http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/carny-nation/print/ Come right in and step right up. See the bright lights and the oddities of nature. Inside folks, for the low price of twenty-two trillion dollars, you can see Binders of Women, Team Big Bird and entire reams of green windmills and fields full of bayonets and horses. Here lies become the truth and […]
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/11/08/State-Department-Games-The-Benghazi-Debacle The cover-up of what really happened in Benghazi continues: the State Department, responding to requests from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to release documents pertaining to the debacle, will make those records available for review only this Thursday and Friday. The problem is that most of the Senators are not in Washington and won’t […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203347104578100832574300740.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
What Have They Done to James Bond?
‘Skyfall’ gives us a kinder, gentler 007. Please, don’t shake or stir his beer.
James Bond, of all people, has turned metrosexual. “Skyfall,” the 23rd movie in the genre—directed by Sam Mendes and opening in theaters Friday—has somehow turned the all-encompassing man’s man into a kinder, gentler Bond.
There are still the casual killings and car chases, of course, but Bond has been shorn of that subtly menacing blend of sadism and political incorrectness that set him apart from Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt and all the other identikit espionage heroes. By making Bond less personally dangerous, and even hinting at a bisexual past, the guardians of his brand are undermining precisely what has made that brand so special. This is all the more astonishing since the first 22 Bond films cost $1.55 billion to make but made $10.41 billion at the box office.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578106721494547456.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion Barack Obama brings to 16 the number of presidents elected to a second term. The total is 18 if you include Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who were elected only once but had served nearly four years of a predecessor’s term. Mr. Obama would be well advised to consider the history of these second […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/11/08/republicans-slow-down-the-blame-game/ In yesterday’s “Bleary Eyes” post, I wondered whether evangelicals failed to turn out for Mitt Romney on Tuesday. The answer is no. My fellow evangelicals turned out and voted for him. His being a Mormon did not cost him a significant number of our votes. Allahpundit’s got the numbers. So evangelicals turned out and […]
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/07/if-you-believe-in-staples-clap-your-hands/?print=1 When Staples founder Tom Stemberg took a star spot at the Republican convention last August, the weakness in Mitt Romney’s message should have been obvious. The retailer’s price already had fallen by a third since March; a month later, Staples announced a 15% cut in its floor space and 3,200 layoffs. I don’t mean […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/11/08/the-wsj-v-romney/?singlepage=true
I’ve elsewhere addressed other shortcomings in this morning’s Wall Street Journal editorial urging Republicans to reassess what is portrayed, in the wake of strong Hispanic electoral support for President Obama, as their hostility to immigration. Here, I’d like to focus on the editors’ swipe at Mitt Romney’s endorsement of “self-deportation”:
… Mr. Romney … often pandered to his party’s nativist wing (especially after Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the primaries), even endorsing what he called “self-deportation.” That may have endeared him to one or two radio talk show hosts, but it proved a disaster on Tuesday.
This is an unworthy rebuke, as is the Journal‘s tired demagoguery that portrays any law-and-order argument on illegal immigration as both “nativist” and a call for “mass deportation” (see, e.g., today: “But the right response isn’t mass deportation—as politically infeasible as it is morally repulsive”). Nobody on the right is calling for mass deportation, any more than we are calling for a mass round-up of, say, cocaine users. Illegal immigration is not terrorism. Yes, it is against the law. But when a problem is merely illegal, as opposed to a threat to national security, the task of law-enforcement is to manage it in a manner commensurate with its relative seriousness, not attempt to extinguish it. To extinguish it would amount to punishment that does not fit the crime and a prohibitive expenditure of resources better allocated elsewhere.
That is why a well-ordered, just society is based on prosecutorial and sentencing discretion. We don’t require every crime to be prosecuted and every sentence to be harsh and definite. We try to put people of sound judgment in prosecutors’ offices and on the bench. We then trust them to make good decisions about whom to prosecute (going after cocaine importers and distributors instead of addicts, for example) and how to punish them within a broad range (selling a small amount of marijuana may merit a probation sentence even though the statute makes it punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment).
“Self-deportation,” so derided by the Journal, is exactly this sort of prudent, humane law-enforcement. The idea is to resist harassing those illegal immigrants who are not serious criminals with arrest, prosecution, imprisonment and deportation. Since enforcement resources are finite, you deport only the serious criminals (i.e., the illegal immigrants who violate laws besides the immigration laws) and you target enforcement resources at the businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants, since employment is the magnet for illegal immigration. This is to be pro-law and order, not anti-business or anti-immigrant: If businesses need the ability to hire foreign workers, you enact immigration laws that satisfy those needs. The idea is to promote legal immigration to the extent it helps our society. If employment prospects for illegal aliens are slim because employers are severely discouraged from illegal hiring, many illegal immigrants will self-deport — i.e., they will decide on their own that it is in their interest to go back home.
I find illegal immigration to be a vexing problem. Like most problems, it has been exacerbated by federalization. As I’ve previously argued (see, e.g., here), the framers left law-enforcement (including the expulsion of trespassers) to the states; the central government’s role was to set the qualifications for citizenship and protect the states from foreign invasion. If we went back to that, states could make their own immigration enforcement policies. Some would be hostile to non-citizens, some would be embracing, most would be in-between, and it would be much easier to adjust policies based on local employment and social conditions. This would be infinitely better than what we have now — for the states, the immigrants, and our public discourse.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/the_revenge_presidency_begins.html What’s with the revenge theme coming from two successful black multimillionaires? First it was Barack Obama. Now Beyonce has posted this vengeful message on her Tumblr account following Romney’s defeat: Take That Mitches Beyonce did delete this childish garble after a while but it still makes you wonder why a 32-year old pop star […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/reckoning?f=puball My friend was being too pessimistic – I thought.Months ago he said the country will continue its downward slide because those who depend on government have become the majority, and will always vote to keep those government benefits coming no matter what. Yes, those people who depend on government for everything are increasing, I […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-gops-present-dilemma A few years ago a friend of mine decided that he would try to climb a particularly difficult rock climb in New York’s Catskill mountains. As he described it, he reached a point where he had to carefully balance between his life-long fear of heights and his desire to not be found in skeleton […]
