Archive for January 2009

LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivian voters embraced a new constitution Sunday that promises more power for the long-suffering indigenous majority and grants leftist President Evo Morales a shot at remaining in office through 2014.

The charter passed easily in a country where many can still recall when Indians were forbidden to vote. But its sometimes vague wording and resistance from Bolivia’s mestizo and European-descended minority foreshadows more political turmoil in a nation polarized by race and class.

“Brothers and sisters, the colonial state ends here,” President Evo Morales told a huge crowd in front of the presidential palace after the results of Sunday’s referendum were announced. “Here we begin to reach true equality for all Bolivians.”

The constitution — the central reform of Morales’ three-year-old administration — won by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, according to an unofficial quick count with a three-percentage point margin of error. A final official tally will be announced in 10 days.

Morales, an Aymara Indian and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, has said the charter will “decolonize” South America’s poorest country by recovering indigenous values lost under centuries of oppression dating back to the Spanish conquest.
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America is facing hard times.

But even in the darkest days the country has seen in generations, a time when its economy is in tatters, its reputation is dented, and many of its citizens are asking whether their country’s best days are behind it, people from other nations are still coming here seeking a better life.

A quarter century ago, Dhirajlal and Manjula Patel came to America from India with not much more than two suitcases. The Patels worked hard, scrimped and saved, and today they own a hotel and are now helping relatives from India come here and do the same.

Hard work, thrift and family helping family are classic American values, and part of the story of every group of immigrants who chose to leave their homelands and come to America, from the English settlers to later waves of German, Irish and Italian immigrants, and now Indian-American families.

Manjula’s sister, Indira; brother-in-law, Dipak; and other members of their extended family recently came to America following a 10-year effort by Manjula to bring them here legally. The Dothan Patels are helping their family members get established, and the new immigrants hope to emulate their Americanized relatives by going into the hotel business.
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MONTREAL — Quebec’s health-care insurance board and the RCMP have uncovered a ring of about 3,000 north Africans allegedly using fake medicare cards to help themselves immigrate to Canada, according to a report in La Presse published Saturday.

In a statement, the Regie de l’assurance maladie du Quebec confirmed it is investigating “a sophisticated subterfuge that apparently was set up by an immigration consultant to make believe his clients live in Quebec.” It did not say how many people might be involved, however.

The operation apparently permitted non-residents of Canada to gather various types of proof of residence in Quebec, the Regie added.

Children were signed up, in name only, in schools and at day camps to prove families’ residence, the La Presse story said.

Those allegedly benefiting from the operation live in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, the story said.
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LAUREL (AP) — The work has always been stupefying and hard. Hour after hour standing on the line, soldering or welding or drilling in screws until tears join streaming sweat and hands cramp in pain.

Even in today’s nightmare economy, most people wouldn’t want this daily grind that steals the soul in 12-hour shifts paying as little as $280 a week, before taxes.

But such labor prospers here in mostly rural Jones County, home to Laurel, where the area’s biggest employer, Howard Industries, maintains a sprawling factory that builds electrical transformers and other big equipment behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

Assembly lines like these offer tenuous lifelines to those desperate enough to toil on them. And sometimes, competition for these jobs pits have-nots against have-nots.

For a long time, Howard workers were blacks and whites in this town of 18,000.

But in the past few years, immigrants poured across the Mexican border, eagerly applying for work on the Howard line and not complaining about long hours or menial labor. Family members followed, until the racial palette of Laurel shifted from black and white to abundant shades of brown.
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In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan – a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps.

Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain? Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?

What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.

You have to be a moron, an ignoramus with no knowledge of history, religion, philosophy, social psychology, economics, geopolitics, strategy, statecraft, higher [and ipso facto Western (2)] culture not to be aware that you have seeded a future civil war, an economic calamity, a cultural wasteland, a major devaluation of social capital, a destruction of your own mother, your nation. Yet the people who have inflicted all this on us have very high IQs (3) and have all been educated at the very best universities.

Why is Christmas in Sweden greeted these days with flaming mayhem by imported Muslim barbarians, rather than with flaming glögg by Swedes? Why are there 2 millions irredeemably alien “refugees” (4) in Sweden, including 600,000 Muslims, when there are only 7 million Swedes proper?
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The government of Iceland today became the first to be effectively brought down by the credit crunch.

After several nights of rioting over the financial crisis, Prime Minister Geir Haarde, surrendered to increasing pressure and called a general election for May.
A poll would not normally be held until 2011.

Haarde also revealed that he had been diagnosed with a malignant tumour of the oesophagus and would not seek re-election.

‘I have decided not to seek re-election as leader of the Independence Party at its upcoming national congress,’ he told a news conference.

The global financial crisis hit Iceland, which has a population 320,000, in October, triggering a collapse in its currency and financial system under the weight of billions of dollars of foreign debts incurred by its banks
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A Nebraska state court has upheld a ban on the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state agencies that was overwhelmingly approved by the state’s voters in November.

Today’s Omaha World-Herald reports that Judge Karen Flowers of Lancaster County court ruled against Nebraskans United, a group that led opposition to the measure, in a lawsuit alleging improprieties in how signatures were gathered to get it on the ballot.

Judge Flowers held that, contrary to Nebraskans United’s claims, “the facts do not support a finding that there was any pervasive pattern and practice of fraud, misinterpretation, or deception” in the petition-gathering process. Nebraskans United can still appeal her decision to the Nebraska Supreme Court, but many observers there believe that Judge Flowers, a Democrat, represented the group’s best hope of getting the ban overturned.

Nebraska is one of five states where Ward Connerly, the prominent affirmative-action critic, had hoped to get such bans adopted last fall. Political analysts had predicted the measures would pass if they got on the ballot, but the state organizations promoting the measures failed to gather enough signatures to put them before voters in three of the states — Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma — and Coloradans defied many pollsters’ predictions by narrowly rejecting the measure proposed there.
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Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitiz recently chose Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and The Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson, as one of the best five books about big legal cases.

Professor Dershowitz: “‘Until Proven Innocent,’ an account of the Duke lacrosse case, should be ranked high among works that disprove the notion that those charged with serious crimes are invariably guilty and that those who are acquitted somehow beat the system. Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson pillory not only the prosecutor in the supposed sexual-assault case — he was eventually disbarred after charges against the three players were dropped before going to trial — but also the president of Duke University and those on his faculty who were willing to sacrifice innocent students as a bizarre form of racial reparation. The Duke case demonstrates how contemporary political correctness, run amok, can deform the legal system just as dramatically as other prejudices have in the past.”

How true!

Because the book is a devastating expose of political correctness “run amok” (to use Professor Dershowtiz’s words), it has not received the attention it richly deserves from the liberal establishment.
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Robert Reich, one of President Obama’s chief economic advisors, spoke before the House Democrat Steering Committee recently and discussed the administration’s proposed new $850 billion plus stimulus package that would include the creation of new construction jobs to upgrade the nation’s roads and bridges. During the course of making his presentation, Mr. Reich said the following, and I quote: “I am concerned, as I’m sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers. … I have nothing against white male construction workers.” (I’m sure that some of Mr. Reich’s best friends are white male construction workers too!). He continued: “Criteria can be set so that the money does go to others, the long term unemployed minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals.”

Reich was basically telling the House democrats to create some sort of “criteria” in the new economic stimulus legislation that would insure that “white male construction workers” are somehow excluded or severely limited from receiving any of these funds. It is also interesting to note that not one of the members of this congressional committee objected to such obvious proposed racial and gender discrimination. Just imagine what would happen if a new Republican administration economic advisor told members of a congressional committee that they should develop “criteria” to exclude black male construction workers from receiving federal stimulus funds. It would be on the front page of every major newspaper in the country. Have you read about Reich’s racist remarks in any major newspapers or on your evening TV news?
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Ministers were criticised last night for issuing a record 151,635 work permits to foreigners as Britain slid into recession.

The document lets non-EU workers take or keep jobs here, even though hundreds of thousands of Britons are losing theirs.

Unemployment rose by 290,000 in the same period, from December 1, 2007 to November 30, 2008, to reach 1.92m - the most since September 1997. Up to 2,500 workers a day are losing their jobs.

MPs said it made a mockery of Gordon Brown’s promise in 2007 to deliver ‘British jobs for British workers’.

The number of permits given to non-EU citizens is crucial to protecting British jobs as ministers have no control over the movement of EU nationals.
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