Maggie's Farm

Excellent video summary of what's most grievously wrong with the bill, from Lou Dobbs.

What bothered me the most is that it provides for the taxpayer to pay the bills of the illegals' immigration lawyers. (Thanks, Reader)

"Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified US worker." In Wizbang's words,

...a shocking video of a law firm offering a seminar to employers that teaches them how to deliberately avoid having to hire US workers so as to get guest workers on an H-1b visa. If the immigration bill that's currently in the Senate actually becomes law, be prepared for a massive effort by companies to find ways to dump American workers in favor of guest workers. Note how the speaker says that employers are "unfortunately" required to go through all resumes submitted for a job.

Here's the Youtube.

Teddy Roosevelt wrote to one of his sons: "I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess."

A quote from Cassandra's very fine Father's Day essay.

Neither Thoreau nor Gandhi fully appreciated the effectiveness and efficiency of unarmed power-grabbing.

If you want to invade a country nowadays, you use immigration, not armies (as in the current invasion by Moslems of Europe, and the invasion by Mexico of the US).

If you want to create an Empire these days, you use bureaucratic methods, not armies (as in the EU, and as the UN has repeatedly attempted).

If you want to disempower and oppress your population these days, you suffocate them with rules and regulations and Nanny-state BS. No police-state thugs or neighborhood spies needed: you just wear them out.

It's so much easier the modern way. No blood spilled and no skulls cracked, but with the same results. Nobody wants freedom except strong, independent souls and, these days, I wonder how many of those exist.

The above is a G.K. Chesterton quote.  Prof. Deneen considers Chesterton's essay, What I Saw in America. A quote:

In Chesterton’s eyes, democracy and Christianity shared similar worldviews, and with the rise of religious doubt, he believed, one could expect to see a concomitant rise in doubts about the prospects of local self-governance, and instead increasing reliance upon experts and elites, in bureaucratic structures, in a growing divide between the rich and poor and the triumph of abstraction over “reality” (WA, 257-263).

Peter Lawler at The Ashbrook Center offered some response to Deneen's piece, and Deneen responded to Lawler's piece here.

That sort of scholarly exchange is a wonderful example of what blogs have to offer. In the pre-internet world, that exchange would have been by letter, and only the two people involved would have had the chance to read them.

Photo: Chesterton

From Scott. Moslem Episcopalians?

This is indeed a reason why the Episcopalians are not thriving: their hierarchy doesn't seem to believe in anything, which means, as Chesterton said, they will believe in anything.

I suggest that they focus on magic spiritual crystals and leave Jesus to those who seriously want to know Him and who want to be lead by His gracious but demanding hand. If you don't seek that, fine. It's a free country.

There is no reason to fake it, other than for social reasons, and it's not the 1950s anymore. You don't have to pretend to be a scotch-drinking Episcopalian to get into the country club anymore. Been there, done that. I golf (badly) with Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, and even a select few Roman Catholics (just kidding). We're in the post-Ice Storm era now. And yes, I am a recovering Episcopalian. Episcopalians, on the whole, are really nothing more than American Anglicans - and look at the poor Anglicans!

(My apologies for my unpleasant comments to any remaining, believing and Christ-seeking Episcopalians - it's all in fun. Sunnis and Shias, American style: good friends, with minimal beheadings - outside of the tennis court or golf course. Those two places are always covered with fresh blood.)

Photo: A magical, mystical, highly-psycho-spiritual and cosmic-energy-focusing, fully organic chemical-free quartz crystal. Actually, a nice one.

Does the American public believe in itself enough to wage war? Robert D. Kaplan looks at Iraq through the lens of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz: On Forgetting the Obvious, in The American Interest. A quote:

If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present clarified by the great works of the past. For over four years now I have been traveling much of the world in the company of U.S. soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. Upon a halt in my travels, I re-read both The Art of War by the 6th-century BCE Chinese court minister Sun-Tzu and On War by the early 19th-century Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. What struck me straight away, thanks to my recent travels-in-arms, was not what either author said, but what both assumed. Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe—in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and they never do.

What is obvious, however, is left unstated not because it is insignificant, but because it is too significant: War is a fact of the human social condition neither man wishes were so. Sun-Tzu, concerned with war on the highest strategic level, affirms that the greatest warrior is one who calculates so well that he never needs to fight. Clausewitz, interested more in the operational level, allows that war takes precedence only after other forms of politics have failed. Both oppose militarism, but accept the reality of war, and from that acceptance reason that any policy lacking martial vigor—any policy that fails to communicate a warrior spirit—only makes war more likely. That is why Sun-Tzu only respects a leader “who plans and calculates like a hungry man”, who sanctions every manner of deceit provided it is necessary to gain strategic advantage, who is never swayed by public opinion, and “who advances without any thought of winning personal fame and withdraws in spite of certain punishment” if he judges it to be in the interest of his army and his state. Clausewitz is no less committed:

In affairs so dangerous as war, false ideas proceeding from kindness of heart are precisely the worst. . . . The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.

Read the whole thing. (h/t, Reader) 

We are all simple-minded country folk here at Maggie's Farm, so here is my final simple statement on immigration:

This country is my home, and it means a lot to me. In fact, my country, and what it represents, is precious to me. You may enter it only on my invitation, and on my terms.

Comment from Bird Dog: And if you don't like your own country - fix it, and make it more like America. It can be done - our ancestors did it here.

A big hat tip to Never Yet Melted for finding Matt Taibbi's excellent The American Left's Silly Victim Complex. It's good to see a liberal or, as he calls himself, a "progressive," being introspective and thoughtful instead of angry, these days. More quotes at Never Yet Melted from the piece at Adbusters. A sample:

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Read the whole thing.

Robert Service in The New Statesman (via A&L Daily). It beings:

Communism destroyed millions of lives, but its critics are now branded "neocons". Why has the left's poisoned love affair with it endured?

Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife. In country after country across Europe - from Russia to Albania - it has been discredited for its record in power. No government in Africa or the Americas subscribes to it except the Castro regime in Cuba. In Asia, the communist flag is waved in Vietnam and China without anyone denying that the economic future lies with capitalism; only North Korea stands by the basic precepts of Marxism-Leninism.

Photo of the Berlin Wall via California Yankee

George Will reviews Brink Lindsay's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. A quote:

Lindsey rightly says that “today’s typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago.” And “the typical bluestate liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power.” In “the bell curve of ideological allegiance,” the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an “implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle.” If so, material abundance has been, on balance , good for us, and Lindsey’s measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

The whole review is here.

I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

There is some psychological wisdom in this schoolyard defence against scapegoating, projection, and name-calling.

Libel and slander lawsuits have a long history of bouncing off the target and damaging the plaintiff. One example is Oscar Wilde's slander suit which landed Wilde himself in jail for homosexual conduct.

The Islamic Society of Boston's recent libel suit provides another example. (They are the folks who got the cheap land deal from Boston for a new mosque.) The process of discovery uncovered many facts which the Islamic Society would not have wanted publicized - but which were, before they finally dropped the case to prevent further damage to themselves.

Attorney Floyd Abrams discusses the case in Opinion Journal.

Photo: Oscar Wilde

Everybody's talking about the 4th Circuit's Al-Marri v. Wright decision. Orin Kerr proposes a hypothetical situation to try to clarify the issues. My question is this: If Moslem terrorists - who view themselves as combatants - aren't combatants, then what the heck are they? Do we need a new category? If we need a new category, may I propose one? Let's call it "Jihadists," and make the laws which would apply. Waiting until after they kill people seems lame to me, as it did to Lincoln and to FDR.

And besides, how do you arrest a successful suicide bomber anyway? 

A vigorous three-hour ride this morning - Mrs. Barrister wanted us to canter most of the time to tire out the horses, and I almost got thrown when a garter snake decided to cross the trail and freaked out the horse - as they always do. You know the sideways, backwards, up-in-the-air dance they do? It's a little snake rodeo. Two sets of singles tennis this afternoon. Now, it is cocktail hour. I think, maybe, a gin and tonic. Then a swim. Then a cigar and another G&T.

Who can beat the NYT in trivializing culture? New Criterion

Shopping for medical insurance. Coyote

London would be better off Islamic, says the Left.

Out of left field. How Fred Thompson became a player, without playing.

Immigration polls. Gateway. Also, a rant against filling the USA with Mexicans. Also, from Dino:

I also asked my source why he thought so many Republicans had been supporting such an incredibly unpopular bill. He gave three reasons: First off, there was what he referred to as the “Rovian School of thought,” which says that passing this bill would capture the Hispanic vote for the GOP for decades to come. Next up, there’s the “Chamber of Commerce” vote. He says these Republicans were heavily influenced by business groups that want cheap labor no matter what the cost is for the rest of the country. Then there was the last group, the smallest group in his opinion, who were willing to sign onto a terrible bill just so they could say they were part of a big reform that had bipartisan support.

Powerline wonders about the immigration bill.

Our News Junkie is still at sea. Here are a few of my gleanings today.

A word on evil, capitalist Peach barons. Sippican. Big Peaches once ran America, back in the day. Then it was Big Prunes, then Big Tobacco, then Big Oil, and now - Big Blogs, like us, rule the world and, indeed, the cosmos itself.

LaShawn is ready to shut down a certain organization.

Who is supposed to pay for these stupid biofuels? Not me. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Brits fed up with immigration. The govt doesn't care. Small Dead Lemmings

Found a new blog I like: The Oxford Medievalist. So many blogs, so little time.

In praise of bad writing. Yes, some of us cannot help it.

Is a G8 a jet? Mr. Free Market

Also, re G8: A quote from Tangled Web:

Oddly enough, and despite all the green rhetoric, EU emissions have been RISING even as US emissions have been FALLING. And even worse for the eco-wacko's, the carbon credits so beloved of so many, have been shown to be at best environmentally neutral, if not an outright fraud. And with China and India very clear that they will NOT be restricting their economic growth to keep Angela happy, the ambitions of Merkel and her socialists cronies can be seen to little more than hot air.  

What's the most important news story of the day?

Paris Hilton, of course. I guess life must be good in the USA if she is the Big Story.

Paris Hilton is a great, walking, almost-talking argument for recreational sex without involvement. One small step above the inflatable sheep thing.

Chart is from an extraordinarily lucid piece by Kling on The Great Tug of War between Capitalism and Socialism/Communism. I thought that tug of war was over, but I guess, in some people's minds, it's not.

There are two utopias - the womb, and Heaven (if you can get in there before they close the door). Life is bracketed by utopias, but in between we must toil and strain and sometimes suffer. It's "the way things are", as the mice say.

It's interesting to contemplate how distrustful and contemptuous of human nature and of human enterprise the anti-Capitalists are. What's that all about? If human nature is so dark, then what would make "policy-makers" any better than business people? I have never seen any evidence that policy-makers are angels.

And, without the money generated by enterprise and commerce, where would the anti-Capitalists hope to get money to run things their way? Who would create the wealth that the policy-makers take from us to do what they want?

A good place to practice one's casting. Might catch something too. Besides some judicious dredging to create some deep holes for trout (which the otters will eat anyway) in the summer, this pond could use about ten Wood Duck houses.