Schumer v. Rubio: Which one looks smarter?

Trust me on immigration, guys -- no way
could Mr. Schumer put one over on me.
Do l look like some kind of doof?

Would I mislead you, Marco?

One way to get a sense of the likely political effects of the Gang of Eight's immigration bill is to think of it as a contest of brainpower between Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). In the long run, either the Democrat is going to have proved to have outsmarted the Republican or vice-versa. Which one would you bet on, Schumer or Rubio?

Commenter Zoink looks up the biographical evidence about the two main men of the immigration bill. From Wikipedia:

"Schumer attended public schools in Brooklyn, scoring 1600 on the SAT, and graduated as the valedictorian from James Madison High School in 1967. 

"Schumer competed for Madison High on the It's Academic television quiz show. 

"He attended Harvard College ... After completing his undergraduate degree, he continued to Harvard Law School, earning his Juris Doctor with honors in 1974." 

Before recentering [SAT scores in 1995], only around 5-7 people a year got 1600 on the SAT each year. [In 1985-86, for example, nine students in the whole country got a 1600]. If Schumer isn't lying about this, he is certainly one of the 1000 or so smartest men in the USA.

Schumer has a career won-loss record in general elections of 15-0. Add in primaries, and he's 30-0 lifetime. He represents Wall Street's interests while also claiming to represent the middle class: that's not easy but his customers appear satisfied with his high-wire balancing act.

"Rubio attended South Miami Senior High School and graduated in 1989. He then attended Tarkio College for one year on a football scholarship from 1989 to 1990, before enrolling at Santa Fe Community College ... He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida in 1993, and his J.D. degree cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law in 1996." 

Rubio did not graduate from Tarkio College because it was shut down by the federal government for acting as a "front" to scam the student loan system: 

New York Times,
A College Acts in Desperation And Dies Playing the Lender
April 17, 1991

"Auditors found that the college was so desperate to increase enrollment and stay alive that it had dealt out loans and grants to ineligible students until it owed the Federal Government more than $22 million.  

'Acting as a Front' 

"In a scheme more often connected with beauty academies than accredited institutions of higher education, Tarkio set up illegitimate off-campus programs and signed up thousands of unprepared students, many of them whisked right off city streets. Most of these students dropped out and never repaid their loans, leaving Tarkio at one point with the highest loan default rate in the nation. 

"'Basically what you had was a small college acting as a front,' said Kent Kraus, Dean of Institutional Advancement at Tarkio."

In conclusion, Schumer attended the most competitive college in the USA and 2nd most competitive law school and plausibly claims to have a 99.999 percentile IQ, while Rubio attended what by one measure was the single worst 4-year colleges in the USA: 

"In 1986 Tarkio's loan default rate was 79 percent, the highest in the nation for four-year colleges. The average default rate is about 6 percent."

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Hispanic turnout in 2012 was overstated by 19%

From my new column in VDARE.com:

Ever since last November’s election, we’ve been hearing that Hispanics comprised a record 10 percent of the vote—which therefore obliges Republican Congressmen to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” right now. 

For example: 

National exit polls showed that 10 percent of the electorate was Hispanic, compared with 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004. … A growing perception of hostility toward illegal immigrants by Republican candidates is driving many Latinos to the polls.

[Growing share of Hispanic voters helped push Obama to victory, By Donna St. George and Brady Dennis, Washington Post, November 7, 2012]  

But what if these nice, round turnout numbers provided by the Edison exit poll company weren’t true? What if the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” clamor is based on exit poll error? ...

It turns out that the official federal government estimate of the Latino share of 2012 voters isn’t 10 percent—but merely 8.4 percent:

So the standard story you’ve been hearing in the MSM for almost seven months is indeed inflated by 19 percent.

Read the whole thing there.

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Djoe Unchained: VP Biden apparently a "Larry Sanders" fan

The "D" is silent; I'm not.

Garry Shandling's 1990s HBO sitcom The Larry Sanders Show about a neurotic late night talk show host and his staff who keep him semi-functional offered this insight into contemporary cultural power, as summarized in a 1998 Los Angeles Times article: 

[Producer] Artie chews out [writer] Phil after his repeated homophobic jokes prompt a gay assistant (Scott Thompson) to hit the show with a sexual harassment lawsuit. “You know who runs this town?” Artie growls at Phil. 

“The Jews?” Phil says. 

“No,” Artie retorts. “The gay Jews.”

(The LA Times' recollection of Phil's reply that sets up Artie's retort is a little different from mine, which is that Phil replied something like: "The Jews, of course" without a question mark. If there was anything quizzical about how Phil responded, it would have been his implication: "Why are you bothering to ask me a question, Artie, that obviously I know the answer to?")

From Politico:

Biden: 'Jewish heritage is American heritage'

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 5/21/13 8:18 PM EDT 

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country's founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights. 

... "No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.” 

Biden spoke for nearly 20 minutes at the American Institute of Architects building in Washington, at times improvising after asking that the teleprompter machine that had been set up in the event space be taken down.

Djoe Unchained!

... “The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements. 

... “I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.” 

“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage, Biden said. 

“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.

(Here's Joel Stein's 2008 column in the Los Angeles Times "How Jewish Is Hollywood?" giving demographic numbers on the ethnicity of studio bosses. And here's Ben Stein's essay on the same subject from 1996. A casual reading of the two Steins' articles would suggest that the top jobs in Hollywood became more monolithically Jewish from 1996 to 2008, but of course the actual trend, whatever it is, should be researched in greater depth by ... by ... uh, by some  careful social scientist who is independently wealthy and who never eats lunch.)

"The influence is immense, the influence is immense.

Fortunately for Joe's post-VP career prospects, he can not only talk himself into trouble, but, since he never shuts up, he can also talk himself out of trouble as well:

"And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said. 

In other news, former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez now has found a variety of part-time jobs after merely a couple of years or so of unemployment.

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“He who controls the schmaltz controls the future. He who controls the present controls the schmaltz.”

From the Washington Post:

Schumer: Immigration overhaul will pass Senate by July 4

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Computer Programmers and Teamsters

Coach Iron Mike Ditka
Richard Trumka,
head of AFL-CIO

Here's a recent paper by Tooby and Cosmides et al that strikes me as pretty plausible: muscular men tend to favor governmental policies on redistribution that are in their own self-interest.

My late father-in-law was a classical tuba player, maybe 6'1" and 220 pounds, who was regularly chosen by his weedy violinist colleagues to negotiate union contracts for them. Why? Because he looked like (and was) a hard man for Management to buffalo.

As a weedy young intellectual, I was struck by how my father-in-law's union career didn't seem to fit into my standard intellectual categories -- Was he on the Left or the Right? Was he Right or was he Wrong? -- and that he didn't care. He wanted to redistribute wealth from Management to Labor, not because he thought it had the better case in the abstract, but because Labor was his side. The irony that Labor in this case was not precisely the poor (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently went on strike because their base union contract only paid $144,000 annually) did not concern him.

Upper-Body Strength Regulates Men’s Assertion of Self-Interest Over Economic Redistribution 

Michael Bang Petersen1
Daniel Sznycer2
Aaron Sell2,3
Leda Cosmides2
John Tooby2

E-mail: michael@ps.au.dk

Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark, and the United States, men with greater upper-body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.

I'm not sure that the blanket statement that these days "personal upper-body strength is irrelevant" is true. Guys who lift things for a living largely operate in the "non-tradeable" sector of the economy.

The irrelevance of upper body strength is true in some jobs. For example, computer programmers don't have to lift anything heavier than the lids of their laptops. And, perhaps not coincidentally, programmers are notoriously prone to self-defeating universalist ideologies like libertarianism and open borders. The Gang of Eight openly conspires with the billionaires of Silicon Valley to lower the pay of programmers, and what do programmers do about it?

In contrast, consider one set of guys who lift things for a living: blue collar workers on TV sitcom sets in Burbank. (Here's Homer Simpson meeting his role models on the set of Radioactive Man: "I always wanted to be a Teamster: so lazy and surly.")

They are in the "non-tradable" sector so their jobs can't be easily outsourced to Foxconn in China. Their jobs, however, could be easily insourced and gradually replaced with, say, immigrants, illegal or even skilled foreign set workers via H-1B visas. And yet the entire concept of granting visas to, say, Mexico City's television set workers to lower Hollywood's costs has never, as far as I know, been publicly aired.

One reason is that the guys who lift things on sets in Burbank don't want it to happen. And, unlike computer programmers, they aren't wracked with guilt over it not happening.

If set workers don't like, you know, who the producers had started hiring, things could get, just hypothetically speaking, dropped. I'm just saying. And little accidents on the set could be really upsetting to the neurotic stand-up comedian who is the star of the show. And if he's upset, his timing could go off, and the show's ratings would drop. So, maybe we don't want to mess up this nice little set we have here by trying to chintz on pay for the guys who lift stuff. Understand?

In contrast, Mark Zuckerberg has organized a coalition of billionaires and near-billionaires to  lobby Congress to grant more visas to lower the pay of his programmers. You might think that Facebook's current programmers might have a certain amount of leverage in this situation. For example, Zuckerberg's current employers could, just theoretically speaking, sabotage his campaign to lower their pay by inserting code that would, say, reveal embarrassing personal details about their owner on his Facebook page.

But this would never occur to them. It would be unsporting. What would Ayn Rand say?

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Marine Le Pen to be prosecuted for crimethink

From the BBC:

French far right leader loses immunity, faces charges

French far right leader, Marine Le Pen, could face criminal charges for inciting racism, the BBC has learnt. 

The French authorities opened a case against Mrs Le Pen in 2011 after she likened the sight of Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France. 

As a European Parliament member (MEP), she enjoyed immunity from prosecution. 

However, this protection was removed by a European parliamentary committee in a secret vote this week.

Uh, I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there something a little fishy about prosecuting somebody retroactively for what they did even though it was perfectly legal when they did it?

BBC chief political correspondent Gary O'Donoghue says he has been told that the vote to remove her immunity was "overwhelming". 

It will need to be ratified by the full parliament, but that's expected to be a formality, our correspondent says. ...

The move clears the way for the French authorities to pursue a case against the leader, who steered her party to a record 18% showing in the first round of last year's presidential election.

So, this is rather like the U.S. government prosecuting Ross Perot, who got 18.7% of the vote in 1992, the next year for campaign statements -- if Perot had been a Congressman and had made them on the floor of the House.

Mrs Le Pen made the remarks at a party rally in 2010 in the southern French town of Lyon. 

She said that Muslims using the streets to pray because mosques were overflowing was an "occupation" of French territory. 

Praying in the streets was banned in Paris in 2011 in response to growing far right protests. 

A reader writes:

Talk about naked political bloodsport. They're going to charge her with a retroactive crime for comments she made when she had immunity from prosecution. 

Also, notice the BBC finds it worthy to note that this was a widely supported and popular move amongst her fellow MEPs. What does the popularity of a decision have to do with whether it is sound? 

The Left is going nuclear against its opponents. 

I wonder if these types of tactics actually work or do they transform the targets into Obie-won-Kenobi - strike me down and I shall become stronger.  

Her father cultivated a mythos around Joan of Arc, who is (or ought to be) the patron saint of nationalism.

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Vibrant diversity and diverse vibrancy

From the Washington Post:

Russian forces arrest mayor of Dagestan city where Tsarnaev lived
By Kathy Lally, Saturday, June 1, 11:34 AM E-mail the writer 

MOSCOW — The mayor of Dagestan’s largest city, who has survived 15 assassination attempts and employs a large security force to protect him, was arrested on murder charges Saturday by heavily armed forces in armored personnel carriers and helicopters, Russian officials said. 

Said Amirov, the 59-year-old mayor of Makhachkala, has been in a wheelchair since 1993, when one attempt on his life severed his spine. His southern Russian city is known for frequent bombings and shootouts among police, criminal gangs and Islamic fighters. For six months last year it was home to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the accused Boston Marathon bombers. His parents live there now.

Amirov was seized by troops wearing camouflage, helmets and bulletproof vests and armed with automatic rifles. They surrounded his palatial house on the Caspian Sea, according to a video shown on LifeNews, a Web site that has close connections to the security services. ... 

In Russia, one question nearly always arises when an arrest is made: Why now?

In other words, everybody is guilty, so who arrests whom is mostly a question of timing.

The answer was unclear Saturday. President Vladimir Putin, however, recently appointed a new acting president of the Dagestan region, Ramazan Abdulatipov,

Putin really likes that name, doesn't he? For those of you keeping score at home:

Ramzan - Chechnya
Ramazan - Dagestan

Maybe RamZPaul could get a gig doing stand-up before Bolshoi Ballet performances?

amid speculation that the usual corruption has gone too far or that officials want order to be imposed on the North Caucasus before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

From the NYT:

Mr. Amirov in many ways embodied the rough-and-tumble North Caucasus city he led, a place where brawls and gunfights are so standard that restaurant menus occasionally list the price of replacing damaged tables and chairs.

America needs more immigrants from the Caucasus to bring the blessings of vibrant diversity to our boring white-bread country.

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