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Obama’s Immigration Policies: Instrumentalities of Change Displacement of American workers, suppression of wages and importation of new voters. Michael Cutler

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Prior to World War II the U.S. Department of Labor was charged with enforcing and administering our immigration laws. It was understood that flooding the U.S. labor pool with foreign workers would force American workers to compete with those foreign workers who would be willing to work for much lower wages. This would depress wages and cost many Americans their jobs.

The enforcement of our immigration laws played an important role in creating America’s unusually large and upwardly mobile middle class, which in turn, gave rise to “The American Dream.”

The authority for the enforcement and administration of our immigration laws was shifted to the Department of Justice during the Second World War when concerns shifted to enemy spies and saboteurs entering the United States.

For our enemies, going behind the “enemy lines” meant the borders of the United States whether they existed along our northern or southern borders, along our tens of thousands of miles of meandering coastline or even by entering the United States through international airports.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 the responsibility for the enforcement of our immigration laws was shifted from the Department of Justice to the newly created Department of Homeland Security- once again reaffirming the nexus between immigration and national security. However, under DHS the enforcement of our immigration laws was hobbled by splitting the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) into several unwieldy components and blending those components with other agencies.

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2016: Year of Decisions Freedom does not mean America writes you a blank check. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Next November’s election will decide more than who becomes president. It will establish whether the United States has shifted from its foundational ideals of limited government, personal freedom, citizen autonomy, and a robust foreign policy that serves America’s interests and security, to the European model of quasi-pacifist internationalism abroad, and a centralized, collectivist technocratic rule at home –– exactly what 2400 years of political philosophy has feared is the infrastructure of tyranny.

Barack Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform the United States,” but for all his malign changes and erosion of the Constitutional order, “fundamentally” remains a question-begging adverb. The unique circumstances of his election and re-election ––especially the desperate and misguided yearning for racial reconciliation to be achieved merely by voting –– question whether a critical mass of Americans agrees with that goal. High disapproval numbers in polls of Obamacare, the president’s foreign policy, and the man himself suggest not. But the election of Hillary Clinton would show that despite those opinions, a majority of Americans endorse the progressive Democrats’ agenda.

That agenda has been obvious for at least a century. It is predicated on political scientism, the false idea that human nature, motivation, and behavior, along with social and political order, can be understood “scientifically,” and thus manipulated and guided toward a more egalitarian world –– the “social justice” of so much progressive rhetoric. But such a program requires a technocratic, administrative elite housed in powerful government bureaucracies and agencies, walled off from direct accountability to and scrutiny by the people. The ensuing reduction of political freedom and autonomy necessary for top-down rule is compensated for by redefining political freedom as private hedonism –– the freedom to indulge the appetites, consume products and services, abort unwanted pregnancies, and choose whatever sexual identity one fancies.

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Obama Goes it Alone on Gun Control The Radical-in-Chief ignores the Constitution and the Jihadist threat. Joseph Klein

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Wiping away tears that eluded him when he spoke about the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, President Obama condemned congressional inaction in the face of gun violence during remarks he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday morning. The president vowed to fill in the void through executive action. The most egregious of these measures is a wholesale re-writing of the definition of what constitutes a “seller” in order to extend the reach of federal government control over all gun owners. Obama listed this as his top priority action, ahead of what he described as “smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books.”

Enforcing the laws already on the books is the responsibility of the executive branch. Making new laws or changing existing laws is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s reversal of his unconstitutional recess appointments and the judicial stay issued against his unconstitutional immigration amnesty executive orders. Obama gave little comfort to skeptics when he claimed in his White House remarks that “I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper.”

The proble

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University Policy: ‘Slight’ Neck-Touching Can Be ‘Sexual Battery’ By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

East Carolina University’s new sexual harassment policy declares that even “slight” neck-touching can be considered a form of “sexual battery” and deserving of punishment.

According to the school’s new “Regulation on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Other Forms of Interpersonal Violence” rules, which went into effect on Jan. 1, “sexual battery includes the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person’s clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent,” “however slight” that touching may be.

Of course, no one wants to deal with some creep coming up to her and rubbing on her neck and making grunting sounds and smacking his lips or something. But where is the line drawn? What if someone picks a piece of fuzz off of my turtleneck and I decide that they seemed sexually aroused by it? Does how I say I felt about it determine whether or not it was sexual battery?

Or is it about whether or not the person with the neck looked uncomfortable with it being touched? If so, would what Joe Biden did to Ash Carter’s wife be considered sexual battery? What about when George W. Bush touched Angela Merkel at that G8 summit? Was that really just a funny little awkward moment, or was it in fact a violent, disturbing incident of battery that was caught on tape and should have led to him being punished if not impeached?

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The Showdown in the South China Sea A plan to keep Beijing from ruling the the Spratly Islands. By Arthur L. Herman

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

On January 3, a Chinese plane touched down on a remote island airfield where, two years ago, there was no island, let alone any airfield — only a lonely stretch of reef in the South China Sea. That reef in the Spratly Islands, known as Yongshu Jiao to China and Fiery Cross Reef to everyone else, has become the eye of an international diplomatic storm.

At issue is who owns the Spratlys, a collection of reefs, rocks, and tiny islets; no fewer than six governments (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the Sultanate of Brunei) claim sovereignty over part or — in China’s case — all of them.

Fiery Cross, for example, is partly claimed by Vietnam, which has dubbed the Chinese-built airfield “illegal” and the plane landing as “a serious infringement of the sovereignty of Vietnam on the Spratly archipelago.”

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman shot back, “China has indisputable sovereignty” over the Spratlys, which Beijing calls the Nansha Islands, as well as “their adjacent waters,” and that “China will not accept the unfounded accusation from the Vietnamese side.”

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Preventing the Seriously Mentally Ill from Owning Guns Is Not Enough By D. J. Jaffe

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

As part of his effort to reduce gun violence, President Obama issued an executive order today that makes it easier to prohibit a small group of the most seriously mentally ill from owning firearms and provides $500 million in additional mental-health funding. The order’s mental-illness–focused gun-control provisions are smart and narrowly tailored to affect only the most seriously ill individuals. But its additional funding won’t go where it could make a difference.

The mental-health industry teaches the public­ that, as President Obama put it, ‘the mentally ill are not more violent than others.’ But that platitude does not apply to the most seriously ill when they are allowed to go untreated. Eighteen percent of the population has some form of “mental-health issue” and is not violent. But 4 percent of the population has serious mental illness, which, left untreated, causes them to be more violent than others. While gun violence is rare, and mass violence by the seriously ill is even rarer, no one outside the NRA and the politically correct mental-health industry believes the seriously mentally ill should have access to weapons.

POLITICS Comments turned off

If Marco Rubio Is ‘Establishment’ Then ‘Establishment’ Has Lost Its Meaning By David French

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

I must confess that I’m confused. I still have vivid memories of the tea-party revolution of 2010, when insurgent conservative candidates toppled incumbents and establishment favorites from coast to coast. This was the year of Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

Perhaps most momentous of all, it was the year of Marco Rubio, who overcame long odds to beat Charlie Crist, a man who’s since proven himself to be exactly the kind of soulless politician the tea party exists to oppose. Since his election, Rubio has delivered, becoming one of the most consistent and eloquent conservatives in the Senate. My colleague, Jim Geraghty, has outlined his stratospheric ratings from the American Conservative Union, National Rifle Association, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council.

In fact, Rubio is largely responsible for the single most effective legislative attack on Obamacare, a move that the New York Times bemoaned in a piece last month:

A little-noticed health care provision that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.

So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

By blocking bailouts of insurance companies, he’s preventing the White House from passing even more of the costs of Obamacare to taxpayers and forcing insurers to live with the true price of the law.

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The Term ‘Neocon’ Has Run Its Course By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

In interviews and on the stump, Senator Ted Cruz likes to attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.

Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up helping terrorists or extremists.

He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the word “neocon.” What does he really mean?

Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former George W. Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush adviser calls the term “a dog whistle.”

I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya. There’s little daylight between the two presidential contenders on foreign policy, and this gives Cruz an opening for attack.

But Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for many people “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. It’s an absurd distortion.

At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic-policy journal.

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Desperate, Dishonest Donald Trump Goes Birther on Ted Cruz By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

You knew it was coming!

Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the Texas senator vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic.

This is how Donald Trump operates: whenever he’s threatened by someone in the polls, he tries to smear his opponents. He did so with Dr. Ben Carson, calling him pathological, and he now does the same with Ted Cruz by trying to convince voters he isn’t eligible to become president because he wasn’t born in the United States.

Sadly for the billionaire businessman, however, there is one minor problem: in September of last year he admitted that Cruz is eligible:

From what I understand everything is fine. I hear that it [Cruz’s eligibility] was checked out by every attorney, in every which way, and I understand that Ted is in fine shape.

As Mark Levin says: “Oh my.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Ted Cruz’s Surge is Real: Now Leads in California By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz not only leads in Iowa, but also in California:

A new Field Poll in California finds Ted Cruz has surged ahead of his GOP presidential rivals with 25%, followed by Donald Trump at 23%, Marco Rubio at 13%, Ben Carson at 9%, Rand Paul at 6%, and Jeb Bush at 4%.

And that isn’t the only good news in this poll for Cruz. It also shows that he’s now twice as likely to be GOP voters’ second choice. This means that he will continue to surge if (or when) some of his rivals get out of the race, which they’ll undoubtedly do once they lose (big-time) in Iowa.

Cruz’s surge comes despite relentless attacks from his rivals for the Republican nomination and establishment-friendly columnists like the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.

And that proves that 2016 will be different from other years. Until this election season, negative attacks from establishmentarians against real conservatives were always successful, which is how moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney ended up being the Republican nominee. Not anymore. The establishment tried to take out Donald Trump, which only resulted in him rising in the polls. Now they’re going after Cruz, and the results are the same. He’s stronger than ever before and actually seems to be relishing the attacks.