Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll

As I figured, proponents of the rule of law are siding with the Washington Times suggestion that the PWC resolution was strengthened, and castigating the Washington Post for saying it was weakened.

Greg L, President of Help Save Manassas, has two posts on this subject. The first was referenced in a comment in my preceding thread, and the second is his explanation, What the Changes Actually Mean. He included a chart which broke down the issue the same way I did in my previous post, but assesses the consequence of the 3rd case differently than I would:

The third case, where a suspect is released with a ticket, warning, or nothing at all is where most of the confusion lies. Under the current policy, we again have immigration checks done at the discretion of an officer, subject to probable cause. The change here is that the probable cause requirement here seems to have been removed. Officers will still check immigration status of those detained for non-arrestable offenses (it can’t be prohibited under 8 U.S.C. 1373) at their discretion, but aren’t required to vault the probable cause hurdle. My understanding here is that since a suspect isn’t being subjected to detention, the opportunity for a successful civil rights lawsuit is either absent or tremendously low. Whether this increases or decreases the number of immigration checks that will be performed remains to be seen, but since it’s easier for an officer to conduct these checks, it’s pretty likely that more checks will be performed.

Remember, my statement was this:

So the question is: Was there more probable cause questioning of non-arrested people, or more probable cause questionings of people who were arrested and NOT taken to jail. The Washington Times article gives us the answer: As of April 1, police said they had had contact with 89 illegal immigrants and that 46 received a ticket but were not arrested or detained. 46 people who we learned were illegal immigrants, were NOT arrested or detained. Under this new "stiffer" policy, those 46 could NOT be questioned anymore.

Now, Greg argues that the new rule doesn't take away the board direction to question these non-arrested people. He argues that they still have "discretion" to question, and in fact will be MORE likely to do so because they don't need "probable cause".

The problem I have with this argument is that, as Greg also notes, under 8 U.S.C. 1373 the police have the right to question illegal status. They had that right BEFORE the resolution was passed, they had that right under the current resolution, and they still have that right under the new resolution.

In other words, for those who are not arrested, Greg's argument is that the NEW resolution simply goes back to what the law was BEFORE THE CURRENT RESOLUTION.

But if that is true, then it would mean that the CURRENT RESOLUTION was actually more restrictive than what was true before it was passed. In other words -- for those not arrested, the resolution that supposedly led to more questioning actually restricted that questioning, so that repealing that part of the resolution will actually let us question more people.

But I doubt Greg is trying to say he pushed for a resolution that restricted the police's right to question status. Of course, the original proposal didn't include "probably cause", but we certainly were led to believe it imposed a requirement for the police to implement a policy of questioning EVERY illegal for which there was probable cause.

In other words, to believe the situation for those not arrested will lead to MORE questioning now is to believe the resolution gave us LESS questioning.

Since it seems clear that in fact MORE questioning was done under the resolution, I believe that the resolution DID order the police department to implement a policy of questioning, subject to "probable cause", and the NEW resolution REMOVES that order.

IN truth, time will tell. But logic can be instructive. How many times in the past 3 months have you read Greg L., or ANY person supporting the rule of law resolution, complaining that Deane might interfere with the resolution by not having the police do the questioning they were required to do under the resolution?

Heck, do you remember any posts suggesting we should remove the requirement for probable cause questioning before last night?

Let's use some more logic. Police wanted video cameras because they were afraid if the questioned someone about their illegal immigrant status, and acted on the results of that questioning, they might be sued for civil rights violations. This when they had been told to question status based on a probable cause criteria.

But now the entire subject of asking questions is left to the "discretion" of the officer. If the officer now, using his own discretion, asks about illegal status, and acts on those answers, it will be COMPLETELY on the officer. There's no order telling him to ask questions, and no more clear process to be followed to show a lack of discrimination (the probable cause process).

And we are supposed to believe that the police, afraid to use probable cause without video camers, will be happy to use a "at your own discretion" process, without any video to protect them? The first time an officer asks the question, a lawsuit will follow, and the department will stand back and say "well, it was up to the officer NOT to violate civil rights. We didn't ask him to do ANYTHING. "

We'll know in a couple of months if the number of non-arrested people who are then hauled in for being illegal goes up or down (realise that we are now talking about people who were not arrested for an underlying offense, but in the act of being suspected of an offense, they are asked their status, give the wrong answer, and are taken into custody for deportation).

Of course, if the argument is that they will be ASKED about their status, but will NOT be detained, then maybe more questions will be asked, but what would the point be. We already have illegals ADMITTING to being illegal in meetings with the Chief of Police, because he has the "discretion" not to take action, and he doesn't.

I’m really getting a kick out of Oregon’s insistence that their laws are copyrighted, and to reproduce them you’ve got to pay a licensing fee. (Texas tried to pull the same thing a few years ago.) If Virginia tried that, you’d better believe I’d have a mirror of the state code set up before the sun set.

Okay, maybe this time he didn’t do anything I’m too upset about…but I love a good Tom Davis bashing. So I was really excited to see this: http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2008/04/congress-did-wh.html

John McCain and Hillary Clinton don't understand the basic concept of supply and demand.  It is that when supply cannot be adjusted quickly, demand controls price.  We don't have the ability to produce more gasoline in the next three months, because our refineries are operating at full capacity, 24 hours a day, producing gasoline.  So what is controlling gas prices is not supply, but demand.

When the price of gas continues to rise, we know that there is more demand for gasoline than there is supply.  Gasoline is not $3.50 a gallon instead of $2.50 a gallon because it costs markedly more for Exxon to pump oil and refine it; it is $3.50 a gallon instead of $2.50 a gallon because Exxon can sell all the gasoline that it produces for $3.50 a gallon.  If the market will pay $3.50 a gallon, it does not matter to Exxon's pricing decision whether 18.4 cents of that price goes to federal taxes or to additional profit.

So if we cut the gasoline tax by 18.4 cents a gallon, what we are doing is giving Exxon 18.4 cents a gallon in additional profit.  If Exxon chooses to reduce its price $3.32 a gallon to reflect the lower taxes, it can.  But it won't have to, because consumers are already willing to pay $3.50 a gallon.  So the economists that I have seen interviewed are unanimous in saying that the 18 cent tax savings will almost certainly NOT be seen by the driving public.  It will give 18 cents more to Exxon.  Now, that's good news for Exxon shareholders, but it is horrible news for the taxpayers, because the tax cut would cost the federal government billions of dollars to increase the profit of Exxon.

Suppose I am wrong.  Suppose that the oil companies actually do reduce their prices, at least to start.  When price goes down, demand goes up -- it's Economics 101.  But we already know that supply can't be increased, at least in the short run.  So when demand goes up, the price rises again.  Every economist I have heard or seen interviewed as said, "If the gas tax is cut, demand for gasoline will rise and the price will rise back close to where it was before."  Most estimates suggest that any temporary reduction in the price of gasoline will be on the order of a penny a gallon.

You can hear Gwen Ifill's story on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, including an interview with economist Leonard Berman, Director of the Tax Policy Center and a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Urban Institute.  Mr. Berman had been a Treasury Department official in both the Clinton and the Reagan administrations.  If you go to the Real Audio version, or the MP3 version , the discussion with Mr. Berman begins at about 3:40 into the interview.  Mr. Berman concludes that the gas tax holiday makes no sense; "only a tiny fraction" of any tax decrease would be passed on to consumers.  

Or listen to Greg Mankiw, a Bush economist:

"Score one for Obama," wrote Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "In light of the side effects associated with driving ... gasoline taxes should be higher than they are, not lower."

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200...

Or look to an economist from a more liberal source:

Economists said that since refineries cannot increase their supply of gasoline in the space of a few summer months, lower prices will just boost demand and the benefits will flow to oil companies, not consumers.

"You are just going to push up the price of gas by almost the size of the tax cut," said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.

Many economists implicitly agreed with Obama that the McCain-Clinton gas tax plan sent the wrong signal on energy efficiency, and would lead to increased, not decreased, carbon emissions.

"I think it is a very bad idea," said Gilbert Metcalf, a economics professor at Tufts University currently working with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"If we want people to invest in energy-saving cars, we need some assurance that the higher price paid for these cars is going to pay off through fuel savings," he said. "It is a very short-sighted, counterproductive proposal."

It's also a lousy way to get money into the hands of struggling households.  

As Mankiw said,

If you want to provide households tax relief, a direct rebate ... is more effective.  Not all of the tax relief from a gas tax holiday will be passed on to consumers. Some will likely be kept by refiners.

New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, a professional economist, didn't like it at all:

John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no.

Why doesn't cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It's Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

Across the political and economic spectrum, it is unanimous -- the McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday is lousy economics.  

Larry King just asked Barack Obama-booster Michael Moore what Moore would do if he were president.

One of Moore’s proposals: “Free HBO for every American.”

Let’s see, last night Larry King interviewed Bush hater Joy Behar (”I just don’t want another Republican in office anymore. Have you watched the ‘John Adams’ series?  Isn’t it brilliant? When you see what John Adams was like and George Bush, it’s almost like Darwinism in reverse?”).

The night before, Larry King interviewed Jimmy Carter (”[Jeremiah Wright] preaches the type of sermon that I think appeals to many people”).

Boy, Democrats must be proud to see their best and brightest in front of the nation every night.  Makes you wonder who they’ll put forward at their summer convention … Sean Penn?  Barbra Streisand?

That’s not a serious party.  That’s a lounge act.

I am not one of those conspiracy freaks. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. I believe that United States astronauts actually walked on the moon. I believe that it was al Qaeda, not the CIA, that attacked the World Trade Center in 2001. However, there is something about this Reverend Wright thing that gives me bad vibes.

Can it be just a coincidence that the videos of Reverend Wright’s preaching surfaced when Senator Clinton’s campaign was at rock bottom? And, what about those photos of the reverend with Bill Clinton in the White House? Isn’t it possible that the videos were actually released by the Clinton campaign? Can it be that Reverend Wright is a secret agent in the Clinton campaign and staged his preaching trip to make sure that his views would remain as a cloud over the Obama campaign? In the last debate, wasn’t Senator Clinton particularly gleeful when she repeatedly found Senator Obama guilty by association? Is it just a coincidence…

Maven, cut it out. You sound like one of those conspiracy crazy.

Thank you, precious reader, for stopping my ranting. Bill and Hillary Clinton couldn’t be that devious. Could they?

you’ll enjoy this.

[I love this. This is yet another good example of why Obama will be so much better as president.] McCain and Clinton, who apparently are coordinating their policies now, have proposed that the 18.4 cent federal gas tax be lifted for the summer to help people get through the summer. Only one problem. (Well, actually many.) It seems that many economists have come out against the "plan" because

I am currently reading a book I originally got as an assignment in graduate school and now re-reading it for leisure rather than for study.  Scalawags:  Southern Dissenters In The Civil War And Reconstruction by James Alex Baggett is a great look at southern unionism during the Civil War.  Part of it is predictable, that most dissenters came from poorer regions of the south, usually following the spine of the Appalachian Mountains.  But what is interesting about this book is that its not a classical political narrative, but rather a broader study of Scalawags, their roots, and what they were doing on a local level.   I usually don't like bottom-up history, but in this case its done fairly effectively.  In fact, Baggatt's study is almost mathematical in its precision and study of what percent of post-war scalawags served in the Confederacy or in exile.  I can't really do it justice, but what is clear is that each state was different and Southern dissenters weren't all the same.  Factions, based on geography and ideology, emerge.  Secondly, Scalawags aren't the villains southern revisionist of the Dunning School would have you believe.  Many were true Unionists, dating back to 1860 and support for either John Bell or Stephen Douglas.  These men where rich and poor, driven by both economic and political motives.  Something people forget is that for many Southerners, there was a difference between slavery and equal rights.  While many despised slavery, they did so because of the power it gave to the planter class, it often had nothing to do with the slaves themselves.  But this book is a very surgical look, state by state, of where these folks came from, how they acted, and why they ultimately failed.  Its not too long, so it moves swiftly and its easy to follow.  Scalawags have been slimed through much of history and in the historiography of Reconstruction, but this book gives us a look into a much more diverse and fractured South that went into the Civil War and emerged from it.  I recommend it without hesitation.

Over at the Read Write Web, Josh Catone notes Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook

A study that will appear in tomorrow's New Scientist magazine found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services were better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information, according to the Telegraph. Dr. Leysia Palen, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, led a research team that studied uses of social media during last fall's wildfires in California and last spring's shootings at Virginia Tech for the report.

I'm currently at a Knowledge Management Conference, and this fits neatly with some of what I've been learning and thinking here. You can follow my learning and thinking this week as I live blog over at Coast Guard Performance Excellence.

Not long ago, I came across a recipe for meatballs that Bob Dylan had included on his Theme Time Radio Hour. At a loose end for something to cook for tonight's diner, I grabbed Bob's
ingredients and threw them together.

They were delicious. Best meatballs I've ever eaten.

The Perfect Meatball

3 minced cloves garlic
¼ cup vegetable oil (for frying)
1 pound ground meat (equal parts beef, pork, veal [I used only beef--ground pork is icky])
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
9 Saltine crackers, finely crushed
½ teaspoon salt
black pepper
oregano
dried basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
¼ cup water
1 egg
1 teaspoon tomato paste

Heat the oil over a low heat in a large Dutch oven. In a big bowl, add the meat, garlic, cheese, crackers, and spices. Mix lightly with your fingers. Don’t be shy—get into it. In a small bowl, whisk the water, the egg, and the tomato paste. Add the egg mixture to the meat mixture. Mix it lightly with your fingers. Form it into drum shapes, or balls. Cook in batches, over medium high heat, until it's browned on both sides. That will be about five minutes total. Serve 'em up with some potatoes, or some spaghetti, or just make a sandwich out of them. You're gonna love 'em.

Only thing missing: Gravy. Threw a tablespoon of flour into the pan, hotted it up, after the balls were cooked and staying hot in a 300-degree oven. One cup of beef broth, stir constantly until it's reduced by half and thickened. One cup of cream goes in, cook till it's just on the edge of boiling. Serve separately, with mashed potatoes. A nice vinaigrette salad, mebbe some bread...

GREAT balls. Bob Dylan makes DELICIOUS balls.

Best thing is, as you're cooking, you are not only free, but encouraged, to spend the whole time talking like Bob Dylan. "Well, you jis' th'ow in 'em cracker crumbs an' spices, en you jis' getcher fingers innat ground meat an' mix it awl up, don' be afraid, getcher fingers awl greezy..."

And when you're done, be sure to send any leftovers to tax-de-duc-tible char-i-ty or-gani-za-tionnnnnnnnns!

Aw, *&%$!!  Hillary Clinton coulda had a V-8!

OK, corporate media, how about you talk about this non-stop for the next few weeks?  Hello?  We're waiting...

What do you think?
	Becky should be suspended until her criminal trial?
	Becky has lost the public trust and should be removed regardless of results of her criminal trial?
	I think that Becky is being picked on and is clean as her husband’s "campaign pledge".
pollcode.com free polls

Guest Post by Happy LCRC Member:

Last  night’s LCRC meeting was amazing and a breath of fresh air.  Chairman  Glen Caroline ran a tight and exciting meeting that was highlighted by special  guest Del. Howell, Speaker of the House of Delegates. The cooperation Speaker  Howell talked about between state Republican leaders and the LCRC – and the  desire to work together – speaks well to our goals in November and  beyond.
 
The Chairman also announced his slate of officers and  committee chairs and they are a diverse group of veterans from past years and  new blood (see full list at http://www.loudoungop.com/index-3.html).  One of the coolest things Glen did was pass around a sign up  sheet to man the polls for November’s election already!  It’s this kind  of planning and proactive approach that is going to help rebuild the  party.
 
Finally, the  absolute most important thing that happened last night was the flood – and I  mean flood – of new LCRC memberships.  The party came out of the mass  meeting with something like 143 members and approximately 34 or so NEW members  joined last night – increasing the roles by 24%! Further Glen told the group  that he has joined a challenge sponsored by Bolling and McDonnell, that calls  for the LCRC to double its membership by September.  
 
Its  been said on this blog recently – but I want to repeat it: if you are a  Loudoun County Republican and haven’t joined the committee, now is the time;  if you are a past member and had some hesitations, please come back!  Go  to the new website and sign up  or volunteer.  It is a new day and a very exciting start to the new  LCRC.
Looks like things are looking up!

With the Virginia Rightosphere mightily pleased about the total endorsement of the Republican Party of Virginia of the McDonnell-Bolling(-Cuccinelli) ticket, D.J. McGuire sigh mournfully... because he's seen this before:

See, over the last few years, I have seen annual attempts to “unite the Republican Party in Virginia.” They have all been followed by the same things: issue-less campaigns, lost leads, surprising (to some) defeats, recriminations, and grudges that go so deep into the next election cycle that the same people try to “bring the party together” and start the cycle all over again.

The first and most obvious of these fiascos came in 2005, when Jerry Kilgore led the state GOP ticket. The party had just been through a vicious policy battle over taxes - one which became a political battle as several tax-hiking GOP Delegates faces primary challenges. Kilgore had a choice: accept the division as a reality and pick sides, or make broad and bland “unity” statements that papered over the serious differences.

Kilgore chose the latter, and ended up with a lower percentage of the vote than any GOP nominee for Governor had earned in twenty years.

No question, the Kilgore campaign the RNC's mishandling of the Kilgore campaign was atrocious. RNC staffers swooping in, taking over and pushing out traditional volunteers and unit organizations... much of which instigates the catcalls about RPV to this day (hint: RPV isn't RNC, but I've groussed about this in the past).

Of course, 2009 is much different than 2005... no looming billion-dollar tax hike (passed under Republican eyes), Virginia Senate Republicans brought back to the realm of common sense, no future prospects for President in 2008.

Then there's one major difference we all seem to neglect: Bob McDonnell is no Jerry Kilgore. As the McDonnell campaign begins to swing into gear, we'll see some major initiatives that will be red meat for both fiscal and social conservatives.

Even "classical liberals" such as Mr. McGuire will be impressed. Time will tell the tale.

New one on the roll. This one is flat out awesome. Any woman with balls enough to call herself a shitweasel is a-okay in my book.