May 13, 2013

Big Bloombrother is watching you

Bloomberg subscriber Winston Smith huddles out of line of sight of his $20,000
per year Bloomberg Terminal so it can't watch what he scrawls in his diary
From the New York Times:
More Clients Ask Questions of Bloomberg 
By AMY CHOZICK and BEN PROTESS 
With new concerns emerging about practices at its news division, Bloomberg L.P., the sprawling financial services company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, scrambled to shield its lucrative terminal business and appease nervous customers. 
The report on Friday that a Bloomberg reporter had used the company’s financial data terminals to monitor a Goldman Sachs partner’s logon activity has set off a ripple effect of inquiries from other worried subscribers, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the European Central Bank. 
The revelations now stretch back to 2011, when UBS complained after a Bloomberg Television host alluded on air to his monitoring of the London-based rogue UBS trader Kweku Adoboli’s terminal logon information to confirm his employment status at the bank. 
Then, last summer, executives at JPMorgan Chase questioned Bloomberg reporters’ techniques after they were among the first to report on the trader Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale. “I’m unaware of any record of a complaint from either bank on this issue,” said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman.
Citigroup and other Wall Street banks have also contacted Bloomberg in recent days, according to these people, who spoke on the condition they not be identified discussing confidential conversations. The banks all declined to comment. In response, the company has been contacting subscribers.
... Bloomberg subscribers pay on average about $20,000 a year to lease each terminal. 

So, Bloomberg customers pay annually about an order of magnitude more to rent a terminal that you can buy a MacBook Air for down at the Apple Store?
Mr. Bloomberg, who stepped away from day-to-day operations when he became mayor, declined to comment on the situation at the company that bears his name. “No, I can’t say anything. I have an agreement with the Conflict of Interests Board,” he said in a news conference on Monday.

Well, that's reassuring. The billionaire mayor can't talk about conflicts of interest because he has an agreement with the Conflict of Interest Board. Really, in the big picture, isn't the entire concept of "conflict of interest" so 20th Century? All this old-fashioned stuff about conflict of interest is really disinteresting to modern people like Mayor Bloomberg, and you should be disinterested in obsessing over it too.
The company also began to discuss possible legal ramifications. While people close to the company doubted that clients would threaten legal action,

The clients aren't likely to threaten to sue? For that to be true, the clients, who include world-historical vampire squids like Goldman Sachs, must be absolutely terrified of just which of their secrets Bloomberg has snooped from them.
Bloomberg hired outside lawyers on Friday to steer it through the crisis. The lawyers, according to the people close to the company, have assured Bloomberg that there is no basis for a lawsuit, since the subscribers did not suffer any damages and the information obtained was more trivial than confidential. An early analysis conducted by Bloomberg further suggested that reporters rarely, if ever, published stories based solely on information gleaned from the terminals.

There's a lot of lawyerese in that sentence: few stories "based solely" ... Anyway, if I were CEO of Goldman Sachs, I'd be a lot more worried about the secrets Bloomberg didn't publish, the ones' that were too valuable to let the reporters have, the ones that got locked away in that special safe at Bloomberg HQ (or, maybe, that safe in the mayor's office).
The people close to the company also noted that Bloomberg’s sales agreement with subscribers disclosed that company employees had access to certain private information. While the agreement did not specify that Bloomberg News reporters were among those with access, the journalists are technically employees of Bloomberg L.P.

It's not the journalists at Bloomberg L.P. that I'd be that worried about if I were, say, Lloyd Blankfein.
But some bank executives said the snooping could have violated a common confidentiality clause in their contracts with Bloomberg. In the clause, Bloomberg promises to keep large swaths of information “in confidence,” meaning that it won’t be shared with “third parties.” 

So, Bloomberg has promised not to let anybody else know what it knows. Now, that's reassuring!
One Wall Street executive, who asked not to be named because of a firm policy prohibiting employees from speaking to the media, said his company was involved in a sensitive situation last year and he now wondered if reporters were monitoring his activities. 
“Looking to see who is in or not is sleazy but hardly earthshaking,” he said. “But if they knew what stocks I was clicking on and what yields I was looking at, that is spying.” (Bloomberg officials have repeatedly said the functions used by reporters did not provide information on specific trades or securities.)

Like I said, reporters might be the least of my worries about who at Bloomberg knows what about my private business.
Another top Wall Street executive, who also asked not to be named, said although he did not know if his firm would take action, he planned to raise this issue with his board. “I don’t like it when something happens that hasn’t occurred to me, and this had not occurred to me,” he said. “I feel violated.”

I'm not sure exactly what he just said, but he seems to feel strongly about it.
... Bloomberg has at least 315,000 subscribers

at $20,000 per year that's $6.3 billion in annual revenue from a business model that sounds like it was obsolete about a year after the World Wide Web came along
and its proprietary terminals reign supreme on most traders’ desks. But the business Mr. Bloomberg pioneered took a hit during the financial crisis of 2008. 
Even as Wall Street recovered, some financial institutions questioned the steep price of the terminals. The price tag, combined with the breach of privacy accusations, have aggravated tensions between Bloomberg and its subscribers, several Wall Street executives said. 
The concerns also presented a rare opportunity for Bloomberg’s competitors to challenge the behemoth. ...

Because the federal government anti-trust enforcers would never presume to do that. Who knows what Bloomberg has on them?
What is more, a report in The Financial Times that a former Bloomberg employee had leaked online thousands of messages from a single day in 2009 and a week in 2010 between terminal subscribers threatened to further fray trust between Bloomberg and the hedge funds, investment banks and money managers who use the service. ... 
The Wall Street executive who expressed concerns over being spied upon by Bloomberg said the price the company charged for service added insult to injury. 
“They pretty much have a monopoly,” he said. “I am fed up and now they do this. I honestly would pay as much for three-quarters of the data just to get away from them.”

Commenter NOTA says:
Dear God, there is a wonderful SF story in there somewhere. Once, just as a civilization was reaching its information age, a particular group of people saw their opportunity and built special information terminals that only the very most rich and powerful people in the society could have, and got this terminal accepted as the marker of membership in the power elite of the planet. And then, control of what went on those terminals, and knowledge of who looked at what on them, turned out to be a source of almost unlimited power, and those terminals' makers became extremely powerful.

Oh, come now, NOTA, Michael Bloomberg is merely the three term mayor of New York City (sure, there was a two-term limit, but that was made to disappear -- he's Michael Bloomberg, for heaven's sake, not some normal New York City mayor who has to obey term limits) and the seventh richest man in America. He's not President of the United States. He's only seriously looked at running for President a few times. If he had judged that it would be in his interest to be President, you'd have been informed of that fact.

Dean Jeffries, RIP

Last week in Taki's Magazine, I wrote about how John Lautner was the leading architect working in the indigenous aesthetic of the car, plane, and movie-crazed eastern San Fernando Valley where I grew up. This week, car customizer Dean Jeffries, another local artistic legend, died at his North Hollywood home, age 80.

Above is Jeffries' 1964 Mantaray.

What a great time and place to be a little boy ...

Today's Mark Zuckerberg = "immigration reform" headline

La comadreja común
From the Washington Post:
Zuckerberg’s immigration reform advocacy group faces backlashZuckerberg’s immigration reform advocacy group faces backlash  
Hayley Tsukayama 
FWD.us, the nonprofit founded by the Facebook chief, has lost some of its star tech sector supporters.

"In Bloomberg America, Bloomberg Terminals watch YOU"

Yakov Smirnoff
From the New York Times:
Bloomberg Admits Terminal Snooping 
Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage, more than half a dozen former employees said.
More than 315,000 Bloomberg subscribers worldwide use the terminals for instant market news, trading information and communication. Reporters at Bloomberg News, a separate division from the terminal business, were nonetheless told to use the terminals to get an edge in the competitive world of financial journalism where every second counts, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the company’s strict nondisclosure agreements. 
The company acknowledged that at least one reporter had gained access to information on Goldman Sachs after the bank complained to the company last month. On Sunday, Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman, said that “reporters would not have been trained to improperly use any client data.” 
Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, underscored that the practice was at one time commonplace. 

Michael Bloomberg, crimefighting billionaire media mogul and mayor of Gotham New York City, is 7th on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of $27 billion. It's usually said that he made his money by renting old-fashioned timesharing terminals to Wall Street for vast monthly sums.

I'd often wondered why Wall Street relied upon an extremely centralized, extremely expensive, and otherwise obsolete computer technology. It's been explained to me that Bloomberg Terminals were so expensive that having your firm rent you one was a sign that you are a BSD, and what real man on Wall Street would allow the symbolic castration of having his Bloomberg Terminal replaced with a Mac or PC?

But this story of how lowly Bloomberg reporters had been trained on how to spy on Bloomberg Terminal clients like Goldman Sachs opens up an entirely different line of thought about how Mayor Bloomberg has continued to prosper.

On reflection, though, perish the thought. Forget I ever said this. Obviously, Bloomberg's organized snooping on its clients' inside info was utterly 100% restricted to pixel-stained wretches on the news side of the Bloomberg company. None of the Big Money Boys on the Terminals side of Bloomberg would ever have dreamed of doing such a thing.

Rubin: The Eight Banditos have better marketing and thus deserve to win

The Eight Banditos (minus five):
McCain, Schumer, and Rubio
As I've long been saying, political journalism is increasingly turning into marketing criticism. The dominant instinct of today's Washington press corps is that not only do the best spinmeisters tend to win, but that they deserve to win.

From the Washington Post's "Right Turn" column:
Why is 2013 different than 2007? 
By Jennifer Rubin, Published: May 10, 2013  
The 2007 immigration reform effort under George W. Bush faltered. 

As did, Bush's Pushes in 2001 (pre-9/11, by the way), 2004, and 2006.
So it is natural to wonder if the effort in 2013 won’t collapse as well. But much has changed in six years, and those changes work to the benefit of immigration reform. 
Then: A president commanding an increasingly unpopular war and having lost the House was losing altitude, especially with his own party. 
Now: A Democratic president desperate for some win — any win — is in office. 
Then: The GOP had the White House and was busy constructing (so it thought) a “permanent majority.” Bush had been successful with Hispanic voters, even absent immigration reform. 
Now: The GOP has now lost two presidential elections, understands (by and large) that it has a problem with minority voters and is eager to claim an accomplishment for which President Obama’s main contribution will be remaining quiet. 

Jen is so infatuated with her own Machiavellianism that it doesn't occur to her that as soon as the bill Obama wants is laid on his desk, he will be all over the Hispanic media claiming credit.
Then: Maverick Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), bane of the right wing, led the charge for the Republicans with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the poster boy for liberalism, at his side. Republicans were not disposed to do them any favors. 
This time: It is the darling of the GOP, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) who is leading the charge, charming the base and going over the heads of talk-show hosts to reach GOP voters. ... 
Then: The conservative base was relatively monolithic and dominate in think tanks and talk radio. 
Now: The conservative base is more heterogeneous, with heavy doses of libertarianism. A plethora of think tanks, pundits and activists are now pro-immigration. 
Then: The president rolled out a policy initiative and got cut off by right-wing activists.

Well, the President back in 2007 (and 2006, and 2004, and 2001) was a Republican.
This time: Rubio is running a campaign-style effort, employing social media and old media, working both in public and behind the scenes. 
None of this means that immigration reform is sure to pass. But it does suggest that the chances for passage are better this time around and that immigration opponents were caught flat-footed (on everything from Rubio’s effectiveness to the Heritage catastrophe), seemingly unaware how strongly a segment of the party had become more ideologically flexible and diverse. The opponents also lack, for the most part, telegenic, capable spokespeople for their cause who are media-friendly and can go toe to toe with pro-reform voices such as Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) 
Meanwhile, for once, Republicans on the pro-immigration side laid out a game plan and organized themselves. Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the American Action Network and many evangelicals have joined together with high-tech executives to run a full-blown campaign for immigration reform. 

Marketing uber alles!

Richwine finally speaks out

Jason Richwine finally speaks out in the Washington Examiner in an interview with Byron York:
A talk with Jason Richwine: 'I do not apologize for any of my work'
May 13, 2013 | 4:22 pm

Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner

"It seemed like that day lasted forever," says Jason Richwine of last Wednesday, when he found himself in the middle of a media firestorm over his writings about Hispanic immigrants and intelligence. "I knew that this probably would not end well." 
It didn't. On Friday morning, the 31 year-old scholar resigned from the Heritage Foundation, where he had co-authored the new report, "The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer." The paper, released last Monday and written largely by Heritage scholar Robert Rector, argued that Hispanic immigrants to the United States, most of them low-skill, end up costing the government more in benefits than they pay in taxes. It was an explosive entry into the debate over the comprehensive immigration reform measure currently being considered in the Senate. By the time of its release, reform advocates on the left and right had already published a number of "prebuttals" arguing that Rector and Richwine had it all wrong, that in fact immigration would be a net benefit in years to come. 
Heritage expected that debate. What it did not expect was the firestorm that broke out Wednesday morning when a liberal Washington Post blogger posted an article titled, "Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs." The blogger, Dylan Matthews, wrote that Richwine, who earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 2009, had written a dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy," which argued that on average immigrants to the U.S., particularly Hispanic immigrants, have lower IQ scores than "the white native population." Admitting immigrants with higher IQs, Richwine argued, would be a better immigration policy than admitting low-IQ newcomers. 
The reaction was immediate and harsh. "The Heritage Foundation's immigration guru wasn't just racist -- he's wrong," wrote the Atlantic. "Ugly racism and xenophobia dressed up in economic hyperbole," said the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. "You have someone who is a racist, obviously, right?" asked a Univision anchor of a Heritage spokesman. 
Heritage quickly tried to put some distance between itself and its scholar. "The Harvard paper is not a work product of the Heritage Foundation," communications vice president Mike Gonzalez said in a statement. "Its findings do not reflect the positions of the Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations." 
Richwine knew he was in trouble the minute the first story broke. "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life," he says. "Once that word is out there, it's very difficult to recover from it, even when it is completely untrue." 

Read the whole thing there.

Jason Richwine and Nate Silver

A friend writes:
It occurred to me that we haven't heard from the greatest statistician who ever lived -- Nate Silver -- on the Richwine affair.  
It seems like it was only a few months ago that the right was the party that was totally ignorant of stats -- and it was the left that owned the future because they knew how to use math.  
Strange turn.

May 12, 2013

The Greg Packer of Gay Marriage

The national news media appears to be turning into a giant conspiracy to feed me material. Yesterday, in "Flight from White -- American Indian Version," I noted the New York Times' breathless article about an academic who has made a career for himself as an American Indian despite being a redheaded white guy. Tonight, in the Washington Post:
The Post's caption: 
"Heather Purser (right) and her girlfriend, Rebecca Platter, are shown near their home in Olympia, Washington, on May 7, 2103. Purser, a member of the Suquamish Tribe, got her tribal council to to vote in favor of gay marriage."

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunette or the blonde, is the American Indian? My first guess was the brunette, but it turns out to be the blonde.

By the way, Washington Post, is Princess Fauxcohontas's t-shirt racist? 

The blonde's t-shirt appears to be racially stereotyping the residents of Motown (83% black) as prone to gun violence. Are blondes really allowed to do that in the Washington Post? Or is it okay because this blonde's not white?

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post's black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

Update: Okay, I've finally read the first three paragraphs in the article:
For Heather Purser, the first pang came more than a decade ago as she gathered clams on Puget Sound’s Chico Beach, watching her cousin’s new husband assist with the digging. She figured she’d never have a legal spouse to help with the backbreaking work. 
Then Purser, a member of Washington state’s Suquamish Tribe who says she knew she was gay at age 7, decided to act: She led a personal lobbying campaign that ended with her tribal council voting in 2011 to approve gay marriage. 
“I realized that I do have the power to change my situation,” said Purser, 30, a commercial seafood diver from Olympia, Wash.

Hmmhmmmhmm ... So far we have a lesbian "commercial seafood diver" who is into clams and racially insensitive t-shirts and is a blonde American Indian and has gotten the Suquamish Tribe to approve gay marriage?

Is this whole story a prank?  It sounds like it was made up by the kind of 8th grader who finds everything the teacher says hilariously dirty.

Well, if it is a prank it's more like a long running performance art project. Googling "Heather Purser" brings up a considerable number of you-go-girl profiles of her. Here's an article about her in Indian Country:
Ms. Purser in her clamdiver suit
Diver Heather Purser Pioneers Same-Sex Marriage for Suquamish
Kevin Taylor
January 18, 2012 
Earlier last month in Seattle, as all the threads for a planned Human Rights Day banquet were being woven together, Heather Purser, Suquamish, who was to be among the honored guests, was shuffling through mud and ooze. 
Under 50 feet of water. Down on the cold bottom of Puget Sound. Wrestling with giant clams.

Indeed.

Purser in New York Times, 2011
The Washington Post story is hardly Purser's first tribute in the national media Here's an ever-so-serious New York Times story from 2011 about Ms. Purser, back when she had strawberry blonde hair.

And here's her profile on NPR's All Things Considered.

Plus, there are a whole bunch of other news stories about her over the years in lesser venues.

For instance,  in Yes! Magazine:
Same-Sex Marriage Brings Healing to Me—and My Tribe 
Heather Purser set out to win gay marriage rights within the Suquamish Tribe and found herself on a personal journey toward self-acceptance.

Considering her omnipresence in the media, maybe Heather Purser is the Greg Packer of Gay Marriage?

In case you are wondering who Greg Packer is, here's Ann Coulter's 2003 column exposing the highway maintenance worker who has been quoted countless times in the MSM as the Voice of the Man on the Street. Here, for example, is a photo of Greg first in line for an iPhone at the Times Square Apple Store, ready with a media-friendly quote.

P.P.S. And what about Rebecca Platter, the non-Indian brunet in the Washington Post's romantic backlit photo above? Well, perhaps she used to be a blonde too, at least she was in this picture of a Rebecca Platter on Red Room: Where the Writers Are. That Rebecca Platter's bio says:
I am a writer who has a strong voice and a clever way with words. I make poetry with strong visual metaphors and an unexplainable emotional pull. Although I have not officially been published I know I will be at some point when the time is right. I feel strongly that the current generation needs to re-connect with their deeper thoughts as opposed to surface "shares" that have become too common. Red Room is a place where I can be surrounded by people who inspire me to continue on my journey.

According to Rebecca Platter's bio at The Seattle Lesbian:
Rebecca Platter graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Comparative History of Ideas and a minor in Russian Literature. After studying abroad in Iceland and graduating on the Dean’s List, she backpacked throughout Europe then later moved to Costa Rica volunteering to tutor locals in English. Passionate about LGBTQ rights, Rebecca is excited to serve as a contributing writer for The Seattle Lesbian while working to transition her love of writing into a career. Rebecca is obsessed with painting multiple headed naked women, traveling anywhere she can, writing about life and wearing red lipstick whenever possible. She is currently writing a set of personal comedic memoirs. Read more.
"Multiple headed naked women"

So, this is all a Portlandia sketch come to life. (Indeed, one story says Rebecca is a barista.) We have two Northwest publicity hounds who have successfully exploited the media's gay marriage obsession. And over the course of several years of media coverage, none of these crack newshounds noticed anything amusing about the story.

By the way, even though Purser grabbed national attention for getting the Suquamish Nation to approve gay marriage in the spring of 2011, the pair still aren't married, or even engaged. The Washington Post article by Rob Hotakainen ends:
Purser is optimistic that the Supreme Court will make gay marriage the law of the land, leaving religion out of the deliberations. 
She’s still unmarried, but is living with 28-year-old Rebecca Platter, her partner of three years. 
“We’re not engaged, but I do plan on getting married — and she’s definitely the one,” Purser said. 

I'll leave you with Rebecca Platter's entire Twitter account:

Tweets

  1. Eating strawberries waiting for my face mask to dry.
  2. So cold outside! I need to clean my room. How does it get this messy?
  3. This is kinda confusing- I am trying to get part of the circle now-- you are the only person I know on here

Stop snickering! Haven't you been informed often enough that gay marriage is the most serious issue in the history of the world?

How do Hispanics score on grad school admissions tests?

Here are a couple of useful tables from my 2009 VDARE article on the results of admissions tests mandated by graduate and professional schools (the Graduate Record Exam, Law School Admission Test, Medical College Admission Test, Graduate Management Admission Test, and Dental Admission Test). 

The worthy organizations that administer these tests issue huge reports most years on how applicants have done by race, ethnicity, sex, and so forth. I took the most recent reports available in 2009, covering years from 2005 up to 2008). To make the median scores comprehensible and comparable, they are all displayed as percentiles vs. the white distribution. 
    Mean Score as Percentile of White Distribution
Test Degree White Black Asian Tot Hisp Mex-Am
GMAT M.B.A. 50% 13% 55% 27% 24%
GRE-Verbal Ph.D./M.A. 50% 18% 47% 29% 28%
GRE-Quant Ph.D./M.A. 50% 14% 66% 29% 28%
LSAT J.D. 50% 12% 47% 19% 29%
MCAT-Verbal M.D. 50% 10% 36% 19% 21%
MCAT-Phys Sci M.D. 50% 14% 61% 24% 25%
MCAT-Biol Sci M.D. 50% 10% 54% 24% 25%
DAT D.D.S. 50% 16% 60% 27% NA
For example, on the GMAT, the median white applicant scores, by definition, at the 50th percentile of the white distribution, while the median black applicant scores at the 13th percentile, Asians at the 55th percentile, all Hispanics at the 27th percentile, and (within Total Hispanics, Mexican Americans at the 24th percentile.

As you'll notice, blacks and Hispanics don't do all that well on these tests, which is why they get affirmative action.

As I wrote in 2009:
Note that language is a surprisingly small problem for Hispanics—they score no worse on the GRE Verbal subtest than on the GRE Quantitative, and only moderately worse on Verbal portion of the MCAT. Why? Because Hispanics who have problems with English generally don't finish college, or even high school.

Here's a second table showing what percentage of each ethnic group, relative to whites, take each test:
White Black Asian Tot Hisp Mexican
% of 20-24 ages 61.5% 15.5% 4.9% 17.5% 10.2%
White Shr Share of Test-Takers v. White Share
GMAT 68.7%     100 49205 29             18
GRE 74.0%     100 47  93 29             21
LSAT 66.1%     100 62 154 47             15
MCAT 57.0%     100 51 434 44             26
DAT 62.0%     100 44 489 36  NA
This table helps you evaluate the first table because it shows how hard the bottom of the barrel is being scraped for each group for each test. What percentage of each cohort of 20-24 year olds takes each test? Whites are set, by definition, at 100. For example, blacks are 49 percent as likely to take the GMAT as whites, Asians 205%, Total Hispanics 29%, and Mexican-Americans only 18%.

Mexican-Americans are no more than half as likely as blacks to take one of these tests. As I wrote in 2009:
If you are wondering why America's white elites aren't more worried about their kids facing competition from the huge number of Mexican immigrants they've let in, this educational indolence is one answer—at the highest levels of American society, Mexican-Americans just aren't much competition.

You can read the whole article here.

David Frum speaks sense on immigration

From The Daily Beast:
You Can't Wish Away the Facts About Immigration Amnesty
It's not some personal quirk of Jason Richwine's that has caused him to doubt that the legalized immigrants will rapidly raise their skill levels or education standards. The most authoritative study of Mexican immigration over time has found exactly the same thing. Edward Teles and Velma Ortiz write from the left in their book, Generations of Exclusion. They indict American society, discriminatory educational attitudes, and other "exclusionary" forces - but they have the goods that Mexican-American inter-generational progress has slowed to a stall.  
... Unless you posit that the newly legalized immigrants will dramatically outperform the existing immigrant population, you will reach a result very like that of the Heritage Foundation: that the taxes paid by the newly legalized will not begin to equal the costs of their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other benefits. ...

Let me put this in boldface: Heritage's cost estimates are driven not primarily by welfare, but by healthcare. Every newly legalized immigrant, no matter how ambitious and hard-working, will get old. When he or she gets old, he or she will qualify for Medicare. Medicare is very, very expensive, and getting more expensive all the time. Fewer and fewer Americans - whatever their ethnic origin - pay enough in taxes to cover their predicted future health care costs. Inevitably, Medicare is becoming a more redistributionist program. People on the left get this point when they scoff at the imputed Tea Party slogan, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Why do they forget the point when they speak of immigration? ...
A lot of people come to these immigration debates with strong prior ideological commitments. Jason Richwine's aren't very attractive, but neither are Grover Norquist's. The apologists for plutocracy are content this week to use anti-racism as their debating tool. But a tool is all it is. 

Today's Mark Zuckerberg = Gang of 8 headline

Puzzled weasel
From Tech Crunch:
Why Zuckerberg’s Lobby Is Collapsing Like A House Of Cards Outside Of DC



Jonathan Chait speaks power to truth

New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, a former co-author with Stephen Glass at The New Republic, speaks power to truth:
How Jason Richwine Passed Immigration Reform 
By Jonathan Chait

The fallout from the Heritage Foundation’s immigration reform study has developed into a watershed moment for the prospects of passing a bill. The release of the study prompted a fierce backlash from proponents of reform, which compounded when Dylan Matthews reported that Jason Richwine, a co-author of the study, wrote a dissertation arguing, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

You'll notice that Chait doesn't argue against this.
Heritage has found itself in a public relations crisis, and announced Richwine was leaving the conservative think-tank. Right-wing blogger and anti-anti-racism activist Michelle Malkin called the treatment of Richwine a “crucifixion,” which seems perfectly appropriate. ... 
Both the financial structure of the conservative think-tank world and the unique branding advantages of his last name should have pushed him into the safer field of denouncing the excessive tax burden on the well-to-do, the largest and safest sub-specialty within the conservative and libertarian think-tank and pseudo-think-tank world. 
The practical fallout of the episode will play out in two ways. First, it has demonstrated that the balance of power within the party has shifted. The pro-business, libertarian wing of the GOP has held the whip hand for many years now. But its control always relied on setting the party’s agenda subtly, directing its political capital into anti-tax, anti-regulatory policies, and paying as little attention to social issues as possible. 
Republican elites were hesitant to rile up social conservatives directly and explicitly. When the base revolted against immigration reform in 2007, the GOP elites had no responses but to cover their face and try to absorb the beating. In this instance, though, elites have actually struck back and inflicted real harm on the social conservatives. There will be a fight, but both sides now understand that it will have two sides, not merely endless placating of nativists. 
Second, Richwine’s quote is exactly the sort of political nightmare Republicans hope to put behind them by passing some kind of reform. The party’s dilemma is that immigration represents a nagging, unresolved issue in American politics.  
Every time it is discussed, conservative Republicans remind Latinos why they hate Republicans. The shrewder Republicans grasp that passing immigration reform is not a sufficient condition for winning a respectable share of the Latino vote, but it is a necessary condition.  
If the Gang of Eight bill fails, Richwine’s comments will continue to linger and recirculate in the Latino-American media until immigration reform finally passes. Republicans will never be able to convince Latinos they killed the bill for any reason other than racial animus. The need to put this behind them is growing desperate.

Jennifer Rubin is never satisfied

Grover Norquist
Jennifer Rubin writes in her "Right Turn" column in the Washington Post:
Distinguished pol of the week 
By Jennifer Rubin
Published: May 12, 2013 
... But this week the standout was the team of pro-immigration conservatives who not only carried their case to the public, but also spoke out against one of their own that crossed the line from anti-immigration reform advocacy to disparagement of an entire ethnic group.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute and Doug Holtz Eakin of the American Action Forum have been the brain trust behind fiscal conservatives’ push for immigration reform. ... But this week they spoke out (with others) in uniform condemnation of a shoddy piece of anti-immigration scholarship by the Heritage Foundation and the anti-immigrant proclamations of one of its authors, Jason Richwine, who contends Hispanics have lower IQ’s as a matter of genetics. Heritage had not vetted this person when he was hired and realized its integrity was at stake. By the week’s end Richwine was gone. 
It was a painful week for Heritage, but they are better without the albatross of a racial determinist, just as jettisoning the John Birch Society decades ago purged the conservative movement of that era’s racial cranks. Whatever differences conservatives have on immigration, they should be united on espousing the intrinsic worth of every individual and the ability of any person, from any walk of life, to succeed. 
In this effort, ATR/Cato/AAF helped to recast the face of the conservative movement, reasserting modern conservatives’ optimistic belief in upward mobility and the American dream. In their minds, no ethnic group is smarter than another. Anyone through diligence, hard work and some smarts can get ahead and improve his life and the American scene. America is an additive society — benefiting from more people, more wealth and more opportunity; America is not a zero-sum game in which perpetually poor people compete for scarce jobs. Conservatism cannot become Malthusian. It must be forward looking and inclusive. 
For all that and for reminding conservatives what conservatism really it, we can say well-done, gentlemen.

For Jennifer Rubin's views on immigration policy in a different context, see the next posting.

American Dream v. Israeli Dream: Jennifer Rubin and Mickey Kaus debate

A commenter transcribes a 2011 videologue between Mickey Kaus and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post:
From the podcast John Marzan posted. Discussion begins after 50:00. Jennifer Rubin and Mickey Kaus discuss an alleged difference between the American Dream and the Israeli Dream: 
RUBIN. The reason they won't recognize Israel as "the Jewish state" is that they are refusing to give up on the right of return, the right of every single refugee, their children and grandchildren, to return to Israel. Translated into parlance it means they are going to destroy Israel if not by the bullet, at least by demography. 
KAUS: Why don't they believe in open borders Jennifer? It seems that is your position. 
RUBIN: [laughter] 
KAUS: These people are willing to go to Israel to work and why are they putting these impediments in their way? It's almost as if they are like Tom Tancredo. 
RUBIN: Well, it's because they haven't been coming there to work. They've been coming there to blow up pizza parlors and kill children.

According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the top priority of Israel's new razorwire fence along the Egyptian border is to keep out black economic migrants, with keeping out terrorists only a secondary consideration.
KAUS: But even if they came there to work, there would no longer be a Jewish state. 
RUBIN: Well, they certainly could. Right now they have people who are coming through checkpoints. Every country in the world, and especially in the Middle East, have people who are coming for work permits and then return. So the issue is not where they are working. The issue is not the labor issue. The issue is, do these people want to kill the inhabitants, which they've been doing. And we forget the major success and I've got to tell you Mickey this is the greatest argument in the world for building the wall. The greatest success, the greatest help toward defusing violence in the Middle East came when Israel built its wall, it's green [great?] wall.... 
KAUS: Really? 
RUBIN: Tall walls make good neighbors. 
KAUS: Walls work. And let the record also show that you are willing to restrict immigration to preserve the ethnic identity of a state and which you would never tolerate in America if Anglo Saxons said, you know, we don't want to become a Latino State, we want to be a non-Latino State, so we have to restrict immigration. You would never tolerate it. 
RUBIN: That's because the difference is, America is founded on a different principle. Israel is founded on the principle of being a Jewish state. The Arabs have 22 or 23 of them, or 29 of them, I lose track. Israel was founded on the premise, that's what Zionism is--a state of the Jews. And people don't like it, but that's what it's about. America is not founded on the principle of America for White People or America for Europeans. It is founded really on an idea. And that idea, if people are willing to assimilate, and I'm a big advocate of assimilation, should not be restricted on the basis of race or religion or language, as long as they are willing to eventually learn English and be part of the body politic. It's a completely different situation bw the United States and Israel.

Personally, I was always under the impression that the reasons for which the Founders founded the United States government are explained in the Preamble to the Constitution:
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The Preamble says "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." For some reason, perhaps a typo, the Founders left out the part about the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Washington Post: "Ariel Castro's American dream"

Have you noticed how immigrants and/or Hispanics have become inseparable in the media mind from the cant phrase "the American dream," even when the implications are disastrous for the beloved Gang de Ocho? Last month, for example, the New York Times headlined its profile of Tamerlan Tsarnaev with "Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream."

And today, a headline in the current Washington Post:
Allegations of violence darkened Cleveland suspect Ariel Castro’s American dream

Q. What are they thinking?

A. I don't think they are thinking. They can't help themselves. The whole American Dream / Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor / Nation of Immigrants / Statue of Liberty thing has just become a Pavlovian reflex.

By the way, when did "American Dream" become a euphemism for "immigrant/ethnic?"

"American dream" didn't mean that when I was a kid. The classic literary example from my youth is the title of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Although Thompson is accompanied by his 300-pound Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo (actually, the radical Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, born in El Paso in 1935, disappeared in Mexico in 1974), Dr. Gonzo is derisive of Raoul Duke's obsession with finding the American Dream, a concept that he doesn't identify with:
Gonzo: : We won't make the nut unless we have unlimited credit
Duke: Jesus Christ, we will, man. You Samoans are all the same. You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man's culture. ...
Gonzo: "But let's forget that b------- about the American Dream," he said. "The important thing is the Great Samoan Dream."  

Update: Just as the NYT later changed their Tsarnaev's "battered American Dream" headline, The Washington Post has now changed their "Ariel Castro's American dream" headline to the more inoffensive (if inelegant):
Ariel Castro, Cleveland suspect, has a dark past that foreshadowed crimes he’s now accused of

But the URL still gives away the hilarious original headline:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cleveland-suspect-ariel-castros-american-dream-darkened-by-allegations-of-violence/2013/05/11/61302bd8-ba44-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_story.html

So, at least there is some shame left that leads morning shift editors to try to cover their colleagues' tracks. But these events have been highly revealing of the Hive Mind.

Obama Administration announces it's been lying with statistics about deportations

For years, I've been hearing about how the Obama Administration is setting records for numbers of illegal aliens being deported. For example, USA Today reported on December 21, 2012:
Obama administration sets deportation record: 409,849 
Alan Gomez 
5:27 p.m. EST December 21, 2012 
For the fourth year in a row, the Obama administration set a record for the number of people it deported. In 2012, the total reached 409,849.

Personally, I find it a little puzzling that the Obama Administration told USA Today exactly how many people were deported in 2012 a full ten days before the end of 2012. This promptness may have something to do with Obama hiring Professor Diederik Stapel as Head Immigration Statistician, but the more likely explanation is merely that Obama has invented time travel in his spare time in the White House garage and has been visiting the future to collect bureaucratic statistics for us.

And yet, despite these ever growing statistics, I almost never read sob stories about the Obama Administration sweeping down on obvious employers of massive numbers of illegal immigrants. 

Perhaps Obama is just counting people caught at the border as deportations (they were one foot over the line, so that's a deportation!). Because the Administration sure isn't taking any proactive steps to go to obvious major employers of illegal immigrants and take away their illegal workforce.

Recently, an Obama Administration ICE spokesperson announced that the Administration wasn't deporting illegal aliens. Why? Because big employers of illegals were concerned that rumors that it might start was discouraging new illegals from coming to America.

From the Sacramento Bee:
Immigrant raid rumor fuels fear in Central Calif. 
By GOSIA WOZNIACKA 
Associated Press 
Last Modified: Saturday, May. 11, 2013 - 1:19 am 
FRESNO, Calif. -- The rumor spread like wildfire via phone calls, text messages and social media postings and has persisted now for more than three weeks: Immigration agents are rounding up unauthorized workers in Central California farming communities. 
In Madera, Dinuba, Reedley and parts of Fresno, streets emptied out, soccer games were cancelled and usually bustling businesses saw few customers. Area farmers say their employees are scared, with some not coming to work. Children are missing school. 
The disruption has become so widespread and unrelenting that local law enforcement and business leaders took the unusual step of holding a news conference Friday to try to reassure the community that no raids have occurred. 
"Every week we're getting dozens of calls from workers who are afraid because they say they heard that others were stopped on the side of the highway and hauled away," said Manuel Cunha, Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League, the group that represents growers in the San Joaquin Valley. 
Cunha organized the news conference, which included a representative from the Mexican consulate as well as other community leaders. 
Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency is aware of the rumors. While she would not discuss specific law enforcement efforts, Kice said ICE's priority is targeting immigrants who have committed crimes and "not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately." 
Local law enforcement officials said ICE assured them the rumors are false. 
"I spoke with immigration officials at our local office and have been told directly that they are not conducting massive sweeps in this area, they are not conducting this activity," Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said. 
The rumor started in Madera, a mainly Hispanic city of 61,000 just north of Fresno. The catalyst, most probably, was an operation by the Union Pacific Railroad Police, which ticketed people who illegally crossed the railroad tracks, Madera Police Chief Steve Frazier said. 
The railroad police arrived in a white van and wore green suits, Frazier said, arresting one individual who was a deported felon and had an arrest warrant. Those who witnessed the action might have mistakenly believed the railroad officers were ICE agents. 
Since then, employers, advocacy groups and churches have received a steady stream of frantic calls on behalf of immigrants who reported hearing about others being loaded onto vans, stopped at checkpoints in town, hauled away from popular stores and from their homes. But none of the callers had any proof. 
"The rumor is patently false. There are no immigration raids occurring in the city of Madera," Frazier said. "We've been telling people not to worry." ...
Lazaro Salazar, an immigration lawyer who specializes in deportation defense, said he has not heard from anyone who has been detained in a raid.