VDH: Assessing Mexifornia

Hansen is at the top of his form with his analysis of the state of the illegal immigration debate and its rightward shift.

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

That’s the conclusion. Read the whole thing.

How an Insurgency Loses

Rich Lowry has an important post on The Corner, notable not just for the potentially significant good news from Iraq, but for the fact that even the New York Times can’t keep the good news out of its own pages.

From the Frontiers of Non-Science

Apparently ScienceDaily is so hard up for content that this thinly-disguised press release counts as a “science” story.

Let’s list a few of the breathtakingly unscientific assumptions here:

• Two people are enough subjects for a “study”
• Five interviews provide enough data to analyze for a “study”
• “Language of the non-powerful” can be identified without bias
• Deciding ahead of time what are “female” and “male” language patterns won’t bias the “study”
• People can have a gender
• Hillary has a sex

Scientific study or sophomore High School homework assigment? You decide.