J's Cafe Nette

Archive for August 10th, 2007

From Politico and AP News Myway comes basically the same story that the Bush Administration is preparing to finally get serious about the borders of our country and the illegal immigrant problem.

Since Politico has more information I’ll quote from it:

The administration is unveiling a series of tough border control and employer enforcement measures designed to make up for security provisions that failed when Congress rejected a broad rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws in June. The plans are scheduled to be announced at 10:30 a.m. by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.

Details were provided to Capitol Hill on Thursday. As part of the new measures, the secretary of Homeland Security will deliver regular “State of the Border” reports beginning this fall.

In one of the most interesting revelations, the plans call for the administration to “train growing numbers of state and local law enforcement officers to identify and detain immigration offenders whom they encounter in the course of daily law enforcement,” according to a summary provided to The Politico by a congressional source.

…

As part of the package, Bush is planning to increase muscle at the Mexican border, as conservatives have long pleaded. “The administration will add more border personnel and infrastructure, going beyond previously announced targets,” according to the summary. “The Departments of State and Homeland Security will expand the list of international gangs whose members are automatically denied admission to the U.S.”

…

“The Department of Homeland Security will raise the civil fines imposed on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants by approximately 25 percent,” the summary continues. “The administration will continue its aggressive expansion of criminal investigations against employers who knowingly hire large numbers of illegal aliens.”

The administration is promising to reduce processing times for immigration background checks by adding agents and converting paper documentation to electronic forms. And the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration say they will study and report on the technical and recordkeeping changes necessary to deny credit in our Social Security system for illegal work.

Under the tougher menu, the administration vows to fund additional beds for people caught breaching the border, ensuring that illegal entrants are returned to Mexico rather than being let go because there’s no space for them, as often occurred in the past.

“The administration will implement an exit requirement at airports and seaports by the end of 2008, and will launch a pilot land-border exit system for guest workers,” the summary says. “By the end of 2008, the administration will require most arrivals at our ports-of-entry to use passports or similarly secure documents.”

It sounds like they are finally going to enforce existing law, which is what we’ve been asking for all along.

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I could have told you that without a poll.

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don’t care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.
And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news — roughly one quarter of all Americans — were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

More than half — 53 percent — of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for “failing to stand up for America”.

Among those who get their news from newspapers and television, criticism of the news organizations was up to 20 percentage points lower than among Internet news audiences, who tend to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole, according to Pew.

The poll indicates an across the board fall in the public’s opinion on the news media since 1985, when a similar survey was conducted by Times Mirror, Pew Research said.

Captain Ed is blogging on this too with the Pew data included as a link.

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This story was written By Rex Rhoades. He was actually there. It’s worth reading.

One-child policy has curbed China’s population, but it has also produced millions of orphans.

The blue-suited police officers were inside the orphanage when our team from L-A College arrived. They had just walked in with a cardboard box containing a week-old infant girl, perhaps abandoned in response to China’s strict population control policies.

It’s a scene that’s been repeated countless times across China over the past 25 years since adoption of the nation’s controversial “one-child” policy.

But it’s really an ancient story rooted in Chinese culture and economic realities.

For many centuries China had been plagued by periodic famines and starvation. Usually, this resulted from poor weather or floods, but in 1959 and 1960, millions of Chinese also starved to death when an attempt by Mao Tse-tung to collectivize farms went awry. Private farm ownership was eliminated, and farm families were forced into thousands of communes.

It was a tragic failure.

But the repeated shortages of food were also worsened by two simple facts: In China, about 22 percent of the world’s people live on 7 percent of the world’s arable land.

In the late 1970s, Chinese leaders realized that with such a high fertility rate (the average Chinese woman was bearing about six children in her lifetime), the country’s population could quickly – and catastrophically – outstrip its ability to produce food.

So, in 1979, Chinese leadership embarked on an ambitious program of economic growth and birth control.

And, they have succeeded on both fronts. China’s fertility rate is now about 1.7 children per woman, and its economy has been the fastest growing in the world.

The Chinese government estimates that its policies have prevented 250 to 300 million births.

Story

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Although Hispanics are still largely Democrats that seems to be changing as the generations progress.

More Latinos are registering as Independents or even Republicans than before.

LOS ANGELES — Democrats hold an edge with Hispanics in national elections, but Latinos’ growing tendency to register as independents and split their vote between parties is buoying Republican prospects for 2008.

Younger and college-educated Hispanics in particular offer fertile ground for Republicans, new data shows. And while no one suggests Republicans have become the party of choice for the United States’ fastest-growing minority, Democrats have been gradually losing ground.

“The Democrats began in the 1980s to slowly lose Latino registration,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a San Antonio-based research group that studies Hispanic issues. “It’s drip, drip, drip.”

…

Although Hispanics tend to vote Democratic, the percentage of Latinos who call themselves Democrats has declined in the last decade, even as the overall number of Hispanic voters climbed.

In California — home to the country’s largest Hispanic population and a key state for the 2008 presidential election — nearly two of three Hispanic voters were registered Democrats in the mid-1990s. By 2006, that figure dropped as low as 56 percent, according to polling and registration data.

Research last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Hispanics in California are about equally divided among those who describe themselves as conservative, liberal and moderate.

And many Hispanic voters are choosing no party at all.

…

Democratic pollster Andre Pineda, who is advising New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign, conducted research after the November 2006 elections that identified a generational shift in Hispanic voter patterns.

Pineda said Hispanic immigrants who become citizens and register to vote become Democrats in nearly 70 percent of the cases, with Republican registration at 18 percent. In the next generation, Democratic registration drops to 56 percent and Republican registration increases to 25 percent. By the third U.S.-born generation, Democratic and Republican registration among Hispanics is nearly equal.

While newer arrivals to the United States feel more strongly about immigration issues, subsequent generations share the concerns of Main Street America — the war, taxes, education, crime, he said.

“We need to … make our case on those issues, otherwise we are going to lose them,” Pineda said.

Republican polling in the California governor’s race last year found that college-educated Hispanics who make more than $60,000 a year are more receptive to Republican ideas than are those with less education and income.

It seems this is one bloc of voters the parties will not be able to take for granted, and remember, they are the largest growing segment of our country right now.

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Stu Byofsky has an op-ed up at Philly.com (Philadelphia Daily News) saying it will take another 9/11 to bring our country back together again.

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.
What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically – thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq – that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O’Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness.

Most Americans today believe Iraq was a mistake. Why?

Not because Americans are “anti-war.”

Americans have turned their backs because the war has dragged on too long and we don’t have the patience for a long slog. We’ve been in Iraq for four years, but to some it seems like a century. In contrast, Britain just pulled its soldiers out of Northern Ireland where they had been, often being shot at, almost 40 years.

That’s not the American way.

In Iraq, we don’t believe our military is being beaten on the battleground. It’s more that there is no formal “battleground.” There is the drip of daily casualties and victory is not around the corner. Americans are impatient. We like fast food and fast war.

Americans loved the 1991 Gulf War. It raged for just 100 hours when George H.W. Bush ended it with a declaration of victory. He sent a half-million troops into harm’s way and we suffered fewer than 300 deaths.

America likes wars shorter than the World Series.

Bush I did everything right, Bush II did everything wrong – but he did it with the backing of Congress.

Because the war has been a botch so far, Democrats and Republicans are attacking one another, when they aren’t attacking themselves. The dialog of discord echoes across America.

Turn back to 9/11.

Remember the community of outrage and national resolve? America had not been so united since the first Day of Infamy – 12/7/41.

We knew who the enemy was then.

We knew who the enemy was shortly after 9/11.

Because we have mislaid 9/11, we have endless sideshow squabbles about whether the surge is working, if we are “safer” now, whether the FBI should listen in on foreign phone calls, whether cops should detain odd-acting “flying imams,” whether those plotting alleged attacks on Fort Dix or Kennedy airport are serious threats or amateur bumblers. We bicker over the trees while the forest is ablaze.

I’ve quoted most of the article because I think it’s a worthy read, and to an extent I agree with him, unfortunately.

Remember how united our citizens and Congress were after 9/11? We had our Congressmen and Senators on the Capitol steps (a presumed target of the terrorists) singing “God Bless America” and resolved to do whatever it took to beat back this enemy.

Our president told us this would be a long war that would not be a conventional war with conventional enemies. The enemy we have does not wear a uniform, but smiles to our faces while he sets IEDs to explode our vehicles and kill our soldiers and any civilians who happen to be in the way.

Some in Congress look at this from only a political view and wonder how it can help them and their party.

It’s gone so far that Congressman Clyburn of SC, the Democratic Whip in the House has stated if the Petraeus report is fairly positive about the surge (and we are reading articles by AP and Brookings Institution think tank people it is) that it would be bad news for the Democrats.

Why would winning or making progress toward peace in Iraq be bad news for anyone? It is only if your entire political campaign is based on us losing the peace there.

Let there be no mistake: We won the war in a matter of days. It’s the peace that is elusive and we have to leave with the country stable enough to defend itself or our efforts will have been in vain.

I know not everyone agrees with me, but that’s what I think and I really believe it.

I don’t want to test the theory it will take another 9/11 to bring us back together. I want our politicians to do things for the right reasons and those reasons do not include how it will help them get re-elected.

I’d actually love to see all 435 House seats get reversed and replaced with all new Congressmen who have no dog in this fight and will do what is right for our country. Then go home and live under the laws they pass, just as our Founders envisioned.

Captain Ed is blogging this story too.

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This is an editorial by ROGER PILON who is a Republican and no friend to Democrats. It’s an interesting read.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, especially for the dying. On Tuesday the D.C. Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed a 15-month-old decision by a panel of the court that had recognized a constitutional right of terminally ill patients to access potentially life-saving drugs not yet finally approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Given the poor quality of Tuesday’s opinion in Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Eschenbach — “startling,” said the dissent — one wonders why it took so long. The opinion’s one virtue is that it brings out clearly how far modern “constitutional law” has strayed from the Constitution, a document written to protect liberty, not federal regulatory schemes.

Represented by the Washington Legal Foundation, Abigail Alliance is named for Abigail Burroughs, a 21-year-old college student who died of cancer in 2001. Their argument could not be more simple or straightforward, nor could Tuesday’s dissent, written by Judge Judith Rogers and joined by Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg, the majority in the earlier opinion. Citing the Fifth Amendment’s right to life, the Ninth Amendment’s assurance to the Constitution’s ratifiers that the rights retained by the people far exceed those named in the document, and the Supreme Court’s “fundamental rights” jurisprudence, Judge Rogers argued that the right to life, the right to self-preservation, and the right against interference with those rights — which the FDA is guilty of — are of one piece. They are deeply rooted in common law and the nation’s history and traditions, implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, and thus “fundamental.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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This is an awful hard subject for me. I just don’t understand how you can charge someone with murder that is fighting a war.

A US general has dismissed all charges against two marines accused in the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, including women and children, the Marine Corp said yesterday.
Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, 22, was charged with murdering three brothers. Captain Randy Stone, 35, a battalion lawyer, was charged with failing to adequately report and investigate the November 19 2005 incident.

The episode is seen as potentially one of the gravest abuses by US forces in the Iraq war. The dead included elderly people, women and children as young as three and one. Several of the victims were killed in their beds.

In dropping the charges, Lieutenant General James Mattis, the general with jurisdiction in the case, said he was sympathetic to the challenges marines face in Iraq.

“Where the enemy disregards any attempt to comply with ethical norms of warfare, we exercise discipline and restraint to protect the innocent caught on the battlefield,” Gen Mattis wrote in his letter to Corp Sharratt.

The decision to drop the charges against the two marines followed earlier recommendations by investigating officers who listened to the evidence against them, though it was recommended that Capt Stone face an administrative hearing.

Four enlisted marines were initially charged with murder, and four officers were charged with failing to investigate the episode. Prosecutors dropped charges against one of the enlisted men, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz, and gave him immunity to testify against his squad mates.

The central figure in the case remains squad leader Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who faces 18 counts of murder and is scheduled to attend a preliminary hearing later this month.

The other enlisted marine, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, has attended a preliminary hearing but no recommendation has been made about whether he should stand trial for murder.

Story

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Can it get any more pathetic?

This weekend, Americans will see images of voters emerging from polling booths proudly displaying their purple-stained thumbs as a mark of pride after their democratic effort.

The images will not be beamed from Baghdad, though, but from Ames, Iowa, where Republicans will gather for an annual straw poll. This year’s straw poll will be the first to have voters dip their thumbs in the same kind of dye used in the 2005 national elections in Iraq.

“We recognize the great privilege of voting by tipping our hat to the Iraqi people who cast their first votes in a free and democratic election,” Chuck Laudner, the Iowa Republican Party’s executive director, said in a news release. “Iowans will be just as proud to display their inked thumb as the newly liberated Iraqi people were.”

Story

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They caved and that’s all that matters. I hope that these democrats loose in their next primaries. This is an editorial by E.J. Dionne Jr.

Shortly before noon last Saturday, about 20 House Democrats huddled in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to decide what to do about a surveillance bill that had been dumped on them by the Senate before it left town.

Many of the Democrats were furious. They believed they had negotiated in good faith with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence. They sought to give the Bush administration the authority it needed to intercept communications involving foreign nationals in terrorism investigations while preserving some oversight.

But the administration held out for granting McConnell and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales more power while seriously circumscribing the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Senate’s Democratic leadership, lacking the votes to pass a measure more to the House’s liking, gave the administration what it wanted.

At one point, according to participants in the Pelosi meeting, the passionate discussion veered toward the idea of standing up to the administration — even at the risk of handing President Bush a chance to bash Democrats on “national security,” as is his wont.

Several members from swing districts — including Reps. Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Patrick J. Murphy of Pennsylvania — expressed openness to having Congress stay in town to fight if important constitutional issues were at stake.

But the moment passed. Even some very liberal Democrats worried about the political costs of blocking action before the summer recess. That Saturday night, the House sent the president a bill that, as a disgusted Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) put it, with just a touch of exaggeration, “makes Alberto Gonzalez the sheriff, the judge and the jury.”

Most Democrats opposed the bill, but 41 (including Shuler) voted yes, allowing it to pass. (Murphy remained passionately opposed.) The one Democratic victory: The legislation expires in six months, meaning the debate will resume this fall. But Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) warned his colleagues that “when you give up your rights under the Constitution, it is not likely you are going to regain them.”

The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.

Story

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I guess they didn’t please this crowd.

At the first-ever televised presidential forum devoted to gay rights issues, the Democratic front-runners, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), were sharply questioned on why they do not support same-sex marriage, while the two joined the other candidates in backing civil unions and the end of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military.

Obama said it is less important to focus on the semantics of the word “marriage” than to focus on equal rights, and Clinton — responding to a comment by singer Melissa Etheridge that gays were “thrown under the bus” during Bill Clinton’s administration — said “I am a leader now” on gay rights.

Activists were even more frustrated with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who when asked whether people are born gay or choose to be, said, “It’s a choice” and later explained, “I’m not a scientist.”

At the two-hour event in West Hollywood, Obama was asked several times why he would not back same-sex marriage, and he pledged to ensure that all same-sex couples have the same rights as married couples, the stance adopted by most of the Democrats.

“Semantics may be important to some,” he said, adding that if gay couples had equal rights, “then my sense is that’s enormous progress.”

The forum, organized by the Human Rights Campaign and Logo, a gay-themed television network operated by MTV, underscored the increasing importance of the constituency to the Democratic Party. When a similar forum was held in 2003, one of the top contenders, then-Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), did not attend, and the event was not televised.

This time, Edwards appeared, along with Obama and four other Democratic candidates who each spent more than 15 minutes taking questions from a four-person panel that included Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, and Etheridge.

When pressed on gay marriage, Edwards said, “My position on same-sex marriage has not changed.” He then used the question to challenge the Clinton administration on its approach to gay rights — and by implication to challenge his rival, Sen. Clinton. ” ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is not just wrong now, it was wrong when it began,” Edwards said.

Clinton took a stance similar to Edwards’s and Obama’s, not backing marriage but saying she wanted same-sex couples to have equal rights. She also said states were making better progress on gay rights than the federal government.

Story

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I wouldn’t leave a comment on this if my life depended on it. It’s an interesting read and something that each individual should decide for themselves, whether or not he is right.

President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn’t specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president’s top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran’s support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn’t clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.

For now, however, the president appears to have settled on a policy of stepped-up military operations in Iraq aimed at the suspected Iranian networks there, combined with direct American-Iranian talks in Baghdad to try to persuade Tehran to halt its alleged meddling.

Story

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