Doug Ross @ Journal

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Larwyn's Linx: The Real Risks of Amnesty

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QOTD: "Harvard economist George Borjas has recently estimated that low-skilled American workers already suffer wage losses of $402 billion a year because of immigrant labor, a sum that does not include the costs to taxpayers of welfare paid to low-skill immigrant workers and their children. Amnesty proponents should explain how providing legal status to millions of illegal aliens will affect the job prospects of the poorest Americans." --Heather Mac Donald

Monday, June 17, 2013

YO, KARL ROVE: The 1986 Amnesty Bill Turned California Into the Closest Thing America Has to a Third World Country

Another phenomenal guest post culled from a comment at City Journal.

"What pragmatic assessment leads to thinking that the Simpson-Mazzoli 1986 amnesty program did anything bad? Anything at all?"

Let's see how many bad things came from that 1986 Amnesty. California is America's number one immigration state and the state most impacted by the IRCA (the 1986 Reagan Amnesty).

1. California once had the best public schools in America. Now they compete with Mississippi for the bottom. Sometimes they "win".

2. California once had the most affordable and best middle-class housing in America. Now it ranks at the bottom.

3. California once paid the highest real wages to workers of any state in the union. Now wages (adjusted for the local cost of living) are rock bottom.

4. California once had income inequality somewhat below the national average. Now it's far above the national average.

5. California once offered mobility to its people. Gridlock is now the norm.

6. California was once a place where Americans from every state could go looking for a better life. Now its a chamber of horrors that even illegal aliens flee.

The Los Angeles Times published a great story about how Amnesty and mass immigration wrecked the once great state of California.

U.S. immigrants' stories often are about reinvention and newfound prosperity, about leaving behind poverty and limitations... But that is not Magdaleno's story.

Both Magdaleno and Anzaldo are illegal immigrants, settled for years in an immigrant enclave. Magdaleno has the same number of children as her parents, who were peasant farmers in Mexico. Like her parents, she is living in poverty and struggling to provide for her family.

"It's not sweet," said her 36-year-old sister, Alejandra. "It's very sad. The life for girls back there in Mexico is the same as the one Angela has now. They marry and have children, and that's their lives."

Neither Magdaleno nor her husband speaks English, though she has been in the United States 22 years and he 28. Even her teenage daughters speak mostly Spanish; their English vocabulary is limited."

"As Angela was having children, her siblings were undergoing a transformation of a different kind. They were slowly leaving Los Angeles.

Her sister Alejandra was the first to leave. In Los Angeles, she and her husband were barely able to make ends meet. As in Mexico, "there was little work and it's poorly paid," she said.

Eight years ago, she and her family moved to Kentucky, where a friend said there was more work and were fewer Mexican immigrants bidding down the wages for unskilled jobs.

In Kentucky, Alejandra picked tobacco. The work was hard and she didn't know the language. But soon, life improved. Over the years, she invited her siblings to join her. One sister married a man who managed a Golden Corral, a chain of all-you-can-eat buffets. Soon several Magdaleno siblings were working in Golden Corrals. Their husbands found work installing windows and as farm-labor contractors. They went to night school to learn English because few people in Lexington speak Spanish.

Today, the Magdalenos in Lexington earn more than they did in Los Angeles, in a city where the cost of living is lower. Kentucky is now their promised land, and they talk about California the way they used to talk about Mexico.

"What we weren't able to do in many years in California," Alejandra said, "we've done quickly here.

"We're in a state where there's nothing but Americans. The police control the streets. It's clean, no gangs. California now resembles Mexico -- everyone thinks like in Mexico. California's broken."

If illegal aliens can recognize that mass immigration has "broken" California, it should be possible for you to make the same intellectual leap.

Hat tip: BadBlue News.

"If they pass an immigration bill that even remotely resembles this one, we can say goodbye to the GOP"

Guest post by the Commenter

Nothing better illustrates the divide between the Republican establishment and the base than this issue. Health care, taxes, abortion, gay marriage, all are small change compared to immigration. The GOP leadership's failure to understand this is practically inexplicable.

I still maintain that the GOP leadership has a very small constituency - these people could not win an election without the GOP rank and file and the independents who have basically walked away from the Party due to the leadership's continued bungling and missteps. That is another story - how the GOP leadership has caused so many people in the Party to leave in disgust. Although that started with Bush's out of control spending, it really got rolling with Bush's amnesty plan.

Bush's approval rating went to 13% when he got behind amnesty. Rank and file Republicans, who are so much more conservative than the leadership, see this issue as a matter of right and wrong, and they clearly viewed Bush as wrong. And, as a direct result of this issue more than anything else, they stayed home in 2006, and again in 2008.

These people simply never learn - it is maddening.

In fact, Bush basically lost any ability to run the country after pushing amnesty. He literally tore apart the party. Many people forget that the country was on a path to a permanent conservative majority in 2000. Bush more or less single-handedly changed the direction of the nation with bone-headed move after bone-headed move - starting with his inexplicable failure to rein in spending. I mean, wasn't the guy a Republican? Aren't we for limited government?

You can read Rove's book in order to gain a good understanding of the foregoing. Karl "Deficits Don't Matter" Rove blames Republicans in Congress, but that is a very thin excuse indeed since Bush did nothing about it and enthusiastically joined in the spending spree. In fact, his book proves how completely disconnected both Rove and Bush were from any notion of conservative values. Bush was given a great trust by the American people, and he blew it in the worst way. But his spending pales in comparison to his destruction of the conservative majority by pressing ahead with amnesty.

But it was also Bush's inability or unwillingness to respond to Democratic media critics, leaving it to those of us who knew the Democrats were more than able to use their powerful control of the media, as well as their ability then and now to set the nation's agenda. This ineptitude destroyed Bush's Presidency and his party.

I've never forgiven Bush, and never will forgive him, for the foregoing - I could care less that he is supposedly a decent man. After all the guy more or less set us on a path to what we have today. The election of Obama is more than anything else the result of Bush and Rove's arrogance, blindness, and - call it what it is - stupidity.

You get the feeling in Rove's book that he was so rattled by the Plame scandal that he ran from Washington with his tail between his legs. The fact that he came back into the spotlight says a whole lot about the man's lack of character. And Rove is still - still - hard at work destroying the Republican party - by going after the Tea Party. Rove thereby demonstrates that he is incapable of learning from his mistakes. And Bush's silence since the Obama election is an indication that he has no problem with the direction of the country. To think I voted for the man - we would have been better off had Gore or Kerry won, and maintained control of Congress.

But, back to immigration. What this issue says is that the Republican leadership has again shown it has no ability to think strategically - it remains bound to the old rules of politics, and acts like the past couple of decades have never happened. It has no real adherence to a consistent policy, no passion for the issues, and it doesn't understand its own constituency.

More than that, the Republican leadership doesn't have a constituency - there is no large group of rank and file Republicans out there supporting the leadership's policies. The leadership may have access to money but informed voters can't be bought as easily as uninformed voters - as both Romney and Karl Rove learned in the last election. But Rove should have known better - he had seen the same thing in 2006. How deaf, dump and blind can one person be? And how troubling is it that the monied elite still fund Rove's repeatedly failed agenda?

In fact, the rank and file is far more conservative than the leadership, which for some reason doesn't understand its own - it is living in the past when Republcans were comfortable as a minority party where it was expected to make some noise and then give in to the Democrats.

The GOP leadership has time and again shown that it is incapable of running the party - it is frightening indeed that the nation's last hope is with these people. This is not the place to recite the litany of horribles committed by the leadership (I could start with the Boehner's absolutely disastrous record as House leader), but if they pass an immigration bill that even remotely resembles this one, we can say goodbye to the GOP.

And with the GOP gone, the Democrats will have free rein and will ultimately destroy this nation. As I've written before, the Democrats are quite comfortable with poverty, since it means all the votes - there is no bottom for the Democrats since they don't care - prosperity is not even remotely on the agenda (look what they have done in places like Detroit, D.C., California, etc.).

It is too depressing to think about - but I'll say this again - if the GOP passes this bill, they will lose the rank and file completely. Not only will the GOP never win another national election they will lose control of Congress - permanently until the country is torn apart.

I could go on, but what's the point? The Senate will do what it will do, and it doesn't appear that the fact that the people in the party and those independents supporting the (supposed) goals of the party makes not one whit of difference to the blind, arrogant despicable people at the top. And no amount of spending will put the party back together again.

Note: This article is an amalgam of several excellent comments related to Heather Mac Donald's article "The Real Risks of Amnesty. Related reading: Politico lets the cat out of the bag: immigration "reform" would give Democrats a permanent majority

Larwyn's Linx: Goodbye America -- Heather MacDonald on Amnesty Bill

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Nation

Goodbye America -- Heather MacDonald on Amnesty Bill: Sara Noble
Shamnesty's New ID rules would threaten citizens' rights: Richard Sobel
Obama’s Amnesty Speech: Bogus Promises, Empty Rhetoric: Jessica Zuckerman

Is Amnesty bill really tough on immigrants with criminal records?: Byron York
What does the SCOTUS ruling on DNA mean?: Leischen Stelter
How Many Crimes Are Committed By Legal Gun Purchasers?: Extrano's Alley

Glass Houses and "The Party of Stupid": Villainous
Rubio Works To Stop Illegals From Getting Federal Benefits…: RWN
Report: Obama runs immigration bill from White House: Neil Munro

Economy

Barack Obama’s ‘Social Innovation’ Slush Fund: Michelle Malkin
Obamacare’s Insurance “Solution”: Medicaid for All: Chris Jacobs
A Culture of Spying at Bloomberg: Ed Driscoll

Obamacare benefits mandate could further phase out full-time work: Patrice Hill
Obamacare co-ops are focus of four federal investigations: Richard Pollock
5 Lies the Democrats Told To Sell Obamacare: John Hawkins

Scandal Central

No, the FBI isn’t investigating the IRS. They’re on the same team.: Bob Owens
Confirmed: Obama IRS Targeted, Infiltrated and Harassed Christian Churches: Jim Hoft
IRS Supervisor Admits Personally Handling Dozens of Tea Party Cases: Tony Lee

Who’s Up for a Fresh State Department Scandal? : JWF
Contradicting IRS Claims, D.C. Personally Scrutinized Tea Party Tax-Exempt Applications: Dave Urbanski
Exposure of NSA surveillance draws attention to Mueller remark about real time email tracking: Catherine Herridge

Media

Lindsey Graham: 'If We Pander To Hispanics, They'll Love Us And We can Elect Jeb Bush In 2016': Joshua
The NRA Highlights Manchin’s Record: Extrano's Alley
Announcing The 2013 Paul Revere Awards: Clown Parade

World

GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert Rips FBI For Working With CAIR: WZ
Secret Service Disguising Themselves As Farmers To Protect Obama At G8 In Ireland: WZ
Tensions Simmer After Attack on Chinese Students in France: WSJ

Mike Rogers: Examples of thwarted terror plots will spur Americans to support surveillance: Sean Sullivan
Apple reveals US surveillance requests, following Facebook's lead: Guardian
French church vandalized: "Death to France, long live Islam, long live bin Laden": JihadWatch

Sci-Tech

Company PRISM Reports Reveal Extent of NSA Requests: Mandy Nagy
Revealed: Yahoo FOUGHT against NSA's warrantless spying program but lost: Daily Mail
Drone Net: The Next Big Thing: John Robb

Cornucopia

UNITED NATIONS MUST SEND FORCES TO STOP MURDERS IN BARACKISTAN (CHICAGO): AWD
Happy Father's Day: MOTUS
My Only Question Is...: Sondrakistan

Image: Trevor Loudon
Sponsored by: Keep KeyWiki Naming America’s Enemies, for Only a Few Dollars a Month

QOTD: "Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

There are many ways in which our government has invaded the precincts of private citizens, the method of earning a living. Our government is in business to the extent over owning more than 19,000 businesses covering different lines of activity. This amounts to a fifth of the total industrial capacity of the United States.

But at the moment I’d like to talk about another way. Because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this" --Ronald Reagan

Sunday, June 16, 2013

President Obama sets extremely bad example for America's youth, uses high-cap magazine in Father's Day activity

Is Mayor Bloomberg aware of this tweet?

As Robby Soave reminds us, these activities come at a time when liberals are hysterically convulsing over toy guns and even references to them.

A 14-year old faces suspension and up to a year in jail for failing to remove an NRA T-shirt he wore to school.

An elementary school student was suspended for biting a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.

And a 5-year old was booted from school for referring to her "bubble gun", pictured at right.

So I'm sure the outrage from progressive media for the president's activity will build to a crescendo any moment.

Hat tip: BadBlue News.

BUT-BUT-BUT BUSH: Feds Admit Listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants, up to 1 million citizens targeted

The National Security Agency disclosed Saturday that thousands of its analysts can listen to domestic phone calls without warrants. That capability appears to extend to email and text messages as well.

The is a far different matter from the oh-so-controversial Bush program of wiretapping international phone calls to and from terror hotbeds.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that"... If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls... Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."

There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws."

[Furthermore,] the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. "They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's what they record..."

...Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged this week that the agency's analysts have the ability to access the "content of a call."

...Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, says he was surprised to see the 2008 FISA Amendments Act be used to vacuum up information on American citizens. "Everyone who voted for the statute thought it was about international communications," he said.

To recap:

• The NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants;

• Federal officials are targeting up to 1 million people in the U.S.;

Curiously, Major Nidal Hasan and the Tsarnaev brothers were somehow overlooked.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the PATRIOT Act, says that the law does not support these kinds of activity.

...Sensenbrenner, who introduced the PATRIOT Act on the House floor in 2001, has declared that lawmakers’ and the executive branch’s excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are “a bunch of bunk.”

In an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Wednesday morning, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin reiterated his concerns that the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the PATRIOT Act intended. Specifically, he said that Section 215 of the act “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” on the scale that’s occurred.

Since we know that Obama's political opposition has been relentlessly targeted by the instrumentalities of the federal government -- including the Department of Labor, the EPA and the IRS -- I have a sneaking suspicion that there are plenty of Tea Party activists, Constitutional conservatives, religious Christians, and Jews, on the list of this administration's targets.

We are witnessing the de-evolution of this country into a Banana Republic.

MEANWHILE, IN GUN-FREE CHICAGO: 7 Dead, 30 Wounded So Far This Weekend

These people are going to be in so much trouble when they get caught.

Seven people were killed and at least 30 others were shot in violence that plagued Chicago over Father's Day weekend.

Five of the fatalities and 11 other shootings occurred overnight Saturday leading into Father's Day, including the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy.

On the Southwest Side, five people were shot, one fatally, in two shootings in the Little Village neighborhood.

At 10:50 p.m. Saturday 21-year-old Ricardo Herrera was killed and two others were shot in the 2500 block of South Ridgeway Avenue, police said. The two injured were taken to Mount Sinai. There condition was not immediately know.

At 12:30 a.m. Sunday, an 18-year-old man was shot in the head, chest and shoulder in a drive by shooting that also injured a 22-year-old woman in the thigh near 31st Street and Pulaski Road.

The man was taken to Mount Sinai in critical condition, according to Police News Affairs Officer Mirabelli.
At 11:45 p.m. Saturday a 16-year-old boy was shot by a gunman on a bicycle in the 4100 block of West North Avenue, police said.

The boy tried to flee but collapsed a short distance from where he was shot... He was pronounced dead at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center after sustaining gunshot wounds to the left arm and back, Mirabelli said... His death was ruled a homicide but police had no one in custody as of Sunday morning.

Just after midnight Sunday, someone opened fire in a nightclub in the Chatham neighborhood, killing one man and injuring three others... Todd Wood, 40, was killed in the shooting and three others were treated for gunshot wounds at area hospitals. One person is in critical condition, officials said... No one was in custody for the shooting as of Sunday morning.

As a commenter on NBC Chicago's website observed, "This is what three generations of federal handouts coupled with the land's strictest gun control laws looks like. This is the Democratic Party's vision for all of America."

Hat tip: BadBlue.

Larwyn's Linx: Sen. Ted Cruz echoes Reagan: ‘If we lose our freedom here, where do we go?’

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Nation

Sen. Ted Cruz: ‘If we lose our freedom here, where do we go?’: Twitchy
The Sandbagging of America: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Tyranny Advances by Nibbles: Joy Overbeck

Lois Lerner: The Face of ObamaCare: Greg Richards
Levin hammers Jeb Bush, Rubio, Ryan, Rove on Amnesty: Jeff Poor
Sarah Palin Lampoons DC at Faith and Freedom conference: Lyndsey Layton

DATA Dystopia. The NSA Scandal and Beyond.: John Robb
Warrants? The NSA Don’t Need No Steeenking Warrants: Ed Driscoll
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants: Declan McCullagh

Economy

NLRB defies Court, sanctions newspaper: Sean Higgins
Michelle Obama's Irish/German/African Pre-Summer Vacation: DeAngelis
Cali Legislature passes $96.3B Democratic budget: Judy Lin

Scandal Central

No Smoking Gun: Ace
MSM-BHO: All in the Family: Ed Driscoll
Secret Service Raids Man For Criticizing Obama On Twitter: WZ

Climate & Energy

How data revisionism hypes global warming: Christopher Monckton
The Continuing Collapse of the Global Warming Hoax : Alan Caruba
Al Gore presses Obama on power plant carbon rules, calls Keystone ‘atrocity’: Ben Geman

Media

Palin Blasts NSA: “Couldn’t Find Two Pot-Smoking Deadbeat Bostonians With Hotline to Terrorist Central”: GWP
I smell B.S. and it's coming from the White House: Regis Giles
Ramirez on US clean-election credibility: Greenroom

AP Tries to Frame NSA Surveillance Issue as ‘Far Left and Right’ vs. Everyone Else — Part 1 of 2: Tom Blumer
Judge Jeanine Pirro: The Real Losers of DC: Scoop
New York Times: no global warming in the last 15 years, despite CO2 increase: Wintery Knight

Washington Post: Eric Holder’s Kind Of An Awesome AG, Isn’t He?: Pirate's Cove
IRS Officials Lerner and Miller Receive Violent Threats: Mandy Nagy
We been HAD folks, but it wasn’t by Glenn Beck: Lady Raven

World

Thanks to Islam, purses, seat cushions, coolers banned from NFL games: Creeping
Imams of Sacramento's two biggest mosques declare music forbidden by Muhammad: Robert Spencer
Turkish protesters remain defiant amid police crackdown: USA Today

Sci-Tech

Israeli researchers find new predictor of heart disease: Meital Yasur Beit-Or
Google and Twitter Aren't Impressed with Facebook's Disclosure Dump: Connor Simpson
Can a week living with Android convince an iOS die-hard to make the switch?: TechRadar

Cornucopia

BRF: It's a Bitch: MOTUS
15 Fun Facts About Father’s Day: IMAO
Full Speech: Sarah Palin at Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2013 Road to Majority Conference: Scoop

Image: Turkish protesters remain defiant amid police crackdown
Today's Larwyn's Linx sponsored by:

QOTD: "[On Saturday Night Live, they] have this skit where they do this fake newscast, and they read this completely absurd news report and finish it with an incredulous ‘Really?

As in, our government spied on every single one of your phone calls but it couldn’t find two pot-smoking, deadbeat Bostonians with a hotline to Terrorist Central in Chechnya. Really?

The IRS says it can’t figure out how it managed to spend more than $4 million on training conferences because it didn’t keep its receipts. Really?

We’re gathering in a town that is awash in scandal. In other words, just another Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C.” --Sarah Palin