that bad” variety. Lopez, Frum and Nordlinger have been particularly embarrassing in this regard.)

And the younger set should be embarrassed. I suspect that many of them have begun to suspect what asses they have made of themselves over Jorge; you certainly don’t read many of those once-ubiquitous comparisons of W. to Ronald Reagan these days. Nor, I note, does the “we are at war” crowd bring up the WWII occupations of Germany and Japan as they did so often two years ago.

Speaking of asses and the Bush administration, the Dear Leader himself seems determined to prove himself to be a donkey of the first degree:

President Bush had a blunt message Monday for fellow Republicans focusing only on get-tough immigration policies: He said sending all the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants back to their home countries is not the answer. “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work,” Bush said. “You know, you can hear people out there hollering it’s going to work. It’s not going to work.”

Enforcing existing laws and deporting 11 million illegals is unrealistic, but altering the centuries-old religious beliefs of one billion people by force, that’s just reasonable.

When you consider that the commentariat never considers these issues in the same context, it sure makes it look as if there isn’t a political pundit on either side of the aisle who is capable of holding two simultaneous thoughts in their head. The Malkanian position of restricted immigration yes invasions yes – and yes, that’s intentional, all ten of you – is merely undue faith in the power of force as per the Wilsonian tradition. But the restricted immigration no invasions yes position of Jorge and company is insane, being logically absurd.

Dennis Prager attempts to explain the liberalism of Jews, and in doing so, underlines my previous assertion:

Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism….

The Jews’ religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

So it appears that what this religious Jew is writing today is pretty much what I posted two days ago, namely, most Jews don’t believe in their own religion. Prager actually goes farther than I did in stating that liberal Jews actually “fear most religion”. I merely noted that secular Jews appear to harbor about as much respect for other religions as they do for the tooth fairy and postulated that this might be due to the lack of regard they have for their own.

I have to say that I quite enjoyed my hour with the NARN crew last weekend. I don’t know if anyone caught it or not, but any time you’re given the opportunity to encourage a public school teacher to tell one of her fourth-graders (or whatever they were) that his two daddies are going to Hell AND completely botch an reenactment of the Monty Python abattoir sketch, well, that’s just a good time, that is.

I did sense a certain air of conspiracy about the boys, though. Powerline was away and the Fraters were in the mood to play. Saint Paul would say something in this completely innocent manner, as if he’d never read anything about me but my bio, to the tune of: “I understand that you might have some unusual perspectives on women in the workforce”, which left me no choice but to bring up the secret codes in Picasso’s paintings which reveal how Betty Friedan’s canonical work is actually a guide to reenacting the Kamasutra with statues of Baphomet that are given away free by the National Organization of Women with every 666th abortion.

Or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. I was drinking Amaretto Sours and watching my Arsenal Centurions DVD on the breaks. And speaking of the former, I just think I might….

From the May 8 National Review:

Harvard economist George Borjas contributes a fascinating article – “Immigrants In, Wages Down” – in the new May 8, 2006 issue of National Review. Here’s a snippet:
It turns out that it’s easy to demonstrate a strong link between earnings and immigration across these skill groups. I calculated the wage growth for each skill group in every decade between 1960 and 2000, as well as the corresponding change in the fraction of that skill group’s workforce that was foreign-born. The data showed an obvious negative correlation between wage growth and immigration: Wages grew fastest for workers in the skill groups that were least affected by immigration.

My results suggest that wages fall by 3 to 4 percent for every 10 percent increase in the number of workers in a particular skill group. This wage response (or “wage elasticity,” to use the economics jargon) is just what one would expect if one had looked at the vast economics literature on how labor demand adjusts (a literature that exists pretty much outside the immigration debate). In other words, the national wage-elasticity estimates I found mirror precisely what we already know about labor demand in the United States.

I was thinking about crunching the numbers on the depressive effect of working women on wages, so it’s kind of nice to see that at least three-fourths of my work is already done. Of course, the aforementioned 36 million women have been even more detrimental than 30+ million legal and illegal immigrants, since they were already here creating demand for labor before they began adding to the supply as well.

And yes, there will be a column on this in the near future…. As for the whiners who wonder why I continue to write on these matters, I merely marvel at their disingenuous disinclination to ask Gloria Steinhem, Naomi Wolf or any other feminist writer that same question.

Dick Morris is somewhat of a nut, but a politically perceptive one:

This withdrawal from globalism is a predictable consequence of the quagmire of Iraq. Bush has spent the constructive energies unleashed by Sept. 11 on his bid to make Iraq a stable democracy. Whether he has squandered our national vigor or simply invested it wisely will only become apparent in the next few years, but what is glaringly obvious is that our patience is over.

Republicans criticize Democrats for not proposing new solutions to the Iraq war, but the GOP misses the point that their opponents don’t have to do so. The wind of isolationism is at the Democrats’ back, propelling them onward to the likelihood of massive victories in 2006 and 2008.

So, what is the Lizard Queen’s entrance music anyhow? I’d suggest “Every Day is Halloween”, but that’s a bit too poppy for her essence of pure reptilian evil. Perhaps Megadeth’s “99 Ways to Die”.

I do find it increasingly amusing how Republican globalists and their cheerleaders – the “we are at war” crowd – can’t seem to get it through their thick little skills that it doesn’t matter how many times they repeat themselves, most people are have rejected and will continue to reject their idea that unless every other country in the world is provided with a two-party globalist ruling elite, America is in imminent danger of extinction.

To mindlessly repeat the argument that all things are justified because 9/11 “changed everything” is deeply and profoundly stupid. There aren’t enough passenger jets in the world to imperil the populace, and in any event, a nation that can’t figure out how to control its own borders has no business attempting to control the populations of other countries. And the two are not entirely unrelated, it is mass immigration that has laid the groundwork for the Eurojihad, after all.

Hey, I’ve got it! Since regime change is the perfect answer to all foreign relations issues, why don’t we simply send the 101st to Mexico City and change the regime there? We’ll just win their hearts and minds, after all, it can’t be any harder to convince Mexicans of the benefits of living in Mexico than it is to convince Muslims to accept an American-approved version of Islam. Immigration problem solved!

I suspect that Morris is correct more often than most pundits because he is a soulless pollster and doesn’t really care which team wins, he just watches the game. I have little doubt that his conclusions are correct here; I think the two of us are still the only ones predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in 2008.

Unfortunately for the nationalists, voting for the Lizard Queen and her cringing Democratic minions won’t do them one damned bit of good since both Democrats and Republicans are equally controlled by the globalist brigade. This is why Republicans never quit the UN despite all of their conservative anti-UN rhetoric and why Democrats are just as happy to wage war despite all the verbal bones they throw to their peacenik camp.

From the Washington Times:

The fortresslike compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the world’s largest of its kind, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future.

The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome. “We can’t talk about it, security reasons,” Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.

A British tabloid told readers that even the location was being kept secret, but the news would surprise Baghdadis who for months have watched the forest of construction cranes at work across the winding Tigris, at the very center of their city and within easy mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital, though fewer explode there these days. The embassy complex — 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report — is taking shape on riverside parkland in the fortified Green Zone just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein’s, and across the road from the building where the ex-dictator is now on trial.

Maybe I’ve been playing too much Total War, but the idea of building a huge palace complex in conquered territory smacks of something ominous to me. I can’t imagine the Iraqis are terribly happy about it either.

From the Washington Times:

Howard Dean’s not-so-surprising announcement that the Democrats are stepping smartly to the right of the president on the immigration issue hit the Republicans yesterday like a rap on the nose with a long-handled wooden spoon, undercutting the assurances that some congressmen are sending back to Washington that nobody really cares about the human tide surging over the border. “The first thing we want is tough border control,” Mr. Dean says. “We can do a much better job on our borders than George Bush has done. Then we can go on to the policy disagreements about how to get it done.”

Now are you beginning to understand what I said months ago with regards to Hillary, immigration and the 2008 election? The Lizard Queen is going to tack hard right on immigration once she sees how well the public responds to this little test. Remember, there isn’t any genuine difference within the parties when it comes to their leadership and their candidates, so the issues are transferable. While the unions have been obediently following the open borders theme for a while, once the Democratic leadership signals a change in direction, they’ll happily get back on board the nationalism train they have historically ridden.