The Russian intelligence services had alerted U.S. intelligence about the older brother, as well as the mother, indicating that they might be sympathizers to extremists. The FBI investigated that older brother. It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother. They concluded that there were no signs that he was engaging in extremist activity.
Shouldn’t the head of DHS be urgently trying to figure out how the FBI screwed up, and tighten procedures so they don’t continue to make egregious mistakes after being warned by foreign governments? Oh wait, that wasn’t the head of DHS.
The notion that we’re going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity, even at a time when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al Qaeda core, we’ve kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan — the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.
It’s a pity that Noam Chomsky isn’t president. If he were, he could just snap his fingers and give the order and Gitmo would be gone. Oh wait, that wasn’t Noam Chomsky.
There’s the military, there’s ESPN, and there’s the Life of Julia generation. We don’t know if the country can survive the media and tenured Boomers’ invention of the Julia generation, and we won’t live long enough to see what the generation after these youngsters is like. But some generation along the line is going to be pretty angry about all the good that is being destroyed.
the two Kazakhs had been to the off-campus housing he shared with other international students a few times for parties. He remembered they played pool with his roommates. One came more frequently than the other, but he was not sure which one. On one occasion, Tsarnaev also attended. The last time the Kazakhs were at a party was in October, before Halloween, he said. Nothing much stood out, although the Kazakhs liked to drive their black BMW hard, making it squeal, he said. He knew them only through mutual friends. The school has several hundred international students, he said, who tend to bond because they are internationals. “They were definitely fun-loving. That stood out. They loved to party,” he said.
single adults age 21-29 earning 300% to 400% of the federal poverty level will be hit with an increase of 46% even after premium assistance from tax credits.
the French political system is terminally sick. The historical background certainly confirms this. For more than 30 years, every French government has lost every election. With a single exception, you have to be over 50 today to have voted in the last election, in 1978, when the incumbent majority held on to power: Nicolas Sarkozy managed to get a conservative majority re-elected in 2007 only because he profiled himself, dishonestly, as a new broom and as a rebel against the roi fainéant, his former mentor Jacques Chirac. Add to this the fact that in 2005 the referendum on the European constitution produced a ‘no ‘vote — that is, a disavowal of the entire political establishment — and you are confronted with a bitter reality: the French electorate hates its politicians and takes every chance to vote against them. François Hollande’s election last May was therefore not a victory but only his predecessor’s defeat. He was elected with 48 per cent of the votes, if you include spoilt and invalid ballots, and 39 per cent of the registered voters. His election was especially unimpressive considering the widespread revulsion at Sarkozy’s personal bling and at his betrayal of his own voters. But even so, Hollande’s catastrophic poll rating has broken all records. When in March he became the most unpopular president after ten months in office, his rating stood at 31 per cent. Now it is 26 per cent.
With unemployment nearing 11%, what do you expect?
We made no predictions, but we’re not terribly surprised at the outcome. These folks made predictions and gave deep analyses of one sort or another — um, really of one sort only. Note the Tomasky piece. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
The Senate’s complex immigration bill would instantly gut the popular E-Verify system that is widely used to exclude illegal immigrants from jobs, and then create an enforcement gap for several years before the arrival of a replacement system. “There’s no doubt that the bill eliminates E-Verify immediately upon signing,” said Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas, told The Daily Caller. “If there’s no statutory authority for E-Verify, there’s no E-Verify,” said Kobach, a lawyer trained at Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities, and a prominent advocate for reduced immigration. The claim is vehemently disputed by the bills’ advocates, including staffers working for Sen. Marco Rubio. However, Rubio staffers were unable to show TheDC any text in the legislation that gives the current E-Verify system legal backing until the new system is mandated in several years…In several emails to TheDC, Rubio’s spokesman repeatedly denounced Kobach’s analysis. But the spokesman declined to supply bill language that shows how E-Verify is enforced once it is canceled, and before a replacement is developed by contractors, deployed by agencies and approved by the courts…despite repeated requests, Conant did not identify a paragraph in the bill showing how enforcement of E-Verify would continue uninterrupted once the program is canceled immediately after the bill becomes law.
Certainly this is easy enough to fix. That’s not the point. The point is that the Rubio team overlooked the thing that is central to his case that there’s enforcement in the bill. We’ll say it again: no new laws to replace old unenforced laws. Enforcement first!
There’s this. There’s this. And there’s this. We heard that Washington and Lincoln were also laff riots at the WH correspondents dinner. But maybe we heard wrong.
We’ve been going on and on about not making new laws but enforcing the ones we already have. The country’s ridiculous situation is the stuff of parody. What would happen to a presidential or other executive candidate who said he’s accept no new laws in areas where current laws weren’t being substantially enforced? Probably wouldn’t make it with the young ladies and the faculty lounge, but one of these days perhaps elections will look more like midterms than American Idol.
Atlantic: “New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle — and a nightmare.” The article runs almost 11,000 words. There’s a lot of research, but to little avail. The author is trapped in the CAGW trap about the earth heating at a dangerous pace, despite the fact that it’s been cooling for some time, while the minuscule amount of CO2 continues to expand apace.
It’s a very odd piece, written as though by an alien visiting earth and discovering that, surprisingly, burning things makes CO2; speaking of alien, the author seems to have some detached globalist perspective, certainly not beginning at what’s best for the USA. The same can not be said of James Lewis’s piece in AT which is all about shale beating shariah. We think that’s pretty likely, as long as the worshippers of Gaia can be defeated. Strange turn of events, isn’t it, when technological and economic constraints have ceased to be a problem, but the US is trapped by its own modern pagans and their strange superstitions?
chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, fielded questions on the issue for more than an hour at a lunch with Democratic senators. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who is up for re-election next year, said, “We are hearing from a lot of small businesses in New Hampshire that do not know how to comply with the law.” In addition, Mrs. Shaheen said, “restaurants that employ people for about 30 hours a week are trying to figure out whether it would be in their interest to reduce the hours” of those workers, so the restaurants could avoid the law’s requirement to offer health coverage to full-time employees. The White House officials “acknowledged that these are real concerns, and that we’ve got to do more to address them,” Mrs. Shaheen said. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on health care, said he was extremely upset with Mr. Obama’s decision to take money from public health prevention programs and use it to publicize the new law, which creates insurance marketplaces in every state. “I am greatly disappointed — beyond upset — that the administration chose to help pay for the Affordable Care Act in fiscal year 2013 by raiding the Public Health and Prevention Fund,” Mr. Harkin said. The administration said it had transferred $332 million from the prevention fund to pay for “education and outreach…Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said last week that the administration deserved “a failing grade” for its efforts to explain the law to the public. “I just see a huge train wreck coming down,” Mr. Baucus said…
Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said he told White House officials on Thursday that he was concerned about big rate increases being sought by the largest health insurer in his state. The company, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, has sought increases averaging 25 percent for individual insurance policies that will be sold in the state insurance exchange, and it is seeking increases of about 15 percent for small businesses. The company said the higher premiums reflected costs of complying with the new law. Senator Cardin said he was also distressed by the administration’s failure to require health insurers to provide affordable coverage of dental services for children. The law lists pediatric dental care as one of 10 categories of “essential health benefits” to be provided by all health plans. Under a rule issued by the administration, Mr. Cardin said, “there is no guarantee or requirement that families have pediatric dental coverage, and the coverage could be provided in a stand-alone plan with a separate deductible, so that a family with two children might have to pay as much as $1,400 in out-of-pocket costs for dental coverage.”
In paragraph one, Democratic senators wake up to what the numerate among us have known for years about this disaster: it’s unaffordable, it costs jobs, and removes the very coverage it claimed to increase. Paragraph two is much more interesting. The fellow from Maryland is all upset about the higher premiums brought about by this train wreck of a law. But then he pivots to being upset that there are not even more benefits from the gravy train. Train wreck and gravy train at the same time. Pity they don’t have time to teach adding and subtracting in school anymore.
Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said. The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive…The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs
WSJ: “restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to limit schedules of hourly workers to below 30 hours a week. That is the threshold at which large employers in 2014 would have to offer workers a minimum level of insurance or pay a penalty.”
Clarice Feldman: “where once legislative initiatives originated in the office of the Chief Executive, in recent decades, they are increasingly being written on the Hill (by those inexperienced twenty-something staffers).”
Of course it’s a scandal that Congress is trying to exempt itself from this healthcare mess, but we have a solution that will make things better. Get all the young staffers who write these awful laws to work fewer than 30 hours a week. No healthcare coverage for the youngsters, which will encourage them to find actual gainful employment, and fewer hours for those that remain to do mischief on the government payroll.
We don’t understand the fluttering heartbeats that this fellow Rubio gives to some in the GOP. His floundering around on the age of the earth was terrible. At a minimum he should have thrown it back at the questioner; at a median he should have said 4.5 billion years; at a maximum he should have referred the questioner to Monty Python for the definitive answer.
As for the immigration issue, which he’s riding like the Lone Ranger rode Silver, he’s even worse. Four years ago he was definitely against many of the things he’s for now. Powerline points out some of the glaring inconsistencies (here and here, for example). Worst of all, it was in his initial position four years ago that he had things right — it’s all about enforcement. We said the other day that when politicians go to Washington they end up in Fantasyland; his rather self-serving Fantasyland is that the new law that he backs is going to be any better enforced than the 1986 law or the 2007 proposed law. Very unimpressive. More words, words, words. The last things we need from a national politician in these times.
The FBI questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, after the Russians asked us to look into his radicalization. (Moscow’s murky role is another story.) It appears that the agents asked him, Are you a Muslim fanatic? To which he replied, No. End of investigation…this is a case of just how idiotic a politically correct bureaucracy can be. The father of the Tsarnaev punks only had to declare himself an asylum-seeker afraid for his life in the Russian Federation and our consular officials fell all over themselves to get him to America. Nobody cared that “fearful” Pops retained his Russian citizenship and passport, then voluntarily returned to Daghestan, a jihad-roiled Russian province, to live. Or that his elder son’s dream vacation appears to have been a terrorist training session. If you’re a highly educated, ambitious West European who wants to become an American, your chances are near zero. If you’re a radical America-hater from a hostile region, all you have to do is shout that you’re a political refugee and we’ll give you residency and benefits. There’s no reason that anyone from Chechnya should be granted a US visa. It’s a gangster mini-state (within the Russian Federation) at war with home-grown Islamists. There are no good guys. Chechnya’s sole export besides terror, Chechen mafiosi, make Mexican drug cartels look like Franciscans. And some of the cruelest jihadis our troops faced in Iraq and elsewhere were Chechens…Our immigration system is one of terrorism’s best allies.
The idea of life-saving asylum doesn’t make any sense when supposed refugees, like both of the Tsarnaev parents, can return to live safely in Russia. The elder of the suspected bombers, Tamerlan, himself had likewise just spent six months in a supposedly deadly homeland — for what exact reasons we can only speculate. Do our immigration authorities really believe that Russia is so dangerous for Muslims that they must be allowed unquestioned admission to the United States, but not so dangerous that they cannot from time to time choose to revisit their deadly place of birth? Can a resident alien no longer be summarily deported for breaking the laws of his host country — in the case of the skilled boxer Tamerlan, for domestic violence against his non-boxing wife, or, in the case of his mother, for shoplifting over $1,600 in merchandise? Does being on public assistance years after arrival in this country, like the Tsarnaev family, no longer qualify a resident alien for deportation? Does being investigated by the FBI for apparently loud and public expressions of support for anti-American radical jihadists not mean much? In short, if a Tamerlan Tsarnaev cannot be deported, then perhaps no resident alien can be under any circumstances. I am sure that in theory there are all sorts of laws to the effect that asylum seekers must prove that they would be in constant peril in their homelands (cf. Obama’s Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Onyango), that they must become self-sufficient residents of the United States (cf. Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Onyango), that they must not break American laws (cf. Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Onyango), and that they must not promote anti-American activity. But what do such theoreticals matter if, for reasons of laxity or political correctness or connectedness, these statutes are ignored
Proposals: (a) all bills that have “comprehensive” in the title should be defeated: and (b) any proposed law that seeks to replace similar laws that are not being enforced (cf 2007 and 1986) should be defeated, since there is zero reason to believe that the new law will be respected any more than the old ones.
Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger…the best place to start is with a carbon tax. A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over 10 years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline…It’s the only way to revive the country and a moribund Republican Party.
Imagine the nonsense you have to believe in order to write the words above. But then again, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” QED.
News from Massachusetts: “the suspects are being held on immigration violations.” Hmmmmm. If the Schumer bill passes, would the Boston 12 be all legal? And would more background checks have prevented the shootout the other night that killed this gentleman? Reality, it seems, has intruded for a brief moment on the utopian fantasies of Washington and the media. It’d be nice if it lasted a while. HT: GP
scholars cautioned Friday against concluding that the Tsarnaevs’ motives were purely religious. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with police early Friday morning, appeared to sympathize with Islamic extremists agitating for Chechen independence from Russia. But family, neighbors, friends, and social media sources painted a complex picture of the brothers’ religiosity. “The story that seems to be developing here is more along the lines of standard alienated man goes out and commits atrocities, much more like the school shootings we’ve seen than organized Islamic insurgency,” said Yuri Zhukov, a fellow at the Program on Global Society and Security at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center who studies extremism in the Caucasus.
Scholars: what would we do without them? Andy McCarthy has a thought or two. HT: RLS
Who would design a system in which a President recently reëlected by a margin of almost five million votes could not move a piece of legislation supported by some ninety per cent of the country through even one chamber of the Congress — even when a majority of legislators in that chamber voted for it?
90%? That seems a tad high. We wonder, as do many outside the MSM bubble, what the percentage was among residents of Watertown yesterday.
• By 21 percentage points (65% to 44%), native-born citizens are more likely than naturalized immigrants to view America as “better” than other countries as opposed to “no better, no worse.”
• By about 30 points (85% to 54%), the native-born are more likely to consider themselves American citizens rather than “citizens of the world.”
• By 30 points (67% to 37%), the native-born are more likely to believe that the U.S. Constitution is a higher legal authority for Americans than international law.
• By roughly 31 points (81% to 50%), the native-born are more likely than immigrant citizens to believe that schools should focus on American citizenship rather than ethnic pride.
• By 23 percentage points (82% to 59%), the native-born are more likely to believe that it is very important for the future of the American political system that all citizens understand English.
• By roughly 15 points (77% to 62%), the native-born are more likely to believe that that there is a unique American culture that defines what it means to be an American.
• By 15 points (82% to 67%), the native-born are more likely than immigrant citizens to support an emphasis in schools on learning about the nation’s founding documents.
This country is in trouble. The perfidious rubbish that the universities and high schools teach today turns Americans into Julia. Is it any wonder then that some immigrants have “been assimilated into a nullity.” The tenured Boomers have ruined the education system and wrecked many under 30. Consider the statistics above. 60-80% of the native born think America is an excellent place overall, but how many of these are the old, as opposed to the Julias? Imagine being an immigrant being educated in a very blue state today? How great is the gulf between some in that group and the older guys who are hockey fans? HT: PL
