Hazleton on Trial

Testimony has concluded in the ACLU’s suit against Hazleton’s “Illegal Immigration Relief Act.” A federal judge will hand down his decision in June. It will probably go against the town. In the meantime we can consider some of the things that have come to light regarding the case.

Steve Chapman, writing in Townhall, notes:

The trial… has not shed flattering light on the competence of those who drafted the law. Mayor Lou Barletta said he was compelled to act when a resident was shot to death, allegedly by two illegal immigrants.

But he had trouble explaining why, if illegal immigrants generate crime, they have been implicated in only about 20 of the 8,500 felonies committed in Hazleton in the last six years. ACLU attorney Witold Walczak also pointed out that amid this supposed crime wave, the city has reduced the size of the police force, despite having a budget surplus.

If Hazleton’s illegal immigrants are prone to crime, they’re the exception. Despite the growth of illegal immigration in the last decade, crime rates have dropped sharply across the country. This may not be a coincidence. In every ethnic group, reports a recent study by Ruben Rumbaut and Walter Ewing for the American Immigration Law Foundation, young men born in the U.S. are far more likely to wind up in prison than those who come here later.

In Hazleton, as elsewhere, the main reason Latino foreigners come is to work and stay out of trouble. In fact, those qualities are the same ones that get them accused of stealing jobs. Even those immigrants who work off the books contribute to the economic health of local businesses by buying goods and services. Hazleton has seen an expansion of its tax base.

So it’s too simple to blame all the city’s newfound troubles on illegal immigrants.

Read the whole thing here.

Chapman argues that the anti-immigrant legislation does not reflect prejudice so much as the strain on local resources caused by the sudden influx of thousands of new residents. He calls on the federal government to stem the tide of immigrants.

But then Julia Vitello-Martin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports:

Mayor Lou Barletta argued that some 10,000 undocumented immigrants have ruined Hazleton’s quality of life: Violent crime has doubled in the past two years, unreimbursed medical expenses at local hospitals have jumped 60% and the annual school budget for teaching English as a second language has soared to $875,000 from $500. Yet business owners and landlords argued the opposite–that immigrants had revitalized Hazleton’s moribund economy, filling once-vacant apartments and patronizing once-declining businesses. As a result, Hazleton’s budget has been in the black for three years–a far cry from its $1.2 million deficit in 2000.

So apparently the influx has had a beneficial effect on local resources. Ms. Vitullo-Martin notes that this has been a general pattern in other cities that serve as immigrant destinations.

Read it here.

So, if it isn’t an upsurge in crime, or depletion of local resources, then what is left? Sheer prejudice? I think not.

A friend of mine from Hazleton explains:

[T]he thing is not the sheer number of crimes, but the types of crimes that were committed. Very public ones, very frightening ones. It was the couple of drive-by shootings and, I think especially, the melees and assaults and alleged rapes in public schools, and the brandishing of guns in playgrounds and malls. There may not have been all that many of these events, but their symbolic import is out of all proportion to their actual numbers: they are the sorts of things that seem to indicate that anarchy is actually engulfing the place. And the cultural issues matter, too. It really does matter when people don’t bother to use garbage cans, and befoul neighborhoods that people had once at least tried to keep reasonably clean. The loud music that makes sleep difficult, the smarmy sexual come-ons to unescorted women on the streets. They matter. They aren’t felonies. In fact, they’re standard operating procedure in the barrios of San Juan. But they matter.

Indeed they do! Behavior that outrages mainstream middle-class sensibilities is an important element in quality-of-life issues and a clash of cultures can explain a lot of the anti-immigrant reaction, but even this is something of a fantasy.
My friend writes:

I see Hazleton as a place where a lot of ordinary, middle-to-working class people wanted nothing other than to be allowed to live the way they had lived for years.

I’m sure that a lot of people see things that way. However, as Ms. Vitello-Martin, points out — change was already taking place before the immigrant influx. The downtowns of small cities were already hollowing out as businesses and people moved away, and rather than precipitating decline, immigrants were responding to it, flocking to places were property values and rents had already declined to the point where homes were now affordable even to recent arrivals in the country. Immigrants are being blamed for a decline that they did not cause, and to which they may well represent a solution.

So what we are left with is outraged sensibilities, and as my friend pointed out, they do matter. The question is, do they matter more than the aspirations of the newcomers and the economic revitalization they represent?

Getting Over Reagan

David Brooks, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, riffs on a perceptive piece by Tyler Cowen in Cato Unbound [the essential blog for libertarians]. Brooks’ piece is behind a subscription firewall so I will cite it extensively. The Cowen piece is online and can be read here.

Brooks’ argument is roughly as follows: Republicans cannot revive their political fortunes by looking back to Reaganism. That was an appropriate response to a particular historical situation but the principles on which it was founded are no longer applicable to the very different world of the twenty-first century.

Ronald Reagan came to the presidency at a time when the top tax rate was 70%, when socialism had not yet been discredited, and when federal regulation was stifling the economy. In that situation many reasonable, non-ideological people could accept the argument that big government was a serious threat to their liberties and future prospects. As Cowen puts it, the “old story” was “big government crushes liberty”.

But things have changed in the past quarter century. Today reasonable people see external forces as the greatest threats to their lives and liberties. They worry about globalization, environmental change, Islamist terrorism, the high costs of health care and the like, and in these circumstances people look to the government to protect them and their liberties. A new storyline, “advances in liberty bring bigger government,” or as Brooks has it, “security leads to freedom,” has replaced the old Reaganite formula in the minds of most Americans.

Because they are heavily invested in abstract principles intellectuals and political activists have been slow to recognize that the ground has been shifting beneath their feet. They still hold to principled arguments long after they have become politically dysfunctional. People might not like big government, high taxes and bureaucratic regulation, but they also want government to act to protect them from a myriad of threats and to them Reaganite rhetoric is a turnoff. The GOP, in other words, finds itself increasingly out of touch with the mainstream of American public opinion.

Brooks then makes an important point. He writes:

The sad thing is that President Bush sensed this shift in public consciousness back in 1999. Compassionate conservatism was an attempt to move beyond the “liberty vs. power” paradigm.

Here Brooks is absolutely right. President Bush has been far more astute and prescient than his critics.

Both major parties are afflicted with ideological hard-liners who, proclaiming themselves to be “the base”, have sought to force the mainstream into a retro political mode. If the Democrat Left is forever reliving the Seventies and Vietnam and Watergate, the Reaganite Right remains mired in the Eighties. The one major political figure who has been willing to take a mature and responsible approach to the problems of government is the man who actually has to govern — President Bush. For this he has paid a terrible political price.

Not only has Dubya been vilified by both the Left and the Right, but in last year’s elections fringe elements of the Republican coalition, determined to administer a “thumpin’” to those who they saw as not sufficiently principled, delivered control of the government to Democrats who are now using that power irresponsibly to undermine the administration. Pelosi and company are less concerned with effective government than in being able to enter the next election cycle portraying Bush as a failure, and that seems to be OK with the hardliners.

Brooks argues that President Bush could have avoided this if he simply explained his policies more effectively. I’m not sure. For those who consider themselves “the base” the “politics of principle” are impenetrable to explanation. The ideologues stubbornly hold to a reassuring vision of a glorious past and comfort themselves with the fantasy that a return to Reaganite principles is all that is necessary to regain political ascendency, but that is a recipe for disaster. Rather than luxuriating in the politics of the past, Republicans have to align themselves, as Dubya has tried to do, with the sensibilities of today’s voters.
As Brooks concludes, “Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they’re not models for the future.”

To which I can only add, “Amen!”

UPDATE:

Oh my! No sooner do I post this than I go over to the “Corner” to find this. Jonah Goldberg, who I respect and read regularly, produced a paragraph that perfectly sums up the unfortunate attitude I was decrying above. He writes:

The conservative movement is not primarily nor even really secondarily about winning elections. Conservatives are about winning arguments or, if you prefer, winning hearts and minds. The Republican Party can be a useful tool in this regard, but it’s an unwieldy and ultimately unreliable one. Personally, I think the GOP and conservatism have become too intertwined. This is good when it makes the GOP more conservative, but it’s bad when it makes conservatism more like a political party.

He wrote this in response to the Brooks article, which seems to be causing quite a stir in the conservative blogosphere. Read the whole post here. And, by all means, go over to The American Scene and read Ross Douthat’s eminently sensible take on the controversy [here]. Douthat points out that many of the policy issues that really interest conservatives, free-trade, ending farm subsidies and the home-mortgage deduction, means-testing Social Security, and the like are “either extremely uninteresting or extremely unpopular with most voters” and when Bush has followed conservative recommendations he has suffered politically.

Hobbling

My ankle is on the mend -- enough so that I can once again enjoy walking [slowly, more like hobbling] around Baltimore neighborhoods with my camera. Today I walked along South Charles Street toward the Harbor through the Otterbein section of the city.

Spring has finally arrived. Trees are budding.




Daffodils are up.



And one lone magnolia is in full blossom.




Aaaaahhhhh! It's been a long time coming!

The Progress of Peace

In the past I have noted studies that show, contrary to popular perception, that the world has been getting more peaceful in recent years. One study, funded by the United Nations, attributes this to the spreading influence of international nongovernmental institutions; another study attributes it to the spread of American influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union; another attributes it to the end of the Cold War. [See here, here, and here]

Stephen Pinker has noted the same phenomenon and argues:

Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

....

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

This long term trend has several important implications.

First, the seemingly endless dispute between Hobbes and Rosseau has been finally settled. Hobbes famously argued that the natural state of mankind is "nasty, brutal, and short." Rosseau, on the other hand, posited the existence of a "noble savage" uncorrupted by civilization. It seems that Hobbes had it right -- the progress of civilization has been accompanied by a decline in the incidence of violence.

Second, theories intended to explain short-term declines in violence are inadequate to explain the long-term trend emerging from several independent studies. Pinker notes three alternative explanations that have recently been offered.

1) Increasing peacefulness results from the rise of centralized states that enforce a monopoly on the use of violence.

2) Prosperity makes lives more worth living and decreases our willingness to inflict death.

3) A progressive increase in knowledge about the world increases our willingness to accord moral status to others.

None of these seems to me to be very satisfactory, but they represent the current state of thinking on this important subject.

Third, how can general perceptions be so wrong? Pinker asks:

How could so many people be so wrong about something so important?

Here there are several possible answers. I won't spoil them for you. Read Pinker's little essay for yourself here. I will, however, note his final point because it is both true and important. Our pessimism, born of a mistaken perception that the incidence of violence is rising, has led us to ask the wrong questions. Instead of asking why there is war, we should be wondering why there is peace. Instead of lamenting the things that go wrong, we should be trying to understand what it is that we are doing right?

Biblioporn!

There's altogether too much book-porn on the web. For instance, this site, or this one.

Another Charming Old World Custom -- Poo Day

It's that time of year again -- St. George's Day is coming soon and the Scots are preparing to celebrate it in their inimitable way.

Sky News reports:

A Scottish company has been slammed for inviting customers to "send a poo" to an Englishman on St George's Day.

Edinburgh-based firm PostaPoo.com is selling plastic "realistic poo" to send to "your favourite (or least favourite) Englishman" to mark April 23.

Customers are given the choice between human or dog-style excrement, wrapped in tissue paper along with a personal message set beside the English flag.

But some people cannot take a joke. An Anglophile politician weighs in:

"It appears to me to be threatening, possibly racist and without question bigoted. It's certainly offensive and possibly an offence."

Racist? Racist!!! More proof that the term has lost all connection with reality.

Read about it here.

Rove Raps

Catch Karl Rove's performance at last night's White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Infidel

Aaron Goldstein has a a nice review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel, over at Intellectual Conservative. Check it out here and marvel at the courage of this extraordinary woman.

Hat Tip: JB

For more on this amazing woman who lives every day under a threat of death but yet maintains a public presence see Cliff May's biographical piece here.

Even better, click on the Amazon link at the top of this page and buy her book, Infidel.

UPDATE:

Check out Fred Thompson's commentary on this brave woman here.

Zimbabwe Update -- And So It Begins

Zim Online reports:

HARARE – Zimbabwe police on Wednesday arrested main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in a raid at his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party headquarters in Harare, a party spokesman told the media.

Tsvangirai was due to brief the Press on the alleged abduction of MDC activists by suspected government secret agents when heavily armed police pounced, nabbing the opposition politician and about 20 members of the administrative staff.

Read it here.

Contrary to the Pollyannish maunderings of the MSM and European Dips Mad Bobby Mugabe has remained true to form. In other words, he is reacting to pressures to step down in a characteristically ruthless way. Arresting the leadership of the opposition party is just the first step of this response. A very bad season is coming.

Common Sense from Michael Crichton on Fear Mongering

Scott Burgess has a nice interview with Michael Crichton over at the Daily Ablution. My favorite quote:

[F]ears are a matter of fashion. Worries are like clothing styles, they come and go, rise and fall, based on what the worry fashion leaders tell the herd of independent minds to fear this year.

Read the whole thing here.

And in a related item, the despicable fear mongers are projecting their nonsensical crap into the minds of school children.

Every generation has its fears. Before the polio vaccine, parents kept their children indoors on hot summer days — no swimming pools, no picnics. Then came the Cold War and its fears of sudden annihilation. For several years after the 9/11 attacks, terrorism dominated the worry agenda.

But today, concern about climate change appears to be replacing atomic Armageddon or anthrax epidemics. For some families, compost piles have supplanted bomb shelters and duct tape as household essentials.

The news has really been unremittingly bad,'' says Madeline Levine, an adolescent psychologist in Marin County, Calif., and author of a book on the angst of today's middle-class kids. Increasingly, Levine says, she sees young patients beset by their fears for the planet. "They're worried,'' Levine says, "and they're angry. They feel that older generations screwed up the Earth and now it's up to them to fix — but they don't have the skills or ability to do it.''

Levine estimates that one in three children struggles with anxiety, and that many have fixated on global warming.

That's right! These creeps have not only worked a significant portion of the population into hysterical rage, they have insinuated themselves into out schools and are scaring the crap out of our children.

Faugh!

Read it here.

Zimbabwe Update -- Mugabe Mobilizes His Base

As criticism mounts, Mad Bobby Mugabe is turning to his most reliable supporters.

The Scotsman reports:

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe is drafting his feared war veterans into a specially created army reserve as he steps up a clampdown on the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Former fighters in Zimbabwe's guerrilla war of the 1970s will be given military training and will be deployed for military duties, according to a special government gazette printed in Harare yesterday.

....

Mr Mugabe knows he can count on the loyalty of his war veterans. He used them to spearhead the violent invasions of hundreds of white-owned farms in 2000.

War veterans were also used to beat and intimidate rural voters ahead of parliamentary elections in 2000 and presidential elections in 2002.

Read the whole thing here.

If the old monster holds true to form this is all a prelude to a major wave of violence. Let us hope it can be avoided.

At Last!!!

Der Spiegel reports:

Ian Paisley meeting Gerry Adams? It was an event of lion-laying-down-with-lamb proportions, as Paisley, a Protestant minister with a taste for fiery Biblical rhetoric, might describe it -- even though each side would doubtlessly argue over who was the lion and who was the lamb.

The meeting was certainly a historic breakthrough for Northern Ireland. Arch-rivals Paisley and Adams have long been icons of the Protestant and Catholic sides respectively in the long and bitter struggle over who should rule Northern Ireland. Paisley is the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which wants to keep Northern Ireland's ties to Britain, while Adams is president of Sinn Fein, whose ultimate goal is a united Ireland.

The two men held their first ever face-to-face meeting Monday in the Northern Ireland Assembly buildings in Stormont, Belfast. However the two arch-rivals did not shake hands, according to officials from both sides.

Afterwards they announced a deal to forge a power-sharing administration by May 8, which will lead to a new era of home rule for the province.

Read it here.

Of course nothing is final yet, and much has to be worked out, but this is incredibly great news!

Recommended Reading: Spinning Clio

One of the best history blogs out there is Marc Comtois' "Spinning Clio."

In recent posts Marc has exposed the deep hypocrisy that characterizes the public stances of the American Historical Association. The organization, invoking a highly questionable interpretations of international law, has denounced the Bush administration for alleged violations while at the same time ignoring the innumerable blatant abuses of law perpetrated by Islamist terrorists. He has also noted the selective interest of mainstream historians who tend to ignore solid historical work that runs counter to liberal interests. One such work is Jennifer Weber's critical study of the "peace Democrats" during the Civil War, titled Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents In the North. And he notes the AHA's failure to condemn stonewalling on the Clinton presidential records, some of which might shed unfavorable light on Mrs. Clinton's role during her husband's presidency.

But the hypocrisy of leading lights in the historical profession is an old subject, one that is always with us and so blatant as to make an easy target. The whole discussion tires me, and if Marc were to focus only on that point, I wouldn't pay any attention to his work. But there is more, much more in his writings. He brings a sharp, conservative, critical perspective to his immensely wide-ranging excursions through history and what people are saying and writing about it. He's well worth reading.

Check him out here.

One For Katie

I have never been much of a Katie Couric fan and usually avoid shows on which she appears, but this time I'm on her side. Apparently in a recent interview she was insufficiently "sensitive" in questioning John and Elizabeth Edwards and now the MSM and the bloggies are jumping all over her. [clip here] Mickey Kaus wants to "throttle" her [here].

Way to go Katie! Stick to your guns. This "sensitivity" crap is nothing less than an attempt to limit permissible speech and thus to control what people can know and even think. It should be opposed whenever it appears.

[Besides, this gives me an opportunity to run this picture. It's been sitting in my files for many months and I knew that eventually it would be appropriate.]

Reefer Madness

The Times of London reports:

By the end of the decade one in four new cases of schizophrenia could be triggered by smoking cannabis, scientists say.

Research has suggested that regular users of the drug are up to six times more likely to develop schizophrenia, although whether the drug is the direct cause remains disputed.

The Department of Health says it is now generally agreed among doctors that cannabis is an “important causal factor” in mental illness.

A study published in the journal Addiction predicts that, if the causal link between cannabis use and schizophrenia is accepted, rates of the illness will increase substantially by 2010, especially among young men.

The use of cannabis grew fourfold over the 30 years to 2002, and eighteenfold among under18s, the researchers say.

Such a boom in cannabis use could lead to increases in the number of new cases of schizophrenia of 29 per cent between 1990 and 2010.

Read the whole thing here.

At last, an explanation for the madness that seems to have affected so much of our political culture..., naaaah!

Zimbabwe Update -- Is This the End of Bobby?

Let us sincerely hope so!

BBC Reports:

[I]nfluential members of the ruling party and the Opposition are mapping out an end to the Mugabe era.

Opposition sources say leading members of President Robert Mugabe's own party have discussed how to sideline their longstanding leader.

Mr Mugabe's iron grip on his own party is gradually loosening. Two factions inside the party, led by former security chief Emmerson Mnangagwa and the former head of the Army, Solomon Mujuru, have held talks to try a find an exit strategy.

They have met Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was beaten by police after being arrested at an anti-Mugabe rally earlier this month.

The talks have been held in the run-up to a key meeting of the central committee of the ruling Zanu-PF party, due to be held next week, at which Mr Mugabe will confront his critics.

Read the whole thing here.

But don't get your hopes too far up. Mugabe's demise has been predicted before and the old madman is still around. Also, note that the source for this report is the opposition leadership which has never been right about anything in the past. And there is also the possibility that Mad Bobby's "critics" will either recant or fail to live long enough to attend the upcoming party meetings.

And, even if a coup is in the making, there is no real likelihood that Bobby's successor will be any improvement. Emmerson Mnangagwa has been complicit in the worst of Mugabe's crimes against humanity and heads a criminal conspiracy that has made him the richest man in Zim.

Solomon Mujuru is no better. His crimes have been so great that he and his wife have been personally singled out for sanctions by western governments.

Both men have strong institutional and tribal power bases and have long hated each other. Should Mugabe be removed, there is a strong possibility that they will square off in a bloody civil war.

So don't get your hopes up too much. Just a little.

The Coming Crisis

Mark Steyn looks at the swelling troubles that afflict President Mussaraf's regime in Pakistan and notes:

If you had to draw one of those organizational charts of the world's problems, Pakistan would be at the center of them.

Read the whole thing here.

A Nearly Perfect [and perfectly nasty] Film -- "Rear Window"

Yep, that's "Bunny," long before he became "Perry."

I have long thought that Hitchcock's Rear Window was a nearly perfect film -- one that does not suffer, indeed becomes more enjoyable, through repeated viewings. Others, however, have not shared my enthusiasm. One who does appreciate this masterpiece is Edward Copeland. Go here to read his excellent discussion of the intellectual rewards of viewing, and thinking about, this wonderful [as in wonder-filled] film.

Warning: thinking too much about this film can lead you to a realization of just what Hitchcock was doing to you and the characters all along, and to an appreciation of what an unspeakable monster he really was.

Girls With Guns

After viewing today's Chris Muir cartoon I decided to check out Oleg Volk's "Girls With Guns" site. It's pretty neat, particularly since several of the images turn the left's slogans back on them.

Lovely!

Check it out here.

Bad Historian..., Bad..., Bad!

Ask a member of the reading public, a PBS viewer, or the MSM to name a definitive study of the mid-Twentieth Century Civil Rights movement and they will probably respond by citing Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy on America in the King Years: Parting the Waters; Pillar of Fire; and At Canaan's Edge.

These immensely popular volumes have been hugely influential in shaping our perception of the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, but are they accurate?

The answer is a resounding "No!"

Ralph Luker, himself a noted civil rights historian, writes:

Branch is a brilliant writer, but put your finger on any page in his civil rights trilogy, give me some time, and I'll find the errors.

Read it here.

The comments come in a description of Branch's most recent effort: a series of secret interviews he conducted with Bill Clinton during the 1990's. They will be published under the title Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes, despite the fact that Branch has no tapes of the interviews. They were confiscated by Bill Clinton who stashed them in his sock drawer!!! No telling where they might be now.

Knowledgable persons within the historical profession are well aware of Taylor Branch's shoddy work. It is time that the general public be made aware of the same.

The whole point of peer review is to guarantee the validity of information dispensed by scholars. Here, as in so many cases, the process has broken down and inferior work has been certified and granted status it does not deserve.