13 May 2007 @ 7:04PM >> The people in this video don’t sound like they are in the mood for compromise on immigration legislation. To put it mildly.

30 March 2007 @ 1:46PM >> It’s official: just as I suspected, a student mob that stormed the stage and shut down a speech sponsored by the College Republicans has emerged victorious, earning what Columbia’s student newspaper calls “a slap on the wrist.”

It’s yet another defeat for free thought and free speech on college campuses. The university has given a wink and a nod to the heckler’s veto, and left-wing students at Columbia now know that they can shut down any speaker with which they disagree and get away with it.

Way to go, Columbia!

2 March 2007 @ 10:39AM >> “At Columbia University, the wheels of justice grind exceeding slow. If at all.” So say the editors of the New York Post in reference to the student mob that, last October, shut down a speech by someone who—horror of horrors—actually supports enforcement of the nation’s borders.

Now Columbia wants the restricted speech zone that is its campus to expand into surrounding neighborhoods. And Columbia wants the government to evict the current occupants so the school can take the land for itself. Columbia hopes the city will use its power of eminent domain to seize the land from the people who currently own it, which the city can do even if the land owners don’t want to sell.

The Post notes:

An ideologically inspired mob attacked an invited speaker at one of America’s great universities. Months pass, and no meaningful punishment is meted out, and the university’s president - whose own academic specialty is the First Amendment - has yet to extend a personal apology to the victim.

And this same university - which clearly is unwilling to police its own grounds - seeks to extend its reach into surrounding neighborhoods by using the government’s power to condemn and seize private homes and businesses.

The two issues aren’t directly related, but eminent domain is such an extreme exercise of government power that it should only be used sparingly and with the greatest care and consideration. The city isn’t obligated to seize the land and give it to Columbia. And the city has every right—no, the city has a duty—to consider the behavior of the organizations that benefit from the exercise of its power.

24 November 2006 @ 3:00PM >> The New York Post notes that it’s been over a month-and-a-half since left-wing students at Columbia University launched a near-riot in order to silence a speaker invited by the student College Republicans group:

[W]hat transpired that night is clear: Just as Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project, opened his remarks at a campus event sponsored by the college’s Republican Club, thugs bum-rushed the stage and physically attacked the speaker.

Their assault was premeditated. Gilchrist was barely able to utter a word before being hustled away by security.

Apart from some boilerplate rhetoric immediately after the attack, university President Lee Bollinger has had little of substance to say about it.

Despite promises from the university to investigate the incident, so far, nothing has happened:

Since then, not a word of apology has been offered to those whose rights were trampled - nor an ounce of punishment meted out to the offenders.

The only thing, in fact, that Columbia’s administrators have done is to announce an “investigation” - which, of course, they would do.

Beyond that, Columbia’s silent.

* No comment on when the investigation might wrap up.

* No comment on how many students are under investigation.

* No comment on how many face possible expulsion.

Maybe Columbia’s hoping the whole matter will simply go away.

Or perhaps the administration is just too scared to confront its brownshirts.

Shortly after the incident, Lee Bollinger issued a nice-sounding statement:

This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.

Mr. Bollinger was right: this isn’t complicated. There wasn’t much to investigate; the perpetrators were caught on video and could be easily identified by other members of the campus community. The only real question was whether Columbia University had the institutional fortitude to punish people whose crime was shutting down the speech of an ideological minority. Would President Bollinger stand up to the brownshirts, especially when those brownshirts seem to represent so many on campus?

At the time, I was skeptical:

These are reassuring words. And I hope Mr. Bollinger intends to stand by them and see that the principles therein are enforced at Columbia. I’ll believe it when I see it, though; Columbia doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to these politically-charged investigations.

I’d prefer for my suspicions to be proven wrong. But there’s not much time left for Columbia to stand up for the principles that President Bollinger claims are cherished by the university he leads.

In this case especially, justice delayed is justice denied. As this semester draws to a close, some students will leave campus with their degrees. The school won’t be in a position to punish students once they’ve already graduated. So unless the school is holding its fire until people forget or until any punishment would be moot, Columbia should either announce its findings or a timetable for delivering them. Otherwise, it looks like yet another cover-up at Columbia.

26 August 2006 @ 1:20PM >> This letter was apparently sent to Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes by one of his constituents:

The Honorable Paul S. Sarbanes
309 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510

Dear Senator Sarbanes,

As a native Marylander and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you. My reasons for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stem from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill’s provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, what I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years.

I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out. Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year so I’m excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively? This would yield an excellent result for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005.

Another benefit in gaining illegal status would be that my daughter would receive preferential treatment relative to her law school applications. If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal (retroactively if possible) and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you for your assistance.

Your Loyal Constituent,
Pete McGlaughlin

(Hat tip: Mona Charen.)

24 June 2006 @ 5:50PM >> The sad thing is, these demands will probably be met:

Like generations of citizens before them, California State University, Chico, students Alba Miranda, Hector Najera and Rene Ochoa descended on the Capitol on Monday to petition members of the Legislature.

Except the three honor students aren’t citizens — they’re illegal immigrants, who under state law have a legal right to in-state tuition at California’s colleges and universities, but are not eligible for financial aid.

Dozens of students like them from across California came to Sacramento to urge legislators to support a measure — Senate Bill 160 by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles — that would allow them to apply for such assistance.

“This legislation would just allow us to be able to fill out applications and compete for a scholarship,” Ochoa said.

The measure has cleared the Senate and is scheduled to be heard Tuesday by the Assembly Higher Education Committee. Cedillo predicts it will land on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk later this summer, as immigration heats up as an election year issue.

12 June 2006 >> The owner of a restaurant in Philadelphia is in trouble for making his language preferences known:

A civil rights watchdog agency opened an investigation on Monday into a Philadelphia cheese steak restaurant that posted a sign saying “This is America - when ordering, speak English.”

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations complaint effectively opens a case against Geno’s Steaks of South Philadelphia, said Rachel Lawton, acting executive director of the agency.

The Philadelphia controversy has fed a national debate over immigration in which the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would declare English the national language and politicians have raised objections to a Spanish version of the national anthem.

The sign may violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, which bans businesses from discriminating on the basis of nationality or ethnicity, Lawton said.

“The complaint will say that the sign discourages patronage by non-English speakers because of their national origin and/or ancestry,” Lawton, whose agency enforces the city’s anti-discrimination laws, said before the official filing.

28 May 2006 @ 4:08PM >> I’m generally not fond of linking to press releases from politicians, but I thought this list of items in the immigration bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate was pretty interesting. My favorites:

Under the bill, illegal aliens get an option to only have to pay three of their last five years in back taxes. Law-abiding American citizens do not have the option to pay some of their taxes. [...]

[E]mployers of aliens applying for adjustment of status “shall not be subject to civil and criminal tax liability relating directly to the employment of such alien.” Businesses that hired illegal workers would now get off scott-free from paying the taxes that they owe the government.

Only having to pay taxes for only 3 out of every 5 years you work? Hey, I’d love a deal like that!

The folks who raise hell any time a tax cut is proposed seem remarkably silent on this. I guess they only like taxes when the money comes out of the pockets of legal Americans and companies that don’t break our immigration laws. I wonder if there are any other laws I could break to get my tax bill cut by 40%.

But what’s happened to the Republican Party? While 32 Republicans voted against the bill, 20 voted to pass it. A significant bloc of Senate Republicans clearly found this bill palatable.

Democrats can be expected to vote for such things; indeed, only four Democrats voted against it. But during campaign seasons, Republicans are usually the ones who claim to oppose placing undue burdens on law-abiding taxpayers. Are they afraid of being called racists? Or are they hoping that when today’s illegals become citizens in the future, the Panderpublicans will end up with that vote?

For years, I’ve heard people on the left complain that there is really only one party in Washington, it just operates under two names. I’m beginning to see what they mean.

22 May 2006 @ 7:31PM >> A few links worthy of reading:

• The website TimesWatch says that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger apologized to graduates of SUNY New Paltz for failing to stop the Iraq war. (And here I was naively thinking that the purpose of a newspaper was to report the news, not to prevent the implementation of American foreign policy.)
• German magazine Der Spiegel reports that Latin America is becoming increasingly dominated by organized crime.
• According to this report from ABC News, the Palestinian Territories may be on the verge of civil war.
• The London Times reports that al Qaeda is specifically targeting Christian children for kidnapping. The children are then sold into domestic slavery and the sex trade, with al Qaeda pocketing the profits.
• As the Mexican government threatens to sue the United States for enforcing immigration laws, it is banning non-Mexicans from being employed within the country.
• Meanwhile, nearly 15% of the Mexico’s labor force is now working within the United States.

17 May 2006 >> This week’s Chutzpah Award goes to the government of Mexico, which is threatening to bring lawsuits against the U.S.—in our own courts—for enforcing American immigration laws:

Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border [...]

“If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people ... we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates,” Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said in an interview with a Mexico City radio station.

Perhaps the Mexican government should instead focus on reforming their economy so Mexican citizens don’t feel driven to flee the country as if it were a burning building.

4 May 2006 >> Stuart Browning, one of my business partners in On The Fence Films, stopped by the May Day protest in San Francisco to gather some footage. He also noticed signs and banners from the various extremist groups that backed the protest, and wonders why the establishment media is glossing over the radical nature of the organizers.

El Uno de Mayo, his two-city report (which incorporates some of my footage from New York), is now available for free online viewing.

4 May 2006 >> Earlier today, Power Line posted an in-depth video report of the May Day protests held around the country this past Monday. The effort was coordinated by documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus, who edited and narrated the report

I shot some of the New York City footage, and contributed a few comments to the report via phone interview. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to dedicate enough time to creating a short video for Brain Terminal, but with the work on Indoctrinate U winding down this summer, I hope to be able to post some new videos of my own in the not-too-distant future.

2 May 2006 @ 4:07PM >> Stuart Browning, one of my partners in On The Fence Films, took his video camera to the May Day protest in San Francisco yesterday. For now, he’s got a series of stills from the rally; in a few days, he’ll be posting a video covering multiple cities.

Also, documentarian Andrew Marcus leads a multi-city team in covering the protests in conjunction with PowerLine and Pajamas Media. He’s got a few scenes from the protests, and will also be following up with more footage later this week.

21 April 2006 @ 9:43AM >> Thomas Sowell points out how amnesty for illegal aliens will make them “more than equal” when compared to many life-long Americans:

Amnesty would mean, for many illegal immigrants, that they would not merely have the same rights as American citizens, but special privileges as well.

Affirmative action laws and policies already apply to some immigrants. Members of a multimillionaire Cuban family have already received government contracts set aside for minority businesses. During one period, an absolute majority of the money paid to construction companies in Washington, D.C., went to Portuguese businessmen under the same preferences.

Immigrant members of Latino, Asian, or other minority groups are legally entitled to the same preferential benefits accorded native-born members of minority groups.

The moment they set foot on American soil, they are entitled to receive benefits created originally with the rationale that these benefits were to compensate for the injustices minorities had suffered in this country.

The illegal status of many “undocumented workers” can at least make them reluctant to claim these privileges. But, take away the illegality and they become not only equal to American citizens, but more than equal.

11 April 2006 >> Public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland are granting credit for participating in political protests against immigration reform:

The Montgomery County schools’ decision to grant students community service credit for attending Monday’s immigration rights protest is raising concern among some parents as well as activists who say officials should focus on education, not political advocacy.

[...]

Student participation in the event is being organized by CASA of Maryland Inc., a Silver Spring-based group that works with the Latino community. It is CASA’s role — as organizer — that has some questioning whether the school system is allowing an outside group to push its political agenda on students. “I do understand that CASA offers some worthy services to immigrants and that’s noble, but it’s a stretch to allow students to protest for a particular side of an issue,” said parent Melissa Andersen. “I’m taken aback by it. I think it’s poor judgment.”

[...]

Maryland students are required to put in 60 hours of community service to graduate from high school. They can undertake a number of activities — including working for political campaigns — as long as the work is done for a secular, nonprofit community organization that is tax-exempt and that school officials have approved.

It would be interesting to see what other organizations have been approved by school officials. I think it is unwise to offer school credit in the name of community service for political advocacy. But if the school board insists on granting credit for one type of political activity, then they should be even-handed and give credit without regard to the political orientation of that activity. Otherwise, it is quite obvious that the school system is attempting to encourage students to adopt a particular set of political views.

School board member Stephen N. Abrams [...] said students have the right to express their opinions, and if they choose to do so at a political rally — as long as they abide by the credit rules — they should not be barred from participating.

“The last time I checked, the First Amendment is not a right to question what the speech is,” he said. “I’m sure if students were participating in a tax cap rally, these same people would not be objecting to that.”

Perhaps. But would the school district offer credit for a rally in support of lower taxes? Do such rallies even exist? Maybe that’s part of the problem. For whatever reason, leftists seem more prone to public protesting than others. People who want lower taxes are more likely to engage in other forms of political activity instead of marching around holding signs and chanting slogans.

I’m attempting to find out whether the Montgomery County school system has ever given credit to students for attending other political rallies.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to report my findings soon.

6 April 2006 @ 3:23PM >> Rudy Rios is an English teacher at Cesar Chavez High School in Houston, Texas. He also opposes immigration reform, and is now being disciplined for using school equipment to create and distribute political fliers to students.

But perhaps most troubling is that, as a teacher of English, this is the best writing Rios could muster:

We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint shit with out us

3 April 2006 @ 11:34AM >> Not exactly the strongest case against immigration reform:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country.

“You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs,” Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. “You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?”

9 November 2005 @ 2:38PM >> Many commentators are saying that last night’s election results bode ill for the Republicans in 2006. But the two headline races—the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey—don’t seem like major defeats for the Republican party as a whole. In each case, a Democrat was elected to replace a Democrat, and even when you factor in Governor Schwarzenegger’s defeated ballot initiatives in California, what you’re left with is Democratic victories in places where Democrats have either been dominant for years or have been successful in recent elections. The one exception, of course, is New York City, where Mayor Mike Bloomberg won re-election in a landslide. This is no victory for Republicans, however; Bloomberg can barely be considered a Republican at all. He switched parties shortly before his first run for mayor, and likely did so only to avoid a bruising Democratic primary, which he would not likely have won in the first place.

So, while last night’s results don’t seem to send much of a signal one way or the other, Republicans in Congress should still be wary. Why? Because with the 2004 presidential election a distant memory, Republican voters no longer have to fear a Kerry presidency rehashing all the greatest hits of the Carter era. A Republican criticizing a Republican no longer has the effect of indirectly helping someone like John Kerry get the keys to the White House. So the supporters who have been relentlessly defending President Bush and the Republicans against the scurrilous smears of the Democrats and the anti-war left can now take stock of their own leaders. And many of them don’t like what they see.

Unfortunately, the structure of our government encourages each Congressman to go to the voters every two years with a laundry list of goodies brought back to the district courtesy of U.S. taxpayers everywhere. When I was growing up, House Speaker Tip O’Neill was the embodiment of the tax-and-spend Democrats. Every time you’d see his face on TV, you knew money was magically evaporating from your pocket. And day by day, his nose seemed to balloon with the size of the Federal government. Tip, you see, lived by the dictum that “all politics is local.” He knew how to buy votes by handing out goodies to his district, and he didn’t care what it did to the size of the budget or the rest of the country.

In 1994, the Republicans took over the House for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration. Faithful Republican voters were promised a class that would clean house. And they did, for a while, until they got comfortable in their jobs, propped up by the perks, and then all of a sudden various planks from the Contract With America went down the memory hole. (Does anyone remember term limits?) Over a decade after the Republicans took over, they seemed to have gotten as fat and lazy as the Democratic leadership they replaced. They’re now spending like drunken sailors in a fashion that would make Tip O’Neill proud (and maybe a little jealous). And on important issues like protecting our borders, the Republicans in Congress have followed President Bush’s lack-of-lead and taken no action. Millions of people stream across our borders illegally—providing a big gaping hole for not just immigrants seeking work, but terrorists seeking destruction—and Republicans turn the other way out of fear of alienating potential voters. With Republicans like that, who needs Democrats?

2006 may be a nasty year for the Republicans, and if it is, it won’t be because the Democrats are making gains with the public. It’ll be because many Republican voters see little point in supporting candidates who are indistinguishable from their opponents on such important issues. In these days of a hyper-polarized electorate, the importance of each party’s base becomes paramount. If Democrats emerge victorious in 2006, it’ll be because their base is energized while the Republican base is dispirited.

So even though last night’s results aren’t really the wake-up call that some commentators are claiming, perhaps Republican politicians should interpret it that way just the same. Because unless something changes between this November and next, I don’t think there are going to be very many Republican voters enthusiastic about pulling the lever for their party.

22 August 2005 @ 9:07AM >> Punish those who are enforcing the law, while rewarding those who break it:

Spent shells litter the ground at what is left of the firing range, and camouflage outfits still hang in a storeroom. Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico.

Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

The land transfer is being made to satisfy judgments in a lawsuit in which the immigrants had said that Casey Nethercott, the owner of the ranch and a former leader of the vigilante group Ranch Rescue, had harmed them.

“Certainly it’s poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land,” said Morris S. Dees Jr., co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which represented the immigrants in their lawsuit.

Mr. Dees said the loss of the ranch would “send a pretty important message to those who come to the border to use violence.”

And what about the message it sends to those who would come here illegally? Come and get it, boys, while the gettin’s good!