Howard Dean’s former campaign manager Joe Trippi keeps making the rounds as The Man Who Bloggered Politics. For a guy who rode a minor-league candidate to utter defeat, Trippi sure talks a big game. Everytime you see him on TV, or quoted in the papers, re-read this piece by liberal/progressive writer and media critic Dan Kennedy:

[T]the idea that no one understood how to raise money on the Internet before Dean (actually, Trippi) is ridiculous. The notion of using technology as a fundraising tool, especially by outsiders, is an old one. Jerry Brown mentioned his 800 number every chance he got in 1992. In 2000, John McCain constantly flogged his website, and had some success raising money that way. Trippi took it to a new level not because he understood something different about the Internet, but because he built a campaign that specifically appealed to young, technologically savvy, well-educated activists who spent a lot of time online. Kerry didn’t so much emulate Dean as he did benefit from a change that was already taking place.

Of course, Kennedy’s plea later in the piece to keep the Democratic party “moderate” is probably overdone since the medium and long term electoral demographics heavily favor El Partido del Donkey. Trippi and his pale pencilneck blogolutionaries just aren’t an important part of that development.

I confess to being extremely vengeful when it comes to 9/11, so imagine how I feel about
this picture (Via The Corner).

Screw Sri Laden, but these guys might still need some help.

The Boston Globe’s Stephanie Ebbert has a brief but informative article about Massachusetts’ dire population situation, the fact that Americans are leaving the state while aliens, both legal and illegal, are pouring in. Last year the population actually decreased slightly, as Americans are leaving even faster than aliens are coming in.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on, especially since whites (that is, in this case, Americans) are growing in numbers in the suburbs, while they are abandoning the cities that immigrants move into. Americans in the Commonwealth not only face a stagnant labor market, they also have to burden increasing housing costs along with growing demand for government services, at the same time as their earning prospects are stalling out. Solution: Do the midnight ride out of the state, to locales where taxes are lower, housing cheaper, and aliens fewer (not that any of it is likely to last, but you can’t blame them for trying).

The only influx offsetting the trend is a boost in foreign immigration, [Paul E.] Harrington[, an economist at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies] said. They’re counted by the Census, but immigrants often don’t show up in job or unemployment data, he said, leading him to conclude that they are being paid under the table on construction sites, in restaurant kitchens, or on landscaping jobs.

“We’re creating labor market institutions in this state that we don’t want,” Harrington said. “I believe this tees up a long-term economic growth problem for us.”

It most certainly is.

Of course, immigration activists see it the other way around: Had it not been for the influx of poorly educated Latinos, the Bay State would have been depopoulated altogether:

Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said that immigrants have sustained Massachusetts’ population for the past 14 years.

He argued that the governor should take a leadership role in recruiting jobs for immigrants and in highlighting the vitality of the state’s immigrant communities.

“Undoubtedly, Massachusetts will continue to strengthen its role as a state of immigrants, but the immigrant community needs to be seen as the asset that it is,” he said. “The data that’s coming out now only solidifies that message.”

Color me awful, but I don’t think the governor has any business at all “recruiting jobs for immigrants.” It is also little more than cheap hackery to pretend that immigration is off-setting native flight, rather than driving it. The Rappaport Institute’s report on Greater Boston’s changing demographics tells you the story.

San Francisco Examiner interviews Richard Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo. Fargo is one of many companies that benefit from the illegal immigration, partly from money transfers, partly from mortgaging.

Q: You have worked to make branch banks more informal and attractive to users. How successful is your strategy at meeting customer needs?

A: What we are doing is making sure we have all the products and services that retail customers at all income levels need. So for example, we are the largest provider of home mortgages to those of low income, and minority groups. For people getting started in a home, we have a mortgage for them. We were the first to allow matricula cards, the program of identification for Mexican immigrants, many of whom didn’t have a banking relationship with anyone. That gets them started with the bank. We offer all the standard services, checking accounts, savings accounts, to get people started with banking and then hopefully to keep them as customers for life.

The customers he’s talking about are documented felony criminals, because only illegal aliens need the Matricula Consular. Legals get appropriate IDs issued by the US government. Good to see that the Enron spirit is alive and kicking in corporate America.

You can read the rest of the article here, including the amusing quote in the title of this post.

Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston recently released a report called “Boston at the Crossroads” that details the racial and ethnic changes in Greater Boston. As the nominal diversity (i.e. the proportion of non-Whites) increases, so does racial and ethnic consolidation, or segragation, according to the report.

The number of whites in Greater Boston decreased by 2% from 1990 to 2000, while Hispanics increased by 49%, blacks by 33%, and Asians by 87%. The number of whites decreased in both Massachusetts and Greater Boston, and whites’ share of the population plummeted to 81% in 2000 from 87% in 1990. At the same time, residential segragation increased, as whites kept fleeing to areas dominated by whites, while blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Others (hey, that’s what the Census calls them) congregated in their own respective enclaves in and around Boston, and scattered across Greater Boston. Bear in mind that the numbers are for 2000. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that whites now make up less than 80% Greater Boston’s population, as both white flight and immigration continue unabated.

The Rappaport report divides Greater Boston into four different and partly overlapping areas: Boston, Urban Core (Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, Malden, Somerville, Waltham), Satellite Cities (Attleboro, Brockton, Fall River, Fitchburg, Gloucester, Lawrence, Leominster, Lowell, New Bedford, Worcester), and Suburbs. The share and number of whites have decreased in all areas, except for in the Suburbs, where their numbers increased by about 100,000, while their share fell to 91% from 95%.

People in Massachusetts will probably recognize most of the the Satellite Cities as “troubled” cities. Those cities were 82% white in 1990. Today, they are 70% so. Together, they had 87,000 fewer whites in 2000 than they did in 1990. Brockton went to being 45% non-white from 23% in 1990, Lawrence to 66% from 45%, and Lowell to 37% from 23%. Brockton, Lowell, and Lawrence all have populations exceeding 70,000 people, so we’re not talking about just a couple of families moving in and a couple families moving out.

The somewhat saving grace for Greater Boston is that no one non-white group dominates: Asians, Latinos, and blacks each make up about one third of Grfeater Boston non-whites. The groups themselves are also quite fragmented, and while there are more Chinese than Indians, for example, the Indian cohort is growing faster than the Chinese. 26% of blacks in Greater Boston are foreign born, compared to only 6% of blacks in the US. There are, as of yet, few Mexicans in Massachusetts (though plenty of Central American machete artists). The flip side is of course that public instituitions in the Commnwealth have to wrestle with that many different languages and cultures.

Guy Stuart, the author of the report, believes, as the title suggests, that Greater Boston is at a crossroads; that we can choose between increased or at least continued segragation, or integration. He sees promising signs that integration still has a shot:

The fact that isolation measures for the suburbs did not exceed 20 percent for any non-white or Latino group shows that non-whites and Latino are willing to live on blocks where they are nowhere near the majority, and that suburban integration is possible if whites do not flee.

Perhaps, but why should non-Hispanic whites not flee diversity? What is in it for them? What could compel them to live side-by-side with non-whites? Stuart has the answers:

This hopeful sign suggests the need for concerted effort by local and regional leaders to encourage and sustain integration at this critical crossroads. Such a concerted effort will require: efforts by home buyers and renters to examine their own assumptions about different neighborhoods and towns across the region; greater monitoring of compliance with fair housing laws; and housing and community development efforts that not only seek to integrate people in the suburbs through expanded housing opportunities, but also to redevelop economically struggling city and satellite city neighborhoods.

Litigation and expansion of government. Those are what Stuart sees as diversity’s upside for non-Hispanic whites. At least you can’t accuse him of sugarcoating.

However, I think Stuart, is fundamentally wrong. The crossroads is not ahead of us, it is way behind us. While most people in Massachusetts support assimilationism (demonstrated, for example, by the 68% of voters who voted for an English immersion proposition in 2002), and while our governor Mitt Romney is admirably Americanist and assimilationist, the vast majority of institutions and power brokers in the Commonwealth support multiculturalism and multilingualism. In a world of disassimilation and fragmentation, who can you trust but your own?

Immigrants who actually like America need to support drastically reduced immigration, while there still is an America to save.

Business Week’s year-end, double-issue special features an investment guide to 2005. One of the articles in the guide, called “How To Seize A Gran Oportunidad” (I thought that’s the name of Mexico’s emigration policy), touches upon investments that might benefit from the rapid Latinofication of America. Among the “opportunities:”

The hottest Hispanic-run company in terms of revenue, earnings, and stock price growth is Molina Healthcare Inc., a provider of health plans and clinics for Medicaid-eligible citizens, says Ramirez & Co.’s Garcia. Chronically underinsured after coming to the U.S. because few Latin American countries have a tradition of health insurance, low-income Spanish speakers account for more than a third of the Medicaid population, says Molina Chief Executive Officer J. Mario Molina. With more than 300,000 new Hispanic immigrants entering the U.S. each year, the ranks of Hispanics using government-sponsored health care are growing rapidly. That has helped push membership in the Long Beach (Calif.) health-maintenance organization up 40% this year, to about 800,000 customers paid for by Medicaid. The stock trades near a 52-week high. But with a price-earnings ratio of 19 and earnings expected by analysts to grow 22.5% in 2005, it remains relatively cheap. “Molina is becoming the Hispanic health-care provider of choice,” says Garcia.

Oddly, the article doesn’t list home or personal security companies as good investments.

It was pretty easy for white liberals to duck to the tidal wave of black crime in the 1960’s and 1970’s. All they had to do was to move away from the urban lawlessness to suburban tranquility. Today’s crime wave is driven by immigrants who do no confine themselves to inner cities. Latin American immigrant criminals are now swarming rural and suburban communities across America, thanks to decades of lax immigration enforcement. The story below is from Northern Virginia, but it doesn’t much matter where you live, some Hispanic gang or another will soon set up shop in your vicinity.

The potentially violent gang argument at South Lakes High School late last month could have been worse.
Classes had just let out for the afternoon and members of two rival street gangs were on the verge of brawling.
A phalanx of police officers rushed to the scene and defused the situation before it escalated, arresting 23-year-old Pedro Perez-Vazquez, who, police said, had facilitated the gang fight and was armed with a concealed knife.
The Nov. 23 incident sheds light on what is considered a growing and challenging problem for Reston — the rise of violent street gangs among the community’s poor and immigrant populations.
…
Law enforcement agencies estimate there are roughly 400 gangs throughout Northern Virginia, though MS-13 is responsible for more than 95 percent of all gang-related crime, including armed robberies, thefts, car thefts, drug dealing, rapes, shootings and assaults, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report obtained by the Connection.
With an estimated 30 individual cliques and 3,000 members, MS-13 is believed to be the largest gang in Northern Virginia and in Reston specifically. The Los Angeles-based gang is linked to more than half a dozen slayings throughout the region.

As always, the proposed solution to immigration problems is more public spending:

Existing after-school programs fail to draw sufficient numbers of young Latino immigrants, Larson said. Latino children and teenagers in Reston are often unsupervised in the afternoon because many of their parents work two or three jobs.
More relevant, effective after-school programs are needed and may be on the way, said School Board Member Stu Gibson (Hunter Mill). Next year’s school budget contains $1 million to expand after-school programs for middle school students.
“We need a positive alternative to gang life,” Gibson said. “That’s how we’re going to get to the root of this problem.”

GANGS HAVE been known to recruit children in Reston’s elementary schools as early as fourth grade.
Impoverished recent immigrants, frequently from South and Central America, are most often targeted for recruitment. Gangs lure children with promises of excitement, along with a sense of belonging and money for food, rent and clothing.
“As long as you’ve got big economic disparities — when you’ve got an underclass of people, like we do in Reston — you’re always going to have gangs,” Larson said. “People are in gangs because the community is failing them.”

Well , the only reason that Latin America’s underclass is here is because America let it in - and that is the real failure.

But, what the hell, as long as Wal-Mart gets an endless supply of cheap workers, what’s there to complain about, right?

Merry Christmas and Joy to the World!

GAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!!!

HOW COULD THEY?

HOW COULD HE?

Yes, the New England Patriots devastating loss to the Miami Dolphins has unhinged me worse than probably any moment in sports since the infamous “Mats Waltinov”-play in the early 1980’s (Swedes can understand; Bostonians, just think Bill Buckner on ice).

For the love of all things good, how could Tom Brady throw such a HORRIBLE pass, just the week after making an almost identical, boneheaded play. The first time it worked out ok, the second…oh boy.

The Pats could have one in spite of Brady’s shaky play, but the secondary is falling apart, and the play calling on offense is becoming more and more Canadian Football League-ish: “How aboot another deep pass, hey?”

I’ll try to come up with more reasoned reactions tomorrow.

Dan Kennedy taunts those who speculated that the fire that devastated a development in Maryland was perpetrated by eco-terrorists. He especially picks on Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume for making vauge connections between mainstream enviromental organization Sierra Club and the eco-terrorists in Earth Liberation front.

It now seems clear that no terrorist organization of any kind was involved in the torchings of the development. So now there’s renewed interest in the theory that the arsonist or arsonists were motivated by racial animosity. An Associated Press article high on ‘tude and low on facts introduces this little nugget:

“Two typical motives for arson are revenge and race,” [spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Michael] Campbell said.

Race? Really, now? Me thinks not.

According to the FBI Unified Crime Reporitng, there were 7,489 hate-crime cases in 2003, but only 34 cases of arson classified as hate crimes.

By comparison, there was a total 71,319 cases of arson in 2003.

Remember the mosque that was torched in Springfield? Early on there was speculation that it was a hate crime, but now it looks like just another case of inner-city lawlessness. The motive for the arson in Maryland could very well turn out to be just as petty. Or not. Let’s just wait and find out, shall we?