Byron York at The Washington Examiner made a top ten list of the dumbest things people have said about the new law to fight illegal immigration in Arizona. It must have been tough to pick only ten.
In the interest of bipartisanship, he might have included this bit of hysterical idiocy from Republican Congressman Connie Mack of Florida.
Silver lining: All the hysterics and demagoguery have failed to convince a majority of Americans. By 51% to 39%, people support the new law in Arizona.
Posted in crime, culture, hate speech, illegal aliens, politics, race
Michael Mukasey has a good article today in the Washington Post on the Obama administration’s handling of the “Christmas Day bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, debunking many of the disingenuous talking points coming from the administration..
Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite. …
Perhaps the most dishonest, but most repeated, of the Democrats’ talking points is the comparison to Richard Reid. Mukasey quickly debunks it:
What of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court? He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab’s.
It’s especially shameless for all these Democrats to use the actions of the Bush administration as the standard in defending their own policies, after spending the last eight years demonizing every move made by the Bush administration.
Good thing they’re peace activists, or the violence might have been much worse:
Protesters attacked members of the Connecticut delegation near the site of the Republican National Convention Monday in a demonstration where more than a dozen people were arrested by police using pepper spray amid window-smashing, bottle-throwing and tire-slashing.
It was a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march not far from the Xcel Energy Center convention site.
….
Police estimates of the crowd shifted several times during the event, ranging from 2,000 to 10,000.
They only arrested a dozen out of thousands of people? The Evil Bu$hCo Gestapo isn’t implementing the fascist police state very effectively, are they?
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Posted in crime, elections, hate groups, liberals, politics
That’s the implication of the decision by New Jersey’s Democrat leaders to abolish the death penalty for murderers in the state.
The AP (via Yahoo News) reports:
Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law Monday a measure that abolishes the death penalty, making New Jersey the first state in more than four decades to reject capital punishment.
The bill, approved last week by the state’s Assembly and Senate, replaces the death sentence with life in prison without parole.
The move is largely a symbolic gesture:
New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982 — six years after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions — but it hasn’t executed anyone since 1963.
But the symbolism is important – in New Jersey, the Democrats who run the state have announced publicly that, no matter how many innocent people you murder, no matter how many lives you take from others, you get to keep your own.
And what will be the penalty for a convicted murderer in the state of New Jersey who murders a second time? Nothing. Zip. Nada. All murders after the first one in New Jersey are now guaranteed by law to be free of any penalty. That is what the Democrats of New Jersey have announced to the world, to the world’s criminals.
On the plus side, this may play into Republican hands next election, and some might suspect another Rovian conspiracy to make soft-on-crime Democrats look soft on crime.
You can always count on the AP to show some of their liberal bias when they report on a Republican event, and their report on the debate held last night in Miami by the Univision Spanish language network is no exception.
The debate was upbeat, reaching out to the audience without (too much) pandering, touching on all kinds of issues – education, immigration, health care, national defense. It was all very pro-immigrant and pro-Hispanic.
But the AP headline reads: “GOP Hopefuls Temper Anti-Immigrant Talk”
Once again, the issue is not immigrants, it is illegal immigrants.
From The Oregonian, (Via Dennis Prager’s Townhall blog):
MCMINNVILLE — A judge dismissed charges this morning against the two Patton Middle School teens accused of sexual harassment for swatting girls on the buttocks.
Judge John L. Collins said he acted “in the interests of justice” after both prosecutors and the boys’ defense lawyers said four alleged victims had signed a civil compromise in the case, which drew national attention. The victims said they want to drop the charges.
Now what happened to Mike Nifong in North Carolina needs to happen to prosecutor Bradley Berry. We commend the judge for finally doing the right thing. Better late than never.
Others:
Michelle Malkin
The Corner
Dennis Prager
In a partial victory for justice, most of the serious charges were dismissed against the two 13-year old boys in McMinnville, Oregon who are the targets of abusive prosecutor Bradley Berry.
Last week, [Circuit Judge John L.] Collins threw out misdemeanor sex abuse charges against the boys, a decision that means the pair no longer face lifetime registration as sex offenders should they be convicted.
But they still face trial for harassment charges, which the judge inexplicably refused to dismiss.
Defense lawyers Mark Lawrence and Rachel Negra are pressing to have the rest of the case tossed. They argued that prosecutors, who initially charged the boys with felony sex abuse, overreacted and unfairly singled them out from other Patton students — boys and girls — who also admitted swatting friends on the buttocks.
Collins rejected both lines of reasoning. He said there was no evidence the district attorney’s office set out to be vindictive and that prosecutors applied a “reasonable set of standards” when deciding what charges to file.
But there is no “reasonable set of standards” that would prosecute two young boys for horsing around at school. By any reasonable standard, the abuse that is being heaped on these boys by the prosecutors, and now being abetted by this judge, is ridiculous and disgusting. The legal system in McMinnville, Oregon has become an enemy of justice and reasonable standards.
Apparently attending law school causes many to lose all common sense and the basic ability to think like normal, decent human beings. What is being done to these boys is simply shameful.
Via The Oregonian:
The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran — what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.
But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.
After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.
Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?
Bradley Berry, the McMinnville district attorney, said his office “aggressively” pursues sex crimes that involve children. “These cases are devastating to children,” he said. “They are life-altering cases.”
Oh, this is devastating to the children alright, and will likely leave life-long scars. And the person who is most responsible for heaping this devastating, life-altering abuse on these two boys is Bradley Berry himself. At least Mike Nifong went after grown men.
Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison are quite simply victims of child abuse. We don’t say that to engage in hyperbole; they are being abused. The fact the abusers are agents of the government only makes it worse. When the state, which exists to protect the rights of its citizens, is the abuser, there’s essentially nowhere else to turn. Bradley Berry’s fate should be at least as bad as Mike Nifong’s.
In a just society, Mr. Berry, along with the principal who allowed the cops to interrogate the boys, the cops who did the interrogating, the cops who put the boys in jail for five days, and any judge that lets the case proceed would be fired, disbarred, forced to resign, etc. Some will argue they were just following the law. Well, injustice doesn’t become justice simply because it’s legislated. Slavery and segregation were legal at one time, that didn’t make it right. For starters, we certainly would not allow our kids to return to that school if they attended there.
If you’d like to contribute some money, even a few dollars, to help these boys’ families with their legal costs, the information is here.
We were going to comment on the absolute nerve of Bill Clinton (and Hillary!) in criticizing President Bush for his commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. You know, when you pardoned your felonious former business partner, your brother, the fugitive ex-husband of a rich campaign donor and a few terrorists, you ought to show just a little humility. But as the Clintons might say: “Humility? Huh? What’s that?”
But why re-invent the wheel? Here’s a great summation of the Clinton record on pardons and respect for the rule of law. Read the whole thing.
The commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence can be considered just partly by the fact that it has outraged all the right people. The Angry Left, including the nutroots bloggers, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, reacted with the expected feigned, and nakedly partisan, outrage.
Barack Obama, as we’ve no come to expect, responded with some vapid boilerplate from one of his routine campaign appearances:
“This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people’s faith in a government that puts the country’s progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years.”
Of course the conviction of Mr. Libby had nothing to do with compromising national security, that is a lie. He was convicted for lying under oath. Lying under oath is a serious offense, and a $250,000 fine (not to mention million of dollars in legal fees) is a serious penalty. As he shoehorns his empty rhetoric about “cynicism and division” onto another unrelated issue, perhaps Mr. Obama should take a look in the mirror.
We would have preferred a pardon for Mr. Libby, but the president at least mitigated the damage. Meanwhile, the criminalization of political disputes, to the detriment of our system of government, will likely continue unmitigated.
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Posted in crime, law, liberals, politics, Wilson Plame
The Unalienable Right 