Monthly Archives: May 2015

The 5th Circuit and “Immigration”

Posted on by
Reply

Recall President Barack Obama’s DAPA program—Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents—which he created by Executive…action…and which allows illegal aliens to register for work, get that work, obtain driver’s licenses, and otherwise avoid the consequences of their illegal entry into the US. Last February a Federal District Judge issued an injunction blocking implementation of DAPA and the creation of government bodies whose purpose would have been that implementation. The injunction was to last until the underlying suit, brought by 26 States, was itself adjudicated.

The 5th Circuit upheld that injunction, ruling in part,

The states have shown that “issuance of the stay will substantially injure” them. A stay would enable DAPA beneficiaries to apply for driver’s licenses and other benefits, and it would be difficult for the states to retract those benefits or recoup their costs even if they won on the merits. That is particularly true in light of the district court’s findings regarding the large number of potential beneficiaries, including at least 500,000 in Texas alone.

But that was the purpose of Obama’s action: to bring these folks in, with actual amnesty (not even the light punishment that too many on the right bleat about being amnesty), permanently.

And

The government identifies several important interests: it claims a stay would improve public safety and national security, provide humanitarian relief to the family members of citizens and lawful permanent residents, and increase tax revenue for state and local governments. To the contrary, however, and only by way of example, on March 16, 2015, the Attorney General, in opposing a motion to stay removal in an unrelated action, argued to this very panel that “granting a stay of removal…would impede the government’s interest in expeditiously…controlling immigration into the United States.” Presumably, by referring to “the government’s interest,” the United States is referring to “the public interest.”

Presumably, no sarcasm was intended by that last….

Never mind that DoJ has been caught—again—talking out of both sides of its collective mouth.

On the matter of Obama’s infamous “prosecutorial discretion,” the court offered this:

DAPA’s version of deferred action, however, is more than nonenforcement: it is the affirmative act of conferring “lawful presence” on a class of unlawfully present aliens. … “[A]lthough prosecutorial discretion is broad, it is not ‘unfettered.'” Declining to prosecute does not convert an act deemed unlawful by Congress into a lawful one and confer eligibility for benefits based on that new classification.

The court’s ruling can be seen here.

PRC Aggression

Posted on by
Reply

Beijing on Tuesday defended its building work in the Spratlys, saying the activity was comparable to construction of homes and roads on the mainland. “From the perspective of sovereignty, there is absolutely no difference,” Senior Colonel Yang Yujun, spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry, said at a news briefing.

To an extent, that’s a true statement. However internally logical Yang’s remark is, though, it proceeds from a false premise: there is no PRC sovereignty over the Spratlys, or anywhere else in the South (or East) China Sea. The grab here is naked aggression.

Local Charity

Posted on by
Reply

There doesn’t seem to be such a concept at PS 120 in Flushing, NY. The grade school held a carnival for its kindergarten through fifth grade classes, around 900 of its students were allowed to go—and an additional 100 were kept cooped up in the school’s auditorium, instead, with the shouts of fun from the carnival just outside plainly audible to them.

The price of attendance was $10, and those 100 were poor students whose parents couldn’t afford the $10; not having paid, those kids were barred from the carnival. Contributing to the thing is the fact that many of those parents are Chinese immigrants who, perhaps, missed the fact that a fee was charged. Let’s discount that, though; there did seem to be adequate notice of the fee.

The rationale for singling out some kids and denying them their fun at the carnival? Principle Joan Monroe, according to Frank Chow, president of the parents association, said,

It’s not fair to the kids’ parents who paid.

The purpose of the fund-raising carnival? Pre-K, kindergarten, and fifth-grade moving-up parties—it’s all for partying. The carnival made two-three thousand dollars in profit, which will make for some pretty rich grade school parties. The money isn’t even going toward school supplies, school equipment, or its physical plant, apparently. Just partying, with no lasting results.

Not fair to the ones who paid? Will the kids whose parents didn’t contribute to the graduation party money be barred from those graduation parties, too?

Never mind that $1,000 of those profits would have covered the kids whose parents didn’t, regardless of the reason, pay.

Fairness depends on how the payments and the purpose of the monies were advertised. And it would have been an interesting experiment: how much money would have been collected with a different purpose presented? Could all the kids have attended on the funds raised?

This is the sort of thing local charity is about.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

Posted on by
Reply

Jeffrey Goldberg drew it out of President Barack Obama in Goldberg’s interview with Obama for a piece in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, Goldberg didn’t pursue it, perhaps because he has the same misconceived notion. The misunderstanding is about Iran; here is the core of the exchange that demonstrates Obama’s error.

Goldberg: Stay with Iran for one more moment. I just want you to help me square something. So you’ve argued, quite eloquently in fact, that the Iranian regime has at its highest levels been infected by a kind of anti-Semitic worldview. …you’ve argued that people who subscribe to an anti-Semitic worldview, who explain the world through the prism of anti-Semitic ideology, are not rational, are not built for success, are not grounded in a reality that you and I might understand. And yet, you’ve also argued that the regime in Tehran—a regime you’ve described as anti-Semitic, among other problems that they have—is practical, and is responsive to incentive, and shows signs of rationality. So I don’t understand how these things fit together in your mind.

Obama: Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.

There is Obama’s error in all its glory. The “you” here aren’t the Iranian people, they’re the Iranian government leadership, men such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. The concerns of the Iranian people related to survival or keeping an economy afloat don’t matter. Nor does any concern for power on the part of the Iranian people.

What matters is what matters to those men of the Iranian government—Khamenei, Rouhani, et al. And those men don’t care about the Iranian economy beyond getting the wherewithal to build nuclear weapons. Those men don’t care particularly about their survival or staying in power beyond using those nuclear weapons. Those men have only one goal, and it’s been their goal and that of their predecessors for over 35 years: destroy Israel. And, hopefully, destroy us. It is the men of the Iranian government who say Israel must be wiped from the map; it is Khamenei who demands the destruction of Israel and chants, during negotiations over their nuclear weapons program, “Of course yes, death to America….”

It’s also these men who likely will die in a nuclear attack on Israel and the response to that mass murder, along with too many of the Iranian people. But that’s an outcome devoutly to be wished from Khamenei’s and Rouhani’s perspective: that’s martyrdom and the path to Heavenly glory. Yes, those men are entirely rational, and every move they’ve made has been consistent with attaining their primary goal. A goal and a cost of which Obama has not the first minim of a clue.

It’s going to be a long and dangerous year and a half. And the Democrats’ proposed replacement for after those 18 months has already failed to answer her own three am phone call.

The Iraqi “Army”

Posted on by
1

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iraqi’s pseudo-defense of Ramadi, that the Iraqi army hasn’t the will to fight.

The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact they vastly outnumbered the opposing force and yet they failed to fight and withdrew from the site… We can give them training, we can give them equipment. We obviously can’t give them the will to fight.

They cut and ran, abandoning that American-supplied equipment, small arms and vehicles among it, to the Daesh and abandoning the city and its remaining residents to those terrorists.

Hakim al Zamili, of the Iraqi Parliament’s Sadrist movement (you remember al Sadr) and chairman of the Security and Defense Committee, objected to that characterization.

The Iraqi army and police did have the will to fight [the] IS group in Ramadi, but these forces lack good equipment, weapons, and aerial support.

No, Hakim, Carter was being generous. Your Iraqi “army” is an insult to armies everywhere; in Ramadi they were stinking cowards who ran away. They wouldn’t fight to defend themselves, or their fellow soldiers, not even their families somewhere else. Here was the fight, and they shrank from it.

The reason they lacked “good equipment, weapons” is because they, once again, abandoned them and left them for the Daesh. Air support? As an American general said in an earlier war, they don’t need air support; they need to fight. The Daesh had no air support, they needed no air support for their inferior numbers to run your “army” out of the city.

No, it’s time for the US to stop using the Iraq Army Transfer Facility to arm and equip Daesh. We should, instead, arm and train—directly—the Kurds and the Sunni and Shiite militias. These are the ones who have the heart to fight, these are the ones who have the skill to fight, these are the ones who have an actual track record of success against the Daesh.

Redirecting our arms and training also would give us an opportunity to turn the Shiite militias away from Iran.