Children Crossing Illegally: Nothing Left to Lose

An NPR reporter  remarked this morning she had interviewed the parents of children who were deported back to Nicaragua from the USA. This was the much bally hooed event of "send them back on the next plane" strategy all the Republicans are screaming will end this crisis.  Just send a few planeloads of kids back and they'll stop coming. 

When they arrived at the airport in Nicaragua  what the kids said and what the parents said, pretty uniformly, was: "We'll try again."

So much for the Republican plan to, "Just send back a few planeloads of kids and their parents will get the message. That'll stop this thing in its tracks."

Of course, what the Just Send 'Em Back crowd is engaging in is wishful thinking.  They purport to know how other people, people in Central America think and from there, how to predict what they will in response to what we do.

Americans have never been very good at this sort of thing.

From the infamous "They will welcome us with open arms" assurances coming from Cheney and Rumsfeld when they were asked about what they expected when American troops rolled into Baghdad, to the "win their hearts and minds" in Vietnam, Afghanistan, you name it... we just do not understand other cultures very well and we do not put ourselves into  other people's minds very well.

Mad Dog is the first to admit, he has no good idea about what to do with 60,000 kids and who knows how many more to come.  But what irks Mad Dog is listening to all those Republicans like John Boehner, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh,  who are so sure they do know what needs to be done. Of course, these Tea Party savants  are even more sure this is all, very simply, Mr. Obama's fault. 

Basically, people who don't like Mr. Obama are shamelessly using this. It's a bad thing and ipso facto, it has to be Mr. Obama's fault. If Democrats had reacted this way on September 11, 2001, how the Republicans would have reviled them for being unpatriotic at a time we needed to all come together. 

One can only imagine what the Republicans would say if the lunatics manage to pull off another big, high profile attack: It's definitely Mr. Obama's fault.  The fact we have paralyzed the government leaves us blameless.

Listening to a CNN call in show this morning, Mad Dog was surprised to hear a Black man from Chicago allude to that ship with people fleeing Hitler, who we sent back to Germany, where all aboard died in concentration camps.  Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, refused to allow the ship to dock in the USA, pointing to the flag by his desk, saying he would have violated his sacred oath to defend that flag if he had allowed the ship to dock. The problem was each passenger, according to US law, required a letter from his local police chief attesting to his good character and for most of the passengers that letter would have had to be generated by some Gestapo official. The Gestapo writing letters of recommendation for Jews. Somehow, didn't happen.

 So, Secretary Hull did his duty by his flag and  sent men, women and children back to the gas chambers.

We do not have information to suggest what these kids face in Nicaragua or Honduras is the equivalent of annihilation in concentration camps, but what do we really know about what is going on down there in Central America?  

Could be pretty horrific. Maybe, maybe not, but the sudden influx must mean something. 

Mad Dog is humble before his own ignorance. Would that he could say the same for John Boehner and his entire cohort of Republican hyenas. 

John Boehner and the Ultimate Con

"This is a problem of the President's own making," the Ohio Republican thundered on Thursday. "He's been President for five and a half years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?"

Another Republican, hearing the President had declined to travel to the border for a photo op, looking sternly South, accused the President of not caring about this problem, as evidenced by his refusal to see the problem "first hand." The President replied, cooly as always: "This is not about theater. This is about real people."

Well, folks, you heard it here first:  Almost 60,000 children have managed to sneak across the border and present themselves, like so many foundlings, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and points south,  and now we know whose fault it is.

It's not that thousands of parents have decided the terror of living in these places is so bad whatever risks their children face trying to get into the United States are worth the near certainty of a short, brutish life at home. It's not that the Republican Congress has refused to act on any sort of immigration plan. It's not that the Republicans have refused to fund judges and all the government nuts and bolts required to process this tidal wave. It's not that, like the rich European countries which have attracted similar tidal waves of immigration, the USA, being rich,  has discovered it is a magnet for poor neighbors. 

It's not that the Republicans, having told us time and again we do not need government and having set to the task of if not dismantling government, at least paralyzing it; it's not that Mr. Boehner and his Republican cronies bear any responsibility.  Oh, no. They have always known exactly how to deal with immigration, but nobody in the Democratic White House would listen! Now, what was it, exactly, they proposed doing about all these illegals crossing the border?

Ever notice how people often criticize in others what they secretly know they are guilty of themselves? Oh, the President. He refuses to take responsibility for anything! We know all about people who hide from their responsibilities. 

It's all Obama's fault. And likely it's Obamacare, the lure of free medical care, drawing all those children north,  like flies to honey.

Why can Obama simply not admit his culpability?

He should have done what I told him to do: Call out the National Guard! That would've fixed the problem. Built a great wall,  like the Chinese once did. Build one straight across the southern border and sink steel plates down half a mile so they can't tunnel under it and put up drones to hover over it and string nets out along our entire seacoast, so they can't come in by boat. 

And cut taxes to pay for it. And do not even think of paying for contraceptives. Oh, sorry, that's another rant.

Or, maybe, we could build big camps and put all those kids in them. Put them down at Guantanamo! Don't ask us what to do about it. It's the President's responsibility! He should know! He's President!

And why does he just not admit what a complete failure he has been as President and resign?

And if we say this often enough, and if the Koch brothers give us enough money to buy enough air time to repeat this often enough, why then, eventually, it will be like, conventional wisdom. "Everybody knows" it's true.

Why hasn't anybody said, "Mr. Boehner, have you, at long last, no shame?"

Well, Boehner knows all about that warm medium--just look aggrieved and nobody listens to the cool, reasoned response from the President; they just respond to the emotion.

But,  even given the Republicans' mastery of the airways, have we not, at long last, reached the point where we can see through all this bluster,  to the truth? 

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.