Out on a Limb with Hillary

Mickey Kaus writes: T.A. Frank, who wrote an eloquent piece criticizing the Gang of 8 bill (mainly from the left) for The New Republic, notes that Hillary’s Hispander war with Sanders has left her waaay out of even the turbulent mainstream on immigration –– she seems to have basically promised not to deport anybody except those who’ve committed violent offenses or drug crimes:

[U]nder Clinton’s policy, if you manage to sneak across the border illegally and make it into a city, you won’t be removed. You could call that open borders, except it’s messier. It’s more like a free-for-all …

I suppose the question is whether Clinton squirms back to a less extreme promise before Trump clobbers her with her current position …

P.S.: When I reread Frank’s 2013 TNR piece, I noticed this eloquent, on point paragraph — worth reprinting because it shows that worry about uncontrolled immigration isn’t really a “right-wing” concern:

The country I want for myself and future Americans is one that’s prosperous, cohesive, harmonious, wealthy in land and resources per capita, nurturing of its skilled citizens, and, most important, protective of its unskilled citizens, who deserve as much any other Americans to live in dignity. This bill threatens to put all of that out of reach, because it fails to control illegal immigration.

No place for that in Hillary’s campaign?

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America Should Follow Israel’s Example

Haaretz in 2013: The state plans to cease issuing birth certificates to children of foreigners born in Israel, thereby depriving them of any official government document confirming their birth. The lack of such a document could cause serious problems later in life, when moving to another country, getting married or even attending college.

The new policy, revealed in a brief filed by the state with the High Court of Justice on Monday, will require foreigners to make do instead with the handwritten birth notices issued by hospitals. But these notices aren’t official government documents.

The government said it is making this change because it fears migrants might exploit official birth certificates to try to obtain legal status in Israel. But the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the change would cause children disproportionate harm.

The birth certificates issued to children of foreigners – meaning everyone from diplomats to asylum seekers to legal and illegal foreign workers – were never the same as those issued to Israeli citizens or residents. About a year ago, however, the state made two additional changes in these documents: It stopped listing the name of the child’s father, and started listing the mother’s maiden name as the child’s surname.

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Power Players Jeopardy

Comments:

* I don’t know if anyone has been watching the “Power Players” version of Jeopardy! which is hosted in Washington D.C. They had former RNC chairman Michael Steele on. It did not go well. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and journalists aren’t really as smart as they’d like to think they are, but how was he so clueless on Final Jeopardy? He tries to make up for his ignorance with a feeble joke. He later on Twitter tried to blame his poor performance on the clicker, but he stood there blankly most of the time well out of his depth. He was once one of the leaders of the party?

* Comedy is a brutally competitive field where only the strong survive (on their wits).

Sucking at the corporate teat of CNN requires a different skill set–like connections and a willingness to suckle eagerly (see eg Anderson Cooper, another moron exposed on jeopardy).

Norm Macdonald is another brilliant comedian who dominated a TV quiz show.

Heck, even Cheech Marin crushed those CNN anchors and affirmative action baby political hacks (some Hispanic woman with a lot of clout in the GOP was particularly dumb).

* Steve Sailer: My clicker was broken when I was on Jeopardy in 1994.

I was constantly holding up my buzzer pushing it over and over with it only going off about 10% or 20% of the time. During both commercial breaks, the Jeopardy technical crew besieged me, asking what I was doing wrong to keep my buzzer from going off.

A few years later, a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a decade dropped by. The first thing he said was, “I saw you on Jeopardy. What the hell was wrong with your buzzer?”

A few weeks after me, General Schwarzkopf appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy and his buzzer was unreliable. He made them stop taping until they fixed his buzzer.

It probably cost me around $25,000.

I believe the Jeopardy episode I was on aired February 27, 1994. It was filmed about a month earlier, not long after the Northridge Earthquake.

* Look up Wolf Blitzer on Jeopardy on youtube – you’ll be shocked at what an idiot he is (or maybe you won’t). OTOH, Andy Richter (Conan O’Brien’s sidekick) did great on the same show – go figure.

* Milo has a Greek father and a Jewish mother. I think he gets away with it because he can pull both the Jew card and the homo card. Maybe he has US residency or citizenship. Plus he is eloquent and amazingly quick on his feet, as you’d kind of expect from an upper echelon Jew/Greek. Zuckerberg would be a fool to be interviewed by him, though I’d love to see it.

* I failed to line up an internship one summer and did temp labor. One job was at P+Gs general headquarters building. I cleaned toilets, mopped the johns, buffed the floors, wiped down desks, emptied trash, vacuumed … did it for barely more than minimum wage, didn’t die of shame and went back to school in the fall.

Cleaning toilets and other janitorial stuff is not even difficult work. Who the heck do you think is cleaning most of the toilets, public, office, hotel, restaurants in Japan or even Germany–two of the most advanced nations on earth? Japanese and Germans. And it used to be that way in America. Seriously, restrooms were cleaned in America before the Mexican invasion.

This is *entirely* a question of employers paying enough. And when you have to raise the pay rate too high for something, folks change procedures, develop work arounds, automate it away, substitute, etc. etc.

This idea that you need immigration for *anything* is nonsense. Most societies down through the ages have *not* had immigration to any significant extent at all. Immigration is invasion and is resisted while a society, people, nation can resist it. And yet these societies were able to do all the work they needed to do.

* Twenty years ago, I had a blonde American maid cleaning my hotel room in Michigan, and had white American men as cab drivers in Spokane and Scottsdale.

* I lived in Salt Lake City five years ago. The landscaping crew at my small apartment complex was all white.

The “need” for immigration is the desire to suppress wages. Elon Musk paying foreign construction workers $5/hour is the latest example.

In the book Freakonomics, drug dealers were interested in being janitors. Janitors earned more and weren’t at daily risk of violence or arrest.

* In San Francisco there are plenty of white bus drivers, but they work for Golden Gate Transit, which runs up to Marin and Sonoma counties. Their drivers often work 13- hour shifts. You don’t see any whites in the SF Muni system. I assume this reflects the differences in extent of government connection. GGT may be privately run with only some government subsidy. But they let blacks ride free by flashing a “mentally disabled” card.

* There was actually something of a UKIP boomlet in 2014 (they reached 25% in one poll). The reason they didn’t do better is because David Cameron has more political talent in his little finger than every Republican politician combined. Seriously, watch Prime Minister’s Questions on YouTube; it’s astonishing how much better British politicians are at debating than American politicians are.

The EU started off as a right-wing initiative — a free trade area (the “Common Market”). In the first referendum in 1975, Thatcher and the Tories campaigned for it while Labour was officially neutral but with the majority of the membership, led by ur-loony-leftist Tony Benn, against.

The subsequent expansions of EU power were also right-wing; harmonization and liberalization of regulations, and the Euro, joining which was supposed to require balancing the budget and keeping inflation minimal on an indefinite basis.

Then they added the removal of border controls and free movement, still not particularly leftist since it was still confined to Western Europe.

And then, in the mid-90′s/early 00′s, Conquest’s Second Law (“any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”) came true, with the creation of the European Court of Human Rights and the expansion agenda.

Since then, the sides have switched, with EU supporters mainly being on the left and opponents on the right. Most of the old loony leftists (such as Corbyn) are now firmly in the Remain camp, and it’s just a few especially crazy types like George Galloway who still support Out. (Presumably, they’re still awaiting word from Moscow that the party line has changed).

* Dying former Republican senator wants to tell Muslims how much they improve America, implying they are better than existing Americans. We’re not told what the recipients of his grovelling thought.

Link: Joyce told her son that his father had approached people wearing hijabs in an airport to “let them know that he was grateful they were in the country and the country was better for them being here.” “

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5 very smart things Donald Trump has done since becoming the presumptive GOP nominee

Trump will do whatever he needs to do to win. He’s not bound to any policy.

The Fix at the Washington Post:

Here are five examples of Trump being smart:

1. Traveling to D.C. to meet with Paul Ryan

2. Hiring a pollster

3. Making nice with Megyn Kelly
Trump has a theatrical/dramatic approach to most things. That includes his feuds, which play out as three-act plays: The introduction of the tension, the formal falling out, and then, of course, the high-profile making nice.

4. Rolling out a list of potential Supreme Court picks
There’s nothing that united the disparate elements of the Republican party base like talk of future Supreme Court nominees. That’s long been true but is even more so now in the wake of twin decisions over the last few years that legalized same-sex marriage and upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

5. Making clear there are no boundaries in your planned attacks against Hillary
Trump’s willingness to suggest that Bill Clinton had raped Juanita Broaddrick in his Wednesday night interview with Hannity is only the latest signal he is sending to Republicans that he considers absolutely nothing off limits when it comes to drawing a contrast with Hillary Clinton in the fall campaign.

That’s a stone-cold winner for his efforts to unify the GOP. Why? Because large swaths of the Republican base have spent the last almost-20 years frustrated that their party leaders weren’t willing (or willing enough) to directly confront the Clintons about their moral character (or lack thereof). That Trump won’t apologize for calling Hillary Clinton an “enabler” of her husband is exactly the sort of rhetoric that conservatives have been waiting the last two decades for.

It is literally impossible to be “too nasty” to Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton) in the eyes of the Republican base. The more Trump amps up his rhetoric toward the former first couple, the more loyalty (and unity) he engenders from a party base badly in need of a rallying force.

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WP: Outrage in Japan as U.S. Marine veteran arrested in connection with death of woman on Okinawa

The Japanese and other asians are not fond of blacks.

Washington Post: Japanese leaders reacted with outrage after a U.S. Marine veteran was arrested Thursday in connection with the death of a Japanese woman near a U.S. air base on the island of Okinawa.

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Kenneth Franklin Gadson, a 32-year-old civilian contractor at Kadena Air Base, admitted to strangling the woman, his defense attorney told Stars and Stripes — though the attorney questioned the condition under the which the admission was made.

Rina Shimabukuro had been missing since last month. The 20-year-old’s body was discovered in a wooded location Thursday after Gadson told investigators where to look, according to the Associated Press.

Japanese media identified Gadson, who also goes by his Japanese wife’s family name of Shinzato, as a U.S. Marine veteran and the U.S. military confirmed that on Friday morning. His mother told The Washington Post that her son was in the Marines from 2007 until 2014.

“They say he’s locked up in jail, killed somebody,” said Shirley Gadson, 63, over the telephone from her home in New York City early Friday morning. She said she learned Kenneth had been arrested when Japanese police called her on Thursday.

“I got scared. I got nervous. Oh my God,” she said. “I didn’t hear from him for two years.”

In a statement posted online, Kadena Air Base said a civilian employee had been arrested in connection to a woman’s disappearance.

“A civilian employee of a company contracted to provide services to U.S. military installations was arrested by Okinawa Prefectural Police yesterday in connection with the disappearance and death of an Okinawan woman,” the statement said. “Our heartfelt prayers and condolences are with the victim’s family, friends, and loved ones. We also send our deepest sympathies to the people of Japan and express our gratitude for the trust that they place in our bilateral alliance and the people of the United States.”

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