February 7, 2008

Obama's pro-illegal alien ploy flops

In the California primary, Hillary won big among Latinos in California by running as a tax and spend Democrat, while Obama ran as a pro-illegal immigrant. The LA Times article says:

The Obama campaign, by contrast, aired Spanish-language radio ads promoting his support for issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. That was a "classic Northeastern assumption" that licenses were the primary concern of Latinos, according to Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC.

"It's not. I think he would have had much more traction on issues like education, or the loss of jobs . . . issues that resonate with Latino homeowners," Pachon said.

Yes, Obama is from the Midwest not the Northeast, but in California, everything beyond Las Vegas is considered "back East."

The thing that people back East like Obama are always forgetting is that illegal immigrants aren't supposed to vote. Granted, a few do vote illegally, but most wouldn't vote even if it was legal. They have more than enough drama in their private lives.

Hispanics who can vote mostly don't really care much about illegal immigrants. They might want legal immigration expanded so they can sponsor more close relatives, but illegals are a pain in the neck -- some third cousin shows up and wants to sleep on your couch for a year until he gets settled.

But most politicians and journalists don't know that because the "experts" they talk to about Hispanics -- such as Hispanic political consultants -- all want more illegal immigrants because it makes them seem more important. They want to be the "voice" of not 45 million people but, of 90 million or 180 million. Think how much business they would get then!

On the other hand, maybe all this dissection of the California voting is premature. Do we even really know who won the California primaries? I noticed this rather disturbing paragraph in the Thursday morning LA Times article:

"Stephen Weir, head of the state association of elections officials, estimated Wednesday that up to 2 million ballots remained uncounted. An additional 450,000 provisional ballots, filed when there is a dispute at a polling place, were also uncounted, according to Weir, the clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County. Elections officials have until March 4 to complete their tally, on which rests the division of party delegates."

Up to two million uncounted votes?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Juno"

From my review in the new issue of The American Conservative:

Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"

So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.

Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?

Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.

First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.

Well, that doesn't tell you much about the movie, now does it? Funny how the excerpts I post usually seem to be like that. It's almost as if I want you to subscribe to the magazine, isn't it?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 6, 2008

Obama's Super Tuesday Demographics

A reader has made up a handy table of Democratic Demographics on Super Tuesday. For convenience, I'll excerpt just the Obama numbers, along with what % each minority makes up of the Democratic voters in that state:


Obama's Share
of Vote
% of Dem. Voters
State White Black Hisp.
Black % Hisp. %
Georgia 40 87

51
Alabama 25 84

51
Tennessee 26 77

29
Delaware 40 86

28
Illinois 57 93

24
New Jersey 31 82 30
23 12
Missouri 39 84

17
Arkansas 16 74

17
New York 37 61 26
16 10
Connecticut 48 74 53
9 6
Arizona 38 79 41
8 18
California 42 78 29
6 29
Massachusetts 40 66 36
6 5
Oklahoma 29


6
New Mexico 55
36
3 34
Utah 55


2 7







Simple Avg. 39 79 36



The "Simple Average" is the mean not weighted by size of state.

A reader points out that Obama's California exit poll numbers are inflated:
Unless I made a mistake with my calculator, these exit polling numbers for Obama aren't correct, i.e. they don't match his actual vote count, being a few points too high.

Normally, they'd be "adjusted" to tie-out with the final results (that included a huge number of mailed ballots), but I'd half suspect that the media was reluctant to lower the initial (inflated) non-black numbers which they'd shown.

Since his Hispanic and Asian numbers are already pretty low, I'll bet his white numbers are the inflated ones. They should probably be about 7 points lower.
Perhaps the other states are too?

Also, keep in mind that exit polls' figures for a demographic group's share of the vote are, by necessity, largely rigged. The polling company guesses ahead of time that Hispanics will cast X % of the vote, so they decide to hire Y Spanish-speaking pollsters and conduct interviews in Z Hispanic-dominant precincts.

For example, I doubt that Hispanic voters outnumber black voters 29% to 6% among Democrats in California. Perhaps Hispanics were less likely to use absentee ballots, which have become hugely popular, and more likely to show up at the polls and thus be exit poll-interviewed?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is Mitt Romney the son George H.W. Bush wished he had?

From the Washington Post blog The Fix:

LOSERS

President Bush: In the nine states for which The Post purchased exit polling data (Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Tennessee), the president's disapproval rating was above 40 percent in five. That includes a 52 percent disapproval score in New York, a 49 percent disapproval rating in New Jersey and a 42 percent disapproval in California. Did we mention these include Republican primary voters? The other bit of bad news for Bush is that among those who disapproved of the job he has done, McCain won overwhelmingly -- meaning that the likely 2008 nominee will, in the minds of many GOP-leaning voters, be a repudiation of the current president.

Okay, except that McCain is just like Bush 43, only more so -- more invade the world, more invite the world, more in hoc to the world. And they have very similar nasty frat boy personalities.

Yesterday, I suggested that John McCain, with his cocky shoot-from-the-hip lack of preparation and thoroughness, is the the kind of man George W. Bush always wanted for a father. (The convoluted psychodynamics of the Bush family, I've long argued, are a key to understanding why we are in Iraq.)

It now occurs to me that Mitt Romney is the kind of son George H.W. Bush would have always wanted to have follow him in the White House. But the public tends to like the McCain / W types more than the Romney - H.W. types.

Of course, Bush 41 has a competent son, Jeb. And the dynastic plan was for him to get elected governor of Florida in 1994, re-elected in 1998, and elected President in 2000 and 2004. Instead, Jeb narrowly lost in 1994 while George W. pulled off an upset election in Texas, screwing everything up royally. Is George W. Bush the only President who would have lost an election unanimously if the candidates had been restricted to his own siblings and the electorate to his own parents?

Of course, America is now so brand-name crazy in its politics that Jeb's chances in 2012, 2016, 2020, or 2024 (when, amazingly enough, he'll be younger than either John McCain or Bob Dole were) can't be permanently ruled out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Southern Poverty Law Center is anti-immigrant

The folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center have turned anti-immigrant ... well, at least against immigrants from a certain part of the world.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The "imaginary hip black friend" voting bloc

Shelby Steele argued that Obama can't win because he couldn't simultaneously be both a race man to black voters and an anti-race man to white voters tired of race. But Shelby is a lot smarter and more realistic than the average voter (or the average pundit, for that matter). Most people just believe whatever they want to believe about Obama. So, in reality, reality doesn't much matter.

So, what we've seen are blacks, after a long period of initial apathy, flocking to their tribal standard-bearer in large numbers; and whites voting for Obama as their "imaginary hip black friend." Obama thus does well in states with lots of blacks and in states with few blacks, like Idaho, (where he won 79% of the small number of Democrats), Alaska (75%), Kansas (74%), and Colorado (67%), but not so hot in-between. Audacious Epigone reports:
Blacks overwhelmingly backed Obama, Hispanics favored Clinton (with the anomaly of Connecticut, where, comprising 6% of the total, they apparently preferred Obama by a narrow margin [I presume that Obama looks like more like the typical Hispanic in Connecticut than the typical Hispanic in California), and the larger the black share of a state's voting population, the more likely whites in that state were to flock to Clinton. Looking at all the contests that have taken place so far, there has been an inverse correlation of .35 (confidence just a hair outside 90%) between the percentage of a state's voters who are black and the amount of support Obama garners among whites in that state.

That's quite rigorous actually, given that obliterations like Illinois are outliers that attenuate the statistical relationship. Further, the real relationship is likely stronger than that, as I computed the results of all contests thus far (including those before Super Tuesday) as though only Hillary and Obama were running--in reality, most of Edwards' (overwhelmingly white) supporters in the southern states would have gone to Hillary if it had been a two horse race at that point. And I gave all the white undecideds in Michigan to Obama (neither he nor Edwards was on the ballot there), so he looked better among whites in that 23% black state that he would've in reality.

In the eyes of whites, Obama is only the Black Candidate when there are lots of blacks rallying behind him.

Among Democrats, Hispanics and Asians appear so far to be resistant to Obama's mythos:
In California, the only state in either party with a sizable enough number of Asian voters to adequately report exit polling data on, Hillary outdid Obama by almost 3-to-1 (71%-25%). In New Jersey, extrapolating from the other racial categories, the best estimate for the Asian vote (which comprised 4% of the Democratic total) suggests 59%-41%, in Hillary's favor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Where would Romney have been without the illegal immigration issue?

Here's the exit poll from the GOP race in California, which shows just how crucial Mitt Romney's public conversion in 2006-2007 to immigration restrictionism was to his having even a chance in this race. Man, people just don't like Plastic Fantastic Man. Without the 29% of the voters who called illegal immigration the most important issue, among whom Romney beat McCain 45%-25%, Romney wouldn't have finished second, he would have been tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail.

Heck, among the 33% of voters who identified the economy as the most important issue (a not surprising choice on a day when the Dow dropped 370 points), McCain beat Romney 48%-27%, even though Yosemite Sam has seldom paid any attention to the economy. Overall, Romney beat McCain 35%-32% among voters who think "Issues" are most important in deciding their vote, while getting clobbered by McCain 49%-26% among those voting on "Personal Qualities."

Most Important Issue Share of Voters McCain Romney Huckabee Paul Giuliani
Illegal Immigration 29% 25% 45% 9% 6% 8%
Iraq 20% 49% 17% 14% 7% 9%
Economy 33% 48% 27% 10% 4% 3%
Terrorism 15% 42% 29% 17% 1% 10%







More Important to Your Vote
McCain Romney Huckabee Paul Giuliani
Issues 52% 32% 35% 16% 6% 6%
Personal Qualities 45% 49% 26% 8% 4% 7%

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Good timing

The Dow Jones average drops 370 points on Tuesday on new evidence of a recession in the offing, and the Bush Administration announces a plan to "dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops." I was thinking that maybe some of those newly unemployed construction workers might want farm jobs, but, apparently, the eternal need for more foreign peasants comes first. Otherwise, we would all starve.

The LA Times reports:

The Bush administration today plans to announce the most significant overhaul in two decades of the nation's agricultural guest worker program, in a bid to dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.

The revised regulations, many months in the works, would make it easier for growers to bring foreign workers to the United States and could alleviate the critical farmworker shortage largely caused by the U.S. crackdown on illegal border crossings. ...

The greatest effect would be in California, the nation's largest agricultural state. Some farmers have had to plow rotting crops back into their fields for lack of workers at harvest time. But lawmakers and growers said Tuesday that more than an administrative fix was needed to solve the state's chronic farm labor shortages.

Don't you love that phrase "chronic farm labor shortage"? It's like golf course owners complaining about the chronic daylight shortage that keeps golf courses closed an average of 12 hours per day and demanding that therefore the government must build them giant floodlights so they can stay open 24 hours per day. There is no farm labor shortage, chronic or otherwise, there's just a higher market wage than the wage the growers would prefer to pay (which, by the way, is $0.00 per hour).

And as for crops rotting in the fields, it's the nature of the agriculture business that each year a few of the many scores of different crops will grow in such abundance or at an inconvenient time or both that it's not worth harvesting some of them. In 2006, for example, it was pears. So, each fall, the growers' lobbyists issue press releases about how pears or brussels sprouts or avocados or whatever it is this year are "rotting in the fields" due to the horrible burden of having to pay stoop laborers in expensive California $8.50 an hour (or whatever it is) for seasonal work.

The more long-range appeal to growers of guest-worker plans is that it lets them bring in Asian peasants who are less able to sneak into the country than Mexican peasants, while allowing the Mexicans to continue to sneak in. (Did you know the population of Indonesia, for instance, is 235 million?) From the employers' standpoint, it's a double your pleasure, double your fun approach to the supply and demand determination of laborers' wages. And then once the flow of guest workers from, say, Indonesia gets started, their will be more illegal immigration from Indonesia too, since the guest workers' relatives will now have connections in America.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Investment idea

I never have any money-making ideas, but here's a vague concept that somebody might be able to profitably apply.

One reason cell phones are so popular around the world is because, unlike old-fashioned land line technology, they don't require the kind of disinterested organizational ability that Northwest Europeans and Northeast Asians have but that almost nobody else displays. Land-lines tend toward being a natural monopoly -- it's silly to string multiple phone lines into your house to choose among competitors -- so phone companies used to be either government agencies or regulated monopolies. And that meant that most of the world had bad phone service. It wasn't just the Third World -- Italy was notorious for the years you had to wait to get hooked up. Italians are terrific at small scale businesses that react instantly to the latest fashions, but their big bureaucracies are disastrous.

In contrast, cell phones aren't natural monopolies, so they thrive in less civic-minded cultures. The most extreme example was Somalia during the recent decade and a half when it didn't have any central government at all, but it had lots of prospering cell phone providers. (There are costs to anarchy, though -- one Somalian cell phone company I read about had 800 employees, 500 to do the work, 300 to carry guns to protect them.)

The point is that most of the world is a little closer to Somalia than to Sweden when it comes to the civic virtues, so products that don't require large scale cooperation and disinterested diligence will thrive more than those that do.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 5, 2008

Taking dynasticism to a whole 'nother level

Do you ever get the impression that John McCain, who for some reason seems to be perceived as the anti-Bush candidate in the GOP race, is the cool, cocky dad George W. Bush wished he'd had instead of that wimpy, diplomatic, prudent father he has spent his life being annoyed that he got stuck with?

The classic problem with dynasticism is regression toward the mean: the formidable father has a less impressive son. Having already gone down that route with the Bushes, we're now embarking on a bizarre exercise in pseudo-dynasticism. Having witnessed the failure of the son, we're now enthroning the man who could be the failed son's crazy old coot of a favorite uncle.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Are Romney's caucus victories due to Mormon conspiracies?

Mitt Romney won big in a couple of purplish states with well-educated, civic-minded electorates: Colorado (59%-19%) and Minnesota (42%-22%-20%). Those are respectable wins.

But ... both were caucus states rather than primaries. And I'm starting to get suspicious.

That seems to be a pattern -- Romney does well in caucuses and loses in primaries. Before today, he won caucuses in Wyoming, Nevada, and Maine, and a primary in his "home" state of Michigan. Perhaps that's just because the more dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals who show up at caucuses have carefully assessed each candidate's positions and resumes and made a responsible choice for Romney.

Or maybe ... it's because Mormons keep packing the caucuses.

Unfortunately, I can't find exit polls for Colorado and Minnesota, but we do know that Romney's victory in the Nevada caucus was boosted by Mormons making up 25% of the GOP caucusers and going close to 100% for Romney. So, I have my suspicions about his other caucus victories. If anybody has any evidence one way or another, let me know.

Oh, wait, Romney did do really, really well in one primary today, where he got 90% of the vote, so maybe my suspicions are paranoid.

Except ... that state was Utah.

Mormons -- they'd take over the world in a couple more generations ... if only they were allowed to drink caffeinated beverages!

This is not to say that Mormons can't be dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals. In fact, I would expect that they are a little above average in this regard. It's just that the discreet charm of Mitt Romney just seems to be a little too discreet to win many elections where Mormons don't make up a sizable fraction of the voters.

In other states today, Romney won in caucuses in Alaska (44%) and in primaries in Montana (38%), North Dakota (36%), and in his "home" state of Massachusetts with 51%. That's a little better than McCain's 47% in his home state of Arizona, but not as good as Huckabee's 61% in Arkansas. In contrast, Obama won 64% in Illinois and Clinton 57% in New York. So, to know McCain and Romney is apparently not to love them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Super Tuesday in Electoral College Perspective

Longtime reader Ben Franklin (since 1706) comments:

On Super Tuesday, McCain won almost exclusively in states that Republicans have almost no chance of winning in November. The only clear exceptions to that are Oklahoma and Missouri, the later where McCain has won with just 33 percent of the vote and with 3 or 4 percent separating McCain, Huckabee and Romney. In Oklahoma, McCain won in a state that has as its law one of the most stringent anti-illegal immigrant laws in the country. So, both of those wins are incongruous.

In the rest of the states McCain won, there is pretty much Zero chance for the Republican nominee to win in the general election in the fall.

As for Huckabee, he won in Southern states that just about ANY Republican candidate will win come November.

So however you look at the results, they mean less then they appear to mean. This also applies to Obama, who won in many states that the Democrat nominee has next to no chance to win, except for Illinois, which is in the bag for the Democrats (and is Obama's "home state"). So, Obama’s big delegate count on Super Tuesday is vastly overstated, what with his winning North Dakota, Utah, Idaho, etc.

I’d say that Hillary comes out of Super Tuesday looking like by far the strongest candidate in the field of either party.

The electoral college means that purple states are what matters: the Great Lakes Blue Collar States of Ohio, Pennyslvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Clean Green States of Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico (okay, NM isn't green and it isn't clean in its politics, but I had to put it somewhere), and then there's Florida, which wasn't that close in 2004 but we all remember 2000.

Surprisingly few purple states participated in Super Tuesday. In Minnesota, Obama won big with 67% of the caucuses, while Romney beat McCain and Huckabee 42-22-20. Hillary won New Mexico 51-42, while the Republicans in that state didn't hold an election. (Getting off the topic here, don't you find it annoying when the parties in a state hold their primaries on different days?)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Where to find exit polls

One place to find exit poll data is to go here:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/

Then Control-F for "exit" then click on the state you want on the map. Then look for the link to "Full ... Exit Poll."

This is all part of my ongoing effort to get my readers to do my work for me.

Here, for example, are the race demographics of Democratic voters in California:

Vote by Race % of voters Clinton Obama
White 53% 43% 49%
Black 7% 16% 81%
Latino 29% 66% 33%
Asian 8% 73% 25%
Other 3% 43% 47%




Race of Candidate Was...
Clinton Obama
Most Important 6% 63% 35%
One of Several 11% 56% 43%
Not Important 82% 49% 46%




Was Race of Candidate Important to You
Clinton Obama
Yes 17% 59% 40%
No 82% 49% 46%

Hillary won 80% of California's Democratic high school dropouts and 61% of the no-college high school grads. So, if Hillary wins California, it looks like it will be on the strength of the "Son of Aladdin" vote. In contrast, Obama did very well in California among the bloc of white voters who want an "imaginary hip black friend," in the immortal words of an anonymous Clinton advisor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What should the nominating process look like?

Clearly, the Presidential nominating process is broken. Here it is February 5, a ridiculous 9 months before the election, and we're about to have 23 states vote at once.

I understand the rush to the front by states who were disenfranchised in 2004 by the absurd amount of momentum John Kerry developed by winning Iowa and New Hampshire, but there's got to be a better way.

The Comments section is open for your proposals.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 4, 2008

What's not a conspiracy?

To call an observation a "conspiracy theory" is widely treated as an argument-winning move. Yet, which of the major historical events of the 20th Century did not have at least some aspect of conspiracy about them?

Start with the event that set in motion the main currents of the century, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. This was the result of a conspiracy right out of an Oliver Stone movie: Elements high up in the Serbian government and military, organized in a secret paramilitary society with the comic book name Black Hand, infiltrated nine assassins and their weapons into Sarajevo and had them sit around for a month waiting for the Archduke to show up so they could ambush him. (They proved incompetent and all missed, but then the Austrians proved incompetent too and made a wrong turn and then stalled the Archduke's car right in front of the despondent Princip.)

Next, the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the rest of the Bolshie boys were classic cafe conspirators who got lucky. Lenin's deal with the German high command to be transported from Switzerland to the Finland Station in order to undermine Germany's Russian enemy is straight out of the conspiracy nut's textbook.

The Depression, however, is the most striking exception to this tendency of major 20th Century events to in some way partake of the conspiratorial. It just sort of happened.

What about the rise of Hitler? You might call the political maneuverings by the conservative Weimar powerbrokers who gave Hitler the Chancellorship in January 1933 a conspiracy, although that's stretching the term. Hitler's manner of government -- midnight meetings to plan great crimes with a few henchmen where no notes were taken (a particularly un-German way of running a government) -- was that of a conspirator rather than a national leader.

Japan's path to Pearl Harbor was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s by conspiracies of Army officers who assassinated all the moderates in the Japanese government.

On a strategic level, the Cold War was not particularly conspiratorial -- it naturally grew out of the radically different interests of the two major victors of WWII. But -- probably fortunately -- both sides preferred to wage it largely by conspiratorial means rather than by tank battle in the Fulda Gap.

According to Paul Johnson's Modern Times,

"Eisenhower's chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy arms-suppliers -- what he termed the 'military-industrial complex.'" [p. 464]

Eisenhower preferred to fight the Cold War using cheaper means -- building a nuclear deterrent and using CIA covert operations, as in Guatemala and Iran.

Finally, the fall of the Soviet Empire doesn't seem terribly conspiratorial at this point, but the history hasn't all been written. I'd be particularly interested in what promises, if any, were made by the American government to Saudi Arabia in 1985 to persuade the Saudis to pump so much oil that the world price plummeted and the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, went broke.

Of course, this doesn't mean that most (or any) of the popular conspiracy theories are true. Most are obviously pretty stupid.

What it does show is that, like with predictions, people are easily bored and depressed by true conspiracy theories. For example, the fact that WWI, the catastrophe of catastrophes, was set in motion by a classic large-scale conspiracy is of almost no interest to anybody -- I was only vaguely aware of that fact myself until I looked up the history tonight.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Yosemite Sam versus Plastic Fantastic Man

My Super Tuesday enthusiasm knows no bounds.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 3, 2008

Real Estate Week at iSteve

I've got a couple of big articles this week on how you can use your personal knowledge of what people look for when buying a house or renting an apartment to understand the big issues better than 99% of the pundits who don't act as if their private affairs has any relationship to everybody's public affairs.

First, now up on VDARE.com is my article "Real Estate, Race, and Immigration on Chicago's South Side" about Chicago neigbhorhoods inspired by sociologist William Julius Wilson's recent book There Goes the Neighborhood. Wilson's grad students spent three years studying four neighborhoods, which he referred to by pseudonyms. I explain what their real names are and then offer a theory to account for the complex relationship between real estate and race in big cities.

Then, in a day or two, the electronic version of the new issue of The American Conservative will contain my full-length exposition of my theory of how "affordable family formation" makes some states vote Republican in Presidential elections, while unaffordable family formation makes others vote Democratic.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Romney wins Maine; NYTimes.com doesn't mention it

With 68% of the Maine caucuses reporting after voting on Saturday, Mitt Romney holds an insurmountable 52% - 21% lead over GOP frontrunner Sen. John McMentum (with Ron Paul right behind him at 19%). Romney is on track to take all 18 Maine delegates.

This is the last voting before Super Tuesday, yet the New York Times, which largely sets the agenda for the rest of the news media, doesn't see fit to mention it on its website homepage as of 4:00 am Sunday. Campaign stories the NYT does feature prominently include these stop-the-presses barnburners:

Democrats Flood States With Ads as Tuesday Nears

A concentrated burst of advertising is putting the candidates’ strategies out in the open and is highlighting the diverging financial fortunes of the two parties.

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate

An Illinois controversy pitting two important constituencies against each other put Barack Obama’s legislative skills to the test.

More Politics

Obviously, it's just Maine, but I don't recall the NYT not mentioning on its home page the result next door in New Hampshire. And it's just a caucus instead of a primary, but I don't believe the NYT skipped Iowa for that reason.

I guess some candidates' momentum is more equal than other candidates' momentum.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer