August 13, 2010
Fire and Imagination
By BOB HERBERT
The Obama administration seems to be feeling sorry for itself. Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary, is perturbed that Mr. Obama is not getting more hosannas from liberals.
Spare me. The country is a mess. The economy is horrendous, and millions of American families are running out of ammunition in their fight against destitution. Steadily increasing numbers of middle-class families, who never thought they’d be seeking charity, have been showing up at food pantries.
The war in Afghanistan, with its dreadful human toll and debilitating drain on the nation’s financial resources, is proceeding as poorly as ever. As The Times reported on Friday, an ambitious operation that was supposed to showcase the progress of the Afghan Army turned into a tragic, humiliating debacle.
And while schools are hemorrhaging resources because of budget meltdowns, and teachers are losing jobs, and libraries are finding it more and more difficult to remain open, American youngsters are falling further behind their peers in other developed countries in their graduation rates from colleges and universities.
This would be a good time for the Obama crowd to put aside its concern about the absence of giddiness among liberals and re-examine what it might do to improve what is fast becoming a depressing state of affairs.
It’s not just liberals who are gloomy. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week found that nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe the country is on the wrong track and a majority disapproves of President Obama’s handling of the economy. Nearly two-thirds expect the economy to get worse still.
Mr. Obama’s problem — and the nation’s — is that in the midst of the terrible economic turmoil that the country was in when he took office, he did not make full employment, meaning job creation in both the short and the long term, the nation’s absolute highest priority.
Besides responding to the nation’s greatest need, job creation would have been the one issue most likely to bolster Mr. Obama’s efforts to bring people of different political persuasions together. In the early months of 2009, with job losses soaring past a half-million a month and the country desperate for bold, creative leadership, the president had an opportunity to rally the nation behind an enormous “rebuild America” effort.
Such an effort, properly conceived, would have put millions to work overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, rebuilding our ports and transportation facilities to 21st-century standards, establishing a Manhattan Project-like quest for a brave new world of clean energy, and so on.
We were going to spend staggering amounts of money in any event. There was every reason to use those enormous amounts of public dollars to leverage private capital, as well, for investment in projects and research that the country desperately needs and that would provide enormous benefits for many decades. Think of the returns the nation reaped from its investments in the interstate highway system, the Land Grant colleges, rural electrification, the Erie and Panama canals, the transcontinental railroad, the technology that led to the Internet, the Apollo program, the G.I. bill.
The problem with the U.S. economy today, as it was during the Great Depression, is the absence of sufficient demand for goods and services. Consumers, struggling with sky-high unemployment and staggering debt loads, are tapped out. The economy cannot be made healthy again, and there is no chance of doing anything substantial about budget deficits, as long as so many millions of people are left with essentially no purchasing power. Jobs are the only real answer.
President Obama missed his opportunity early last year to rally the public behind a call for shared sacrifice and a great national mission to rebuild the United States in a way that would create employment for millions and establish a gleaming new industrial platform for the great advances of the 21st century.
It would have taken fire and imagination, but the public was poised to respond to bold leadership. If the Republicans had balked, and they would have, the president had the option of taking his case to the people, as Truman did in his great underdog campaign of 1948.
During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt explained to the public the difference between wasteful spending and sound government investments. “You cannot borrow your way out of debt,” he said, “but you can invest your way into a sounder future.”
Now, with so much money already spent and Republicans expected to gain seats in the Congressional elections, the president finds himself with a much weaker hand, even if he were inclined to play it boldly.
What that will mean in the real world of ordinary Americans is that even if there is a fretful recovery from the Great Recession, millions will be left out of it. Hope has morphed into widespread gloom as widespread economic suffering becomes the new normal in America.
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Heather Mac Donald: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration
By: Heather Mac Donald
OpEd Contributor
August 4, 2010
The real motivation for the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's new immigration statute was the only one not mentioned in the department's brief: The Obama administration has no intention of enforcing the immigration laws against the majority of illegal aliens already in the country.
It is that policy alone which conflicts with SB 1070: Arizona wants to enforce the law; the Obama administration does not. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that conflict puts Arizona in violation of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.
But what is indisputable is that the failure of the federal government to openly acknowledge the real ground for its opposition to SB 1070 has rendered incoherent not just its own public arguments against the law, but the judicial ruling which largely rubber stamps those arguments as well.
The Arizona statute affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff's deputy to inquire into someone's immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.
Both the Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, in striking down most of SB 1070, couched their opposition to the statute exclusively in terms of its effect on legal, as opposed to illegal, aliens. SB 1070, Judge Bolton wrote, would impermissibly burden legal immigrants already in the country by subjecting them to unwarranted immigration checks.
There are two problems with this line of argument: First, it ignores the fact that Congress has already anticipated and approved precisely the sort of local immigration inquiries that Judge Bolton now finds unconstitutional. Second, the argument would make all immigration enforcement impossible.
In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary policies, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from working with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the "apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens."
In pursuance of that mandate, the federal government operates an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide just the sort of immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials that SB 1070 seeks.
It is therefore absurd to now claim, as Judge Bolton and the Obama Administration do, that such local inquiries conflict with the federal immigration scheme. It is even more absurd to argue that the risk that a legal alien will be questioned about his immigration status makes the alleged conflict unconstitutional.
Any immigration enforcement carries the possibility that a legal alien or U.S. citizen will be stopped and questioned. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people for questioning applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.)
If Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have revoked the 1952 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.
Such unpersuasive reasoning suggests that something else is going on. That something is the fact that SB 1070 would have put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of repeatedly telling Arizona's law enforcement officers that it is not interested in detaining or deporting the illegal aliens that they have encountered in the course of their duties; the law, in other words, would have exposed the administration's de facto amnesty policy.
And SB 1070 would have shown that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Even before it went into operation, the Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports.
Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department's brief or from Judge Bolton's opinion. Despite this studied avoidance, it's time to have a public debate about how much immigration enforcement this country wants and which enforcement policies--the administration's or Arizona's -- best represent the public will.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and co-author of The
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/White-House-doesn_t-want-to-enforce-immigration-1007060-99891419.html#ixzz0w8gI2nha
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
FAIRUS.org
JUDICIALWATCH.org
ALIPAC.us
IN FACT THERE ARE SO MANY MILLIONS OF MEXICANS USING FRAUDULENT SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS WITH COMMON HISPANIC NAMES, THAT E-VERIFY MAY BE ALREADY BE A WASTE OF TIME.
HOWEVER, EVEN WITH THE STAGGERING UNEMPLOYMENT, FOR WHICH OBAMA HAS DONE NADA, HE’S STILL MAKING IT EASY FOR ILLEGALS TO TAKE OUR JOBS
Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law
The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano. (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief). Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed. From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.
To date, Arizona’s E-Verify law has been upheld by all lower courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit, in particular, viewed it as an exercise of a state’s traditional power to regulate businesses. (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2010). Obama’s Justice Department, however, disagrees. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said in his filing with the Supreme Court that the lower courts were wrong to uphold the statute because federal immigration law expressly preempts any state law imposing sanctions on employers hiring illegal immigrants. Mr. Katyal argues that this is not a licensing law, but “a statute that prohibits the hiring of unauthorized aliens and uses suspension and revocation of all state-issued licenses as its ultimate sanction.” (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief, p. 10). This is the administration’s first court challenge to a state’s authority to act against illegal immigration, and could be a preview of the battle brewing over Arizona’s recent illegal immigration crackdown through SB 1070.
Napolitano has made no comment on the Department of Justice’s decision to challenge the 2007 law, but federal officials said that she has taken an active part in the debate over whether to do so. (Politico, May 28, 2010). As Governor of Arizona, Napolitano said she believed the state law was valid and became a defendant in the many lawsuits against it. (Id.).
illegals vs crime
206 Most wanted criminals in Los Angeles. Out of 206 criminals--183 are hispanic---171 of those are wanted for Murder.
Why do Americans still protect the illegals??
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_11255121?appSession=934140935651450&RecordID=&PageID=2&PrevPageID=&cpipage=1&CPISortType=&CPIorderBy=
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TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN CALIFORNIA ARE MEXICANS!
http://ag.ca.gov/wanted/mostwanted.php?fid=mostWantedFugitives_2010-01
ACCORDING TO SENATOR LAMAR SMITH OF TEXAS, WHEN CHALLENGING SO- CALLED “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIPS” LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO, AS TO WHY OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN TO NARCOMEX, OBAMA HAS CUT ENFORCEMENT BY MORE THAN 60% IN ALL AREAS.
Obama soft on illegals enforcement
Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.
The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.
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FAIRUS.org
FEDERATION FOR AMERICAN IMMIGRATION REFORM
FAIR CHARACTERIZES THE OBAMA, AND LA RAZA DEMS PLAN FOR AMNESTY AS FOLLOWS:
That's why, throughout 2009 FAIR has been tracking every move the administration and Congress has made to undermine our immigration laws, reward illegal aliens and burden taxpayers.
• Foot-dragging on proven methods of immigration law enforcement including border structures and E-Verify.
• Appointment of several illegal alien advocates to important administration posts.
• Watering down of the 287(g) program to limit local law in their own jurisdictions.
• Health care reform that mandates a “public option” for newly-arrived legal immigrants as well as illegal aliens.
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