Commentary by James Shott
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave a speech on the Senate floor last week where he said this about the disastrous implementation of the Affordable Care Act: "Despite all that good news, there’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue."
This abjectly stupid remark ignores the problems millions of the people Harry Reid serves as Majority Leader have encountered at the hands of this Democrat-created nightmare, some of them with life-threatening consequences.
Some say he really was alluding to claims made in ads paid for by the Koch brothers, about which he specifically commented shortly after that major gaffe, claiming the Kochs are trying to “buy America” through Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)(4) started by David Koch and Richard Fink.
He believes that the Koch brothers are the single greatest threat to liberty, “spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling Americans that Obamacare is bad for them.”
However, Koch Industries donated less than $3 million in the 2012 election cycle, earning 77th place on the Top Donor List of OpenSecrets.org. Americans for Prosperity is reported to have spent $40 million, but does not appear on the Top Donor List.
Top Donor organizations ahead of Koch Industries include: the National Education Association, #5 at $14.7 million; the United Auto Workers, #8 at $13.3 million; the American Federation of State/County/Municipal Employees, #10 at $11.4 million; the AFL-CIO, #14 at $9 million; and the Service Employees International Union, #18 at $6.6 million. Ten more labor unions beat Koch Industries in spending. Organized labor is “buying America” to a much larger extent than Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity combined.
Harry Reid misleads us on political spending, and lied to us during the 2012 campaign about Mitt Romney having paid no taxes for 10 years. He epitomizes the sordid aspects of partisan politics, and simply cannot be believed.
*****
On May 5, 2010 Latino students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California turned out to celebrate their Mexican heritage on Cinco de Mayo.
When some American students showed up at school wearing American-flag shirts, school officials ordered the American students to turn their shirts inside-out or go home, to avoid a repeat of the unrest that had occurred during past observances of this date.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld the action of school officials.
So, when students from Mexico attending American schools want to flaunt their Mexican-ness in the face of the American students by waving Mexican flags on a Mexican holiday, and some American students decide to show their patriotism by wearing American flag shirts, the school authorities believe that the American students are wrong, and the Mexican students are right, and a federal court agrees with them.
Disgusting!
Whacky, radical rulings like this one have earned the Court the nickname, “The 9th Circus.” The Mexican students should not be allowed to stir up sentiments by waving a foreign flag around to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. If they prefer Mexico to the U.S., perhaps they should just go back.
*****
Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has produced a tax reform plan based upon three years of hearings and discussions with bi-partisan groups.
Hardly anyone who pays taxes will argue against reforming this overly complex system. The last round was in 1986, and at that time the tax code was more than 26,000 pages. Thirty years later, the tax system is a incoherent mess that negatively affects prosperity, job creation and investment, and is regulated by a tax code that has nearly tripled in size to roughly 75,000 pages.
Each year the tax code gets further complicated with more special interest loopholes, credits, and carve-outs.
Rep. Camp would make several changes to the code, like eliminating loopholes, reducing tax rates, whittling down the current seven tax brackets to three, and lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world, to 25 percent.
In those 75,000 pages are goodies for numerous interests, and they will scream bloody murder if their special goody is on the chopping block. The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore notes that we can “expect the White House to lambast this plan as a ‘tax cut for the rich,’ but the evidence from history shows that lower tax rates are usually associated with higher overall tax receipts and more taxes paid by the rich. In the 1980s after two rounds of Reagan tax rate reductions, income tax receipts doubled, and the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent rose as the economy expanded.”
This plan simplifies the tax code by allowing millions of tax filers a larger standard deduction, meaning they don’t need to itemize and can use the EZ form. For those who do itemize, the mortgage and charity deductions remain.
While the Camp plan isn’t perfect, and produced quite a few knee-jerk criticisms, it has many advantages, and is certainly a good start toward finally transforming the current tax code into something that is sensible and easy to understand. Let’s hope Congress has the courage to follow through.
Cross-posted from Observations
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Political Quotes To Ponder...
by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth
Tired of the daily political bull**it? I don't know about you but I sure as he*l am. With the growing partisanship kn America and the resulting rancor between the wings of both g-damn major political parties perhaps you'll enjoy the following. On second thought, maybe not.
Here goes anyway...
Till next time...
Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth
Tired of the daily political bull**it? I don't know about you but I sure as he*l am. With the growing partisanship kn America and the resulting rancor between the wings of both g-damn major political parties perhaps you'll enjoy the following. On second thought, maybe not.
Here goes anyway...
The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
Aristotle
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
Plato
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
George Washington
I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
Robert A. Heinlein
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
Ayn Rand
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
George Orwell
I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
Ray Bradbury
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Aldous Huxley
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
Till next time...
NIPCC report disputes the conventional wisdom about climate change
Commentary by James H. Shott
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.
Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.
Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.
Among the group’s findings are:
• Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.
• Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
• The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.
• CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
• No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:
• Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.
• Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)
• There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.
• No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.
These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.
As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”
In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”
The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”
Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.
Cross-posted from Observations
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.
Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.
Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.
Among the group’s findings are:
• Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.
• Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
• The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.
• CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.
• No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.
The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:
• Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.
• Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)
• There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.
• No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.
These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.
As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”
In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”
The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”
Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.
Cross-posted from Observations
Obama and taxing the rich, and another deadly school shooting
Commentary by James H. Shott
Running for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama claimed, “The rich are not paying their fair share of income taxes.” Playing to the baser instincts of voters is a tried and true technique, and if Mr. Obama does nothing else very well, he is a master at dividing people from one another and creating class discord.
However, so much of what the president says just ain’t so, as we have seen so dramatically and with such terrible consequences with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. He is so closely related to this fiasco and has invested so much political capital in it that the ACA is now routinely called by his name.
However, Mr. Obama’s effort to tar and feather the rich as being stingy taxpayers falls on its face in a new study released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO study “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010” shows that the top 40 percent of households, as determined by pre-tax income, paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s income tax in 2010.
How can any group of Americans, or even all Americans together, pay more than all of the income taxes received? Read on.
The study also showed that the lowest 40 percent of households paid “negative income tax,” meaning that they paid no federal income tax, but instead received on average $18,950 in government transfer payments. Within this group the CBO said that the lowest fifth of income earners paid an individual income tax rate of minus 9.2 percent, and the second lowest group paid minus 2.3 percent.
Presumably, Mr. Obama would like the “rich” to pay not just “all of the income taxes,” and not just “more than all the income taxes,” but still more than that.
The study shows that the redistribution of wealth that Mr. Obama and his progressive cronies so strongly favor is well underway. But, of course, it still isn’t enough, and won’t be enough until everyone shares equally in the misery, because in their quest for the unachievable goal of financial equality, the progressives will have made it impossible for hard working Americans to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and will dampen the enthusiasm for earning, causing a collapse of the system.
In other news, as the nation observed the passage of one year since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings that resulted in the death of 20 children and six adults, another school was in the news over an incident involving another young person determined to hurt innocent people.
Upset with the debate team sponsor and librarian at Arapahoe High School in a Denver, Colorado suburb who had disciplined him recently, the high school senior wearing a backpack with three Molotov cocktails inside it, a bandolier and carrying a pump-action shotgun entered the school and headed for the library.
The librarian got a warning and left the building. In this rampage the shooter fired five shots, two randomly down hallways that hit no one, and one more random shot that claimed no victims, but two other shots that each injured one student, one of them critically. He also set off one of the Molotov cocktails in the library that fortunately injured no one. And then he killed himself.
The rampage might have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who was working as a school resource officer, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told CNN. He praised the deputy’s response as “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself, and lauded his response to hearing gunshots. “He went to the thunder,” he said. “He heard the noise of gunshot and, when many would run away from it, he ran toward it to make other people safe.”
A student who had a class with the alleged shooter told The Denver Post that, "He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff." The classmate added that she had heard that he was bullied a lot.
The alleged shooter described himself on Facebook as "Keynesian,” one advocating government monetary and fiscal programs, and also attacked Republicans: "You republicans are so cute," he wrote, and posted an image that read: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?"
Two other students told The Post, “He had political views that were ‘outside the mainstream.’”
We must not ignore the message from Sheriff Robinson that he clearly believes the presence of an armed and trained individual at Arapahoe High School, and the shooter’s knowledge of that person’s presence had a positive influence on this situation.
Making schools and other public buildings “gun-free zones” means no opposing force will be there when a criminal carrying a weapon shows up.
As we have seen at Sandy Hook and other places, this is a prescription for carnage and pain, whereas at Arapahoe High School, the county sheriff thinks the presence of an armed resource person prevented even more death, pain and suffering.
Cross-posted from Observations
The scare mongering continues on the debt ceiling and default
There is great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the potential for catastrophe if the debt ceiling is not raised, but whether the ceiling is raised or not, the underlying problem will remain to be reckoned with yet again.
We are warned against defaulting on the national debt, which President Barack Obama tells us will have the most dire consequences. However, default really isn’t an issue, as economist and former long-time Federal Reserve System Chairman Alan Greenspan explained: “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
While Mr. Greenspan’s statement is technically true, printing even more money to pay the nation’s debts has its own set of economic problems, and heaven knows we have enough of those already.
Another reason paying our debt service isn’t a problem is that even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised so that the government can borrow more money, there is more than enough money coming into the treasury each month to pay the interest on the debt multiple times over, although that has its problems, too.
But the best reason is contained in Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which directs, in no uncertain terms, that "the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." The Constitution commands the president to make good the debts of the United States, and that includes both what our nation owes to bondholders, and the sums promised in legislation to those receiving pensions set by law, according to legal scholar Garrett Epps.
What that means is that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised President Obama will be forced to make some tough decisions on what won’t receive funding so those mandated payments can be made, and since much of Mr. Obama’s popularity comes from spending money, there could be some uncomfortable and long days in the White House.
However, the scare mongering about the catastrophe facing the nation and the resulting public outrage will likely force an increase in the debt ceiling for the 80th time since 1940.
President Obama tells us this won’t increase spending, but since it does increase the limit on spending, does anyone really doubt that spending will soon increase, and before long the politicians will want yet another debt ceiling increase.
Sometimes there are compelling reasons for deficit spending, like WWII, the 9-11 attacks, and the banking crisis that threw the country’s economic system into crisis, but most times it is just a bail out from fiscal irresponsibility. Sometimes the ceiling has been raised by a small amount, other times by a large amount, and sometimes it’s been raised temporarily with provisions for a "snap-back" to a lower level.
“Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions – and the way most businesses make decisions if they want to stay in business,” says the eminent economist Dr. Thomas Sowell. “Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.”
And that is the crux of the problem. People who are elected to represent the interests of the citizenry do not use common sense and basic economics when making decisions we pay them to make.
Trying to obtain benefits without considering either the cost or the likelihood of success not infrequently produces bad programs, and bad programs breed and multiply in Washington, DC, and live forever.
The federal government is simply too big, too powerful, too intrusive, too expensive, and too undisciplined, and as a result there are dozens of duplicate programs, and more than a few programs that do not, and never have, achieved success, but are still being funded. And there are billions going to fraud and abuse.
Attempts to reign in waste, fraud and abuse have mostly lacked serious action, and efforts to cut spending to match income likewise have accomplished little.
And atop that lackluster record we have the biggest deficit producer in history in the White House.
At the end of FY2000, four months before George W. Bush took office, the national debt totaled $5.67 trillion. At the end of the fiscal year that Barack Obama took office it had risen to $11.91 trillion. That number is skewed higher due to the $151 billion TARP program President Bush implemented, $147 billion of which was repaid after Mr. Obama took office.
At the end of FY2013 the debt stood just short of $17 trillion. Excluding FY2009, when both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama held the White House, the president and the mostly-Democrat-controlled Congress added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, with average deficits of $1.163 trillion from FY2010 – FY2013.
It is way past time that government face up to reality and live within its means. The president and Congress must get rid of unproductive programs; eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, fraud, waste and abuse; shut down or downsize federal departments; and implement business-like fiscal standards. In short: do their job.
Privacy under attack? Stop-and-frisk vs. NSA surveillance
As Americans, we each have a guaranteed right to privacy. The online legal site FindLaw explains it this way: “The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects personal privacy, and every citizen's right to be free from unreasonable government intrusion into their persons, homes, businesses, and property – whether through police stops of citizens on the street, arrests, or searches of homes and businesses.”
That seems plain enough, but how one interprets the word “unreasonable” provides ample opportunity for mischief, as well as for good law enforcement.
As for good law enforcement, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has credited the City’s stop-and-frisk policy with helping drive crime to record lows since the policing policy was implemented in 1994, with the murder rate falling by an astounding 82 percent by 2009.
New York’s stop-and-frisk policy seeks to prevent crime before it happens by deploying officers with pinpoint precision to critical street segments in high-crime areas where they interact with individuals displaying suspicious behavior: they approach, question, and sometimes frisk the individuals. That practice has led to fewer people, such as members of street gangs, risking arrest by carrying a weapon on their person, and with fewer gang bangers carrying weapons, there are fewer spur-of-the-moment shootings in New York, and correspondingly fewer deaths.
You might think that, given the obvious level of success in reducing the murder rate in the Big Apple, such a policy would fall outside the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against “unreasonable” searches. But you would be wrong, according to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who believes that the policy indeed does violate the Fourth Amendment protection.
Mayor Bloomberg believes that the judge's decision will cause a reduction in the use of stop-and-frisk, which would reverse crime reductions and make his city a more dangerous place. And data indicates he is correct. In 2011, guns were used in 61 percent of all homicides, but in black neighborhoods 86 percent of young black males died from gunfire. Stop-and-frisk reduced the total number of deaths by reducing the number of guns on the streets.
The challenge to the policy arose because officers stop minority residents at a rate disproportionate to their number in the general population. But those stops are not disproportionate to the minority resident population in the crime-ridden neighborhoods or disproportionate to the number of crimes minorities commit in those neighborhoods.
As we have seen recently, there is the possibility that authorities may lose perspective and become abusive in the use of policies like this one, but supervisors are charged to competently manage their operation. And due to the depths of its crime problem when the policy was implemented, New York police applied stop-and-frisk more aggressively than other cities. But whether or not the City is too aggressive ought not be decided without considering its unique circumstances and surprising rate of success in reducing murders.
An opposite approach to systematically and thoughtfully targeting areas where crimes mostly occur and populations that most often commit them like New York City is doing is the blanket, indiscriminate, suspicion-less spying on telephone, email and other private communications and activities of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency.
The government’s spying on Americans is so egregious – eavesdroppers broke privacy rules or overstepped their legal authority thousands of times every year – it’s no wonder the administration wants to arrest and try Edward Snowden for making the information about its spying public.
Where New York police might appear to have been over-aggressive in implementing stop-and-frisk, the federal government’s policy itself is over-aggressive by design. Surely, observers familiar with the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches would be unable to conclude anything other than that NSA spying is precisely why there is a Fourth Amendment.
As reported in The Washington Times, “A Top Secret internal NSA audit, leaked by Mr. Snowden to freelance journalist Barton Gellman earlier this summer and published online by The Washington Post Thursday night shows that, in the 12 months prior to May 2012, there were 2,776 incidents of ‘unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications’ — those between Americans or foreigners legally in the United States.”
“Most were unintended,” according to The Post. “Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure.” Even if the problems were unintended, sloppiness certainly is no excuse: The infringements are no less wrong, no less a breach of individual privacy, and no less intolerable.
The larger the scope of a program, the greater the chance that something will go wrong, and the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) defends the program, saying that the situation is being blown out of proportion, that the rate of error is miniscule.
Maybe so; however, since the NSA program seeks to find a few fake grains of sand on a beach, and involves millions upon millions of records. For every million records, ten thousand mistakes can be made, affecting the privacy of ten thousand Americans, and the success rate is 99 percent.
Even if such gargantuan programs are run efficiently and competently, they are examples of unjustified government excess, and should not be allowed.
Congress must address the serious immigration problem. But first …
Commentary by James Shott
When illegal immigration is the subject, a large faction keeps saying that immigrants contributed greatly to building America into the greatest nation on Earth, and that we should therefore give all those illegals citizenship or some sort of legal status. And it is true that smart, dedicated, hard-working people who came here for a better life made tremendous contributions to the American success story.
But those people came here the right way, by following immigration procedures. Right now, there are some 4.5 million people following in their footsteps waiting to come to America legally.
Currently, however, there are some 11 million people inside our borders who did not come here the proper way. About 40 percent of them are foreigners who arrived legally, frequently on tourist Visas, and simply didn’t leave when they were supposed to.
Most of the other 7 million illegals are low-wage workers and their families who sneaked over the southern border, and even though they did not enter the country honorably by obeying immigration laws are people who are here for honorable purposes. And then there are the punks and thugs bent on committing vicious crimes, including murder, against American citizens.
For every 100 actual American citizens there are roughly 3 people residing in the country illegally, and that is a huge problem.
Actually, there are two separate problems: One problem is what do we do with the people here illegally, and the second, and most important, is how do we remedy the circumstances that allowed this intolerable situation to develop so that it never happens again?
Our immigration system has been both neglected and mismanaged, and as a result the country has endured substantial harm. This situation has been the genesis of frequent and strong calls to reform the immigration system. But the immigration system is not what failed; the people in positions to competently operate it and enforce the laws have failed – and in some cases, refused – to do their jobs.
So, the question is: What do we do about the fact that we have 11 million illegals now in the country?
Perhaps past history will be a good guide as to how we should proceed. What the bipartisan US Senate “Gang of Eight” is proposing today is very similar to what was done in the 1986 amnesty when Ronald Reagan was President.
According to Mr. Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, writing in the Heritage Foundation’s “The Foundry”: “The path to citizenship was not automatic. Immigrants had to pay application fees, learn to speak English, understand American civics, pass a medical exam, and register for military selective service. Those with convictions for a felony or three misdemeanors were ineligible.” That is quite similar to the “Gang of Eight’s” idea.
When the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was enacted, there were approximately 5 million illegal aliens in the country, and about 2.7 million of them benefitted from the IRCA. What has happened since then is that the number of illegal aliens has more than doubled.
What went wrong after that compassionate act to grant legal status to those illegal aliens that caused not a decrease in the number of illegals, but a dramatic increase?
“Well, one reason is that everything else the 1986 bill promised—from border security to law enforcement—was to come later,” Mr. Meese said. “It never did. Only amnesty prevailed, and that encouraged more illegal immigration.” Had we done all that the IRCA required, we likely would not have the problem we have today.
In fact, Mr. Meese writes, the failure of the federal government to implement all of the elements of the IRCA to protect the nation from people entering illegally in the years after its passage caused Mr. Reagan to regard the amnesty as the greatest mistake of his administration.
Now that we see what happened after 1986 when we failed to prevent people illegally entering the country, and this time we have to make sure that does not happen again. We therefore have to yield the strong demand for securing the borders and putting improved control programs in place before doing anything to provide legal status of any kind to any illegal alien.
We have to become more sensible and less ruled by compassionate impulses. The country and the states cannot afford amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, or for half that number, no matter how nice they may be.
What must happen first is to do whatever is necessary to secure the borders. After that – but only after that – whatever steps we take must protect the interests of the United States before considering the interests of illegal aliens. And we must honor the 4.5 million who are waiting to come to America the proper way before helping illegals.
If you steal food because you are hungry, you have a good reason, but you still broke the law. If you want a better life and sneak into a country that offers promise for a better life, you have a good reason, but you still have done something wrong.
We must not endorse wrongdoing by rewarding it.
Cross-posted from Observations
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