Put Up or Shut Up

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

COMMENTARY

By Korso

In case you missed it, Fox News has a transcript of Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s appearance on Greta van Susteren’s show yesterday.  It makes for some interesting reading, as it sheds a lot of light on Washington’s response — or rather, non-response — to Brewer’s pleas for help and dialogue on the border situation down there.  Brewer also throws down the gauntlet in a way few other pols have, admonishing the administration to do their jobs and enforce federal immigration laws that have been on the books for decades.  In this day and age, I guess that’s too much to ask.

For those who are unclear on the Arizona law, it’s not a radical departure from federal statutes;  it simply makes it a state crime to be present in Arizona illegally (it was already a federal crime), a move that allows local and state police to act as enforcement agents.  The only reason this was necessary is because the federal government has refused to enforce the existing federal laws.  By enacting their own legislation, Arizona has effectively told the feds to put up or shut up.

Somebody Get Me A Doctor

COMMENTARY

By Korso

Picked up an interesting story from, of all places, MSNBC.  It details how some dental and medical practices are getting rather aggressive with pushing elective procedures that aren’t covered by patients’ insurance plans.  This struck a chord with us personally, as our general practitioner likes to order up expensive (and unnecessary) vitamin tests during routine blood panels–stuff that adds over $100 to the bill, which we have to pay out of our FSA.  And that ain’t all.  The last time Korso’s wife went in for a visit, she asked about a raised area on her skin and got offered an expensive lightening cream.  As she put it, “I asked if it was worth seeing a dermatologist over and they said no.  So I told them no thanks to the cream.”

I’ll Get Back to You On That

Eric Holder (Photo: Department of Justice)

COMMENTARY

By Korso

With the administration pouncing so hard on the new Arizona immigration law, and the Justice Department preparing to challenge it in court, you’d figure that Attorney General Eric Holder might have actually read the thing.  Alas, you would be wrong:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/13/holder-admits-reading-arizonas-immigration-law-despite-slamming/

I’ve seen the text of the law (if you’re interested, you can see it for yourself here).

It runs sixteen pages.  Chapters in a Dan Brown novel run longer than that.  Holder could have absorbed the entirety of the law at his desk during lunch while munching on a burger and fries, and still have time afterward to go out for a Frosty.

So why so squirrelly over a law you’ve never read, Eric?

Could it be that the administration has already made up its mind that it doesn’t like a state taking its own steps to enforce federal laws that the feds themselves refuse to enforce?

Or maybe that the president is trying to use this as a wedge issue to drive more Latino votes to the Democrat Party?

Nah, couldn’t be anything like that.

I’m reminded of the time Barack Obama pronounced sentence on the Cambridge Police Department, saying that they acted “stupidly” in the arrest of his buddy Skip Gates.  That he knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding that arrest didn’t matter.  In law, that’s called assuming facts not in evidence–and as a lawyer, he should have known better.  It’s becoming increasingly clear, however,  that this administration doesn’t have much use for the facts–particularly if they contradict the party line.

Tea and Sympathy

COMMENTARY

By Korso

The Era of Obama brought with it a number of unintended consequences–and not just for that part of the electorate who bought into the whole hope and change thing, only to discover that they’d been baited and switched.  It also, at long last, blew the cover off the mainstream media-as-watchdogs scam, and laid bare the full-left tilt of news organizations desperate to engineer an election rather than cover it.  Short of wearing “I Grok Barack” t-shirts and throwing the man a ticker tape victory parade, our reporter brethren couldn’t have been more biased.  And people noticed.

Which carries us to the here and now, and my how things have changed.  The Tea Party has grown into a full-blown resistance movement–nay, a Fifth Column in the administration’s view–and so naturally, true to their modus operandi, the media are doing their damnedest to tar and feather them with the broadest brush possible:  racism.  That’s right, folks–if you’re a bit worried about the country running up a trillion and an half dollar deficit in a single year, if you think that a socialized health care system might lead to poor service and runaway costs (as it has everywhere else it’s been tried), if you have compunctions about government taking over huge swaths of the private sector, you can’t possibly have arrived at these conclusions out of mere principle.