The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week.

Council Winners

• *First place with 4 votes! –Joshuapundit–The UN Reveals Its Cowardice And Hypocrisy By Attacking The Catholic Church
• Second place with 2 votes –The Independent Sentinel – Common Core Is Rewriting History Like a Tin Pot Dictatorship
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes – Nice Deb – ACLJ Head Says Newly Discovered IRS Emails Are A “Smoking Gun” – Calls For Special Prosecutor
• Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes –Simply Jews – John Kerry’s “stand with Ukraine’s people” and the staggering ineptness of State Department
• Fifth place with 1 vote –VA Right! – Battered Obama Supporter Syndrome – B.O.S.S.
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Bookworm Room – Conservatives should take a page out of the Islamists’ book and disavow bad actors marching under their banner
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Colossus of Rhodey – A Kickstarter idea which is not only unoriginal, but based on pure media bias
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Noisy Room – Idaho Opens the Door to Martial Law and Gun Confiscation – the Nullification of the Posse Comitatus Act
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Liberty’s Spirit – When told they can’t use the word “bitch,” watch some male heads explode
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Code Name: Johnny Walker

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 3 votes! – Michael Totten –The Truth About Che Guevara submitted by The Razor
• Second place *t* with 2 1/3 votes –Mark Steyn – America Takes Early Retirement submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 2 1/3 votes–The Elder Of Ziyon–EoZ posters for “Apartheid Week” submitted by Bookworm Room
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –The Sad Red Earth – Academic Boycotts and Re-Colonization by Theory submitted by Simply Jews
• Fourth place with 1 vote –Diana West –A Nation of Laws, Not Men, Must Impeach Obama submitted by The Noisy Room
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote– Small Wars Journal – General Patton as a Counterinsurgent submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote–Sipsey Street Irregulars –An Open Letter to Michael Lawlor, the CT Governor’s Hatchet Man on Firearms Confiscation. “How’s your KGB file hangin’, Mike?” submitted by Nice Deb
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote–Victor Davis Hanson – An Immigration Morality Tale submitted by Watcher
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –George Scott Reports – Veteran Texas House Lawmaker Eviscerates Pay To Play Slates As Destructive To GOP Future; Uses Schofield’s Race In District 132 As Example submitted by Rhymes with Right
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote–Frontpage Mag – Union Gangsters: John Sweeney submitted by The Right Planet

The announcement post at the Watcher’s site is here.

What struck me about George Will’s recent column on immigration reform is how quaint his view of today’s immigration was. Consider this:

Many Republicans say immigration runs counter to U.S. social policies aiming to reduce the number of people with low levels of skill and education, and must further depress the wages of Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder, who are already paying the price for today’s economic anemia. This is true. But so is this: The Congressional Budget Office says an initial slight reduction of low wages (0.1 percent in a decade) will be followed by increased economic growth partly attributable to immigrants. Immigration is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty. Small wonder, then, that immigrants are about 20 percent of owners of small businesses, and that more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.

The emphasis is mine and the highlighted sentence expresses a view of immigration rooted in pure nostalgia. It was true a century ago. Now the other side of the world is a plane ticket and a sixteen hour ride by air. That’s quicker than travelling from New York to Chicago in 1900. In point of time Mumbai is closer to closer to Los Angeles than New York was to Philadelphia at the time of the American Revolution. The children of today’s immigrants frequently return home to spend the summer with Grandma. And only the most secluded and isolated countries in the world have actual uncertainty about the United States. The Cosby Show is shown everywhere. Today’s immigrants might have a rose-colored view of the United States but “uncertainty” is too strong a word. These are not yesterday’s immigrants.

This

Many Republicans see in immigrants only future Democratic votes.

reflects a different kind of misconception. Democrats who see an unending stream of newly-arrived Mexican immigrant conferring on them a permanent electoral advantage are kidding themselves, too. A minority of the immigrants legalized in the 1980s sought citizenship. Advances in travel and communications (not to mention Mexico’s changing social and economic conditions) will probably reduce that rather than increasing it if there’s a new move towards legalization (whatever it’s called).

I wish that U. S. immigration policy and politics were geared to the realities of today’s immigration rather than the immigration of the imagination. Our agricultural sector needs a guest worker program. We should establish such a system that’s targeted at today’s realities rather than the glow of a nostalgic yesteryear or an imagined present reality.

My guess is that John Judis doesn’t understand the problems that monopolies cause any better than the regulators do. The problem isn’t merely that monopolies raise costs or that they “slow innovation”. Imagine a world without modems, highspeed Internet, fax machines, or mobile phones smart or otherwise, and in which long distance phone calls—whether a call to the next county or to the coast let alone overseas—were incredibly expensive, the expense having little to do with the cost. That was the world that the Bell System imposed on us. The system insisted that all equipment that connected with their telephone equipment be approved by them and that raised the cost of all of those essentials of modern life beyond what most people could pay.

That didn’t just “slow innovation”. It blocked whole technologies altogether. The world of today would have been impossible without breaking up Ma Bell.

However, this he’s got right:

Monopolies can also have a corrosive effect on related industries. The big cable companies have been able to squeeze cable content providers—even to cut off access to customers, as Time-Warner did with CBS last fall. If they also own content providers, as Comcast does, they can harm rival content providers—as Comcast seems to be doing to Netflix.

And this should give us pause:

In short, the only beneficiary of these merger will be Xsanity’s management and stock holders. Consumers will get screwed. The American telecom/broadband industry, already lagging behind South Korea and other upstarts, will fall further behind. Of course, the FCC or the Justice Department could block the merger. But what has happened before does not inspire confidence. Obama’s Justice Department did threaten to block the merge of AT&T and T-Mobile, USA, but Comcast has strong ties to the administration—Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts is one of Obama’s golfing buddies and Cohen has been a major fundraiser—and in the past, the administration has been soft on the company. The FCC approved the merger of Comcast and NBC and the agreement between Comcast and Verizon.

If I were king, I would treat the cable companies as common carriers and prohibit them from expanding their business beyond the delivery of cable service. They are, after all, government-granted monopolies. I would further demand that they ratchet their prices down until their net revenues reach a reasonable level of profit above operating expenses, keeping a wary eye on executive salaries. I’m not king and never will be and what’s more likely to happen is that crony capitalism will prevail and soon we’ll all live in Comcastworld.

Yesterday, as usual, we stayed in. This is, after all, the best restaurant in town and it’s hard for me to justify braving the weather, traffic, and crazy drivers to spend a lot of money on a meal that’s not as good as the meal that I would have made at home.

I wanted to make something nice but not ostentatious for Valentine’s Day so I prepared a dinner of roasted shrimp, pan-browned asparagus with cherry tomatoes and garlic, champagne, and a dessert of Mississippi Mud cake (bakery-made) and mint chocolate chip ice cream. I had never roasted shrimp before but they turned out very nice. I’d be hesitant to try it with anything smaller than colossal grade shrimp (8-12 per pound). I left the shrimp in their shells, cut the shells with kitchen shears and cleaned them, and brined them for a half hour before roasting them, carefully placed upright on a rack in a quick oven. I basted them with melted butter and dusted them with a Moroccan spice combination I happened to have on hand.

For the asparagus I sauteed the tomatoes in olive oil until they began to break down, added a bit of garlic and sauteed that for just under a minute and then set that aside. I blanched the asparagus in water for a few minutes, drained it, and pan-browned it in a bit of olive oil for five or six minutes, adding the tomatoes and garlic just before serving to warm them.

As is my usual practice, I built my menu around things that were on sale.

After dinner we exchanged cards and I gave my wife some nice European chocolate. Not candy—just chocolate. She doesn’t like incidentals like nuts, nougat, caramel, or fruit getting in the way of the central chocolate.

James Joyner complains about President Obama’s ambassadorial appointments:

Now, I think this goes too far. As Neumann notes in the NPR story linked above, his own father was “an enormously competent appointee who served four presidents, three embassies and two parties” as ambassador to Afghanistan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. But, like Barkey, the elder Neumann was an international relations scholar with deep expertise and experience in the region, not a political hack. Further, as our own John Burgess, a retired career foreign service officer, has noted, an appointee can be an enormous asset if he has the ear of the president.

But filling this many ambassadorships with people whose sole qualification is having raised a lot of money for the president not only smacks of corruption but undermines our foreign relations.

In my comment on that post, I mentioned that appointing unqualified political allies as ambassadors was nothing new, going back to the beginnings of the Republic.

Recently, we marked the death of Shirley Temple Black. Mrs. Black served with distinction as our ambassador to Ghana, possibly the best ambassador we’ve ever sent to Ghana. She had no formal qualifications for the job—she was distinctly a political appointee. However, in her role as ambassador she applied the same skills and energies that informed her work on the screen as a child to her new post. She learned the language. She became familiar with the culture, customs, and politics. She harnessed her new knowledge to the recognition that her movie stardom brought along with it and her distinctive qualities of mind and spirit and became a unique asset to the United States as ambassador.

Will President Obama’s appointments fare as well? Frankly, I doubt it. The greater question, perhaps, is should we be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt?

A persistent criticism I have had of the present administration is that for the Obama Administration politics overwhelms every other consideration. IMO that was true of the ARRA, the PPACA, it has been true of the president’s public statements, and it has been true of his foreign policy. When the politics doesn’t play out as he had thought it would, he reverses course. This is most apparent in the action he’s being criticized for him some circles: delaying the enforcement of the employer mandate for mid-sized firms. To date no one has presented a coherent defense of the action either from a legal or a policy standpoint. If you believe the PPACA is good policy, you should also believe that the administration has erred in its repeated postponements of the employer mandate. The administration’s move as well as the defenses of its actions are purely political in nature.

Politics always influences policy. It is a major consideration in every presidential administration. They wouldn’t be presidential administrations if that weren’t the case. Is there some point at which a difference in degree is a difference in kind?

You probably wouldn’t expect something as small as the bead pictured above to be so interesting from an archaeological standpoint. The bead is a Spanish trade bead, roughly 300 years old, and it comes from a Chumash site in Rancho Sierra Vista, California:

Two tiny glass beads came as a bit of a surprise.

The National Park Service staff and volunteers excavating a small site in Rancho Sierra Vista this week expected some finds — an earth oven, cooking tools, maybe some beads to help date the site to when Chumash lived in the area.

Beads were important to the Chumash, but most were made from shell, not glass. The glass showed up when the Spanish first came to the area.

“At this point, we’re fairly confident that the site will date to the late 1700s during the initial period of Spanish colonial occupation in the area,” said Gary Brown, cultural resource program manager for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. He was three days into the weeklong dig near Newbury Park.

Finds from the period of initial contact between the Spanish and indigenous people are quite rare.

There’s an interesting bit of archaeological news. As you might know, the Clovis people lived in most of what is now the continental United States, southern Canada, and northern Mexico roughly 13,000 years ago. At one time they were believed to be the earliest settlers of the Americas and are believed to be the ancestors of all modern American Indians both in North and South America. The origins of these people has been a matter of some controversy. Although there’s been a long-time belief that the Clovis people entered the Americas by crossing the Bering Straits about 15 years ago an alternative theory, the “Solutrean hypothesis”, proposed a connection between the Clovis people and the prehistoric people of southern Europe, suggesting that the Clovis people entered the Americas via Greenland.

There’s only a single set of human remains that have been definitively identified as belonging to a member of the “Clovis culture”—the skeleton of an infant boy that’s about 12,600 years old. Genetic material has been extracted from those remains and its genome has been sequenced:

Now, an international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the Anzick boy and compared it with the select genetic information of modern Native Americans across the Americas, as well as with that of ancient Europeans, Asians and Greenlanders.

Their results show that approximately 80 percent of today’s Native Americans are direct descendants of the Clovis boy’s contemporaries, particularly the indigenous people who live today in Mexico and South America.

The remaining 20 percent are found among some of Canada’s First Nations, who, while not direct descendents of the Clovis, are still more closely related to them than any genetic group from any other continent.

He has been found to be a member of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup D4h3a, sort of an ancestral genetic lineage for all people descended from the people who lived in the Americas before historic Europeans arrived. Importantly, the closest relative identified to date for this boy is a Siberian child from about 24,000 years ago. This has provided the strongest evidence to date for the Asian origins of the prehistoric peoples of the Americas.

If 2014 will be a wave election, the generic ballot polling results certainly aren’t showing it. That the conclusion of Larry Sabato’s highly respected Crystal Ball:

Democrats would need a very substantial lead on the pre-election generic ballot surveys, something in the vicinity of 12 to 14 points, to have a good chance of gaining the 17 House seats needed to regain control of the chamber. At this point, that appears highly unlikely — no nonpartisan poll in the past year has shown a double-digit Democratic lead on the generic ballot. Moreover, no party holding the White House has gained anywhere near 17 seats in a midterm election in the past century. It seems highly unlikely that 2014 will see such a result. On the other hand, it also appears highly unlikely that Republicans will be able to significantly increase the size of their House majority in November. Right now, the most likely outcome of the House elections would appear to be a near standoff.

I strongly suspect that the president’s pollsters are telling him the same thing: he can’t expect to work with a Democratically-controlled House in 2015. That’s the reason behind the “if I can’t do it with you, I’ll do it without you” tone of his remarks for the last few months.

The real battle will be for the Senate. To win the Senate Republicans would need to win all the races they look likely to win at this point and either win at least two of the races that are toss-ups right now or win some races they’re not expected to win. My hipshot reaction is that Republicans are likely to fall just short of that, taking 49 or 50 seats in the Senate, not enough to control that house of Congress.

When I was a kid “Your Show of Shows” was regular viewing at our house. It was by far the best comedy/revue program on television. There was nothing like it. The onscreen talent was wonderful: Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howie Morris. And the writing! Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Tony Webster, Joe Stein, Danny Simon. Larry Gelbart wrote for Caesar’s later programs. These are the names that have dominated comedy in the U. S. for the last half century not only on television but in film and on the stage. If you want a good feel for what “Your Show of Shows” was like, watch any episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. Think of that but zanier. The goings-on among the writers and backstage have been dramatized in the movie My Favorite Year.

It was by far the funniest and most innovative comedy show on television until Ernie Kovacs hit the airwaves.

Sid Caesar has died at the age of 91:

In a day before comedy was laced with irony and studded with mean-spirited barbs, Sid Caesar was more than funny.

He was hilariously, outrageously, tear-inducingly, gather-up-the-whole-family-for-this funny.

A veteran of the Catskills with an elastic face, a knack for gibberish and a mind that could find comedy gold in the workings of a Bavarian cuckoo clock, Caesar was the king of live television sketch comedy in the 1950s.

Some of the best writers — Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks — vied to work for him. No slouches at comedy themselves, they were dazzled by his genius and, at times, horrified by his temper; he once tore the sink from a hotel bathroom and threatened to throw Brooks out an 18th-story window.

Caesar went public with some of his emotional problems in 1956, long before it was common for celebrities to do so. He is best known, though, not for his tormented inner life but for the inspired zaniness of the sketches on his trademark programs, “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour.”

A two-time Emmy Award-winning performer, Caesar died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills after a brief illness, according to his biographer Eddy Friedfeld. He was 91.

“He was without a doubt the greatest monologuist, pantomimist and sketch artist that ever worked on TV,” Reiner told The Times on Wednesday. “He set the template for all the other comedians that came after him, but none could do what Sid did.”

Today’s comedy programs are funny, maybe, 10% of the time. Sid Caesar’s program was funny 90% of the time. That’s what happens when you gather together great performers and great writers. We will not see the like again.