Make Up Your Own Mine

Make Up Your Own Mine - An impoverished town strikes gold. George Soros and foreign environmentalists say, leave it in the ground - John Fund writes another excellent article about the angry knee-jerk Left that cares more about their own emotional self-stimulation than about facts or the well being of poor people:

The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. 'Mine Your Own Business' is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana 'comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu's mining.'

Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he 'found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.'

Carbon on the Continent - WSJ.com

Carbon on the Continent - WSJ.com Kyle Wingfield writes a caution about blindly following the European lead on Carbon Control and Global Warmism:

Let's assume [...] that most Americans believe global warming is a real danger, that carbon dioxide is public enemy No. 1, and that the only question is what to do about it. Before following Europe's lead in adopting a cap-and-trade system or mandatory renewable energy targets, wouldn't you want to know that those actions will lead to something better than the status quo?

So would I. And the numbers show that if America is the Great Carbon Satan, Europe is certainly no angel.

Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we're talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations.

There is a theme here - that for Europe (as for American Leftists) it's not actions that matter, but words and how they make us feel.

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Hatred Begins at Home

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Hatred Begins at Home analyzes a new report, "The NYPD looks at what turns young Westerners into jihadis."

She says: "The view we show of life to ourselves, and to whatever lost young men are watching, is not broad and inspiriting. It is limited and dispiriting. It is every man for himself.

"We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

John F. Kennedy Speech "The President and the Press" (April 27, 1961)

Stumbled across this... Miller Center of Public Affairs - John F. Kennedy Speech "The President and the Press" (April 27, 1961)

Kennedy put it so well:

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future--for reducing this threat or living with it--there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security--a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President--two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

How stark is the contrast between Kennedy's candid appeal, and his eloquence, and the bumblings (to date) of George W. Bush.

If ever a President had a reason to call for national unity, for self restraint by the press, or for international cooperation against a common enemy, JFK did, and GWB does.

Is it too late for Bush to turn things around, to start to unite a nation that he has to a large extent helped divide?

I can only say that it is never too late to try to do the right thing. And I hope he and his administration will not stop trying to improve. We certainly need it.

Crime consumed a family, and an 8-year-old is lost - The Boston Globe

Crime consumed a family, and an 8-year-old is lost - The Boston Globe is a detailed story about the crime-riddled family of the late Liquarry Jefferson.

The story is full of the double-speak and bizarre assumptions so common among the liberal media:

1. The mayor "partly" blames the NRA for the death of this child, when everything leading up to that death involves things the NRA loudly opposes - criminals possessing guns; underage gang members with guns; young children playing with loaded guns without adult supervision. This bizarre stance by the mayor is accepted as perfectly reasonable.

2. A collection of government agencies spent over $300,000 in a single year intervening with this one family, to apparently no positive effect. Yet the professional social workers all are quoted talking about the successes they claim to have achieved - all of them completely subjective. The mother was "responsive" - the surviving 15 year old brother is "bright". Is that what we spend money on, so that social workers can delude themselves?

Perhaps it's even worse. These same social workers are the ones who arranged for this dysfunctional and crime-ridden family (mom with criminal record, once charged with stabbing the dead boy's father in the abdomen; multiple "fathers" of the mom's kids all criminals; the children committing crimes) to remain together:

Despite Liquarry's death, caregivers involved with the family say they see something worth saving in Gadson and her children. As a result, prior to Liquarry's death, the state Department of Social Services didn't take the children into custody even when they witnessed or took part in violence.

These folks see "something worth saving" so they keep this dysfunctional group together... why? So they can continue to be dysfunctional and continue to demand high amounts of services that these same folks are then paid to deliver?

3. When the dead boy's father (with a friend) breaks into an apartment and beats and stabs the occupant to death, it's described as a "tragedy...involving his relatives". No, the tragedy involved the dead neighbor. It was a horrific crime of violence that involved his dad as the perpetrator. Oh, but to the liberal media the killer suffers too - the killer is even more of a victim than the victim.

4. The social worker Carrie Clausen describes the incredible collection of mutual assaults and other crimes - from the dead boy's father beating his mother in the face with a barbell to the oldest child apparently keeping a loaded gun where his young siblings (ages 13, 8, and 2) could find it - as among "a whole lot of ... awful things that happened to the family."

No, these things did not just happen "to" the family. But that's the sort of criminal-as-victim, projection of powerlessness that one expects from the pimps of the welfare state. No wonder nobody ever expected any member of this family to behave responsibly. The idea of responsible behavior is foreign to them, social workers and reporters alike.

Immigration Reform Without Deportation or Amnesty

Can we - and should we - reform our immigration policies without wholesale amnesty?

Can we - and should we - reform our immigration policies without wholesale deportation?

My answer on all counts is yes.

As I've said before, amnesty is wrong - it rewards lawbreakers for their lawbreaking, and encourages more. It severely devalues citizenship. It also makes fools of the tens of thousands who have obeyed the law and are, right now, still waiting and working through the legal channels to obtain citizenship "through the front door."

I also believe that wholesale deportation is also wrong, on both moral and practical grounds.

The moral case goes something like this:

Implied Permission
America has been divided internally for 20+ years about enforcing our immigration laws. The Feds have laws against being an undocumented alien, but clearly don't care enough to actually enforce it. The other levels of government have actively assisted people entering illegally, including passing laws to forbid local law enforcement (and state and local bureaucrats) from asking about citizenship status, to agencies holding special outreach events to sign up illegal aliens for state services to which they are not legally entitled. Taken as a whole, there's been something of a welcome mat set out - woven unevenly out of federal indifference and local encouragement.

That internal division, this de facto welcome mat, is not without consequences. Morally, it makes the arrival and the residency of illegal aliens something that America has allowed. We've become complicit.

Consider a very rough parallel with property rights and the idea of "adverse possession." Suppose you own a field, but you allow me to put up a fence on it, you allow me to mow it, water it, graze my animals on it, plant it, and so forth - and you allow me to do that for a number of years. Then, in most states I can make a legal claim to ownership of the land. And I can get the title to that land transferred to me, without paying you a dime.

You thus lose your property rights - because you abandoned them. You allowed me to make use of the property as if they were mine and never complained about it. The law allows you to bring a complaint of trespass against me. You can easily get the authorities to stop me. By choosing not to enforce your rights, you abandon your claim to the property.

Why Adverse Possession is a Good Doctrine
The good side of "adverse possession" is that it prevents an injustice that was depressingly common in the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s (though the concept was well established in England and Wales hundreds of years earlier). During the homesteading period, a settler could live on and improve a piece of land, and by improving it, lay title to it - the state or territory would transfer ownership from the state to the settler. (Native Americans were of course conveniently excluded from this equation.)

The homesteading deal was conditional - you had to actually improve (farm) the land, not just squat on it. A temptation could arise when someone owned a very large amount of land, having purchased it instead of improving it. If a settler came along and started building improvements, thinking it was unclaimed land, the landowner could sit silently while the settler worked for years to improve the land. Then, years later, the owner would "suddenly" discover this person living on his land and evict him - but keep the improvements (buildings, cleared fields, fences, etc.)

The settler who worked for years in hopes of earning the land now discovers he was working for free to improve someone else's land.

The Parallel
The parallel, though inexact, is this - I think that America has allowed illegal immigrants to come here too easily. We've allowed the federal laws to go unenforced while locals have acted in ways that welcome illegal immigration. We've looked the other way or been (effectively) silent as aliens have moved here and built their lives.

For us now to suddenly decide we want to enforce the laws after all, feels a little dishonest to me.

If the undocumented or illegal alien is really so unwelcome, why did we look the other way for over twenty years? It's not as if our citizens haven't benefited from the arrangement. We have. We've hired them, sold them houses and cars and clothing and food, and taken their tax payments and Social Security contributions. We today live, many of us, in houses built with their labor. We've allowed them (indeed, by discontinuing the guest worker program, encouraged them) to bring their families here and establish lives.

Given where we all are and how we got here, I think amnesty is too much to give, but mass deportation is too harsh to inflict.

So Now What?
Here's my proposal.

Allow illegal aliens with (say) 5 years or more of residency to receive a new visa and stay indefinitely as a legal resident alien, with these limits:

• They can never become citizens
• They will be deported if convicted of any crime
• They must demonstrate within two years that they have paid all taxes they owe
• They can never collect taxpayer funded welfare or medical benefits

No More Anchor Babies
An illegal immigrant parent of a US citizen child may, if facing deportation, either leave the child with a legal resident, leave it with an orphanage, or waive the child's citizenship and take the child back to the parent's home country.

Path to Citizenship
If a permanent resident alien wants to apply for US citizenship after all, they should be allowed to do so under these conditions:

• The permanent resident alien must leave the US and establish residency in their home country
• Every other applicant who has already applied for US citizenship must be processed first
• The existing quotas on US citizenship will still apply

OpinionJournal - Extra - 'It Didn't Happen'

Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity. Two top Democrats are unbelievably complacent about the risk of Iraq descending into chaos: "Mr. Obama's blase cynicism about the possibility of genocide in Iraq is of a piece with Mr. Kerry's denial of the humanitarian catastrophe that followed America's departure from Vietnam."

The Left consistently claims that Bush "ignored the experts" but those same experts warn today that a sudden American withdrawal from Iraq would be bad for both Iraq and America. It would harm America's long term interests. Why does the Left want to harm America's long term interests?

OpinionJournal Federation - Emptying the Humidor

Congressmen push a cigar tax, proving they've learned nothing from history. Democrats in Congress love to do several things at once - pretend to solve problems, hike taxes, and make other problems worse: "A Joint Economic Committee study later found that 330 jobs in the jewelry industry and 7,600 jobs in the yacht industry were lost thanks to the luxury tax. Perhaps the greatest irony was that in 1991 the federal government paid out over $7 million more in unemployment benefits to those workers than it collected in luxury tax revenues."

The dirty secret is that for Democrats, slowing the economy and increasing unemployment is good, because it makes people more dependent on the government, increases the need for social services (and thus government employment), and thus bumps up the numbers of people voting Democrat.

OpinionJournal - The Spitzer Method

His nasty tactics get exposed in Albany: One of the reasons why I think there's an intellectual monoculture among most MSM reporters. This was a big story waiting to be broken, but most papers wouldn't touch it and most reporters wouldn't look into it.

Reporters have an obligation not to be used this way:

"The media are doing their best Claude Rains act over the revelation that the office of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer orchestrated a smear campaign against State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. But far from being a unique, out of character event, the episode is a classic example of the Spitzer political method: nasty and exaggerated accusations fed by selective, politically motivated news leaks. The difference is that this time his targets could fight back.

On Monday, the office of Democratic Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a 54-page report on Mr. Bruno's use of state helicopters, allegedly for personal political purposes. The investigation had been prompted by the Governor's office after Mr. Spitzer's communications aide and hatchet man, Darren Dopp, saw to it that allegations of impropriety against Mr. Bruno had found their way into the hands of gullible, pliant reporters.

Only now it is Mr. Dopp who is in hot water, having been suspended without pay for his role in ginning up a non-scandal about the Republican Majority Leader. The AG cleared Mr. Bruno of any wrongdoing, but in the process uncovered Mr. Dopp's unseemly little scheme to plant the story and then use that as a pretext to call for the investigation."

Of course all the red flags were there for years, for anyone who wanted to see them.

Delusions of Honesty - Tony Blair's domestic legacy: corruption and the erosion of liberty

OpinionJournal - Federation provides the text of a City Journal article.

Key quote:

At the outset of his tenure, Mr. Blair said that his government would be tough on crime and on the causes of crime. He wanted to appeal--and succeeded in appealing--to two constituencies at once: those who wanted criminals locked up, and those who saw crime as the natural consequence of social injustice, a kind of inchoate protest against the conditions in which they lived.

Mr. Blair's resultant task was to obfuscate, so that the electorate and even experts could not find out, without great difficulty, what was going on. For example, Mr. Blair's government, aware of public unrest about the number of criminals leaving prison only to commit further serious crimes, introduced indeterminate sentencing--open-ended imprisonment--apparently a tough response to repeat offenders. But the reality was different: the sentencing judges still had the discretion to determine such criminals' parole dates, which, in England, are de facto release dates. The sentences that criminals would serve, in other words, would be no longer than before the new law.

Another way to confuse the public was to corrupt official statistics. Last year, to take one example, the government dropped three simple but key measures from the compendious statistics that it gathers about people serving community sentences--that is, various kinds of service and supervision outside prison: their criminal histories prior to sentencing, their reconviction rates, and the number given prison sentences while serving their community sentences. Instead, it introduced an utterly meaningless measure, at least from a public-safety perspective: the proportion of people with community sentences who abide by such conditions as weekly attendance for an hour at a probation office.

The police also received encouragement to keep crime numbers down by not recording crimes. The crime rate has fallen in part because shoplifting has ceased to be a crime, for instance. Police now deal with it the way they do with parking violations: shoplifters get on-the-spot fines worth half, on average, of the value of the goods that they have stolen.

Reminds me of the classic book "How to Lie with Statistics" - apparently required reading in Blair's government.