Is the corporate wing of the GOP leading the party to disaster ?

SF killing

There are a number of national stories recently that seem to resonate with voters. A big one is the killing of a San Francisco woman by an illegal alien with seven felony arrests who was deported five times.

The fatal shooting of a woman in San Francisco last week, allegedly by an illegal immigrant man convicted of seven felonies and previously deported to Mexico, has sparked a debate about the extent to which local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities should cooperate.

At issue is the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of seeking to identify potentially deportable individuals in jails or prisons nationwide by issuing a “detainer,” a request rather than an order to extend the individual’s detention.

San Francisco is a “Sanctuary City” which has pledged to resist efforts by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to deport illegal aliens.

On March 26, Mr. Sanchez was booked into the San Francisco County Jail on a local drug-related warrant after serving a federal prison term, the city’s sheriff’s office said. The next day, Mr. Sanchez appeared in San Francisco Superior Court and the drug charges were dismissed.

After San Francisco officials confirmed that Mr. Sanchez’s federal prison term had been completed and that he had no active warrants, he was released from jail on April 15. He was freed despite a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, to the city’s sheriff’s department that would have enabled the federal agency to take him into custody.

This is routine, plus of course, the fact that the Obama Administration has chosen to facilitate illegal immigration and resist deportation.

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Private Enterprise, Public Space

Some time since (Oh, heck was it in 2005, ten years ago? So it was.) I mused on the concept of public space, both in the general sense of a large city and the smaller sense, of a neighborhood … that is, the place that we live in, have our gardens and our households, where we have neighbors who know us, where we jog, walk our dogs, take an interest from the mild to the pain-in-the-neck over-interested and judgmental. If our homes are our castles, then the neighborhood is our demesne.
And unless we are complete hermits, home-owners will take an interest in the demesne. I state that without fear of contradiction, and it does not matter if that demesne is in a strictly-gated upper-middle or upper-class community with real-live 24-hour security, a private and luxurious clubhouse with attached pool and attractively-landscaped park or a simple ungated, strictly crisscrossed-streets and cul-de-sacs development of modestly-priced starter houses without any HOA-managed extras like golf courses, swimming pools, fitness centers, jogging paths indeed, anything beyond a little landscaping around the sign denoting the entrance to the development. This is where our homes are, and at the lower end of the economic scale of things, likely to have consumed a major portion of disposable income on the part of the householder. A good portion of our material treasure, in other words, is committed to those foundation, walls, roof and yard.

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Obamacare = Medicaid

emergency

I have been interested in health care reform for some time and have proposed a plan for reform. It is now too late for such a reform as Obamacare has engaged the political apparatus and sides have been taken. The Obamacare rollout was worse than anticipated and it was hoped that the Supreme Court would have mercy on the country, but that didn’t happen and it has been the law for two years.

What has it accomplished ? Well, the forecast drop in ER visits hasn’t happened. It also didn’t happen in Massachusetts when that plan took effect.

Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve the problem of people going to the ER for routine medical problems? We were told that if everyone had “healthcare” — either through the ACA exchanges or through Medicaid expansion — people would be able to go to their family doctors for routine care and emergency rooms would no longer be overrun by individuals who aren’t actually experiencing emergencies.

As it turns out, Medicaid patients can’t get appointments with physicians.

“America has severe primary care physician shortages, and many physicians will not accept Medicaid patients because Medicaid pays so inadequately,” said Michael Gerardi, MD, FAAP, FACEP, president of the ACEP.

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Truly Horrifying

Do not fail to read these links describing the use of the police in Wisconsin against individuals who dared offer opposition to the Democratic Party–Big Labor machine:

Glenn Reynolds at USA Today:  Wisconsin’s dirty prosecutors pull a Putin

David French at National Review:    Wisconsin’s Shame:  I thought it was a home invasion

Also David French at NR:  The deep state knows how to protect itself

If these reports are true, or anything like true–and I see little reason to doubt it given the conduct of the Democratic Party and its agents and allies over the past decade–then the threat to individual rights and the rule of law in America is even more serious than I thought it was.

Immigration Policy

The airspace over coastal South Florida is buzzing with police/ICE/USCG helicopters. A buddy of mine pointed out a Coast Guard cutter in the Atlantic off Miami and a highway-patrol Cessna flying along the beach. Apparently the federal govt fears a new wave of Cuban migrants due to rumors that we will soon cancel our “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policy, making it more difficult for Cubans to enter the country legally. Thus the feds are mobilizing all resources to keep Cubans out. Here, at last, is a restrictive immigration policy that the Obama administration can support.

My advice to prospective Cuban migrants is to try to get to Mexico first. And learn Arabic if possible.