The New York Times notes that Boehner and the dysfunctional Republicans have punted on immigration. Will the president pick up the ball and run?
Sometime in late summer, if predictions are right, President Obama will use his executive authority to protect many unauthorized immigrants from deportation.
We don’t know the details. Mr. Obama and the Department of Homeland Security have not yet supplied the who, what, when or even, officially, whether. But Mr. Obama has promised to respond to Congress’s refusal to act on immigration reform. And the most obvious thing is to lift the threat of deportation from immigrants who should be the lowest priority for removal: those with citizen children, jobs, clean records and strong community ties. Some reports put the size of that group at four million to five million.
The mere possibility of Mr. Obama’s protecting any of the 11 million immigrants living here outside the law is already making Republicans clutch at their chests and cry out: Oh, the legality! He has done nothing yet, but right-wingers have pre-emptively declared him Caesar, crossing a Rubicon into lawlessness. ...
In truth, Mr. Obama is well within his authority to madden the right. His power to conduct immigration policy is vast. Congress has given the president broad flexibility and discretion to enforce immigration law. It has also given him the resources to deport about 350,000 to 400,000 people a year, as Mr. Obama has done, relentlessly. It could have given him billions more to deport everyone, but it has not.
It's easy to believe that the GOP designed this situation to generate a presidential action — any presidential action — so they can scream "Constitution!" and "Tyrant!" Truthfully, idiocy on the right is a fully adequate explanation for how we got to this place. But whether we got here by plan or accident, it won't stop Republican theatrics... so there's absolutely no reason the president shouldn't do the right thing.
Come on in. Let's look at the rest...
Leonard Piits refuses to acknowledge that the U S is at war... on white people.
At this point, you really have to wonder: Is it still news when a Republican says something asinine?
On the off chance it is, let us spend a few moments pondering the strange case of Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who said last week that the Democratic Party is waging a “War on Whites.”
Yeah, he actually said that. You can look it up if you want.
Brooks was responding to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who had asked him to comment on a remark from National Journal columnist Ron Fournier to the effect that the GOP cannot continue to be competitive in national elections if it continues to alienate voters of color. This is a truth so self-evident as to have been adopted by the GOP itself in its “autopsy” report after the 2012 election.
Yet here is what Brooks said in response: “This is a part of the war on whites that is being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.”
“A War on Whites.” Yet it’s President Obama who is guilty of racially inflammatory rhetoric?
...
Okay, so let’s say the obvious first. There’s something surreal and absurd about this lecture, coming as it does from a member of the party that invented the Southern strategy and birtherism and whose voters were last seen standing at the border screaming at terrified Guatemalan kids. But it’s not the ridiculousness of Brooks’ words that should be of greatest concern. You see, Fournier is right. If something does not arrest its present trajectory, the GOP seems destined to shrink into a regional party with appeal only to older white voters. It will be irrelevant in a nation where white voters will soon cease to be a majority — no group will be a majority — and appeals to racial and cultural resentments have less power to sway elections.
Dana Milbank hopes the CIA will come at least moderately clean.
If the CIA spends half as much energy finding terrorists as it has spent fighting Congress, we should feel very safe.
The spooks, taking a break from the mundane work of protecting the nation, have lately been turning their spycraft against the lawmakers who are supposed to be overseeing them. The not-so-secret mission: To block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on tortu—, uh, enhanced interrogation methods.
First, CIA officials broke into computers that were being used by the committee — a clear constitutional violation — and then, using false information, tried to have committee staffers prosecuted. CIA Director John Brennan apologized for spying on the senators’ activities. President Obama, in a news conference on Aug. 1, said the intelligence committee was free to issue its report, “the declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee.”
But Brennan’s apology must not have been sincere, and the committee, to its displeasure, learned that the CIA has “redacted” — read: censored — key elements of that report. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee, said this week that she couldn’t release the report because the CIA had attempted to redact key details that “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.”
Seriously, I'm past the point of forgiving whistleblowers. I think they should be on staff, and paid bonuses for every "secret" revealed.
Roger Cohen worries that the loud may always out shout the reasonable.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians work to build bridges, but their voices are lost in the stampede of zealots schooled in hatred and cynics adept in the manipulation of fear for the consolidation of power. ...
The center, it seems, cannot hold. This little war has had about it something of the Salem witch trials, bookended by murky incidents of murder or disappearance generating mass hysteria. With each war, each tweet, even, vitriol grows.
Hannah Arendt warned of the dangers of nationalism in a Jewish state; she thought it might be redoubled by dependence on the United States. I find another thought of hers more important: “Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” ...
It will take immense courage now for Israelis who wrestle with their consciences to raise their voices for a two-state peace — and just as much for Palestinians to engage in open self-criticism of disastrous choices.
But going back to Arendt's words again, if there's an understanding that not everyone will comply in every situation, can't we reach a point where we don't escalate violence just because a relative handful won't sit down? The current situation in the Middle East is akin to not ending World War II because a couple of Japanese soldiers are still hiding in the bush.
Ross Douthat is ready to see US action in Iraq.
Three times before last week’s decision to launch airstrikes against the self-styled caliphate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama was urged to intervene in Middle Eastern conflicts: in Libya in the spring of 2011, in Syria from 2011 onward and in Iraq two short months ago, when Baghdad was threatened by the swift advance of ISIS.
In each case, there were good reasons to hesitate. In Libya, we had little to gain strategically from Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fall, and more to fear from the vacuum that might follow. Syria was a more significant theater, and Bashar al-Assad’s downfall a consummation more devoutly to be wished — but there as in Libya, there was little clarity about what forces (liberals? warlords? jihadis?) we would be empowering and what would follow Assad’s rule.
A similar problem existed for the recent battles outside Baghdad. ...
The latest crisis, however, is different. This time, the case for war is much stronger, and the decision to intervene is almost certainly the right call.
You know things are serious when Douthat can't think of a way to blame the situation on the religious beliefs of liberals.
Anne Applebaum wonders where the globalization goes when trade has not stopped being a political tool.
While it lasted, globalization was a beguiling tale we told ourselves about the future. The world is interconnected and therefore getting not just richer but more peaceful. The technologies of international capitalism — outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring — would not only make the world’s businesses more profitable, they would make people less quarrelsome. We would play chess online with Indians, and thus become more like them. We would buy software from China, and thus never go to war with them. Even better, once they started trading, India and China would never go to war with each other.
At the height of this optimism, the “McDonald’s theory of international relations” was a thing one heard about quite frequently. The idea was that no country with a McDonald’s restaurant would ever go to war with another country with a McDonald’s restaurant, because in order to have a McDonald’s restaurant you had to be thoroughly integrated into the global economy, and if you were integrated into the global economy you would never attack another one of its members. This theory of “McPeace” was exploded, literally, by the U.S. bombardment of Belgrade, the city that in 1988 had opened the first McDonald’s restaurant in the whole of what was about to become the ex-communist bloc. But the hope that it might be true somehow lingered.
This week, as Russia, a country with more than 400 McDonald’s, ramps up its attack on Ukraine, a country with more than 70 McDonald’s, I think we can finally declare the McPeace theory officially null and void.
Carl Hiaasen shows that even the rich can sell out.
Back when he first ran for governor as a self-styled outsider, Rick Scott lambasted his opponent in the Republican primary for taking campaign money from U.S. Sugar, one of the worst corporate polluters of the Everglades.
Scott indignantly squeaked that Bill McCollum had been “bought and paid for” by U.S. Sugar. He said the company’s support of McCollum was “disgusting.”
“I can’t be bought,” Scott declared.
Seriously, that’s what the man said. Stop gagging and read on.
Four years later, the governor’s re-election campaign is hungrily raking in money from U.S. Sugar, more than $534,000 so far.
Exactly when Scott overcame his disgust isn’t clear, but in February 2013 he and undisclosed others jetted to the King Ranch in Texas for a hog- and deer-hunting junket on U.S. Sugar’s 30,000-acre lease. ...
A month after his secret safari, the governor appointed an executive of King Ranch’s Florida agricultural holdings to the board of the South Florida Water Management District, the agency supposedly supervising the Everglades cleanup.
Our current Supreme Court might find a way to ignore this, but it sure looks like bribery to us peons.
Kevin Fedarkoaug castes a wary eye toward threats to a very special place.
... if there is a space of worship in this country that qualifies as both national and natural, surely it is the Grand Canyon.
Unfortunately, this idea of a tabernacle that is marvelously open, but also precariously vulnerable, is also a useful metaphor to capture what is unfolding this summer as the canyon’s custodians confront a challenge that some are calling one of the most serious threats in the 95-year history of Grand Canyon National Park.
To be precise, there is not one menace but two. And many of the people who know this place best find it almost impossible to decide which is worse, given that both would desecrate one of the country’s most beloved wilderness shrines.
On the South Rim plateau, less than two miles from the park’s entrance, the gateway community of Tusayan, a town just a few blocks long, has approved plans to construct 2,200 homes and three million square feet of commercial space that will include shops and hotels, a spa and a dude ranch. ...
Perhaps the only thing more dismaying is that the second threat is even worse.
Less than 25 miles to the northeast of Tusayan, Navajo leaders are working with developers from Scottsdale to construct a 1.4-mile tramway that would descend about 3,200 feet directly into the heart of the canyon. They call it Grand Canyon Escalade.
The idea of a tram to the bottom of the Grand Canyon is about as revolting as an escalator on Everest.