† A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ: As per a request by the Obama administration, the  Supreme Court agreed to review the Legal Arizona Workers Act during its term starting in October, reports The Washington Post: “With the Justice Department preparing a lawsuit against Arizona over the new law, the court's decision to review the … measure … signals a willingness to get involved in one of the nation's most politically divisive issues. “ If the high court agrees with the AZ Federal District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which both found that the statute did not violate the Supremacy Clause with respect to federal immigration laws and policy, then it bodes well for the Constitutionality of AZ’s new anti-immigration law.

 

† ICE Hopes To Have Chilling Effect On Illegal Immigration By Targeting Identity Thieves: Puerto Ricans typically take a dim view of illegal immigration. They object to competing for community resources and job opportunities with illegals. And because they are American citizens by birth and have Spanish surnames, they are in the cross hairs of identity thieves, whether they live on the mainland or on the island. Puerto Rican officials are taking drastic steps in response, reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

 

[T]heir records - kept loosely in schools or church rectories, where they are easy to steal - draw as much as $6,000 on the black market. …

 

Documents stolen from Puerto Rico have shown up in fraud-ring busts in Delaware and Ohio and immigration raids on meatpacking plants from Texas to Florida. …

 

"Birth certificates have become legal tender," said Kenneth McClintock, Puerto Rico's secretary of state.

 

The island government's only answer so far is to void every Puerto Rican birth certificate as of July 1 and require about 5 million people - including 1.4 million on the U.S. mainland - to reapply for new ones with security features. New birth certificates will be issued starting July 1, and all old birth certificates will be annulled by Sept. 30.

 

But no one can guarantee the mass inconvenience will solve the problem. Untold numbers of passports, driver's licenses and other documents issued to holders of false birth certificates are still valid.

 

The law only aims to make it harder to get false documents in the future, but does nothing to target those already in circulation. …

 

Under another law that takes effect in 2014, Puerto Ricans will have to obtain new driver's licenses with higher security features. Currently, the island has five different types of driver's licenses, which are sold for $100 to $150, said Puerto Rico police detective Jose Bejaran Mercado.

 

† Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?: Venerable Washington Post columnist David Broder notes that “[a]s forecast by his campaign, Obama has staked almost everything in his reputation as commander in chief on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan”:

 

He staged a long and heavily publicized review of the war strategy, concluded it by adding 30,000 more U.S. troops to the struggle, set a mid-2011 deadline for beginning a withdrawal and picked [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal as the commander to carry out the task.

 

That choice - recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who fired McChrystal's predecessor - has backfired, but the president insists the change of command does not signal a change of strategy. His fingerprints are still indelibly on the war.

 

Instead, he has turned to Gen. David Petraeus, the hero of President George W. Bush's Iraq surge - which Obama opposed - and handed him the mess that is Afghanistan.

 

At some point, a nuclear Iran may pose an even greater challenge for Obama. But for now, and likely in 2012, he will be rated on national security by what happens in Afghanistan.

 

This being the case, New York Times columnist Frank Rich criticizes Obama for hiring McChrystal in the first place (“[t]he general’s significant role in the Pentagon’s politically motivated cover-up of Pat Tillman’s friendly-fire death in 2004 should have been disqualifying from the start)” and for keeping him on “long past his expiration date”:

 

We now know, thanks to Hastings, that the general was out of control and the White House was naïve. The price has been huge. The McChrystal cadre’s utter distaste for its civilian colleagues on the war team was an ipso facto death sentence for the general’s signature counterinsurgency strategy. You can’t engage in nation building without civilian partnership. As Rachel Maddow said last week of McChrystal, “the guy who was promoting and leading the counterinsurgency strategy has shown by his actions that even he doesn’t believe in it.”

 

This fundamental contradiction helps explain some of the war’s failures under McChrystal’s aborted command, including the inability to hold Marja (pop. 60,000), which he had vowed to secure in pure counterinsurgency fashion by rolling out a civilian “government in a box” after troops cleared it of the Taliban. …

 

But none of the general’s defenders had an argument for him or the war beyond staying the course, poor as the results have been.

 

For his part, Rich’s colleague Ross Douthat agrees that “if the current counterinsurgency campaign collapses, it almost guarantees that some kind of American military presence will be propping up some sort of Afghan state in 2020 and beyond” and enumerates the reasons “success is our only ticket out” - though he sees the path to success as staying the course:

 

First, the memory of 9/11, which ensures that any American president will be loath to preside over the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul. Second, the continued presence of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, which makes it difficult for any American president to contemplate giving up the base for counterterrorism operations that Afghanistan affords. Third, the larger region’s volatility: it’s the part of the world where the nightmare of nuclear-armed terrorists is most likely to become a reality, so no American president can afford to upset the balance of power by pulling out and leaving a security vacuum behind.

 

This explains why the Obama administration, throughout all its internal debates and strategic reviews, hasn’t been choosing between remaining in Afghanistan and withdrawing from the fight. It’s been choosing between two ways of staying. …

 

Ostensibly a left-wing, antiwar critique of counterinsurgency, Michael Hastings’s [Rolling Stone] article relied heavily on complaints that the current strategy places too much value on ... innocent Afghan lives. “In a weird way,” the Center for a New American Security’s Andrew Exum pointed out, Hastings ended up criticizing counterinsurgency strategy “because it doesn’t allow our soldiers to kill enough people.”

 

This is also how The Stiletto read the Rolling Stone article (second item), though she does not find the idea that we can’t win a war without killing people “weird.” But the issue is moot for the time being, as Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured Karzai that the U.S. will continue to value the lives of Afghans and insurgents more highly than the lives of our soldiers.

 

Let’s hope Petraeus proves Mullen wrong. As counterinsurgency expert Mark Moyar explains to The Associated Press: "I think morale would not be an issue if the rules permitted success, but in many cases they have made it impossible to defeat the insurgents and to convince the population that we are strong enough to protect them."

 

AP adds that “officers fear career damage if they mistakenly call for air or heavy weapons support and kill civilians in the process.” Recall that when Mullen became chairman of the JCS, he said that diversity was a "strategic priority," and that the officers who failed to stop a radicalized Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan from rising through the ranks also feared for their careers because of Mullen’s emphasis on diversity (fourth item). If Obama means to winning his war, he needs to replace Mullen as well.

 

† Mama, Don’t Take My Incandescent Bulbs Away: The Washington Times notes that on January 1, 2012 “100-watt versions of Thomas Edison's venerable invention will be first on the contraband list” and advises that “[i]f you like a safe, warm glow with your lighting, now would be a good time to start stocking up on incandescents.”

 

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: The New York Times reports on a new pedagogic fad that The Stiletto has seen first-hand when one of her young relatives graduated from high school this year, except that at this particular school the principle turned the naming of class valedictorian into a popularity contest and the senior elected to receive the honor had average grades:

 

In top suburban schools across the country, the valedictorian, a beloved tradition, is rapidly losing its singular meaning as administrators dispense the title to every straight-A student rather than try to choose the best among them.

 

Principals say that recognizing multiple valedictorians reduces pressure and competition among students, and is a more equitable way to honor achievement, particularly when No. 1 and No. 5 may be separated by only the smallest fraction of a grade from sophomore science. But some scholars and parents have criticized the swelling valedictorian ranks as yet another symptom of rampant grade inflation, with teachers reluctant to jeopardize the best and brightest’s chances of admission to top-tier colleges. …

 

Even some principals who have named multiple valedictorians acknowledge that the honor no longer carries the same weight.

 

“If you’ve got one in a population of 500, it has special significance,” said John O’Breza, the principal of Cherry Hill East. “When you have 9, 10 or 30 in a population of 500, the numbers speak for themselves. The more rare it is, the more distinguished.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, Why We Need Gitmo): New York Law Journal reports that a court-appointed psychiatrist has determined that Gitmo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani “understands the charges against him and is competent to go on trial in September for the al-Qaida conspiracy that included the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.” Looks like Ghailani has to get over the “post-traumatic stress” he claims he suffers when strip-searched each time he leaves or returns to the Metropolitan Correctional Center for his court appearances.

 

Meanwhile in other Gitmo-related news The New York Times reports that President Barack Hussein Obama is “[s]tymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities” and will be unable to close the offshore prison before his only term in office ends. One “senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity” tells The Times that Obama “can’t just wave a magic wand” and shutter  Gitmo. What? He needs a magic want? Didn’t Maureen Dowd and Obama’s other MSM minions insist that all The One needed to do was simply will Gitmo closed with his highly evolved mental powers?

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, President Obama Channels Gov. Paterson): After they “refused” to introduce his Draconian emergency spending bill for a vote, an “angry” Gov. David Paterson (D-NY) “slammed” state legislators for cobbling together a budget that includes "irrational spending that is not paid for" and is threatening to use his line-item veto to cut out “nearly $200 million in pork,” reports the New York Daily News.

 

The alternative spending bill Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and Senate Democratic Leader John Sampson of Brooklyn are pushing “reject[s] several of [the governor’s] hallmark proposals, including allowing wine sales in grocery stores and capping property taxes,” reports the New York Post, and he “seethed over the legislative mutiny,” while “administration officials warned that the package would fall between $500 million and $1.5 billion short of closing the state's yawning budget deficit, although Silver insisted “[t]he difference between us and him is $200 million over what will be a $135- or $136-billion budget, which I suggest to you is less than a tenth of 1 percent.”

 

There is more at stake here than a stray billion dollars or avoiding a partial or complete government shut-down. NY’s long-overdue budget has become a struggle to the death between the state’s executive and legislative branches, reports The New York Times:

 

By introducing their own bill, Mr. Sampson and Mr. Silver have stripped Mr. Paterson of the leverage he had by using emergency bills to pass regular budget appropriations; if lawmakers pass their own appropriations bills, there is no real threat of a government shutdown. If those bills pass, Mr. Paterson could, in turn, use his line-item veto to cut any spending authorized by the Legislature that exceeds the amounts laid out in his executive budget from January.

 

Meanwhile President Barack Hussein Obama must be wondering whether Tea Party sympathizers have infiltrated the G-20 – not the anarchists rioting outside the meeting, but the world leaders who rejected his call for propping up a “fragile” world economy with more stimulus spending and agreed instead to cut their annual deficits in half within three years.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): Commenting on a recent report by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) claiming that in the past three years, 166 people were killed by holders of concealed-weapon permits The Washington Times points out that “many of the so-called victims of gun violence were criminals” and denounced the disingenuousness of gun control groups “twisting legitimate examples of self-defense into crimes”:

 

The simple fact is that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens. Suggesting that burglars, rapists and other hardened criminals are "victims" of permit holders is a stretch, even for these groups. The real statistics show that America is a safer place thanks to more of its citizens having a right to protect themselves and their families.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing): Syndicated columnist Susan Estrich fears that Baby Boomers are going to find out what it means to have government healthcare coverage but be unable to actually get healthcare :

 

Not long ago, a close friend called me with an unusual request. She
and her husband were looking for a new doctor to take care of them. What made it unusual was that they'd had the same doctor for years - decades, actually. …

 

Her husband had turned 65 and was now eligible for Medicare. Good news - except [their doctor] is one of the increasing number of doctors who aren't taking "new" Medicare patients, or even old ones. …

 

[A] study, this one by the American Medical Association, 17 percent of the doctors they surveyed restrict the number of Medicare patients in their practices - and that number for primary care physicians is 31 percent. …

 

There is something wrong when people like my friends reach their 60s and have to find new doctors because the ones who know them best won't take care of them anymore.

 

Estrich knows what’s wrong – her private insurer paid her highly educated doctor less to read her brain scan than she pays her hairdresser to cut her hair, and Medicare would have paid him roughly 22 percent less than that – and has figured out that Obamacare will do nothing to fix this.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Only The Little People Pay Taxes): Roger Lowenstein, author of “While America Aged,” explains in this New York Times op-ed when states no longer have the funds to cover pension obligations for government employees (IL is expected to be the first to face this budget nightmare in 2018):

 

As funds approach exhaustion, states will be forced to borrow to replenish them. Some have already done so. …

 

Such an explosion of debt would threaten desperate governments with bankruptcy. Alternately, states could try to defray pension costs from their operating budgets. Illinois, once its funds were depleted, would be forced to devote a third of its budget to retirees; Ohio, fully half. This would impoverish every social (and other) program; it would invert the basic mission of government, which is, after all, to serve constituents’ needs.

 

States really have no choice but to further cut spending and raise taxes. They also need to cut pension benefits. About half have made modest trims, but only for future workers. Reforming pensions is painfully slow, because pensions of existing workers are legally protected. …

 

Recently, states have begun to test the legal boundary. Minnesota and Colorado cut cost-of-living adjustments for existing workers’ pensions; each faces a lawsuit. But legislatures need to push the boundaries of reform. That will mean challenging the unions and their political might. …

 

The days when state officials may shield their workers while subjecting all other constituents to hardship are fast at an end.

 

Even Dems – who are beholden to (AKA “allies of”) organized labor – are getting the message, reports The New York Times and are demanding concessions from public sector unions:

 

For years, Republican lawmakers have railed against public employees’ pay and benefits, but now another breed of elected official is demanding labor concessions, too: current and former labor leaders and allies themselves. …

 

For decades, many state and city politicians, especially Democratic ones, helped assure their re-election by cozying up to public-sector unions and benefiting from their campaign dollars and precinct walkers. …

 

But now, with cities and states struggling to close budget gaps, there is a glaring need to scale back costs of all kinds, and public employees are a favorite target.

 

Last year, 51 percent of cities froze or reduced pay, according to the National League of Cities, while 25 percent laid off workers, 24 percent reduced health benefits and 22 percent revised union contracts to reduce pay and benefits. According to the Pew Center on the States, states are $452 billion behind in their pension contributions while also having $554 billion in liabilities for retiree health care.

 

Even with the resistance from public sector unions, some elected officials are realizing that getting tough with the unions can be good politics in down economic times, as government employees’ benefits are held up as examples of excess - and as taxpayers (and voters) demand greater accountability.