This is a middle school today in America. The message is bad enough, but what is worse is that this method of communication apparently conveys wisdom and credibility to its audience instead of ignorance and vulgarity.
Perhaps the thing that we find most offensive about the Senate immigration bill is that it does not appear to take itself seriously as a law that intends to be implemented in its details. There is precious little in the bill that addresses in a serious way how the massive enterprise it envisions is to be put into practice. And where there is implementation language, it is often ludicrous.
Here’s a bit from the section labeled Interior Enforcement, Sec 201, Additional Immigration. It is unclear from the language if relatives of those who have Z Visas residing in foreign lands would be covered by this subsection. If so, those cases alone could number potentially in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Note that only 50 immigration lawyers, if even that many, are being added to the Department of Justice to litigate the cases covered in this section:
(b) Department of Justice.-
(1) JUDICIAL CLERKS-The Attorney General shall, subject to the
availability of appropriations for such purpose, appoint necessary
law clerks for immigration judges and Board of Immigration
Appeals members of no less than one per judge and member. A
law clerk appointed under this section shall be exempt from the
provisions of subchapter I of chapter 63 of title 5 [5 USCS §§
6301 et seq.]
(2) LITIGATION ATTORNEYS.-In each of the fiscal years 2008
through 2012, the
Attorney General, subject to the availability of appropriations for
such purpose, shall increase the number of positions for
attorneys in the Office of Immigration Litigation by not less than 50…
50 litigators, budgetary conditions permitting. That’s some serious enforcement. At two lawyers per case and a case resolved every three months, this group could resolve as many as 100 cases a year. Maybe more.
It’s hard to conceive of 12 million people as a line of men, women, and children who need to be processed in some manner or other, many with particular needs and oddities of their cases, many with so-called “routine” cases, whatever they are. Imagine it as 120 Super Bowls, all being played at once. Crowds of 100,000 line up at 120 equivalents of the Rose Bowl around the country. Assume that each one of the newly legal wants to pay the cashier and be admitted to the game of being able to work legally in America. (For a moment we’ll leave aside the requirement that the applicant has to leave the country before applying.) But the cashier can’t just sell tickets.
The cashier has to inspect the papers of each of the 100,000 people standing in line to buy a ticket. The cashier has to run a background check on the ticket buyer, which is supposed to be done within 24 hours. The background check may involve the cashier in communications with towns and villages in foreign countries. The cashier has to do further investigations if something on the background check comes up spotty or incomplete. The cashier then has to ask the ticket buyer to get out of line and stand to one side. The cashier has to consider what will be done with the ticket buyer’s younger brother who is next in line, and with the ticket buyer’s 8 year old daughter, who also wants to go to the game and who was born in Pasadena. Can she be admitted without adult supervision while her father is waiting off to one side? And all this is repeated 100,000 times at the Rose Bowl, and there are 120 Rose Bowls around the country. How long do you think that would take before all could be admitted, given these procedures? 3 years, 5 years, 10 years?
And that’s if there were cashiers available today and they and their superivsors knew what to do. Here’s our point: there are no cashiers today, no supervisors. The bill puts in place zero cashiers on day one, and there is no Employment Manual for any that get hired on how to do the newly created tasks outlined in the bill. And yet, the moment the bill is signed, 12 million people, or 100,000 people lined up at 120 Rose Bowls around the country, have been told to expect that they can buy a ticket. What are the chances that they will be admitted without even buying a ticket, given the ridiculous situation the Senate bill sets up?
Forget the mockery of border law enforcement that is today’s sad story, and will continue to be so under this new law. The Senate immigration bill mocks itself, because it does not even take its own enforcement seriously.
Michelle Malkin has compiled an excellent list of the paperwork backlogs that already exist under the current system. Adding another 12 minllion to a paperwork backlog already numbering in the millions is an indication of how seriously Congress takes itsel in the matter of law enforcement versus the appearance of good intentions.
(This is a belated April Fool in a sense. This is what we wrote about how bad the 2007 bill was. Question: is enforcement likely to be any better under this new bill?)
The more you know about government finances, the harder it is to take the budget theater in Washington seriously. The president boasts that non-defense discretionary spending is at “its lowest level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration,” but that measure ignores about 81 cents out of every dollar Washington spends. The tiny reductions in spending growth imposed by the sequester have been for the most part shrugged off by the people, though they have produced a great deal of angst and wailing in Washington — not only from the politicians, but also from such private-sector beneficiaries as defense contractors. This is an almost entirely meaningless debate. The total fiscal overhang of our federal, state, and local governments — their combined debt and unfunded liabilities — is around $140 trillion, and growing. That is about twice the annual economic output of human civilization, and nearly the value of all the financial assets in the world. It is something close to a mathematical certainty that those debts and obligations will not be made good on at their present value. The real debate for the next 30 years is not how we go about paying our bills, but how we go about not paying them.
Of course the deficits are unfinanceable. If the professoriat and the media could give up believing in utter nonsense, we could make things a lot better by fully exploiting our oil and gas resources and privatizing everything in government that business does better. Oh well, dream on!
more than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried. That is census data, from census demographers, from the very government that then becomes responsible for many, if not most, of those unmarried women and children. If that isn’t an astonishing statistic, it should be.
From bad to worse. Melanie Phillips has more.
Roger Simon remembers when the Washington Post became famous:
We are in a fascinating period of unraveling. Whistleblowers in the defense community are appearing. I’m sure at State, some are looking over their shoulders, waiting for the “Night of the Long Knives” to begin. It probably has already. How far will it go? We will soon, no doubt, be in the period of “limited hangouts.” (The attempt by Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, to play the “Benghazi happened a long time ago” dodge on Wednesday arguably fits this definition.) Who will be the John Dean, the Erlichman, and Haldeman? Is “Deep Benghazi Throat” talking at this moment? While we are making Watergate analogies, it’s worth noting this is far worse than that noxious moment in American history or the other recent impeachment episode — Clinton. In the former, some dumb zealots broke into the campaign headquarters of the opposition party in an election that wasn’t remotely close. Nevertheless, the paranoid Nixon destroyed himself by trying to cover up the idiocy. Clinton wagged his finger at us and lied about sex under oath, while his wife — an important figure in Benghazi where she has already been caught dissimulating — similarly lied by publicly blaming her husband’s philandering on the “great right-wing conspiracy.” (What power!) Creepy behavior all around and certainly nothing remotely presidential, but, compared to Benghazi, no one died or was even injured. As far as I know, no one even stubbed a toe. Benghazi, on the contrary, was an important battle in the Global War on Terror, which has now reached our shores more than once. It will undoubtedly do so again. Those who take this casually in the slightest are conscious or unconscious traitors or fools — or so self-interested as to be beneath contempt.
Meanwhile, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and two others will testify before Congress this week:
Hicks was in Tripoli at 9:40 p.m. local time when he received one of Stevens’ earliest phone calls amid the crisis. “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” the ambassador reportedly shouted into his cellphone at Hicks. Chaffetz, who subsequently debriefed Hicks, also said the deputy “immediately called into Washington to trigger all the mechanisms” for an inter-agency response. “The real-life trauma that he went through…I mean, I really felt it in his voice. It was hard to listen to. He’s gone through a lot, but he did a great job.”
It was obvious what had happened at Benghazi from the very beginning. The cover-up was pathetic, and only worked because the media actively assisted in it. Because the cover-up is so inept, it requires that enormous pressure now be put on both the whistleblowers and the media, and the Chicago Way certainly knows how to do that. The most interesting thing will be to see if anyone in the media choir defects.
CBS seems to be doing a little of that.
Obama won “Young voters” (18-29) by 24 points (60% to 36%). These folks were 19% of total voters. Obama won “Young middle aged voters” (30-44) by 7 points (52% to 45%). These folks were 26% of total voters.
Romney won “Middle-aged voters” (45-59) by 5 points (52% to 47%). These were 29% of voters. Romney won “Older voters” (60+) by 9 points (54% to 45%). These were 25% of voters.
So as you age you become more conservative. No news there. But the question is whether there has been a fundamental and irreversible shift among the young that will not undo itself as these people age. The 18-29 cohort is a lot more liberal than the 60+ group is conservative.
The Boomers were raised on the sturdy American values of the 1950′s, values largely in sync with many earlier generations. Vietnam created great incentives for the anti-war crowd to get graduate degrees and become professors, which many did. They’re the department heads for the more youthful voters. Meanwhile, illegitimacy has soared among the young, from negligible levels in the Boomers’ youth to 40-70% today. These are reasons to be pessimistic about the country’s future.
Some trends are self-limiting, however, and when the government runs out of other people’s money, we’ll see how many those trends are, and how radical the changes are. Radical changes do happen. A century ago the country enacted and then repealed Prohibition. In our time, we note that things seem to be coming to a head. There’s the crazy denial of what’s at the heart of terrorism. There’s a newly hysterical tone about those who even blandly take issue with today’s PC outlook. The denial and the hysteria are signs of weakness, not of strength. Brittle.
Add to the mix that the young have had it pretty easy by earth’s standards and haven’t so far been challenged like some generations by great wars, famines, plagues or depressions. It wasn’t that long ago that the Dow fell by almost 90% and life expectancy was half of what it is today. Things don’t look good if present trends among the young continue. But there are many reasons to think that some of the current excess is self-correcting. HT: Neo
We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, or inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case…we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.
We may live in a post-Judeo-Christian world but we don’t live in a post-hysteria world.
the U.S. was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants…the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them – 12 million – from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants…
any rational immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the U.S. by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out the numbers.
Thirty three million is like importing the entire population of Canada…if you’re black, look at it this way: the demographic clout it took you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsay Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40 percent of Americans who will be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to go nowhere?
Speaking of demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican Party would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by columnist Charles Krauthammer and other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency”
Meanwhile: Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) says the White House has helped keep the truth about the “extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet” from the public…“The smoking gun of the whole issue, which is when they saw hovering space craft in Wyoming and South Dakota over the ICBM missile silos that the missiles couldn’t work,” Gravel says.
An open letter from the Philosophy Department of SJSU to a Harvard professor:
We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours. Unfortunately, the move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university. We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice…
what kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard? Our very diverse students gain far more when their own experience is central to the course and when they are learning from our own very diverse faculty, who bring their varied perspectives to the content of courses that bear on social justice…
having our students read a variety of texts, perhaps including your own, is far superior to having them listen to your lectures. This is especially important for a digital generation that reads far too little. If we can do something as educators we would like to increase literacy, not decrease it…the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel…
Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities. Sincerely and in solidarity, The Department of Philosophy San Jose State University
Get a load of that second paragraph. Right out of Life of Julia. BTW, here are some of the other things the faculty are up to. HT: PL
Once again, this fellow Rubio and his team show themselves to be not ready for prime time. This NRO piece provides the sorry details on pages 370-394 of the bill he likes. The other day it was the E-Verify glitch. The other week it was the age of the earth. He seems to be a pleasant enough chap. But……. HT: PL
LAT:
Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services…hundreds of thousands of other hourly workers may also see smaller paychecks in the coming year because of this response to the federal healthcare law. The law exempts businesses with fewer than 50 full-time workers from this requirement to provide benefits. But big restaurant chains, retailers and movie theaters are starting to trim employee hours. Even colleges are reducing courses for part-time professors to keep their hours down and avoid paying for their health premiums. Overall, an estimated 2.3 million workers nationwide, including 240,000 in California, are at risk of losing hours as employers adjust
Golly gee, this is news, at least to the innumerate among us. The rest of us knew this years ago. But not the LAT. They reported the utopian propaganda put out by the government as if it were true. (Don’t think that a change in ownership can change the culture BTW.)
Via BOTW:
There was a recent survey of the top airports in the country — in the world, and there was not a single U.S. airport that came in the top 25. Not one. Not one U.S. airport was considered by the experts and consumers who use these airports to be in the top 25 in the world. I think Cincinnati Airport came in around 30th. What does that say about our long-term competitiveness and future? And so when folks say, well, there was some money in the FAA to deal with these furloughs — well, yeah, the money is this pool of funds that are supposed to try to upgrade our airports so we don’t rank in the bottom of industrialized countries when it comes to our infrastructure. And that’s what we’re doing — we’re using our seed corn short term.
Actually the head of the FAA sounds like a fool. The sequester resulted in ATC’s having one furlough day every two weeks. He’s apparently claiming that that tiny amount of money is material to “upgrading our airports.” How ridiculous is that? But he inadvertently making a compelling case to privatize everything the government does that the private sector can do better — get all that out of government spending. Oh wait, that wasn’t the head of the FAA.
Via BOTW:
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.
Noam Chomsky on Gitmo, via BOTW:
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.
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.
That’s the heart of the winning D coalition. Will the R’s now go and do something incredibly stupid to make sure they don’t benefit from the utopian madness of the current government? We’ll see.
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.
DC:
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!
The unimpressive Rubio is running for president as a celebrity. We’ve had just about enough of that. Chuck Schumer is no one’s celebrity, but he can outfox a fool three times before lunch.
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?