Blog Posts

The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business Republicans.

I admire Satoshi Kanazawa's lively intelligence, although I'm not totally persuaded to trust every idea he comes up with. From The Economist:

... less intelligent people are better at doing most things. In the ancestral environment general intelligence was helpfuhelpful only for solving a handful of evolutionarily novel problems.

This is an excerpt from the official memo from Janet Napolitano on Obama's unconstitutional Administrative Amnesty. You can read the whole thing as a PDF on the DHS site. Link via Stanford Law School Fellow William Baude, who describes it as "short on legal specifics".

Ross Douthat has been a columnist The New York Times since 2009: I doubt he will be there much longer.

 In The Media and Obama’s Immigration Gambit June 18, 2012 Douthat has the temerity to question the political wisdom behind the Obama Youth Amnesty and – even more heretical – he does so by thinking in terms of race:

Hispanics were still only about 10 percent of the electorate four years ago, whereas whites without college degrees were almost 40 percent. This meant that even though Obama won about 67 percent of Hispanics and only 40 percent of white working class voters, he still won millions more working class white votes in total — and needs to win at least some

Aaron Renn makes an interesting argument in City Journal:

I may be the only person in North America who was sentient in 1991 yet didn't see the endlessly-replayed videotape of "Rodney King's beating by the LAPD."  (This was before the internet, and I essentially never watch TV.)

Gun buybacks are pretty useless. Sometimes pro-gun activists will turn in thirty dollar guns for the hundred dollar credit, and tell the press they're investing them in a Glock. Libertarian Steve Chapman notes  the uselessness, and mentions the demographic aspect:

How quickly the dinosaur media reacts when the sniffles of diverse persons are available to be propagated. The President announced his work-permit and no-deport plan on Friday, and the AP has a story with several deported young foreigners (including one DIY) on Sunday, where they tell their sad stories of what could have been had they not been treated to a free ride home.

If only they could have stayed in America, the foreigners complain, they could have availed themselves of the wonderful opportunities. None gives a thought to taking a college slot or job from a deserving young citizen, of course.

There are many disturbing aspects to Obama’s political slight-of-hand, not the least of which is the damage done to American basics like the rule of law and the separation of powers. Charles Krauthammer called the amnesty ploy “out-and-out lawlessness.”

But another effect is to wave the welcome mat at billions of poor around the world with the message that America’s admittedly imperfect attempt at immigration enforcement has been cratered by design. Obama’s sketchy requirements are guarantee of future job stability for forgers, where document designers can lower ages on paper to the desired under-30 as necessary.

Congressman Lamar Smith’s June 15 statement included the fraud factor:

“President Obama’s amnesty only benefits illegal immigrants,

It may be that Obama’s use of the phrase “work authorization” may be more alarming to the American public than the term “amnesty,” because while the latter can be mentally filed away in the immigration category, anything having to do with employment affects everyone directly or indirectly. Creating 2-3 million additional legal workers overnight to compete with citizens in this brutal economy gets universal attention.

Here’s what the President said on Friday regarding the policy changes he ordered:

“Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people. Over the