What would Saul Alinsky do?

By: David Limbaugh

Remember the popular motto “What would Jesus do?” which was invoked by many Christians as a moral guidepost for daily living? President Barack Obama more likely adheres to “What would Saul Alinsky do?” as most recently evidenced by his apparent defiance of a federal court order on his moratorium on offshore drilling.

Politico reports that the drilling companies who secured the court order blocking the moratorium say the administration indeed is going to defy the court order. I’m quite sure that Alinsky would applaud this move: If at first you don’t succeed through proper legal channels, proceed anyway, because nothing is more important than the radical ends you seek, including the means that must be trampled in the process.

Of course, shrewd Alinskyites like Obama will always have a plausible excuse for their deceitful tactics. In this case, they are alleging newly discovered facts. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he intends to reimpose the drilling moratorium based on information that wasn’t “fully developed” in May, when the six-month moratorium was imposed. Quite convenient.

The administration is also sending mixed signals, probably to introduce sufficient confusion to cover its disobedience. The government’s brief filed with the court insisted, “Of course, until a further order of this Court or the Court of Appeals granting relief from this Court’s Preliminary Injunction Order, Defendants will comply with the Court’s Order.” But attorneys for the drilling companies warn that “Secretary Salazar’s comments have the obvious effect of chilling the resumption of (outer continental shelf) activities, which is precisely the wrong this Court sought to redress through its Preliminary Injunction Order.”

The companies’ point, notes Politico, is that Salazar’s public announcement that the administration will reinstitute the moratorium will have the same practical effect as actually doing it because companies are not about to prepare rigs for drilling when they might be shut down in a few days. The administration predictably pooh-poohs the companies’ concerns and says these new “facts” present an entirely different scenario. How convenient. Whenever you can’t advance the football, just move the goal posts your way.

Can’t you just hear an irate Alinsky-schooled Obama behind closed doors learning of the court order audaciously purporting to limit his plenary executive authority? “Just find the damn loophole — or say you did — and I don’t want to see you again in this office until it’s done.”

Defying court orders is just one of many ways Obama abuses his authority. When Congress failed with its initial efforts to impose cap-and-tax legislation designed to suppress traditional energy production and consumption in the United States for the ostensible purpose of reducing global temperature an imperceptible amount over the next century, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency just issued ultra vires regulations to accomplish similar results. It didn’t matter that every literate and intellectually honest person had to concede that the EPA had no statutory (or any other) authority to issue such sweeping regulations. What mattered were the administration’s radical environmental goals.

When Obama wanted to secure for his favored unions a stake in his new General Motors far exceeding their actual ownership interest and rob secured creditors of their preferred-creditor status and the value of their investment, he used the power of his office to strong-arm a restructuring of the company to accomplish his aims. When Democratic Party donor and super-lawyer Tom Lauria opposed this plan on behalf of his client, the White House, according to Lauria, threatened to destroy his client’s reputation. One unnamed source described the White House as the most shocking “end justifies the means” group he had ever encountered. Another attributed Obama’s negotiating tactics to a “madman theory of the presidency,” saying Obama wants to be feared as someone who is willing to do anything to get his way. In return for standing up for their legal rights as secured creditors and not bending to Obama’s horrendously unfair demand, er, offer, Obama maligned the recalcitrant creditors as “a small group of speculators.”

When inspector general Gerald Walpin blew the whistle on the corruption of an Obama friend and supporter, Obama fired Walpin and sought to discredit him as a senile misfit — a charge wholly unsupported by the facts.

And I won’t begin to recite the many ways (e.g., reconciliation) Obama sought to circumvent the legislative process en route to Obamacare.

Alinsky is surely beaming from the other side.

Obama’s Department of (illegal immigrant) Labor

By: Michelle Malkin

President Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers. What you need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always had a rather radical definition of “American.” At a Latino voter registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted to thunderous applause, “We are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not.”

That’s right. The woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn’t give a hoot about our immigration laws – or about the fundamental distinction between those who followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who didn’t.

While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal immigrant benefits (including driver’s licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty.

Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal immigrant worker organizing movement in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal immigrants regarding fair wages:

“I’m here to tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay – especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours,” Solis says in the video pitch.

“We can help, and we will help. If you work in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you can count on the U.S. Department of Labor to see to it that those protections work for you.”

To be sure, no one should be scammed out of “fair wages.” Employers that hire and exploit illegal immigrant workers deserve full sanctions and punishment. But it’s the timing, tone-deafness and underlying blanket amnesty agenda of Solis’ illegal immigrant outreach that has so many American workers and their representatives on Capitol Hill rightly upset.

With double-digit unemployment and a growing nationwide revolt over Washington’s border security failures, why has Solis chosen now to hire 250 new government field investigators to bolster her illegal immigrant workers’ rights campaign? (Hint: Leftists unhappy with Obama’s lack of progress on “comprehensive immigration reform” need appeasing. This is a quick bone to distract them.)

Unfortunately, the federal government is not alone in lavishing attention and resources on workers who shouldn’t be here in the first place. As of 2008, California, Florida, Nevada, New York, Texas and Utah all expressly included illegal immigrants in their state workers’ compensation plans – and more than a dozen other states implicitly cover them.

Solis’ public service announcement comes on the heels of little-noticed but far more troubling comments encouraging illegal immigrant workers in the Gulf Coast. Earlier this month, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to Spanish language publication El Diario La Prensa, Solis signaled that her department was going out of its way to shield illegal immigrant laborers involved in cleanup efforts. “My purpose is to assist the workers with respect to safety and protection,” she said. “We’re protecting all workers regardless of migration status because that’s the federal law.” She told reporters that her department was in talks with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who had visited coastal worksites to try to verify that workers were legal.

No word yet on whether she gave ICE her “we are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not” lecture. But it’s a safe bet.

Obama’s golf game tees up image debate

By Alexander Bolton

President Barack Obama is facing the same dilemma several of his Republican predecessors faced during times of national crisis: whether to golf.

His love of the game is clear from his willingness to play over successive weekends, even in sweltering heat.

But he has come under criticism from Republicans — and some in the media — for playing the country-club sport while millions of gallons of oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama has played at least seven times since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, according to a compilation of media reports. He has reportedly golfed a total of 39 times since his inauguration, though some rounds came during vacations.

“Very seldom do people look at a president golfing with admiring eyes,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “Like [Sen.] John Kerry [D-Mass.] with windsurfing and Obama with golfing, there’s a feeling that it is an Ivy League, country-club activity.”

Obama’s golf game became a political issue this week when Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called on the president to quit playing until oil stopped gushing into the Gulf.

A White House spokesman pointed out that the president, given the demands of an all-consuming job, deserved a little time to himself.

“I don’t think that there’s a person in this country that doesn’t think that their president ought to have a little time to clear his mind,” said Bill Burton.

Republicans used Kerry’s fondness for windsurfing to deadly political effect in 2004, when he was the Democratic presidential nominee. GOP strategists portrayed Kerry as a member of the elite and a politician who followed the prevailing political winds.

Some in the GOP have been leery of following Steele’s lead in criticizing Obama for how he spends his weekends. Sens. George LeMieux of Florida and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, two Republicans who have blasted Obama’s response to the spill, declined to take issue with his golfing during the crisis.

“He needs to be more focused on the Gulf of Mexico; it’s not just tar balls, it’s sheets of oil that have been washing ashore,” said LeMieux. “But I’ll leave the president’s personal time to him.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) has likewise criticized the president’s handling of the Gulf disaster, saying he needs to have “a higher command-and-control operation.”

But Nelson said he is not concerned with how much time Obama plays golf.

Said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who frequently disagrees with Obama on policy matters: “It’s a low blow.”

Other Gulf Coast lawmakers, including Rep. Allen Boyd (D), who represents the Florida panhandle, and Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), said the same.

Democrats were more outspoken about commanders in chief who golfed when Republicans controlled the White House, according to presidential historians.

GOP President Dwight Eisenhower loved golf so much that he made several trips to Augusta, Ga., site of the Masters Golf Tournament, where he had a house on the course.

“Eisenhower was criticized by Democrats who didn’t have a great deal to criticize him for as being asleep at the controls and spending too much time on the golf course,” said historian John Sayle Watterson, author of The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.

Eisenhower’s golf habit led to a confrontation with Congress when his staff tried to trap and remove squirrels digging up a putting green on White House grounds.

Former Sen. Richard Neuberger, an Oregon Democrat, called on Eisenhower to leave the squirrels alone and helped set up a Save the White House Squirrels Fund. Eisenhower eventually backed down.

Former President Gerald Ford, another Republican, came under attack from Democrats and the media for taking a golfing trip to California at a time when the inflation rate was rapidly rising, threatening the economy.

“He was criticized for being away at a critical time,” said Watterson.

Former President John F. Kennedy and his aides were keenly aware of the public image golf projected. They used to joke about the amount of time Eisenhower spent on the links.

After Kennedy won the White House in 1960, he initially tried to keep his golf playing from the public eye.

Obama often plays at Andrews Air Force base, where public access is restricted. When he plays at other courses, he often deploys protective foursomes ahead of and behind his golfing party so bystanders have a tough time catching a glimpse of him mid-hack.

The president also holds his scorecards back from public scrutiny, perhaps fearful that an appalling score may raise questions about his prowess in other matters.

Obama was roundly mocked on the campaign trail in 2008 when he bowled an atrocious 37 out of a possible 300 while on the stump in Pennsylvania — though he did not finish the whole game.

Tim Joyce, a columnist for RealClearSports.com, said that sports can become a metaphor for a president’s governing style.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s reputation as a micro-manager was cemented after it emerged he had sign-off authority over who used the White House tennis courts.

Carter’s near-collapse from exhaustion during a Maryland 10K race became a troubling symbol of a presidency that seemed to be running out of steam.

Joyce noted that former President George H.W. Bush spent much of his presidency fighting the public perception that he was a pampered East Coast establishment elite.

To avoid fueling his country-club reputation, Bush would play tennis games at an indoor court in the Senate Hart Office Building, away from prying eyes and cameras.

Former President George W. Bush understood the potential public-relations fallout of playing golf during a time of national crisis. Bush said it would send the “wrong signal” to continue playing golf while American soldiers were fighting and dying in Iraq, and vowed not to.

He said he decided to quit after the bombing of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. But liberal critics shamed him when they found video of him on the green two months after making his promise.

But Bush seemed well aware of the sport’s image during a time of crisis.

“During the BP spill, it may have been wise to avoid a couple rounds here and there,” said Brinkley.

“Every elected official must be mindful of how things that seem a part of everyday life will be looked at differently during times of crisis,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, who ran for president in 2008.

Penn Jillette Will Not Call Out Scientology Or Islam

Matt Welch

The Las Vegas Weekly conducts a survey of “the personalities who define Vegas,” and judges Penn Jillette to be #1. Selections from the brief, reliably interesting interview:

Let’s talk about your TV show Bullshit! Will you ever run out of theories to debunk and people to expose? If you build a kingdom on bullshit, you’re not in danger of running out of it. Our producer says that Teller and I can take any subject in the news and do a credible show on it. Sure, we like to have a villain, something to call “bullshit” on, but if we don’t, we can depart from that model.

Are there any groups you won’t go after? We haven’t tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tackled Islam because we have families.

Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back … Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific. […]

You do go after Christians, though … Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.

Brewer to Obama: Warning Signs Are Not Enough

Obama zones out

By Mark Steyn

What do Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and BP have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re both Democratic Party supporters.

Or they were. Gen. McChrystal is a liberal who voted for President Obama and banned Fox News from his headquarters TV. That may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone. They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The managers of BP were unable to vote for Mr. Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister, duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord John Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of “cap-and-trade.” BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. It was to Mr. Obama what TotalFinaElf was to Saddam Hussein.

But what do Gen. McChrystal’s and BP’s defenestrations tell us about the president of the United States? Mr. Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Mr. Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Only the other day, Sen. George LeMieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something about the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States; weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “superskimmers.” Mr. Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Mr. LeMieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” the senator reported.

He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. … The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today, Mr. Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass. After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Mr. Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Mr. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world, you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they supposedly supported, the one from which the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Mr. Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance.” He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated melange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis on the one hand and Britain and the other American allies heading for the checkout on the other all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Mr. Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Mr. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi “quagmire,” was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Mr. Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to the state legislature to the U.S. Senate without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Mr. Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Wasn’t he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That’s why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media. Did all those hopey-changers realize that Mr. Obama’s war would be run by George W. Bush’s defense secretary and general? Hey, never mind: Moveon.org has quietly disappeared its celebrated “General Betray-us” ad from its website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Mr. Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Mr. Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “antiwar” movement was really an anti-Bush movement and the protesters really don’t care about dead foreigners, after all. The more things “change you can believe in,” the more they stay the same.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be. It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

G8: Obama interested in Huntsville’s golf courses

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan (top, R), Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (top, L), U.S. President Barack Obama (bottom, R), and French President Nicolas Sarkozy pose for a group picture after a working session with African outreach leaders during the G8 summit at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, Ontario, June 25, 2010 Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/06/25/g8-obama-interested-in-huntsvilles-golf-courses-clement/#ixzz0ryh3MxGH

When U.S. President Barack Obama stepped off his helicopter in Huntsville on Friday, the first thing he said was, “You’ve got a lot of golf courses here, don’t you?” Industry Minister Tony Clement told the National Post in an exclusive interview.

“I told him, ‘We would really recommend and love it if you could come back here with Michelle and the kids at some point — we think you’d really love it here,’” Minister Clement said on the sidewalk of Huntsville’s Main Street, in his home riding. “I think I’ve planted a seed in the President’s mind.”

Minister Clement said he personally welcomed each of the G8 leaders — with the exception of French President Nicolas Sarkozy — all of whom commented on the natural beauty of the region, which they observed during their airborne travels over cottage country.

The minister downplayed suggestions that Huntsville had grown sleepy in the face of a massive security presence.

“I was here on Monday and Tuesday, and the place was rockin’ — even before the leaders got here,” he said. “We figured as soon as the G20 was announced that a lot of the protests would happen in the city, and not up here. The very pleasant surprise is people are not afraid to come downtown, people are going on with their daily lives. They want to be part of the vibe.”

— Kathryn Blaze Carlson and Kenyon Wallace

Ariz. gov: Most illegal immigrants smuggling drugs

By PAUL DAVENPORT

PHOENIX (AP) – Gov. Jan Brewer said Friday that most illegal immigrants entering Arizona are being used to transport drugs across the border, an assertion that critics slammed as exaggerated and racist.

Brewer said the motivation of “a lot” of the illegal immigrants is to enter the United States to look for work, but that drug rings press them into duty as drug “mules.”

“I believe today, under the circumstances that we’re facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in,” Brewer said.

“There’s strong information to us that they come as illegal people wanting to come to work. Then they are accosted and they become subjects of the drug cartel,” she said.

Brewer’s office later issued a statement in response to media reports of her comments. It said most human smuggling into Arizona is under the direction of drug cartels, which “are by definition smuggling drugs.”

“Unless Gov. Brewer can provide hard data to substantiate her claim that most undocumented people crossing into Arizona are ‘drug mules,’ she must retract such an outrageous statement,” said Oscar Martinez, a University of Arizona history professor whose teaching and research focuses on border issues. “If she has no data and is just mouthing off for political reasons, as I believe she is doing, then she must apologize to the people of Arizona for lying to them so blatantly.”

Sen. Jesus Ramon Valdes, a member of the Mexican Senate’s northern border affairs commission, called Brewer’s comments racist and irresponsible.

“Traditionally, migrants have always been needy, humble people who in good faith go looking for a way to better the lives of their families,” Ramon Valdes said.

A Border Patrol spokesman said illegal immigrants do sometimes carry drugs across the border, but he said he couldn’t provide numbers because smugglers are turned over to prosecutors.

“I wouldn’t say that every person that is apprehended is being used as a mule,” spokesman Mario Escalante said from Tucson. “The smuggling organizations, in their attempts to be lucrative and to make more money, they’ll try pretty much whatever they need.”

T.J. Bonner, president of the union that represents border agents, said some illegal border-crossers carry drugs but most don’t. People with drugs face much stiffer penalties for entering the U.S. illegally, and very few immigrants looking for work want to risk the consequences, Bonner said.

“The majority of people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs,” he said. “Most of the drug smuggling is done by people who intend to do that. That’s their livelihood.”

A spokesman for a human rights group said Brewer’s comments were “an oversimplification of reality.”

“We have some stories of people being forced to carry drugs,” said Jaime Farrant, policy director for Tucson-based Border Action Network. “We disagree with the assessment that people are crossing (to carry drugs). We have no evidence that’s the truth. We think most people come in search of jobs or to reunite with their families.”

Brewer spoke Friday when asked about comments she made in a recent election debate among Republican candidates for governor.

She said during the June 15 debate that she believed most illegal immigrants were not entering the United States for work. She then associated illegal immigrants with drug smuggling, drop houses, extortion and other criminal activity.

Brewer on April 23 signed a controversial new state immigration enforcement law that is scheduled toe effect July 29, although five legal challenges already are pending in federal court, and the U.S. Justice Department may file its own challenge.

The Arizona law requires police officers enforcing another law to question a person’s immigration status if there’s a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

Francisco Loureiro, who has run a migrant shelter for more than 20 years in Nogales, Sonora, across the border from the Arizona town of the same name, said Brewer’s comments are aimed at turning the people of Arizona against migrants and strengthen support for the state’s new law.

“That governor is racist and she has to look for a way to harm the image of migrants before American society and mainly before the people of Arizona,” Loureiro said.

Roberto Suro, a University of Southern California journalism professor who founded a research center on Hispanics, said he was skeptical of Brewer’s assertion, partly because federal authorities would be trumpeting many more drug seizures than they do. “The Border Patrol is not secretive about saying when they apprehend 10 people and found knapsacks (containing drugs) nearby,” he said.

Attorney General Terry Goddard, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, said Brewer “does not understand the difference between illegal immigration and the organized criminals who are members of the violent drug cartels who pose a very a real danger.”

Obama Internet kill switch plan approved by US Senate

President could get power to turn off Internet

By Grant Gross

A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.” Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.

The committee unanimously approved an amended version of the legislation by voice vote Thursday, a committee spokeswoman said. The bill next moves to the Senate floor for a vote, which has not yet been scheduled.

The bill, introduced earlier this month, would establish a White House Office for Cyberspace Policy and a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, which would work with private US companies to create cybersecurity requirements for the electrical grid, telecommunications networks and other critical infrastructure.

The bill also would allow the US president to take emergency actions to protect critical parts of the Internet, including ordering owners of critical infrastructure to implement emergency response plans, during a cyber-emergency. The president would need congressional approval to extend a national cyber-emergency beyond 120 days under an amendment to the legislation approved by the committee.

The legislation would give the US Department of Homeland Security authority that it does not now have to respond to cyber-attacks, Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, said earlier this month.

“Our responsibility for cyber defence goes well beyond the public sector because so much of cyberspace is owned and operated by the private sector,” he said. “The Department of Homeland Security has actually shown that vulnerabilities in key private sector networks like utilities and communications could bring our economy down for a period of time if attacked or commandeered by a foreign power or cyber terrorists.”

Other sponsors of the bill are Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat.

One critic said Thursday that the bill will hurt the nation’s security, not help it. Security products operate in a competitive market that works best without heavy government intervention, said Wayne Crews, vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulation think tank.

“Policymakers should reject such proposals to centralize cyber security risk management,” Crews said in an e-mail. “The Internet that will evolve if government can resort to a ‘kill switch’ will be vastly different from, and inferior to, the safer one that will emerge otherwise.”

Cybersecurity technologies and services thrive on competition, he added. “The unmistakable tenor of the cybersecurity discussion today is that of government steering while the market rows,” he said. “To be sure, law enforcement has a crucial role in punishing intrusions on private networks and infrastructure. But government must coexist with, rather than crowd out, private sector security technologies.”

On Wednesday, 24 privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter raising concerns about the legislation to the sponsors. The bill gives the new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications “significant authority” over critical infrastructure, but doesn’t define what critical infrastructure is covered, the letter said.

Without a definition of critical infrastructure there are concerns that “it includes elements of the Internet that Americans rely on every day to engage in free speech and to access information,” said the letter, signed by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups.

“Changes are needed to ensure that cybersecurity measures do not unnecessarily infringe on free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties interests,” the letter added.

Poor Planning in Fairfax