The Senate isnt serious about enforcing the nations immigration laws. It is bad enough that the bill that 39 Democrats and 23 Republicans just voted to pass provides an amnesty to illegal immigrants already here. There might be an argument for doing that if there were any evidence of a commitment to enforce the immigration laws in the future. But the bill actually prohibits local police from enforcing civil violations of immigration lawswhich in practice, given the byzantine rules distinguishing between civil and criminal violations of those laws, will get local police out of the enforcement business altogether. No serious effort is being made to make the bureaucracy capable of the enforcement tasks that will now be asked of them, such as performing background checks on the illegal population.
The bill forbids the federal government to use any information included in an application for amnesty in national-security or criminal investigations. Any federal agent who does use that information would be fined $10,000which is five times more than an illegal alien would have to pay to get the amnesty. The Senate, on a tie vote, defeated John Cornyns (R., Tex.) attempt to rectify these provisions.
When Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) offered an amendment to require that enforcement be proven to have succeeded before the amnesty or guest-worker provisions could take effect, he was voted down, 55-40. For most senators, enforcement is just boob bait for the voters. They are not willing to demand it before getting what they, for various reasons, really want: an amnesty and a massive increase in legal immigration.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) wanted to deny illegal immigrants the earned income tax credit. It is one thing to legalize them, went the argument, and another to subsidize them. He, too, was voted down, with Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) flippantly suggesting that the amendment was akin to requiring illegals to ride in the back of the bus. (No, senator: Theyre in the front of the line, at least for legal residency in the U.S.)
The temporary guest-workers will be eligible for citizenship. If they overstay their welcome, there is no guarantee they will be deportedespecially when Congress will have signaled, by passing this bill, its view that deportation is draconian. So these temporary workers will permanently change America. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimates that the bill would make for an inflow of 66 million immigrants over the next 20 years. Since much of this inflow would consist of poor and relatively uneducated people, one result would be, he says, the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years. (And hes not accounting for the likely effects of these peoples votes.) Another very likely result would be the increased balkanization of America, as this massive inflow slows both economic and cultural assimilation.
If supporters of the Senate bill were serious about securing the border, they would have considered following a strategy of attritionof stepping up enforcement of the immigration laws so as to shrink the illegal-immigrant population over timeand, if they ultimately rejected that strategy, explained why. Implicit in their arguments for amnesty and a guest-worker program is one possible objection to the attrition strategy: that the American economy needs more cheap, unskilled labor. Proponents of mass immigration boast that immigration brings a net benefit of $10 billion to the American economy. But this amount is, in the context of our $13 trillion economy, trivial. Reduced immigration would lead to some increased outsourcing, some substitution of machines for labor, some increased wages, and some higher prices. The economy would survive.
So will Republicans, if they reject this bill (as most Senate Republicans did). They are being told that they need to pass a bill, even if they dislike many of its provisions, to be seen as doing something about the border. But the voters who care the most about this issue know that the Senate bill does something they heartily detest. They know that the only way to get any enforcement of our immigration lawsat the border or the workplaceis to keep all of the interests that want increased immigration from getting what they want until enforcement is achieved. The Senate should stand down in favor of the Houses enforcement-first approach, not the other way around. But it would be much better to enact no bill than to enact the Senate bill.
Good site - subscribe - I do..
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LONDON -- In the Cotswold hills, in deep England, there is a pair of villages named Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter. In addition to its rather gruesome name, Lower Slaughter possesses a unique distinction. It is the only village in all of England that does not possess a First World War memorial. In the remainder of the country, even the smallest hamlet will have -- I almost said "will boast" -- a stone marker with an arresting number of names on it. In bigger towns, it wouldn't be possible to incise all the names in stone, though at the Menin Gate in the Belgian town of Ypres a whole arch is inscribed with the names of those who fell along the Somme. Every year on Nov. 11 -- anniversary of the 1918 "Armistice" -- the rest of the English-speaking world gathers, with Flanders poppies worn in the lapel, to commemorate the dead of all wars but in particular to feel again the still-aching wounds of the "war to end all wars": the barbaric conflict that shook peoples' faith in civilization itself.
Though the carnage of that war was felt much less in the United States, it was only after the doughboys returned in 1918 that the former Confederate states dropped their boycott of America's original "Memorial Day," proclaimed by Union commander Gen. John Logan in May 1868. And here one can note the bizarre manner in which war -- which is division by definition -- exerts its paradoxically unifying effect. If it is "the health of the state," as was sardonically said by that great foe of "Mr. Wilson's war," Randolph Bourne, then it can also be an agent of emancipation and nation-building and even (as was proved after 1945) of democracy. But even this reflection can never abolish the insoluble problem: how to estimate the value of those whose lives were cruelly cut off before victory was in sight. It is sometimes rather lazily said that these soldiers "gave" their lives. It would be equally apt, if more blunt, to say that they had their lives taken. Humanity has been grappling with this conundrum ever since Pericles gave his funeral oration, and there would have been many Spartan and Melian widows and orphans who would have been heartily sickened by those Athenian-centered remarks.
The soil of the United States is almost spoiled for choice when it comes to commemorative sites. They range from Gettysburg itself -- still one of the most staggering places of memory in the world -- to the Confederate statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, and extend from the Polar Bear monument in Detroit (honoring those Michiganders who helped invade Russia in 1919: a forgotten war if ever there was one) to Maya Lin's masterpiece of Vietnam understatement on the National Mall. But Memorial Day transcends the specific, and collectivizes all disparate recollections into one single reflection upon the losses inflicted by war itself. The summa of this style, and one that transcends Pericles, is of course the Gettysburg Address, in which one cannot distinguish which side's graves are actually being honored. It was always Mr. Lincoln's way to insist that he was the elected president of every state, not just the "northern" ones, and this speech still has the power to stir us because it was the most strenuous possible test of that essential proposition.
A memorial to, and for, all is certainly an improvement on the Arc de Triomphe/Brandenburg Gate style, which was regnant until 1918 and which asserted national exclusivity. Kemal Ataturk did a noble thing when he raised a monument to all those who fell at Gallipoli, and informed the British and Australian peoples that their "Tommies and Johnnies" would lie with his "Alis and Mehmets." But there are also disadvantages to a memorial that is too "inclusive." Not even President Reagan's fine speech at the cliffs of Pointe du Hoq has erased his crass equation of the "victims" at Bitburg cemetery with their victims. Bitburg is not Gettysburg: Some wounds cannot and perhaps should not be healed. The opposite danger also exists: Our "Memorial Day" is now the occasion of a three-day holiday weekend (over the protest of the Veterans of Foreign Wars) and has become somewhat banal precisely because it seems to honor nobody in particular.
The stark concept of "The Unknown Soldier" was the best expression of awe and respect that the century of total war managed to produce. Rudyard Kipling, whose only son John was posted as "missing" in 1915 (and whose remains were not found until 15 years ago) was the designer of the official headstone for those soldiers who lay in mass graves and could not even be identified. No pacifist, he nonetheless wrote with scorn of the "jelly-bellied flag-flappers" who lectured schoolboys on the glories of combat. Over time, it is the bleak poetry of Wilfred Owen, and not the inspirational verse of Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke, that has come to express the more profound experiences of warfare. Some thoughts must always lie too deep for tears.
Since all efforts at commemoration are bound to fall short, one must be on guard against any attempt at overstatement. In particular, one must resist efforts to ventriloquize the dead. To me, Cindy Sheehan's posthumous conscription of her son (who fell on Memorial Day) is as objectionable as Billy Graham's claim, at the National Cathedral, that all the dead of Sept. 11, 2001 were now in paradise. In the first instance, we have no reason to believe that young Casey Sheehan would ever have supported MoveOn.org, and in the second instance we cannot be expected to believe that almost 3,000 New Yorkers all died in a state of grace. Nothing is more tasteless, when set against the reality of death, than the hollow note of demagogy and false sentiment. These things are also subject to unintended consequences. When Dalton Trumbo wrote his leftist antiwar classic "Johnnie Got His Gun," he little expected that it would be used as a propaganda tool by pro-fascist isolationists in the late 1930s, and that he would be protesting in vain that this was not what he had really meant.
"Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in mid-conflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.
Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is author, most recently, of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (HarperCollins, 2005).
With the mounting confrontation over Irans nuclear weapons programme, the Middle East could-be standing at the brink of war once again. An American decision to attack Iran to prevent Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from acquiring nuclear weapons would not only risk engulfing the region in conflict but would also dramatically increase the chances of Iranian-supported terrorists striking the United States at home and its interests abroad.
President George W Bush would not be facing this terrible quandary if an international smuggling ring, headquartered in Pakistan, had not helped Irans nuclear programme for over a decade. At the head of the criminal syndicate was the Pakistani Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of his countrys nuclear bomb and a man who former CIA Director George Tenet called just as dangerous as Osama Bin Laden.
Following Ahmadinejad's Letter to Bush, Iranian Satirist Writes to Ahmadinejad
In response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's May 9, 2006 letter to U.S. President Bush, the well-known expatriate Iranian satirist Ibrahim Nabavi published an open letter to President Ahmadinejad, in the online Persian daily Rooz.
The following are excerpts from Nabavi's letter: [1]
"Oh Adorable Little Boy Who Makes Noise and Needs Attention!" This guy's good!
"...Oh adorable little boy who makes noise and needs attention!
"...In your explanation [about this letter], you said that you had written to [President] Bush to present a solution to the problems in the world. What an excellent idea. But have you noticed that the problem in the world is you yourself? Do you know that it is you who are the cause of most of the bad luck and punishments now descending upon the free peoples and the countries of the world? [Do you know] that if there is a problem that must be solved, it is called Ahmadinejad?...
"My dear son Mahmoud!
"You wrote to George Bush: "...[You intend to] establish a single global society which is to be ruled by Jesus and by the righteous of the earth..."
"My good boy! Do you really think that George Bush wants to establish a single global society so that Jesus and the righteous of the earth will rule it? Who told you this? Who said that Bush and the Americans - whose regime, thought, and laws are based on secularism - want Jesus and the righteous of the earth to rule the globe?...
"All Westerners, including the Americans, have for 200 years been diligently saying that they are not interested in a religious regime, and that they advocate secularism. Now you say that they are interested in rule by Jesus? Where is Jesus? Who was talking about Jesus? On your mother's life! Go find the nutcase who taught you these things, fire him, and don't listen to him any more. [Those who taught you] see that you are naïve, so they want a laugh at your expense. They say these things in jest - and you publish them?!..."
More at link. I love this guy. He'll be playing here all week. Or until the Basij track him down. Mahmoud b*tch-slapped!
#2
The punchline is worth revealing: "My Dear Mahmoud!
"Your effort to convert George Bush to Islam is indeed admirable... Do you think that Bush's problem stems from the fact that he's not Muslim? If he were Muslim, he would have, first thing, become a Wahhabi, and, with the power that he possesses, would have attacked us with a vengeance overnight. So don't ask him to convert to Islam!"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
