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Charles Krauthammer discusses Ahmadinejad’s latest comment.
“They [the United States and Israel] have decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months.”
– Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, July 26
…Ahmadinejad’s claim is not supported by a shred of evidence. So what is he up to?
It is a sign that he is under serious pressure. Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. Already, reports Reuters, Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London and other players refuse to insure the ships delivering them. …
Peggy Noonan tells Republicans that Chris Christie is the role model to follow.
…National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”
That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. …
…What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.” …
…Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. …
Jennifer Rubin doesn’t think much of Senator Lindsey Graham’s latest idea on illegal immigration.
Lindsey Graham is second to none when it comes to shameless pandering and preening. … But nothing quite tops this:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he’s talked with other senators about crafting a constitutional amendment that would deny American citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States.
Even the most aggressive figures on immigration reform think this is idiotic. Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one:
…“I’m exactly against changing this,” he said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”…
And we have two posts from Mark Krikorian on the subject. Here are some of his thoughts:
Would it be cynical of me to think that McCain’s “little jerk” is just trying to burnish his tough-on-immigration bona fides?: …
…So the guy doesn’t want to do what’s necessary to actually stop illegal immigration, but he wants to make sure that the children born to all the illegals he helps bring here become U.S.-born illegal aliens? I’m afraid, though, that his rationale, whether he actually believes it or not, is in fact one shared by a lot of immigration hawks:
“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”
I don’t like illegals having U.S.-citizen kids any more than anyone else, but there’s no evidence suggesting that this “drop and leave” stuff is true — anything’s possible, I suppose, but it’s just an assertion at this point. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here (accounting for nearly 10 percent of all children born in the U.S. each year) didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids. There are no doubt some people who dash across the border illegally to have kids, but they just can’t amount to a large share of the problem. Nor does the problem of “birth tourism” require a change in the Constitution — we just need to permit (and require) our consular officers to reject visa applications from pregnant women, inviting them to re-apply once they’ve given birth in their own countries. …
And here’s the second post, where Krikorian hears from US citizens whose jobs bring them into contact with women coming to the US to have children.
…And finally this:
Our daughter is an OB/GYN Doc here in Texas. You are correct in that citizenship for illegal’s babies is a symptom of the problem, but it is a real incentive for illegals to come and stay in this country. A couple of anecdotes. A few years ago an illegal walks into the ER on my daughter’s night on call. Mother (of 8 at the time) is in distress, as is the baby at 5 or 6 months. Have to put the mother in the hospital on bedrest for the rest of her pregnancy. Due to good care from our daughter and the hospital nurses, plus entire time in hospital, mother delivers 9th healthy baby a few months later. Disappears, walking out on tens of thousands of dollars, if not a couple hundred thousand, of doctor and hospital bills. Hospital is stiffed, our daughter is stiffed and of course the 9th US citizen is born . . .
I guess my point is I am somewhat in favor of not granting citizenship to the children of illegals, but really prefer sealing the border. If an illegal isn’t here, the citizenship issue isn’t an issue. I fear Graham’s bill is just a grandstand play to pump up his bona fides and not driven by any strong conviction—given his waffling/consorting with the Dem’s on so many other liberal issues. The illegal’s baby citizenship issue is just another bit of smokescreen to hide the real problem and NOT get serious about controlling our borders.
This is exactly my point, though expressed better and more concisely than I did.
David Harsanyi has exciting news about public schools in Washington D.C. and Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor.
…In 2006, 8 percent of eighth-graders in Washington, D.C., could perform minimal math, yet not a single teacher was fired for stinking up the place. In fact, as D.C.’s chancellor, Michelle Rhee, points out, for years over 90 percent of teachers in her district were evaluated as having “exceeded expectations.”
All of this makes Rhee’s decision to fire 241 Washington teachers — after they failed a new (real) evaluation system — a precedent-setting moment. Another 737 teachers could face a similar fate unless they significantly improve their performances. Does anyone doubt many of them will?
Rhee — appointed by a liberal mayor in the bluest of American cities — is a radical in the best sense of the word. Bureaucrats succeed through a devotion to risk-aversion. But Rhee came into the job and immediately commissioned an outside audit of the entire school district, laid off scores of administrators and non-essential staff, and closed more than 20 underperforming schools. …
Jonah Goldberg comments that Obama’s policies are the real environmental disaster.
…But now it increasingly appears that “the worst environmental disaster in American history” wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the loss of human life was tragic, and the loss of animal life was regrettable — but it also wasn’t that dramatic. Some birds were oiled and died, always a sad sight. But according to Time, the number of birds killed is — so far — less than 1 percent of the avian casualties of the Exxon Valdez. And to date, only three oiled mammal carcasses have been recovered. Three.
…The greatest damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and yes, even with the hyper-deflation, it’s still a disaster) has been from the federal government. The drilling ban imposed by the administration, against the counsel of the sort of “sound science” Obama usually sanctifies, has been devastating to the region, costing thousands of jobs and untold millions in lost revenues and taxes. …
Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about driving America forward to a green economy “even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there,” he will take the Gulf region’s devastation on the road, destroying good jobs across the country (the oil and gas industry pays twice the national average) and replacing them with bad ones. He will replace cheap energy with expensive energy. (During the campaign, he promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.”) He will place bets on unproven technologies while discarding proven ones. In short, he will nationalize a disastrous disaster policy. …
In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia says that the energy bill is a lot more vanilla now that the global warming hoax has been revealed. But do the Dems have any parliamentary rule tricks left? Will cap-and-trade magically reappear if the energy bill gets to conference?
Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!
…Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax–oops, cap-and-trade–scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation’s fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.
…The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. …