Obama’s Back Door Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

Obama’s Back Door Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

There Must Be An Election Coming

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

Once again the Obama Administration has by-passed Congress, federal laws, and the Constitution by granting what amounts to amnesty for illegal aliens within the US.

The Washington Times reported last week (Friday August 19^th, 2011) the following:  “ … the Obama administration said Thursday that it will halt deportation proceedings on a case-by-case basis against illegal immigrants who meet certain criteria, such as attending school, having family in the military or having primary responsible for other family members’ care.


The move marks a major step for President Obama, who for months has said he does not have broad categorical authority to halt deportations and said he must follow the laws as Congress has written them.


But in letters to Congress on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she does have discretion to focus on “priorities” and that her department and the Justice Department will review all ongoing cases to see who meets the new criteria. (Read the entire article HERE.)


You may recall, dear reader, we warned months ago that Obama was seeking some method to grant amnesty to all those “undocumented democrats” in time for his reelection bid.  Plus, we have warned many, many, times that Obama would do whatever it takes to win in 2012.  This, I warrant, is just the beginning of the Obama Campaign’s shenanigans to secure his bid to return to the Oval Office in November of 2012.

The Washington Times article continued:  “The top House Republican on the Judiciary Committee said the move is part of a White House plan “to grant backdoor amnesty to illegal immigrants.”


“The Obama administration should enforce immigration laws, not look for ways to ignore them,” said Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican. “The Obama administration should not pick and choose which laws to enforce. Administration officials should remember the oath of office they took to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.” (Read the entire article HERE.)

When is enough … REALLY enough?  Seems to me this is the Obama Administration thumbing its nose at federal law.

When, oh, when, is the Congress going to grow a spine and confront the Obama White House and explain that America does not have a KING!  We have a constitution and the Obama Administration is trampling all over it.

How many times must we repeat that illegal aliens are law-breakers, criminals, and ought to be jailed and deported… period?

As soon as Congress returns it must pass legislation that outlaws exactly what the Obama Administration is doing by granting illegal aliens amnesty and refusing to comply with the federal laws already on the books.  Seems to me this is serious grounds for impeachment proceedings. 

This is such an in-your-face move aimed directly at the Congress that it defies explanation other than the Obama Administration has decided they are going to lose nest year and they’ve just decided to throw everything they have at the American people, and the Congress, and see what sticks.

And, really, isn’t it about time we rid ourselves of the Department of Homeland Security?  I mean, it might have been a good idea at the time (one I did not agree with) but DHS has taken on far too much power and the fear of DHS by the American people rivals that of the German people for Hitler’s Gestapo.  Even the name sounds like one of the Third Reich’s numerous security departments.  Its not as if we don’t have enough intelligence agencies … we do.  DHS is acting more like some state secret police than is comfortable for the people of a constitutional republic. 

The Congress should cut off all funding for DHS and do so immediately.  Just shut it down.  It has grown far too powerful and is entirely too easy to manipulate by an administration, any administration, that wishes to force its will on the American people.  In my opinion, it has become a threat to the liberty and freedom of Americans.

If this Congress allows the Obama Administration, including the Dept. of Homeland Security, to get away with this blatant refusal to enforce immigration laws, the law of the land, passed into law by the people’s representatives in the national legislature, then not a single currently serving senator or congressperson should be allowed to keep their seats in the Congress.

Look.  It is very simple.  If a department of government, or even a President, is allowed to refuse to uphold any law they choose, then what’s to stop them from refusing to recognize any other law they choose… say… like … oh, the second amendment, for instance?

The whole thing smacks of illegal amnesty for illegal aliens.  Shouldn’t SOMEONE be drawing articles of impeachment?  If we don’t stop this unlawful power play by the administration … what will they do next, huh? 

It is long past time for the Obama Administration to be brought to heel.  If we wait for the election – there may NOT BE AN ELECTION.  There ARE ways to, uh, “postpone” an election.  Do we really want to take that chance?

J. D. Longstreet    

Giveaway Nation ... Alan Caruba

Giveaway Nation

By Alan Caruba


I am not sure that Americans, the generations born since the New Deal of the 1930s, are ready to give up all the goodies that the federal government provides.


My father’s and my generation found comfort in Social Security checks and Medicare payments, but as the late Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, used to say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” by which he meant you pay for what you get one way or the other, even it does not seem obvious at the time. When it comes to federal loans and guarantees, John Q. Public gets stuck with the bill.


As a result of government housing programs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation ran smack into a financial crisis in 2008 and got its credit rating downgraded in 2011.


Now Moody’s, another rating agency, is warning that the student loan program, dubbed Sallie Mae, could implode leaving Americans holding the tab for millions in unpaid loans as students graduate into an economy where no jobs would enable them to pay them back. There’s a long history of students who simply defaulted on these loans.


Typical of the idiotic double-down approach of the Obama administration, the volume of these loans has actually accelerated during the recession. The student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt. Put plainly, not all young people should go to college just as not all people should own a house. There was a time when some standards were expected, but no more when bankers and lenders just want to pig out at the federal trough.


There was a lot of talk about cutting the size of government and its programs during the debt ceiling debate. It ended with the largest historic increase, adding another trillion to the national debt. The result was Standard & Poor's downgrade of the nation’s credit rating! No more blank check said S&P and they were right.


A bogus congressional “super committee” has been created to do this, but it is doubtful a divided Congress can achieve this unless and until new elections put people in office that actually will. Turning this function over to a dozen Congress critters is a very bad idea.


Fox Business News anchor, John Stossel, published a commentary on his July 28 blog that cited some recommended reductions by libertarian and conservative experts at the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation.


Many involved eliminating whole federal departments and agencies that included the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, Interior, and Labor.


That kind of draconian approach—his blog was titled “Take a Chainsaw to the Budget”—has a certain kind of appeal, but only if one puts aside that some of these departments actually have some good programs amidst the questionable ones. We tend to forget that the Preamble to the Constitution includes the objective to “promote the general welfare” of Americans, though it has been much abused, like the commerce clause, by progressives over the years.


The Constitution authorizes the government “to borrow money on the credit of the United States” while also stating that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law” while calling for a budget to be “published from time to time.” The Democrats haven't submitted a budget in over 800 days, though the Republicans did when they took control of the House.


The debt the nation has incurred has been authorized by a succession of Congresses, but mostly dates to the exigencies of the Great Depression of the 1930s when “entitlement” and make-work projects—among them the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority—were initiated to relieve the plight of American workers and provide electrification of significant benefit.


Future events are impossible to predict. Neither the consequences of those programs, nor a Second World War, the threat of the Soviet Union posed, nor were the recessions that followed were entirely predictable at the time. As in the case of 9/11, Congresses reacted within their existing time frame.


There is, for example, no justification for public broadcasting subsidies when it is clear that PBS is controlled by politically motivated liberals.


Cutting the Defense Department budget is pure folly as a weak nation will surely be attacked. There’s room for reductions, but maintaining a strong military is necessary to “provide for the common defense” as set forth in the Constitution. Eliminating many of our foreign bases would save billions.


There are, among the recommendations, many good ones such as privatizing the Army Corps of Engineers and the Post Office. Leasing the coastal plain of ANWR would generate $1.5 billion in addition to providing billions of barrels of oil to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The Gulf of Mexico must be reopened to more drilling.


The “War on Drugs”, estimated to cost $15 billion, is widely regarded as a failure. Drug laws fill our prisons to the point where the U.S. has more people in prison, often for minor drug offenses, than any other nation. Greater efforts at interdiction at our porous borders would help. Legalizing marijuana would help.


Eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government sponsored entities” that currently own half of all mortgages would take the government out of the housing mortgage business and return it to banks and mortgage firms that would be forced to be more prudent. The housing bubble was largely caused by these two agencies and the banks and mortgage lenders that knew a government bailout was guaranteed no matter how many bad loans they made.


Instead, the White House is talking about renting homes back to those foreclosed upon, thereby making the central government the largest holder of private property! That is Communism, pure and simple.


Stossel and the Washington, D.C. think tanks offered lots of other options, but the greatest option of all is an end to mindless, often insane, government spending and that includes major, rapid changes to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Don’t look for that to happen anytime soon.


© Alan Caruba, 2011

Please, MR. President, Take A LOOOONG Vacation!

Please, MR. President, Take A LOOOONG Vacation!

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

The only time I feel really safe is when the Congress and the President are recessed and/or out of town.  That is not an original statement.  Someone said it long before I -- and that makes it even weightier, or lends it more gravitas, if you please.

I have heard it asked so many times in the past few days whether the President should be taking a vacation at this particular time.  To that I answer… YES!   Get him the heck away from Washington and keep him away as long as possible!

Hey, I won’t even complain about the taxpayer money it is costing us to house, feed, and protect the First Family, IF the President will just stay away.

Middle class Americans are begging the Obama Administration to please stop trying to help us.  It seems everything they try only makes matters worse.  I am of the opinion that it is time for them to back off and allow us to catch our collective breath.

So far, the Obama Administration has been lurching from one crisis to another almost on a weekly, or monthly basis.  Their efforts at solving the nations problems seem juvenile, at best.  In fact, one wonders if a group of high-schoolers from “Boy’s (or Girl’s) State” couldn’t do as good a job, and … with a little effort, a better job than the bunch of seemingly clueless, er, people who are stumbling and bumbling through the worst presidency this county has ever experienced.

Yes!  I AM glad the President is out of town.  I am equally glad the Congress is out of town … even though the House is meeting every day in “pro-forma” sessions, lasting minutes or even seconds, to stop the President from making those annoying “recess appointments.”

No, I don’t worry because they are out of town.  I worry that they are coming back in September.  And the President has promised a NEW PLAN that will end all problems and solve all the nation’s financial puzzles, which seem to be wrapped in the most disturbing enigma ever.  (My apologies to Sir Winston Churchill.)  Now THAT scares the living daylights out of me.       

Yeah, come September we will have THREE entities to worry about as opposed to the two we have now:  The Office of the President, the Congress, and that mini-congress called the “Super Committee.”

Expect a continuation of one crisis after the other.  The President’s plan is already dead on arrival in the US House of Representatives.  The Congress’s plan is dead upon arrival at the President’s desk, and if the 12 members of the super committee don’t break out in fistfights and manage to pass something out of their partisan pit, it, too, will be dead as a doornail when it comes before the full Congress.

See what I mean?

By this Christmas, the outrage of the American people will be at historical levels and will certainly damage the “goodwill” of the holiday season.

Keep in mind that all this legislative wrangling will be going on while the presidential campaign is really heating up with accusations and counter accusations flying in both directions like snowflakes in an Oklahoma blizzard.  It’s going to be a long, long, fall and an even longer year ‘til November of 2012.

I was thinking, just the other day, that maybe it is time to bring back dueling.  Now -- think about it.  Dueling was an honorable way to settle “affairs of honor.”  Just think of the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate meeting in a clearing down in “Foggy Bottom” on the banks of the Potomac, swaddled in the mists of dawn to settle their differences.  Having chosen rapiers as their weapons, they’d have at it with full coverage by every TV network on the planet.

Of course, there would be a rather large turn over of Senate Majority Leaders and Speakers of the House, at least for a while, until the escalating loss of political talent in the Congress forced a more amicable approach to legislating. 

Yeah, I know it is a far-fetched idea. But it would certainly serve to focus our legislator’s attention on their jobs and not so much their reelections.

Term limits, in my opinion, would have given the US a more effective legislature.  But the Supreme Court has ruled term limits unconstitutional.  Of course, if the constitution was amended in such a way as to make congressional term limits constitutional -- then that would make the Supreme Court’s ruling void an of no account. 

I know.  That, too, is just a dream because no Congress is going to limit its member’s time in their cushy offices with all the perks that go with the trappings of power.

But some flicker of light may be seen in the darkness at the end of this long tunnel America is traversing today -- Election Day 2012. 

Another purge of the Congress is shaping up next year.  As the pollsters continue to point out, Americans are extremely dissatisfied with the Congress and the President. That is pointing to another historical change in the make-up of both houses of the Congress and the Oval Office.

For now, however, we can revel in the fact that the people making American’s lives miserable are currently out of town -- on vacation.   Ain’t it grand?

J. D. Longstreet    

Buckle-Up! It’s Going To Get Mean!

Buckle-Up!  It’s Going To Get Mean!

Campaign 2012.  The Ugliest Yet!

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

As the President sweeps through the Midwest, bashing republicans at every stop, riding in a black custom-made bus (made in Canada), and campaigning all the way, it is difficult NOT to notice that fuel for the bus is not the only thing being paid for with taxpayer dollars.

There is something just wrong about this.  In my opinion, there ought to be a law forbidding the President of the US from using taxpayer money to finance a campaign.  It does not matter who the President is -- or which party he is affiliated with -- it is just unseemly.  And that is putting it mildly.

It doesn’t help that the worst President in the history of the universe is having his campaign for reelection paid for by voters who can’t stand his political philosophy!

It has been reported that the reason for this bus trip was to demonstrate that the President feels American’s pain in this time of low employment, etc.  GIVE ME A BREAK!  It’s a crock!  This president is so completely unattached to the American people that it is frightening.

But the campaign is in early days and frankly; I see it going downhill from here. 

Very soon we will have “race” introduced into the campaign. And it will REALLY spiral downward from there.

The coming face-off between Obama and Perry is going to get blistering hot.   The two men hail from two geographical extremes of the country -- Texas and Illinois.  (Of course, I know that Alaska is farther north than Illinois, but I mean the contiguous states.)  Not only are their politics different but also the customs and culture is vastly different in those two sections of the US.  There are bound to be sparks.  Rest assured, the sparks will be fanned into flames by the mainstream media (Code for “leftist media.”)

Obama is backed by the labor unions and, generally speaking, labor unions are barely tolerated in the southern states. There will be clashes. 

Allow me to just lay it out for you:  Obama is just not liked in the south.  It’s not his race.  It IS his socialist, liberal, progressive, and even Marxist politics that the conservative south abhors.  It grinds on us like a hair shirt.  Four years of toleration is more then enough.

Now, I expect you are saying to yourself: “Longstreet must think Perry will be the GOP nominee.”  Honestly, unless someone more conservative comes along, I expect he will be.

Let me be very clear about this.  If Romney is the GOP nominee, the GOP will lose the south and the election to Obama. 

Look, conservative southerners are tired of a limp-wristed President.  We want America to have a President who stands tall, who doesn’t ask permission of the UN to do ANYTHING, who doesn’t bow to princes, kings, queens, and Islamic tribal leaders.  In other words, we want a President we can be proud of.  It is as simple as that.

To many southerners, Romney exudes weakness.  He appears as a tired, worn-out, has-been, perennial candidate who would make no better a President than Barack Obama.  I have heard southerners say they would vote for Romney ONLY to avoid having Obama for a second term.  That is a problem for Romney -- even if he did happen to win over Obama.  He would enter office with the support of only half the states. He would be a weak president from day one.  That would not be good for him, or the GOP, and it would most certainly be bad for the country.

There is talk of Congressman Paul Ryan entering the race.  In my opinion, Ryan simply does not have the experience to make this nation a good president.  Maybe later.  Maybe.

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey doesn’t seem to have the fire in the belly necessary for a run for the Presidency.  Maybe later.

With the entrance of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, it is beginning to look as if the GOP slate is set for the primaries.  Of course, that could change even before this piece is published. 

My feeling is, at this early stage (and I reserve the right to be wrong!!), the race will be between Perry and Romney, with one or the other as the Presidential candidate -- and one or the other as the Vice-Presidential candidate.  That’s the way I see in now, in August of 2011… but so much can happen, so much can change in a single day’s time that making a solid prediction this early is darn near impossible.

Of one thing we can be sure.  It is going to be a rough and tumble presidential campaign – quite likely the meanest many Americans have ever seen. 

J. D. Longstreet

A Horrible Week for Global Socialism ... Alan Caruba

A Horrible Week for Global Socialism

By Alan Caruba

Over the weekend of August 6-7, the Wall Street Journal’s lead headline was “U.S. Loses Triple-A Credit Rating.”

On Monday, August 8, the Journal’s headline was “Markets Brace for Downgrade’s Toll.”

By Tuesday, August 9, it was “Downgrade Ignites a Global Sell-Off.”

On Wednesday, August 10, it was “Markets Sink Then Soar After Fed Speaks.”

Thursday, August 11, the Journal cast its eyes across the Big Pond noting that “Italy’s Woes Weigh on Europe.”

On Friday, 12, the headline said, “Stocks Swing Up in Wild Week.”

A week after the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+, in the August 13-14 edition, the Journal took note of a “Global Crisis of Confidence”, adding that “World Policy Makers’ Inability to Agree on Fixes Led Markets on Wild Ride.”

As the new week dawned on August 15, the Journal said, “Markets Gird for Fresh Drama.”

It was a great week for dramatic headlines and a horrible week for the rest of the world. Mostly, though, it was a fulfillment of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s observation that socialism works just fine until you run out of “other people’s money.”

That is a perfect definition of “redistribution” or, as President Obama once observed, “At some point you’ve made enough money.” A more un-American statement has rarely been uttered by an American President.

The U.S. has been engaged in a huge experiment in redistribution since the years of the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who knew absolutely nothing about running a business and who had spent most of his life living off an allowance from his mother, tried everything he could think of to get the economy going again.

FDR could have tried cutting taxes. He could have encouraged Congress to avoid voting for trade barriers in a fit of protectionism. Instead, he came up with Social Security, among an alphabet soup of government programs which were a disaster when it came to encouraging private sector job creation. Not unlike President Obama's "stimulus" and other doomed-to-fail experiments

The history of Social Security is one long succession of lies that Americans have been told. By the time Lyndon B. Johnson was President, the funds set aside for Social Security payments were moved to the general fund where they could be plundered by Congress. Under President Clinton Social Security payments began to be taxed as income.

World War Two arrived in the U.S. on December 7, 1941, and full employment followed to defeat the fascists in Germany and Japan. The government that had expanded during the FDR years continued to expand.

Americans emerged from the war without a scratch on the homeland. With the exception of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, none of our cities were bombed. We had a million battle-tested young men returning home in 1945, the GI bill let them go to college if they wanted, and by the 1950s we were on our way to being the greatest military power in the world and the greatest economy ever known.

And the federal government never stopped expanding. It needed more money, but the stock market, with occasional recessions, just kept growing too. As time went along, Great Britain and Western Europe rebuilt, alliances such as NATO were created to thwart the Soviet Union’s ambitions, while Eastern Europe stagnated under Soviet imposed communism.

In Asia, Japan became an economic powerhouse and South Korea too. China which had suffered under Chairman Mao waited until he died to convert its economy to a capitalist model, while retaining all the worst aspects of an Orwellian communist government. In the Middle East, oil allowed nations led by a handful of tribal chiefs and assorted despots acquire wealth beyond belief. Their populations remained oppressed. Now they are in the streets demanding freedom and justice. They will get Sharia law and more oppression.

Economies became increasingly global and interconnected. Europe became the European Union, a huge bureaucratic mess with the Euro as a common currency. Western bankers purchased Europe’s securities and vice versa. When the housing market imploded in September 2008, they discovered that most were de-linked from the original mortgage assets and were essentially worthless to the tune of billions.

The Federal Reserve responded by shipping $600 billion to prop up European central banks and Congress responded by authorizing the Treasury Department to “bail out” U.S. banks and the huge insurance company, AIG, with public funds--your money.

So what have we learned from all this? Foremost of all, socialist economies are inherently unfair and disconnected from the real world of hard work, property ownership, and capital investment. We learned that bankers are greedy and take greater risks than they should.

Great Britain, which has become one of the greatest welfare states in the world, was rewarded for its generosity with looting and rioting by youths whose families had lived on the dole their entire lives. Greece had already had its spate of riots.

Everyone keeps saying that the U.S. must not become Greece, but the U.S. has become Greece and that accounts for all those horrible headlines from last week.

The Obama administration, which has steadfastly ignored every previous “commission” that has studied the economy, has now engineered “a super committee” in Congress. It is composed of the twelve worst ideologues on either side of the economic policy divide in an effort to cut some spending, any spending! Failure has been baked into that cake.

The old way of conducting the affairs of nations, particularly their economies, is coming apart at the seams. It has exposed the hypocrisy of socialism here in the United States and everywhere else it has been practiced.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
********************
 Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.