Slimy Clinton, Wussy Obama. There is no satisfying the Clintons. Billary is slime, pure and simple, and every attempt by the (asterisk)ussies of the Obama camp to mollify the Clintons is misguided. Michigan and Florida delegates should NOT be seated AT ALL if the admission of Clinton delegates would produce a challenge to Obama on the floor of the Democratic convention. The Clintons, who have done almost nothing for the presumptive nominee, are trying to cause all the trouble for him that they can, like spoiled children threatening to take their ball and go home. Obama should tell them to go f(asterisk) themselves. The Democratic Party doesn't need selfish, vicious babies who would rather the Democrats lose the White House than have someone whose name isn't "Clinton" win.
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Whites a Minority? Media Hype. ABC World News this evening ran an alarmist "tease" twice in the first half of its evening news program about "minorities becoming the majority" of the U.S. population. Oh? The U.S. is 80% white. If you stuck around for the actual story, you find that the claim is only that by 2050 — 42 years away — and only if present trends continue, "minorities", including Hispanics (who can, as the Census Bureau points out, be of ANY race, including WHITE) could become the bare majority.
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Never mind that we have known this for a long time. Never mind that if we decide to remain a majority-white country we can change the immigration laws any time we want, for any reason we want, and exclude anyONE we want. Any "equal treatment" rule of the Constitution applies only to people ALREADY HERE: neither the Federal Government nor any State may "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". People outside the United States are neither "within its jurisdiction" nor under the "protection of the laws" of the United States. So if we want to keep the United States predominantly white, we can do that. If we want to exclude from immigration people we suspect will not learn and use English, we can do that.
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As it happens, Hispanics not only include many WHITE people (or largely-white), but are also losing their ancestral language at an unprecedented rate. Even older people are learning English, at least to the point where they can get basic information and communicate at a primitive level, slowly. This is all due to the proliferation of sources of spoken English within the home (TV, radio, movies and music on CD, the Internet), but mainly television. Altho there are Spanish-language TV and/or radio stations in most localities where Hispanics congregate in substantial numbers, the unfortunate reality for those broadcasters is that they do not have a monopoly on Hispanics' attention, and if the particular time period does not contain programming a particular person of Latino culture is interested in, s/he can channel-surf into English programming. Which is precisely what millions of Latinos do. Even if they understand little at first, over time they learn a little more, and a little more, and a little more still. After a while, they understand enuf that very little escapes them. And then Spanish-language broadcasters have to work hard to keep an audience.
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The kids go to school, and make friends across linguistic boundaries. Some kids are proud to retain Spanish; others, embarrassed. When they have kids, they may not teach them Spanish at home, and those kids have to learn Spanish from media or even as a foreign language in high school! And you know how well kids learn languages in high school.
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The loss of Spanish is precipitous, in historical terms. To anticipate trends to 2050, we need to invoke historical trends:

In the third generation, only 17 percent of Mexican immigrants still speak fluent Spanish, and in the fourth generation, just 5 percent. The corresponding fourth-generation figure for white European immigrants is 1 percent. [That is, not a big difference. The melting pot is still boiling hot.]

What is endangered, said the authors [of a 2006 study from Princeton University], is not the dominance of English but the survival of the non-English languages immigrants bring with them to the United States.

"To the extent that language fluency is an asset and that knowledge of a foreign tongue represents a valuable resource in a global economy, immigrants' efforts to maintain this part of their cultural heritage and pass it on to their children should not be discouraged," the authors said.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:42 PM