Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Spinning For Rudy by DoubleSpeak Media

I come from an Irish family. When I say that I mean I have aunts and uncles born in Ireland, not that we’ve been here in the United States since the first potato famine. For all of that I am not one to engage in tribalism. I am proud of my Irish heritage, but it does nothing to blind me to the actions of those who would engage in terrorism in the name of liberty.

I have no truck with the I.R.A and not amount of family history about how this great-grand-father or that great cousin was hanged by the British is going to get me to say otherwise. But that is not always the case for everyone, especially a politician of no conscience like Rep. Steve King of New York.

Today Rep. King got a bit of comeuppance as he testified before the British Parliament about the radicalization of immigrants. Rep. King has been holding hearings (witch hunts) about the possible radicalization of American Muslims. This is the worst kind of fear mongering but he is the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and he can hold hearing about whatever he likes.

As far as any can find this is the very first time that a sitting United States Representative has ever testified to the British Parliament. Rep. King got to add his particular brand of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria to the mix in England, but it did not come without a cost for the Republican.

You see Peter King has been a major apologist for the I.R.A. for a very long time. Today he was put on the hot seat by the committee about his vocal and hypocritical support for Irish terrorists, while treating every Muslim like a terrorist.

He was asked by Labor MP David Winnik about some of his more over the top quotes. In particular he was asked if he stood by his 1985 statement saying:

If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.

King replied:

“I stand by it in the context of when it was said

He then went on to blather about injustice and how as an Irish American he felt that those injustices gave some kind of moral justification for the acts. What he did not do was ever condemn the acts of the I.R.A. nor express any regrets for the deaths.
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The FSM knows that the president does not always get it right, and often times it takes him way to long to do so, but he should get credit when he actually acts in a way that progressives can support. That is what he has done yesterday.

According to the Hill Newspaper:

Under the new rules announced Thursday, officials at the Department of Homeland Security will perform case-by-case reviews of those in line for deportation, weeding out violent criminals and other high-priority cases while closing the books on those considered no threat.

Since being unable to get the DREAM Act passed there has been a lot of pressure on the administration to use it’s executive power to change the enforcement policies of ICE. The so-called Secure Communities initiative was supposed to focus on the criminal element in the informal immigration community.

The theory was that people who were committing serious crimes in addition to their undocumented status should be the first ones that were found and deported to their country of origin. It is actually a decent idea, spending the limited amount of money we have for this kind of enforcement on actual criminals who don’t contribute to our society.

Of course the problem is that they are not as easy to find as say a undocumented immigrant without a license caught in a traffic stop. The Obama administration has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than the Bush administration every did, but they have not all been the hardened criminals like the Secure Communities program envisioned.

Changing the emphasis and closing the books on the cases of non-violent, non-criminal undocumented immigrants is the right thing to do. How can we tell? Because xenophobic Republicans are already howling to the moon about it, here is what the reprehensible Representative Peter King (R-NY) had to say about it:

“This new non-enforcement policy announced by the Obama Administration Thursday is a blatant attempt to grant amnesty to potentially millions of illegal aliens in this country.”

Rep. King is the same fellow who spends a bunch of committee time looking for radicalized Muslims. But he is an equal opportunity hater, if you are brown he is pretty sure that you are out to ruin the United States.

In this case though, he is going to be about as affective as box full of mewling kittens. This is completely within the powers of the Executive branch to use its prosecutorial discretion to decide which cases it wants to take to court, be it civil or deportation court, and which it will give a pass to.
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Snow White and the seven dwarfs - Hessen - Germany - Bergfreiheit - Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge - Alemania by Ela2007, on Flickr

I don’t know if any of you have ever directed a play or a film but there is a step that both have in common that is always a problem, casting the leads. Sometimes you know who your leads are (if you have a repertory group or a lot of money to hire a high profile performer) but more often you have to hold auditions.

Sometimes you have to hold more than one set of auditions if you just can’t find the right person for the part. This seems to be where the Republicans are with their nominating process for president. It was always going to be a “Seven Dwarves” field, after all, they do not have an incumbent and the last person to have the nomination from that party is not running.

Still they seem to have a problem even getting all seven cast. Halley Barbour dipped his toe in the water and decided it was too cold. Donald Trump was never really going to run, but he flirted with taking the role and got the Republicans all-hot-in-the-bothered about the prospect. Newt Gingrich is going to run but it looks as though that will last about another week, maybe 10 days.

(Here is a hint for all aspiring nominees, never, ever, ever say “right wing social engineering” at least don’t say it as if it is a bad thing. Just a word to the wise, eh?)

Sure there are serious candidates in the field. Mitt Romney has shown that he can raise a lot of money and lets face it he has been running for this job for the last 5 years at least. There is also Tim “As interesting as a blank sheet of paper” Pawlenty. He has the chops, so far to straddle both halves of the Republican base, but that is mainly because he is so bland and boring that no one is willing to be offended by him.

So far no one who actually has a chance of being president has really caught on fire with the Republicans and so they are looking to another round of auditions to see if someone with the “right stuff” will pop out of the wood work.
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Joseph McCarthy by History In An Hour, on Flickr

Today we might be seeing the start of the New McCarthyism is the House of Representatives. Homeland Security Committee Chair Peter King will convene the first of what he intends to be series of investigative panels on the supposed radicalization of Muslim Americans.

Rep. King, who represents a Long Island, New York district has been on of the most vocal of the Right-wingers shouting that we can not trust our citizens who happen to practice the religion of Islam because some of their coreligionists attacked the United States on 9/11 and have tried to do so again since.

When Sen. McCarthy kicked off his witch hunt for Communists it was along similar lines. First it was implications that there were people who would not help root out Communist infiltrators, then it moved on to accusations of people who were more than sympathetic to the Communists goals and finally it became a guilt by association hunt where just knowing Communists was enough to make you unemployable and semi-treasonous.

Today Rep King (R-Islamophobe) will be trying to bolster his claim that there most Muslim communities in this nation are not cooperating with law enforcement. Will he do it by calling expert law men from around the nation who’ve had these problems? Not even one. He has consistently refused to name the sources of those claims (maybe it is because the voice in his head only claim to be a Marshal?)

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photo: inoneear via Flickr

It has been a fun thing to shout “Speaker Boehner where are the jobs?” on the blogs and in real life, but the question is starting to become more than rhetorical. The Republicans spent most of 2010 talking smack and outright lies about jobs. You all know the story, they claimed, loudly and constantly, that the stimulus program did not create a single job (a flat lie) while at the same time going to ribbon cutting ceremonies for projects that were going to be built with stimulus money.

They’ve called everything “Job Killing” from the ACA to the trying to assure the safety of deep water drilling rigs before we had even started to clean up the Gulf of Mexico. It was all about how regulation of any kind was killing jobs. It was all about how if we did not make sure that millionaires and billionaires keep their undeserved Bush era tax cuts that there could not be “certainty” in the market and jobs could not be created.

And you know what the American people bought it, for the most part. They looked around and took a stick the body that actually passed lots of things which would have addressed these issues, the House of Representatives. While the Republicans might think that this was a mandate for their policies (it wasn’t) the more likely answer was that the public, dealing with unemployment numbers they had not seen in a generation and persistent unemployment they had not seen in nearly a lifetime wanted to put the people they heard talking the loudest about jobs in the driver seat for a while.

All of which makes it more stunning that the House Republicans have not put forward a single jobs bill. Not one in the whole month of January. Congress can be a busy place, lots of things can be moving forward at the same time, but isn’t it strange that the supposed high priority item of jobs for the people has not had a vote?
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It is a central pillar of my philosophy of life that if you live in fear the worst thing that can happen to you already has. While not wanting to get all fan-boy about things Frank Herbert did hit on a small “t” truth when he wrote that fear is the mind killer. This is why there are and have been acts of terror all through the history of our species. Using our ability to be afraid of the next horrible thing to influence the actions of people is something Sun Tzu and Machiavelli would both approve of. Fear makes your opponent do dumb things and ultimately makes them easier to defeat.

Which is why the current spasms of legislation in response to the attempted truck bombing in Time Square is so disappointing. We have a couple of proposals which under any other climate would be laughed out of Congress that are going to be taking up time over the next few weeks.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

The first one is the risible plan by Sen. Joe Lieberman (Putz- CT) to allow the State Department to determine if you are associated with a terrorist group. They could provisionally strip you of your citizenship. You could challenge it in court, but only after the fact, not before the decision was made.

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Everyone knows that the Republican Party thinks there are things that are fine when they do it but are a problem when anyone else does them. This is the It-Okay-If-Your-A-Republican or IOIKYR meme. It is starting to look as though there is another one, MIOFWP or Miranda-Is-Only-For-White-People.

We have heard the predictable and flatly wrong whines from Republicans that terror suspects like Umar Abdulmutallab (the Fruit of the Boom attempted bomber) should not be given any kind of rights, regardless of years of Supreme Court decisions that require it and the highly successful prosecutions that have arisen from them. They are “terrorists” and the must be put in to the hands of the military tribunal system!

Right up to the point where the FBI and Homeland Security announced that Faisal Shahzad was the suspected Time Square attempted bomber the silence from Republicans was deafening. As long as it was thought that the suspect might be a middle aged bald white guy, well there was no talk about throwing him into the military system. Now that it is clear he is a naturalized citizen of Pakistani extraction, the usual suspects are coming out of the woodwork bleating that he should be treated differently than other citizens.

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