Ten Thousand Illegal Immigrant Children: Yikes!

What do you do when children are loaded into vans, boats, whatever conveyances the imagination can provide, shipped from desperate poverty, violence, lives of no promise other than "short, brutish and sad" variety and they wind up in the custody of adults, across the border in the United States?

The first thing is to pick the right spokesman, and Cecilia Munoz, President Obama's White House czar of immigration,  is clearly not that. She uses phrases like, "We are taking this very, very seriously" and speaks in legaleese and sounds like the right wing's send up of  a fuzzy minded liberal bureaucratic. "Well, we don't want to deny any of  those children who qualify as asylum seekers, so we have to respect the process and the law." 

Then she is followed by some Congressman from Arizona saying, "Look, the way to stop this is to send a planeload of these illegal kids back to Guatemala, another to Brazil, and another to Nicaragua,  three days after they cross the US border, and that'll stop this flood."

As is true for so many Republicans, the answers are always simple. 9/11? Just load up the troops and blow Sadam Hussein out of Iraq, that'll learn 'em.

But there is a certain truth in what he is saying: When we are confronted with a tidal wave of children, we cannot proceed with business as usual. Our rules were never meant to deal with this.  If we have to send back some deserving children with the "undeserving" then we will, just to get the contagion under control.

The fact is, they are all deserving. We are making distinctions which are game playing. No kid deserves to be raised in squalor and desperation. Trouble is, we cannot just adopt every desperate kid. We had foundling hospitals in this country once, but we had to devise better solutions than that when the numbers overwhelmed them.

But this problem has clearly caught President Obama unprepared and he needs to think about how to communicate with his countrymen about the problem and its solutions.  And don't sound too concerned about sending home the twelve kids who, by law, should really be granted asylum,  when you've got 10,000 kids to deal with. Even in medicine, you have to do the greatest good for the greatest number:  Quarantine sacrifices people,  so the general population is protected. If you have to send back a dozen deserving kids so 10,000 more kids don't wind up on their way to our shores, so be it.

One thing which really inflames white Americans is the idea that people will come here and "freeload," live off welfare, not work, simply ask to be given a handout. Children are always "freeloading" even white children. You have to support them until they can become independent. So, in a sense, it is a very clever idea to send children, if you are a desperate parent in Bolivia. Nobody can really blame the kids. Your heart has to go out to them. 

But if we throw open our doors to the world's children, what are we taking on? 

Sound tough. Sound reasonable. Do not sound like a lawyer.

Mr. Ted Cruz vs Mr. Paul Krugman: The Knowing Crowd vs A Voice in the Wilderness

Green Eggs and Ham School of Economics

 Everyone has a theory.  The dynamic duo from the Lone Star state share the same theory of macroeconomics, which is not really a great surprise since that theory was handed out in the welcome boxes at the Republican Party barbecue. It goes like this: Economics is really very simple--it's just like sitting around your own kitchen table at home. You can't spend more than you get in income because then you go into debt and debt is BAD!
This means any time the Democrats suggest spending on anything you can say whatever it is they are hoping to spend money on will cost too much, send us into debt our grandchildren--don't forget to mention grandchildren; everybody worries about the grandchildren--will struggle to pay for years to come.
So there is this big, nasty dragon, "The Deficit" and another cousin drag, "The National Debt," which just get fed irresponsibly by those idiotic Democrat (NB: not Democratic, always Democrat, sounds more like "rat") politicians.

Economic Stimulus Is Not Pornographic 

Ah, but then there is Paul Krugman.  Mr. Krugman has two strikes against him: he was on the faculty of Princeton for many years, and he won a Nobel Prize in economics. These are two reasons, Mad Dog admits it, not to like Mr. Krugman. There is something so smug about Princeton.  And a Nobel Prize, with the queen of Sweden on your arm, all blonde and fairy tale like and white ties and music and it could just make you puke, being so ultimately establishment. If you are a good ol' boy from Arizona to South Carolina, you just know you will hate anything this guy says.

But, okay, we can get past all that. What Mr. Krugman says, frequently and at length, even today in the New York Times, is that sometimes debt is a good thing.

Like when you go into debt to buy the house your family will grow up in and which you'll live in for 30 years, until you sell it and move to Florida, or, Heaven forbid, to Arizona.

Walking around my college campus in the 1960's I noticed most of the buildings had cornerstones with the date they were built and most of those cornerstones said "1932" or "1934" and when I wrote my father and told him about this, I said I thought the 1930's were bad times, the Great Depression, how could they have built so many buildings if times were so bad. And he wrote back, "They built those buildings because times were bad: cheap labor, cheap materials, cheap loans."

Now Mr. Krugman is saying the same thing. Now, when interest rates are low, is the time for the government to borrow to rebuild bridges, roads, electric grids, water lines and all like that.  If the government does that, since nobody in the private sector is much interested right now, the government will not be competing with the private sector, and in fact, it will be throwing some business to the private sector and it will be hiring and those construction workers will be going out to eat, buying stuff and the economy will come back and more people will pay more taxes and the deficit and the debt might go down. 

But Mr. Cruz and all his Republican party clones will not hear it. They have their own faith. They hear God talking to them. And God is saying, "Do not do government. And, oh yes, do not let Obamacare pay for contraception."

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: SCALIA STYLE

You are Not Free to Object 

Have At It 

The First Ammendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So here's how freedom of speech works in these United States, according the Scalia court:  
1. If you are an 18 year old boy who is offended by being roused out of his school, told to stand and cheer for the Olympic torch as it is borne by you on the street you are not allowed to speak your mind. You may believe the "Olympic movement" is nothing more than a shameless, corrupt, commercial enterprise masquerading as a lofty idea of worldwide brotherhood, but you cannot say that in public, or at least during the school day, when, presumably, your speech is controlled by your teachers, your school principal or some other adult who agrees with Justice Scalia. 

Your case is not a case of freedom of speech but is a case of a child being appropriately constrained and silenced by some authority figure. Even if you have shown yourself to have adult perceptions and maturity enough to engage in political speech, your case is lost.

2. If you are the owner of a business which makes a profit on the backs of its thousands of employees, you can impose your "religious" ideas on them by refusing to pay for what every other employer, similarly situated,  has to pay for, to wit, health insurance which includes insurance for IUD's and Plan B. Your religious belief trumps the law of the land.

3. If you are a person who believes abortion is murder because your religion tells you so, because you hear the voice of GOD, then you can stand nose to nose with any woman who attempts to walk into a Planned Parenthood office, even if she is there for contraception, so she will not get pregnant, and you can block her way, scream in her face, tell her she's a murderer. No boundaries need apply.

So what this comes down to: If you are espousing something Misters Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Roberts believes--you've got no restraints at all. If you are someone who espouses something the "justices" abhor--independent thought--your free speech is nothing more than unruly behavior which deserves to be suppressed.

Got that? 

RED STATE ORTHODOXY: CUT TAXES. NIRVANA TO FOLLOW

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, notes the Republican song of the great disastrous failure of Obamacare turns out to be wrong. In fact, by most measures, Obamacare has worked quite well, much like the system it was based on, the system Governor Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. Fears that individual premiums would skyrocket have not come true. Nor have fears that only the desperately ill and the very old would sign up for it--young people have signed up in substantial numbers so the "payer mix" has proven to be quite profitable for the insurance companies it was meant to enrich.

The Republicans, of course, cling to the belief if you say something often enough, it will become accepted as received wisdom, and they may be right about that, but they are wrong about Obamacare.

Another Republican article of faith is that cutting taxes will increase employment. The story goes like this: Take money away from the government and give it back to "small businesses" and those entrepreneurs will use it to hire new employees, who will then pay more taxes and everybody lives happily ever after. 

But as Josh Barro points out in today's New York Times, "Yes, if You Cut Taxes, You Get Less Tax Revenue,"  the Republican canard that cutting taxes increases job growth and ultimately fattens tax collections,  has been put to the test in the state of Kansas and has been discovered to be, you guessed it, dead wrong.   

What happened in Kansas is tax revenues, projected to bring in $651 million arrived at $369 million. It turns out, when you cut income taxes for "businessmen" most of them do not hire more workers. Some of this happens because a "businessman" may be nothing more than a contractor, who has been hired by a company trying to avoid having to pay him benefits, and because they issue him a 1099 instead of a W-2, he gets to avoid paying income tax on that income, but he does not hire anybody. He just gets the tax break. 

Most of the "small businesses" which Kansas stopped collecting taxes from actually did not generate new jobs, and in fact the main beneficiaries of the cut in income taxes were wealthy businessmen who simply used Kansas without giving anything back.

Of course, no Republican will ever agree these numbers. Paul Krugman may be an economist who analyzes numbers for a living, but no Republican will accept anything he says because he is so clearly a Democrat, and so cannot possibly know or speak the truth. And Josh Barro writes for the New York Times, so he cannot be believed. When he quotes Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, saying the cut in income taxes will "create tens of thousands of jobs" and when Barro points out since the income tax cut was signed into law in 2012 Kansas job creation has been in the pits, the Republicans will simply close there eyes and shake their heads and raise their chins and chant, "No, no, no!"  

Carl Rove, on election night, faced with the numbers coming in from all the key precincts did the same thing: He denied what the numbers were saying, until one of the news broadcasters literally walked him through the rooms and screens which showed Mr. Obama being re elected quite comfortably.  But Rove looked at the numbers and said, "No, this cannot be happening." As the lady told him: Your not wanting this to be true, does not make it untrue."

And that's what's the matter with Kansas, with the Republican Tea Party and the Congress they control. Heaven help us when they get the Senate as well.

Justice Scalia's Knobby Hobby Lobby Problem

May we have the envelope please?  The judges' decision has already been made and we need to know the verdict.

Here we have a severe test of Mad Dog's theory of Supreme Court jurisprudence:  If, as Mad Dog has postulated,  the votes of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts can be predicted from a one paragraph summary of any case using the simple formula:  
Outcome =Scalia's imperative to rule in favor of authority (commercial,  religious or class)  x   Mr. Scalia's own religious convictions x his resentment of women who want to have sex, taken  to the power of 4 (the sum of votes from the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse) times the right to free speech for those who agree with Mr. Scalia, times  the libertarian belief government should not be allowed to do much, divided by the argument that the Constitution is scripture.

Using this formula,  the ruling in the Hobby Lobby case has got to be in favor of Hobby Lobby and against the Obama administration's rule that if you are a for profit enterprise required to provide health insurance, you must provide benefits for contraception as part of Obamacare.

Here's the case: the owners of Hobby Lobby refuse to pay for contraception benefits including IUD's and the morning after pill because they consider these forms of "contraception" to be backdoor abortion, and their religious beliefs would be violated if they had to pay for their employees' choice for abortion.

This is the old Rush Limbaugh argument to the Georgetown Law student who argued her birth control pills ought to be covered under her health insurance: You want me (as a taxpayer) to pay for your contraceptive pills? You want to be paid for having sex?  That makes you no more than a slut! 

Except for the Eyebrows--but eyebrows are easy--It's possible

So, this should be easy, right?  Scalia abhors abortion (and some would say he bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Limbaugh, and the fact is, they have never been seen in the same room together, in the flesh) and this is a case of people who agree with him. 

Ah, but Mr. Obama argues:   if anyone, a citizen or a company,  can assert the right to decide whether or not to comply based on their own religious rules, then what stops the owners of a company whose faith tells them income tax is a violation of their faith,  because those taxes support spending on weapons of death?  Any  company, in fact any individual can claim it or he or she  does not want to comply with laws against sexual discrimination or racial discrimination because these laws violate some particular religious belief.  My religion says homosexuality is an abomination against God, therefore I do not have to employ homosexuals.  My religion says Blacks carry the stain of Cain, (see Church of Latter Day Saints) and therefore I do not have to employ African Americans, or, if I do employ them, I can pay them less because they are Black. My religion says vaccinations are an abomination against God. Mine says blood transfusions are an abomination. 

You see the problem. 

This is, in essence, a case of whether individual belief can trump the law of the land.  This is a case of whether or not any individual can claim he hears the voice of God and everyone else must listen to what he hears.

Then there is the whole issue of whether or not the government can violate the religious practices or beliefs of a corporation. This Court has has said corporations are people. Justices Scalia et al really do love corporations dearly and would not want to do anything to upset them.   So frame the case as a case about offending corporate rights, and you've got a winner.   

This is what Ted Cruz would say is the tactic for victory. If you can frame the argument differently, if you can chose the ground on which the battle is fought, you can win the battle. It's like slavery was not about the slaves, their bondage and suffering, it was all about States' Rights! You can't come down here and tell us not to whip, rape and brutalize our slaves because this is a case about STATE'S RIGHTS! Change that frame of reference, you can use the law to slip right by what is actually happening in real life. 

So, one battleground which would allow Justice Scalia to win would be  to make this  a case about whether a corporation can be granted the rights heretofore granted only individual citizens.  Good ground on which to fight.

But even better, and this was the tactic of the lawyer arguing Scalia's side:  If the government can mandate contraception, why not abortion? If that what's this case is about, then Scalia's side has staked out an unassailable ground, and Mr. Obama has to charge uphill without cover and sharpshooters firing away. 

This has got to be the winning strategy: What if the government said it wanted corporations to provide for ABORTION? If the government can mandate contraception, why not abortion?  Why not sex with barnyard animals? See how this works?  We thought we were talking about contraception coverage, and now we are talking about abortion. We are hearing God's voice as the owners of Hobby Lobby hear it. We have the Ted Cruz effect--the battle is now being fought on different terrain entirely.

Of course, what this case is really about is whether or not you can force people to do something they find objectionable. The fact is, they need employees to do their Hobby Lobby business, and the fact is they owe to their employees what all business owners owe, according to law, even though they may not like the idea of their employees having sex outside marriage, even though they may not like certain forms of contraception or whatever you want to call the IUD. Their perceptions trump the law.

If any ethical analysis begins with establishing "the facts" of the case, we may have more problems for Justice Scalia.  The "fact" is the IUD MAY prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the lining of the uterus,  but it may be some or all IUD's actually prevent the sperm from traveling  to find the egg in the first place, in which case there is no fertilized egg to worry about.  As for the morning after pill, same thing. It may be the morning after pill  prevents implantation, but it may work entirely differently, preventing the egress of the egg and thus prevent fertilization from ever occurring. So, we just don't know. The science is not settled.  The perception that the IUD and Plan B work after fertilization (conception) may be fundamentally wrong.  

Ah, science is so full of doubts.  The Hobby Lobby folks will argue, well, until we know, we cannot take a chance on a fertilized egg being thwarted by an IUD or Plan B. 

When  Native Americans, as individual people,  wanted to use Peyote as part of their religious ceremonies, as they had for centuries,  the Court said, no you cannot violate the law in the name of your religion. You cannot use a religious belief to violate the law of the land.  Of course, the subtext here was the Native Americans wanted to use a hallucinogenic drug and the justices do no like hallucinogenic drugs, so ipso facto, a priori, the Native Americans lose. 

In the case of the owners of Hobby Lobby, well the justices like these two God fearing, white capitalists, so they are halfway home, maybe more than halfway, from the get go.

But Mr. Obama persists, arguing, you cannot say, "I hear God's true word, and the government and the Congress and the law do not hear God's true word, so I am entitled to listen to God as I hear him speaking to me personally." 


So, what is in that envelope?  Mad Dog can only imagine. Let's see: Why should contraception be considered "health care?"  This is not a medical practice but a social and ethical choice. Pregnancy is not a disease. You cannot say preventing pregnancy is a medical practice. Preventing pregnancy is a distinctly different realm. There may be social reasons for a government to want to prevent pregnancy, but these are social, not medical reasons and you cannot contaminate a healthcare bill with contraception.  

You can argue that the Constitution grants the government the right  under the" promoting general welfare," but that's all a legal trick, and the justices do not like legal tricks, except when they work to support their own prejudices. They can see right past all that to a   governmental policy allowing women to have unfettered sex and to support that activity with taxpayer dollars. Why, that's abominable.  What sluts!

So, you heard it here first:  The Court has to rule against Mr. Obama and for Hobby Lobby. Mad Dog cannot be sure what path the inventive Mr. Scalia will find to this end, but that is the place he wants to go, and according to Mad Dog's formula, he will find a way. 

Have faith in Justice Scalia. All he has to do is sell Justice Kennedy on this. Do we really want to turn American women into sluts?  This should be a slam dunk.

FREE SPEECH AND PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Let's see if I understand this: The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, that being the most fundamental freedom of any democracy. 

But what is speech?  And to whom among all those living on this continent is that right actually guaranteed?

Well, speech can be someone planting his body in the path of a woman who is trying to walk into a planned parenthood office and screaming in her face, "You are about to commit murder!" as she is on her way to get her birth control prescription refilled, her breast cancer screening and her screening for sexually transmitted diseases. 

She's a tart, anyway, and deserves a little dose of free expression slap in the face.

Or speech can be a corporation spending billions on TV ads to defeat certain political candidates it finds it cannot bribe into submission.

But if you are a teenager who is appalled by the whole, perverse "Olympic movement" with it's pervasive jingoism, it's debased commercial essence, masquerading as the thrill and purity of "sport" and you find yourself ordered by your high school principal to stand along a road as the Olympic torch is borne by someone in an  open convertible, and you are supposed to cheer wildly and wave your little American flag but you feel more like puking, so you unveil your protest banner for the TV cameras, "Bong Hits For Jesus" well, that speech is NOT protected. That is speech by a child and heaven knows American children, especially American children in school,  are not entitled to free speech. 

Which is to say, you are free to express yourself in this United States of America, as long as what you express meets with the approval of Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts, and, most importantly, Kennedy. 

If you are expressing opinions which challenge authority, which undermine the financial dominance of those in power, well, that is not free speech, that is obscenity.  But if you express an opinion against abortion, contraception or anything Judge Scalia agrees with, well the Supreme Court has got your back. 

Congratulations! You live in the land of the free and the home of the knave. 

Americans in the Middle East

When George Bush reacted to the September 11th attack, there was something refreshingly simple about his approach. Everyone knew the Middle East was a cauldron, a riddle within a riddle, a miasma, but he took the Alexander the Great approach: Just cut through that Gordian knot with a swift stroke of the sword and let the pieces fall where they may.

For George Bush, it didn't matter we really did not know who attacked us on 9/11; he just wanted to kick someone's ass. He chose Saddam Hussein, because he was, as Bush put it a bad man, someone "who tried to kill my dad."

So that made it all very simple: Just roll our Army over Iraq.

Saddam replied, presciently, as it turns out, once you get rid of me, you'll have worse people to deal with.  But Saddam imprisoned his enemies, tortured some, ruled his country with an Iron hand, so we did not like him. As it turns out the people now closing in on Baghdad do not torture prisoners because they do not take any; they just behead those they don't like, including women who have the nerve to venture outdoors un-escorted by a male relative or without a head covering.  They are very unappetizing,  these nasties from the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham. They are Sunnis and they don't like Shiites much, so they just behead them. 

Talk about "bad" men. George, you had no idea how bad men can be. We had our own, Christian, bad men in the American Army and CIA, at the Al Ghrarib prison, but they were just sadists, not head choppers, as far as we know today. 

From an American point of view, we have two choices: Become an Imperial power, taking John McCain's advice to simply conquer the region and install an army and keep it there, to enforce a  Pax American for a few centuries--or... get the Hell out.

Fact is, Americans for all their manifest destiny history,  really do not like being imperialists. We just want to live in our towns and cities and enjoy America.  When Lyndon Johnson spoke on the phone to his good and trusted friend, Richard Russell (D-Georgia), Johnson asked Russell what he ought to do about Vietnam. Russell said, well, you know Lyndon, we don't want to stay in Vietnam. Yep, Johnson agreed. We want out. Well, Russell said, the Viet Cong know that, too.

All the Vietnamese or the Sunni radicals or the Afghans or the Pakistanis or the Somalis need to do is wait for the Americans to go away, and we inevitably will. Then the radicals can crawl out from under their rocks and get down to the business of conquering whatever unpopular, weak kneed government the Americans left behind.

So why did all those Marines die in Mosul?  Same reason Marines died in the Mekong Delta and all over Vietnam: Stupid old men sitting behind polished desks in Washington needed to feel powerful and important. 

President Obama was smart enough to see all this in Iraq, but he's been remarkably obtuse about Afghanistan, buying into the notion we needed to clean Afghanistan out so those terrorist sanctuaries would not give rise to crazies intent on launching the next 9/11.  As if you can clean out one rats's nest and never have to worry about the rats finding a new home. Right now, the whole swath of land between Syria and Baghdad is one big terrorist sanctuary, not to mention Somalia, villages in Indonesia, Yemen, and Heaven only knows where--Berlin, London, Detroit, Toronto likely.

What would Mad Dog do? 
1. Close Gitmo.
2. Keep  ears open --yes even NSA ears--and keep those drones flying.
3. Close our bases in Germany, and anywhere we really do not need them.
4. Fly our SEALS and Delta Force guys in when we need to, but fight these head choppers with intelligence and stealth, not with large armies and big vehicles.

In short, treat these guys we are looking for not like enemy soldiers, but as crazed serial killers who have patterns and vulnerabilities and do our police work relentlessly. We will never kill them all, any more than you can kill every rat on earth. You can simply try to find them and kill them when you can, and resolve this is not a war, with an end point, but a continuous effort at public hygiene.