You’ve probably heard about the bigoted “raghead” remark recently made by a South Carolina state senator. I have a comment about it on the other blog.
Israel Vs. Ireland
Israeli marines have boarded the ship Rachel Corrie, which was registered in Ireland. One of the 11 passengers aboard was Nobel peace laureate Máiread Maguire.
Apparently, officials in Ireland had already sent Israel a sternly worded memo asking the Israelis to show “restraint” if they stopped the ship. “There can be no justification for the use of force against any person on board the Rachel Corrie,” the Irish foreign minister had said. I take it this meant Israel would have Ireland to reckon with if anyone on the Rachel Corrie came to harm. Fortunately, it seems no one did.
Already there are protests against Israel in Belfast. The Deputy First Minister of Ireland, Martin McGuinness, has called the boarding “unacceptable.” “This is an attack on an Irish flagged vessel and it demands a strong response by the Irish government,” McGuinness said.
I wonder if Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly will have anything to say about this. Several rightie bloggers are commenting on the boarding of the Rachel Corrie already, but not one mentions, or seems to know, that the boarding could be construed as an act of aggression against Ireland.
Israel says the marines did not board the ship until they had the passengers’ permission. However, this account has not been verified with the passengers, because the Israeli military jammed satellite and radio communications on the boat.
Here is some raw video of today’s boarding being distributed by the Associated Press.
[Video no longer available]
The boat is being escorted to the Israeli port of Ashdod. Israel says it will inspect the cargo and send all humanitarian supplies on to Gaza.
Elsewhere — Liz Cheney has been babbling about the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis. Now will it be the Irish-Turkish-syrian-Iranian axis? The Irish managed to avoid getting themselves killed (they were “amazingly cooperative” chuckles Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s blog), so they are less likely to draw the full Wrath of the Wingnuts.
Powers implies that the Rachel Corrie crew behaved because they’d been taught a lesson by the deaths in the earlier raid. But maybe Israel doesn’t want to mess with the Irish.
The Republican Snit Machine
So Sir Paul McCartney played a concert for the Obamas at the Library of Congress, and at the end of the concert he said, “After the last eight years, it’s good to have a president that knows what a library is.”
And the Right is going ballistic. It’s OK to call the sitting President a “raghead” and a criminal and whatnot, but a Republican president stands on a higher pedestal. John Boehner actually said that Sir Paul ought to apologize to the American people. No, I think Bush ought to apologize to the American people, and all the rest of the people, and Boehner ought to apologize as well. Just because.
I was thinking of how the entire American South went into a paroxysm of record-burning when John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. I doubt Sir Paul is wasting sleep over John Boehner.
But does Boehner really think America is offended? Hello?
I Haz a Snark
I have to write fast because my laptop cooler stopped working and I have about half an hour before the laptop overheats. Dontcha love technology?
Anyway, here’s some first-rate snark — John Cole predicts that Turkey will be the new Iran. The Gaza-bound flotilla that was raided by Israeli commandos a few days ago was under the flag of Turkey. The “wingnut Wurlitzer” has gone to work demonizing Turkey. “I suspect by this time next year your average teabagging idiot will be convinced the Turks were behind 9/11 and the Holocaust,” John Cole says.
Among the people killed in the raid was a 19-year-old American citizen named Furkan Dogan. Dorgan, who was born in New York but has lived most of his life in Turkey, was shot five times at close range, four times in the head.
Steve M’s headline: MALKIN ATTACK COMING IN 5, 4, 3, …
How soon is Michelle Malkin going to spit on this kid’s grave? How thorough is the mistress of garbology going to be in rummaging through everything the kid ever said or did, along with the words and deeds of every one of his relatives up to eighth cousins twice removed, until she’s left no doubt that Satan would consider himself an evildoing underachiever by comparison? What Malkin’s going to do to this kid will make Joe McGinniss’s work on Sarah Palin look like press agentry. It’s going to be ugly. My condolences in advance to the family.
However, Little Lulu has been striving mightily to tie together Rod Blagojevich, Joe Sestak, Andrew Romanoff, the Services Employees International Union, Chicago politics from the beginning of time, and the entire staff of the White House all together in one big unified field pseudo-scandal. but, fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.
Time’s up; gotta shut down before my hard drive fries. I’ll get a new laptop cooler tomorrow sometime.
Sometimes Merit Shines Through
The New York Times just announced that it will host the great FiveThirtyEight blog on its website and make Nate Silver a regular contributor to the newspaper. It’s so gratifying, and rare, to see a break like that go to someone like Nate who actually deserves it. The evil MSM seems to pick up 50 Erick Ericksons for every one Nate Silver, unfortunately, but it’s nice to see one of the good guys win once in a while.
Congratulations, Nate!
The Constitutional Anchor Baby Crisis
A few days ago Rand Paul expounded on the “anchor baby” crisis. Anchor babies are, of course, babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. The babies are citizens by virtue of their birth, and this infuriates righties. In recent years Republican lawmakers have been promoting a bill that would deny citizenship to such babies. Mind you, this is coming from some of the same people who want to extend citizenship to frozen embryos.
Yesterday, in an entirely different context, Jeffrey Goldberg quoted the Babylonian Talmud: “Who is wise? The one who can foresee consequences.” That may become my new favorite saying. Applied to the citizenship question — like it or not, the 14th Amendment gave us a clear, bright line regarding citizenship:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
I can see all kinds of unfortunate consequences of making that clear, bright line fuzzier and darker. Leave well enough alone, I say.
Now, most legal experts say that because of the 14th Amendment, Congress does not have the power to deny citizenship to so-called “anchor babies.” Doing this would require a constitutional amendment. But righties are arguing no, because the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says. This argument was presented by none other than George Will a few days ago, and it is a tortured argument, indeed. But when I read Will’s column I didn’t have the time to research what he was saying to see if it could hold mayonnaise, never mind water.
But lo, yesterday, while researching something else entirely, I ran into a discussion of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) (see also Wikipedia discussion of Wong). Wong Kim Ark was a man born in the United States of ethnic Chinese parents. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. You probably remember that this barred anyone of the Chinese “race” from entering the U.S., and it denied citizenship to ethnic Chinese people already in the U.S. Wong challenged this law, and in a 6-2 decision the Supreme Court agreed with Wong, and said he was a citizen of the United States by virtue of being born here. And it seems to me there’s a made-for-television movie script in there somewhere.
Anyway, as I read about the Wong decision I realized that the dissenting argument in the Wong case is exactly the same argument being made today by Will and the Republican lawmakers.
The dissent was based on an interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Will and the two SCOTUS dissenters (John Harlan and Melville Fuller) say this phrase means “and not subject to any foreign power.” In their dissent of Wong, Harlan and Fuller point out that native Americans were (at the time) not citizens of the U.S. because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 had given citizenship to “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”
This act became law just two months before the 14th Amendment was proposed. So, the argument is, this wording gives us insight into where lawmakers’ heads were at the time. And thus, if the parents are subjects of a foreign power, then their baby born in the U.S. is not eligible for citizenship. This was the dissenting opinion in Wong in 1898, and Will repeated this same argument in his Washington Post column. Will doesn’t bother discussing that pesky Wong majority opinion, however.
Will argues further,
What was this [the jurisdiction phrase] intended or understood to mean by those who wrote it in 1866 and ratified it in 1868? The authors and ratifiers could not have intended birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants because in 1868 there were and never had been any illegal immigrants because no law ever had restricted immigration.
As far as I know, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first attempt to render any sort of immigration illegal, and it didn’t become law until 1882. Congress had passed an earlier version of the exclusion act in 1878, but this was vetoed by President Hayes. But the Wong majority decision says plainly that an act of Congress making Chinese immigration illegal, and denying citizenship status to ethnic Chinese, did not override the clear language of the 14th Amendment.
So, whether Will and the Republican lawmakers like it or not, SCOTUS already nixed their argument.
The majority opinion in Wong is based partly on English common law, which said that babies born in England are English, with the exception of the children of diplomats and children born to hostile forces occupying English territory.
In addition, at the time native American tribes were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction and were therefore not citizens. Another case decided in 1884 (Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94) had declared that a native American who left his tribe and went to live in a white community didn’t automatically get citizenship, although he could be considered a citizen if he went through whatever naturalization process existed at the time and paid taxes.
Will leans heavily on the example of non-citizen native Americans to argue that the 14th Amendment was not intended to confer citizenship to babies of foreigners who happened to be in the U.S. at the time. But the Elk decision (which Will doesn’t mention, either) did not consider Indian tribes to be foreign states. A tribe was an alien political entity which Congress dealt with through treaties, but not the same thing as a foreign nation.
So, it seems to me the Wong decision — the majority opinion, anyway — more closely speaks to the circumstance of babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants than does the Elk decision. And I think I just blew by nerd blogging quotient for the day.
Update: Read more about Wong Kim Ark in “The Progeny of Citizen Wong.”
Enough
First off, if I were President Obama, I would so get in Benjamin Netanyahu’s face and tell him that if he gets Israel into a war with Turkey, Israel is on its own. No help from us. Not so much as a “good luck” card.
Here’s the deal: Turkey says its navy will escort the next aid flotilla to Gaza, and if Israel tries to stop it … well, seems to me that could be construed as an act of war. And don’t forget, Turkey is a NATO country. If Turkey were to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, it would put the U.S. and the U.K. in a very nasty spot.
Sean Paul Kelley explains that Israel’s actions weakens moderate forces in Turkey, emboldens extremists, and forces Turkey closer to Syria. Way to go, Bennie.
As Jeffrey Goldberg says, it’s not clear exactly what happened with the flotilla yesterday. Apologists for Israel claim the people in the flotilla somehow provoked Israeli commandos into boarding the ships. The Israeli Navy released a video that clearly shows violence on a ship, which the Israeli Navy says justifies the deaths on the flotilla.
But, says I, obviously this violence occurred after Israeli commandos with live ammo had boarded the ship. So who was provoking whom?
The one encouraging thing I heard this morning was from Juan Cole, who writes about the UN Security Council condemnation of the incident.
This development is head-spinning in its implications. The United States almost never allows UNSC resolutions condemning Israel to go forward (though this text was admittedly a presidential statement rather than a full resolution). But here it is clear that President Barack Obama instructed his ambassador to the UN to join in the condemnation of the Israeli “acts.†Since Turkey is currently a non-permanent member of the UNSC and led the charge on the condemnation of Israel, it is possible that the US felt it had to trade horses with Ankara if it has any chance of still getting a UNSC resolution tightening sanctions on Iran (a step that Turkey opposes, as does Brazil, though neither has a veto). It is also possible that Israel’s rash attack has sabotaged the Obama administration’s push for increased UN sanctions on Iran, hardening opposition to an Israel-driven policy toward Tehran.
Compare/contrast with Jack Tapper, who claims a White House official told him the U.S. would “stand with Israel.”
I’m told there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel in the aftermath of the incident on the flotilla yesterday, which resulted in the deaths of 10 activists.
Regardless of the details of the flotilla incident, sources say President Obama is focused on what he sees as the longer term issue here: a successful Mideast peace process.
I don’t see how knee-jerk support of every damnfool thing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does is going to enable a “successful Mideast Peace process.” I think either Tapper or his “source” is blowing smoke.
The Usual Peabrains are loudly insisting that Israel can do nothing wrong and that the Israeli Navy’s actions were 100 percent justified. There doesn’t seem to be so much as a glimmer of awareness from them that this act puts the United States into a terrible position, threatens war between two U.S. allies, threatens to break NATO, makes peace with terms to Israel’s liking damn unlikely, and probably isn’t doing the security of Israel much good, either.
See also Jackson Diehl, “Obama, Netanyahu and the Free Gaza flotilla.”
Update: Here’s another perspective, from Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., whose opinion I respect.
Update Update: See Blue Texan, especially the part about “Nothing like invoking Der Dolchstoßlegende in a pro-Israeli/anti-American rant.” Heh.
Remember the Gulf
It’s a gorgeous Memorial Day here in Westchester County, New York. I’m sure lots of people are heading for the shores of New Jersey and Long Island today. Owners of seasonal businesses must be very happy.
I don’t know what the weather is like along the Gulf Coast today, but I suspect the moods are darker. “Top kill” failed after all. The oil could keep gushing for months. This is the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It’s affecting fisheries, tourism, shipping, and wildlife.
Whether the spill is the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, as some are saying, is questionable; I think the young folks have forgotten the Dust Bowl. But it’s really, really bad nonetheless.
I read somewhere that the oil spill isn’t expected to affect the U.S. economy, but I think whoever said that must be a fool. How can it not?
This was in a news article from yesterday (emphasis added):
“This scares everybody: the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,†BP’s chief operating officer Doug ÂSuttles said yesterday.
“Many of the things we’re Âtrying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000ft.â€
However, back when BP was applying for a permit to drill in the gulf, the company declared it could handle a spill ten times larger than the one it can’t handle now.
In other words, the permit application was written by the company’s marketing department, not the engineering department. I’d bet money there were engineers at BP who realized there were contingencies they weren’t prepared for, and they were told to shut up about it if they wanted to keep their jobs.
Well, as Bill Kristol brilliantly said, offshore drilling is perfectly safe “except where there is a disaster like this.” No, really, he said that.
For the record, Kristol is also wrong when he said the Exxon Valdez spill was worse.
Not Quite Like Old Times
The wingnuts are making an issue of the fact that a cleanup crew was brought in by BP to prepare the scene for President Obama’s visit to Grand Isle, Louisiana, yesterday. The Jammie Wearing Fool (I don’t know about the jammies, but … ) wrote
Maybe the alternate photo caption should read something like “I can see the end of my presidency from here.” Well, we all figured this would be a carefully choreographed photo op for the current occupant of the White House, but little did we know having their boot firmly on the neck of BP meant the folks at BP were obliged to send in some stooges for the visuals.
What I suspect really happened: Realizing that there would be tons of cameras and national attention drawn to the beeches of Grand Isle, Louisiana, BP headed off further PR disaster by busing in workers to clean up the beaches. In other words, the clean beaches were more a benefit to BP than anyone else.
But this news also brought to mind some other great photo op stories from recent years. For example, remember the firefighters who volunteered to help clean up New Orleans and found themselves being used as props for the Shrub? And what about the tool belt? I remember you guys got a real kick out of that one.
And then there was the Jimmy Breslin column from March 2004 in which the Unparalleled Mr. Breslin wrote about the large crew of Nassau County, New York, park workers that had to be pulled together to build a walkway for the President. Bush was going to attend a groundbreaking ceremony of a 9/11 memorial in Long Island, after which he was to walk across the park to a restaurant. But the President’s feet were not to touch the ground, Nassau County was told.
The Grand Isle crew was paid by BP, notice, not taxpayers. When Bush went to Long Island, the taxpayers paid. It’s possible the White House reimbursed Nassau County, but I’d be surprised if they did.
And then there was the Great Chinese Box incident, in which boxes stamped “Made in USA” and used as a backdrop for a Bush speech were found to have come from China. Good times.
And then there was the time that Bush flew to Jackson Square to give his post-Katrina speech of fake plans he never intended to implement, but which sounded good at the time. The White House, or somebody, brought in big generators to bring lights back on, which was the first electricity people had enjoyed for days. The the President left, and so did the electricity.
And who can forget …
Seriously, whenever I see a rightie get outraged about something Obama did that Bush did a lot worse, I wonder if they were all in comas for the eight years Bush was president. But no; they were just watching faux news.
Speaking of Teh Stupid — and unrelated to photo ops — some organization with the email address [email protected] has presumed to put me on its email list. Today’s email started this way:
Obama will use Memorial weekend as a gad-fly schmoozing with his homies in the Chicago hood, maybe even barbeque some weenies. …
Racist, much? Then later, it says,
The last time the Obama family has been home (and I don’t mean Kenya) was – in February of 2009. But now they will make the trip over Memorial Day weekend of all times! But it doesn’t stop there, an official trip of this caliber means the tax payers are shelling out of the kazoo for his bump and grind in the hood. …
Do we want to talk about presidents on vacation, Mr. Party? Seriously? Well, all right, then — this is picked up from an old post —
Let’s review:
George W. Bush took more vacations than any other President in U.S. history.
That’s 487 days at Camp David and 77 trips to Crawford, Texas, where he spent all or part of 490 days. I calculate that to be about two years and eight months.
I don’t know what the travel time is from the White House to Camp David — I assume just a few minutes — but I figure Crawford must be at least three hours one way by air, and I assume there’s no Crawford International Airport, so there’s motorcade time to figure in, also. Assuming a 6 hour two-way trip, times 77 trips, equals 462 hours, or more than 19 days days spent just flying back and forth to Crawford.
Bush was in Crawford when he blew off the memo “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” as being too trivial for his attention. As I remember it, he was in Crawford during the great electricity blackout of 2003, and it was several hours before he addressed it. He was in Crawford while two wars were going on in the Mideast.
And need I say … Hurricane Katrina?
For a collection of outraged snark at the Endless Vacation that was the Bush Administration, see Source Watch. I think the only reason there wasn’t more outrage is that Bush was such a bad POTUS, most of the time it didn’t matter whether he was on vacation or not.
Even when he wasn’t officially on vacation, Bush wasn’t famous for staying put in the White House. Especially in his first term, when the War on Terror was still new and sparkly, as I remember he spent about half of his not-vacation time traveling to Republican Party fundraisers. The pattern was to schedule some “official” event like a ribbon-cutting or a speech in a particular city, where by some coincidence there happened to be a GOP fund-raider going on that very evening, so he could take Air Force One on Republican Party business without reimbursing taxpayers. (See, for example, “Taxpayer Mugging for Political Fundraising.”)
How could anybody who was not sound asleep 24/7 for the entire eight years Bush was President not know this? Really, this goes beyond Teh Stupid.
Any Excuse Is Good Enough
I’ve been sorta kinda following the Sestak pseudo-scandal trying to figure out why it was scandalous. But of course there’s no reason except that the Right wants it to be a scandal because they want to impeach President Obama.
The charge is that the White House tried to bribe Joe Sestak into dropping out of the Senate primary race against Arlen Specter. The reality appears to be that former President Bill Clinton was sent to ask Sestak to consider not entering the race, not to drop out of it. And perhaps Sestak would have been appointed to an unpaid advisory position. No money was offered, in other words.
It sounds vague and preliminary, and it also sounds like fairly standard political horse trading to me. Exactly where is the scandal? I’m not seeing it.
Yet this non-scandal has been sucking all the air out of political news for the past couple of days — proof that the Republican Noise Machine is still in operation.
Steve Benen speaks to what will no doubt happen if Republicans re-take the House and/or Senate in November. The GOP will not rest until they can bring articles of impeachment against Obama, and they won’t be terribly picky about what charges they concoct to do so.
I continue to believe that if Obama sits in the White House for six years with a GOP majority in the House of Representatives that the odds are very good — better than 50 percent — that he’ll be impeached. Not convicted, of course, but impeached, forcing a Senate trial.
I’ve been asking for guesses about when the first impeachment resolution will be filed in the House (leave your prediction here). To be fair, I’ve already been wrong about one thing — I predicted that Michele Bachmann would have introduced a resolution by now (actually, I predicted April 15). So perhaps I’m just as much of an alarmist as those Republicans who believed that a Pelosi-led House would impeach George W. Bush in 2007. Perhaps! But I don’t think so. In fact, impeachment talk moved yesterday from Tea Party rallies to at least one Republican Member of the House, Darrell Issa. And Issa’s not an obscure backbencher; he’s the ranking Republican on Oversight and Government Reform, and he also sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Issa currently is calling the Sestak episode an impeachable offense. Seriously.