People have had it with Immigration Excuses by Thomas Sewell

One of the most lame excuses for doing nothing is that we can't do everything. Such excuses have been repeated endlessly, even by some conservatives, when it comes to illegal immigration.

We can't deport millions of illegal immigrants already living in the country, some say, so the wise thing is to just learn to live with them, according to the supposedly sophisticated crowd.

This completely sidesteps the plain, obvious and galling fact that we are not deporting those illegal immigrants who are arrested by the police for violating other laws -- and are then turned loose back into American society. In so-called "sanctuary cities" across the country, local police are under orders not to report illegal immigrants to the federal authorities.

Nobody has a right to obstruct justice when it comes to federal laws -- not even the President of the United States, as Richard Nixon discovered when he had to resign after Democrats threatened him with impeachment and Republican Senators told him that they would not defend him.

Today, any mayor of any city of any size across the country can publicly announce that he is going to obstruct federal laws against illegal immigrants -- and then bask in a glow of self-satisfaction and the prospect of winning votes.

Even people who are gung-ho to punish employers who do not take on the role of immigration police, for which they have neither training nor authority, are often ready to overlook elected officials who do have both the duty and the authority to uphold the laws, but openly refuse to do so.

The federal government itself, under the Obama administration, has refused to enforce immigration laws, and has ordered its own agents to back off when it comes to enforcing some laws that President Obama happens not to like.

Then there is also what might be called the pretense of enforcement -- when people who have been caught illegally entering the country are turned loose inside the country and told to report back to a court later on. How surprised should we be when they don't?

One of the most widely known abuses of the immigration laws is the creation of "anchor babies" to get automatic citizenship when a pregnant woman simply crosses the U.S. border to have her child born on American soil. This is not limited to people who cross the Mexican border. Some are flown in from Asia to waiting posh facilities.

Not only do their children get automatic American citizenship without having to meet any requirements, this also increases the opportunities for other family members to gain admission later on, in the name of "family reunification."

This is such an obvious racket, and so widely known, for so long, that you might think our "responsible" leaders would agree that it should be stopped. But, here again, there are excuses rather than action. One distinguished conservative commentator even said recently that this is such a small problem that it is not worth bothering with.

The anger of Americans who feel betrayed by their own elected officials is not a small thing. It goes to the heart of what self-government by "we the people" is supposed to mean.

To say that it is a small thing is even worse than saying that we can't do anything about it. We certainly can't do anything about it if we won't lift a finger to try.

Some legal authorities say that the 14th Amendment confers automatic citizenship on anyone born on American soil. But the very authors of that Amendment said otherwise. And some distinguished legal scholars today, including Professor Lino Graglia of the University of Texas Law School, say otherwise.

Even if it were necessary to revise the 14th Amendment, it is sheer Progressive era dogma that Constitutional Amendments are nearly impossible to revise, repeal or create. There were four new Constitutional Amendments added in just eight years, during the height of the Progressive era in the early 20th century.

But it is indeed impossible if you are just looking for excuses for not trying. Republicans who are worried about Donald Trump should be. But their own repeated betrayals of their supporters set the stage for his emergence. This goes all the way back to "Read my lips, no new taxes." 

Via: Real Clear Politics

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HILLARY’S ‘PROGRESSIVE’ DEMISE

Under her deathly leadership a term loses all meaning and direction.

Barack Obama is the most “Progressive” of recent, and perhaps of all, American presidents. Indeed he is the only recent Democratic president rightly characterized as “Progressive” rather than just liberal.

But with massive increases in government debt and food stamp use, declines in labor force participation, the impending insolvency of the Social Security Disability Fund, relentless unemployment among African-Americans and deteriorating race relations, and by far the worst economic “recovery” in modern American history, one has to ask (in the sarcastic style of my Jewish grandma), “This is progress?!?”

It’s not just that things aren’t going well. It’s that they’re going particularly badly for those whom Progressives claim to care about most (the poor, minorities, the “working class”) while the rich get richer (in itself not a bad thing) and large companies succeed while small companies struggle and new business formation stagnates — a terrible situation in an economy that relies on small and new companies for job growth.

Conservatives have long fretted over Democrats controlling the political lexicon, causing words to mean — Humpty Dumpty style — what liberals say they mean, but we have consistently failed in changing the literal terms of the debate.

Following on Barack Obama’s dismal performance, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and campaign offer the best opportunity in memory for Americans to reconsider the true meaning of the most fundamental word in the left’s rhetorical arsenal: Progressive.

Mrs. Clinton has yet to propose a truly new idea. Each of her few policy positions are regurgitations of populist pabulum that offer nothing innovative, nothing for Americans to get excited about, no hope to improve the lives of people anywhere on the income spectrum, and no future for our nation. In short, she is a perfect Progressive.

Hillary’s biggest “new” idea is to massively increase the capital gains tax rates and holding period for those Americans in the top income bracket — couples earning over $464,850 per year and individuals earning over $413,200 — creating six tax brackets with holding periods up to six years and confiscatory rates up to a jaw-dropping 43.8 percent.

Bloomberg and even the New York Times have trashed the plan as doing nothing more than making the tax code more complicated while not furthering Hillary’s stated goal of causing corporations and investors to become less short-term focused.

Beyond the feckless political pandering — can you smell Hillary’s fear of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? — and economic idiocy of the plan, it’s remarkable that the wife of the man whose vaunted federal budget surplus occurred due to cutting the capital gains tax ratewould so aggressively champion the opposite policy.

Other Clintonian “progress” includes pandering to black voters about “voter suppression” through Voter ID laws even though a recent poll shows that more than three-quarters of Americans, including 58 percent of Democrats, continue to support having to show photo ID before voting. (Data are mixed about the actual impact of the laws on turnout among blacks and other voting groups.)

Of course if you pander to blacks, you have to pander to women as well. Hillary does that in the most predictable fashion, tweeting out the threadbare but mythical “outrage of so many women still earning less than men on the job.”

Hillary is also calling for the installation of half a billion new solar panels in the United States. No matter your view on the merits of solar power (you can count me among the skeptics regarding its value for utility-scale power generation), if this is what counts as innovative policy Mrs. Clinton must have a truly stunted imagination.

In a politically boneheaded statement given Clinton’s need for Silicon Valley’s checkbooks and millennials’ votes, she whines about “the on-demand or so-called ‘gig economy’… raising hard questions about workplace protections.” Actually, Hillary, it doesn’t raise any such hard questions and your union-driven crocodile tears don’t mask the anti-progress nature of your complaints.

Her comment related particularly to ride-sharing service Uber, which received another thinly veiled threat from Clinton: “I’ll crack down on bosses who exploit employees by mischaracterizing them as contractors…” No, Hillary, it’s fairly simple: I own a car. I want to give someone a ride to make a few extra bucks. I don’t need your “protection” and I’m not — and don’t want to be — an employee.

Hillary might offer us even more “progress” if she would answer more questions. But she’s a political greased pig, refusing to take a position on issues ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline, the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade treaty, and repealing Obamacare’s medical device tax.

When Hillary Clinton deigns to answer a question, or during one of her remarkably robotic and somnolent teleprompter speeches, she offers hackneyed and harmful policy prescriptions that, even if you’re of a moderately liberal mindset, must strike you as utterly uninspiring and representing anything but “progress.” In trying to be everything to everybody, she’s turning into nothing for anybody.

Soul-crushing big-government policies are, to coin a phrase, failed policies of the past. What’s really new — in the sense that it was abandoned long ago by American politicians of both major parties — is freedom. Freedom-based policies derive from trusting (as Progressives manifestly do not) that Americans are, can be, and prefer to be self-reliant and smart enough to make important and often difficult choices about our own lives and businesses without being nudged, much less shoved, by the Nanny State. More freedom… that would be real progress.

So why do conservatives, who are proposing creative, cost-saving, and freedom-enhancing solutions to a wide range of vexing public policy issues from poverty to education to health care to transportation funding, allow the regressive, bossy, mindless and uncreative left to maintain the mantle of “progressive”? I wish I knew.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign gives Republican candidates an opportunity to ask voters a simple question: If “Progressives” are lying about the very name of their movement, what else are they lying about? The answer, of course, is “nearly everything.”

Via: American Spectator

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Three Great Progressive Lies

Conservative leader Morton Blackwell keeps a picture of Leonardo’s model of a bicycle on the wall of his Leadership Institute. It’s his site gag—and it’s a sight gag.

Leonardo’s bike is a reminder that the great conservative philosophical insight—Ideas Have Consequences—is true only if people act upon it. You can sketch a bicycle and perhaps even build a working model. But we know it took four hundred years for people to start riding bicycles.

Progressives don’t ever wait that long. They start acting upon their ideas immediately. The only trouble is: the ideas they believe in are not true. Among the lies they believe, here are three of the most prominent:

Progressive Lie Number One: We do not know when human life begins. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote this in his infamous Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973. That was a lie when he wrote it. We all knew that human life begins at conception. We had known this incontrovertible scientific truth since the 1850s. That was the reason the states were urged to bring their homicide codes into conformity with science’s indisputable findings.

Justice Blackmun lied about all of this. TIME Magazine’s columnist Joe Klein was honest enough to admit this truth. He noted that the pro-life movement (he didn’t call it that, of course) had “gotten a major boost from science, ironically, as sonograms have made it impossible to deny that from a very early stage, that thing in the womb is a human life.”

Fifty-seven million innocent human lives have been taken in this country as a result of this liberal lie.

Progressive Lie Number Two: Sexual intimacy between two men is equal to the union of man and woman. The 7.2 billion human beings who live today are each the fruit of the union of a man and a woman. Zero human lives have issued from the sexual intimacy of man and man. Is there marriage equality? Yes, marriage is for every race and nation, for every class and people. But each marriage, which has always been about procreation and child-rearing as well as complementarity of the sexes, is possible only for a man and a woman.

Progressive Lie Number Three: With enough cream, you can tame a tiger. Since 1989, our State Department has been feeding cream in the form of U.S. foreign aid to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). State Department liberals hope they can change that man-eating tiger’s stripes.

Resolving the conflict would remove a major source of instability in the Middle East. (AP Photo)

The PLO has never ceased to be a terrorist outfit. All the monies that the UN, the European Union, and the long-suffering U.S. taxpayers have been dunned to pay out have served only to strengthen this gang of mass murderers. All formulas for a “Two-State Solution” to the perennially turbulent Mideast that are based on a peace settlement between a legitimate, democratic, and free Israel and a bloody regime of killers in the PLO are failing. They are a house built on sand. They should fail. Ditto, Iran.

So it is not surprising that our foreign and domestic policies are in turmoil. They are each premised on untruth. We strive to base our principles on truth. We do not always succeed, but we do believe we can know the truth. And the truth will set us free.

Via: CNS News

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The Intentional Buffoonery of the Progressive Left

Goldilocks wrote: So how are beginning workers and poor people supposed to advance economically?Obama Wage Hike is Obamacare by 'Other Means'

Dear Comrade Goldi,

I can tell you one way to make it more difficult for “beginning workers and poor people” to advance. If you raise the minimum wage, they’ll be likely to be hurt worst, first.

People advance economically by gaining experience and thus bringing more value to an employer, not by passing capricious laws.

According to a BLS survey done in 2011, only 5 percent of workers who make hourly wages are at or below the federal minimum wage to begin with. Of the 1.7 million people who receive minimum wage salaries, 54 percent are aged 24 or below even as 80 percent of the workforce is 25 and above. So despite accounting for only 20 percent of the workforce, we see that minimum wages are more concentrated in those “beginning workers and poor people.”

When you are younger and lack skills you make less money.

Only a liberal would have difficulty understanding this obvious fact.

Powerful or Pitiful?

Curiously-- and damningly too-- 2.1 million of the 3.8 million at or below the minimum wage are accepting wages below the federal minimum.

Via: Townhall

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The Progressive Degradation of Freedom

There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry.  It makes sense.  North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure.  China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide.  And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important lesson for what is left of a Western civilization looking down the barrel of a gun of its own aiming: the feeling of self-determination can be reduced to the satisfaction of having a daughter to sell for food. 

As totalitarian dreamers of both the one-party and multi-party varieties have long understood, and have come to count on, humans have an almost infinitely elastic ability to accommodate themselves to conditions that seem inescapable or predetermined.  Our natural desire for self-preservation virtually guarantees it -- there is almost no degradation that men cannot learn to live with, given enough time. 

"Learning to live with it," however, is both a natural reflex and a great danger.  For although self-preservation is not at all the same as acquiescence, the former can devolve into a rationalization of the latter due to the slackening of will and reason that results from battle fatigue and the stretching of the soul's moral cords by' the constant pull of inescapable conditions.  And when this slackening of the soul occurs, men may become bound to oppressive rulers more firmly than could ever be achieved with mere chains and fences.  For what they are losing is a faculty of perception less obviously vital to our bare existence than others, and therefore easier than others to survive without, namely the capacity to feel free. 

Via: American Thinker

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