Moe Lane

A. I’ve read Arizona’s immigration bill:

REPRESENTATIVE TED POE, (R-TEXAS): …Have you read the Arizona law?

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: I have not had a chance to, I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.

POE: It’s ten pages. It’s a lot shorter than the healthcare bill which was 2,000 pages long. I’ll give you my copy of it if you would like to have a copy. Even though you haven’t read the law, do you have an opinion as to whether it’s Constitutional?

HOLDER: I have not really, I have not been briefed yet.

And AG Holder is being paid to do that, too.  He’s not being paid to opine on it as a top administration official without thoroughly researching it first.

[pause]

Or is he?

Via Newsbusters; see also The Corner, Hot Air, Moonbattery, Instapundit, and just about everybody else at this point.

Moe Lane

PS: Rep. Ted Poe just wasn’t having any of that, was he?

As you’ve no doubt read by now, several people have been arrested, likely in connection with the Faisal Shahzad case. There’s something about this case that I don’t particularly want to highlight – in the sense that I don’t want it to be an issue – but that I sort of have to:

One of the men arrested near Boston on Thursday has been charged with overstaying his visa, and the other, identified as Pir Khan, was already the subject of proceedings to remove him from the country, according to one source.

The third man was arrested in Maine, also allegedly for overstaying his visa, a source said.

Folks, that right there is an example of why the Arizona legislature decided to explicitly implement federal immigration law on the state level; it’s not being enforced on the federal one.  Do as many boycotts, protests, and/or primal screams as you like, but immigration control is a national-security issue.  Yes, I’m being a big meanie by bringing up what appears to be an illegal-immigrant shadow economy that’s independent of the one that Mexican illegals use; the point is that these networks exist, and even if these three guys were merely part of a system to avoid showing up on the radar they were still apparently used by a terrorist to launder money.  Sort of like how drug smugglers are doing the same thing, yes?

Sorry, but that’s what’s happening.

Moe Lane

Like a large section of the right-blogosphere, I like Jake Tapper while being slightly resentful that I have to.  It’s nothing against the man; Jake’s a good guy who will do things like this.

TAPPER:  You’ve said we’re a nation of cowards because we don’t talk
freely and openly about race.  So in that spirit, let me give it a
shot.  Do you think the Arizona immigration law is racist?

HOLDER:  Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea…

[snip*]

TAPPER:  Do you think it’s racist?

HOLDER:  I don’t think it’s racist in its motivation…

What’s annoying is that he’s so bloody rare for doing this. (more…)

Radical Left-anarchist stripe, of course.

A large group of protesters demonstrating at a May Day rally for worker’s and immigrant rights downtown broke off into a riot vandalizing about a dozen businesses around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, police said.

Many in the group were carrying makeshift torches as they marched, breaking storefront windows and writing “anarchist graffiti” on buildings, according to Capt. Steve Clark. Many businesses sustained multiple broken windows including very large storefront windows at Urban Outfitters and The Rittenhouse building. Police believe at least 15 businesses suffered damage.

Via Ed Driscoll.  Blackshirts probably do more than any other faction of the Progressive Left to embarrass and marginalize the Progressive Left, bless their hearts: put enough of them in a crowd and you are absolutely guaranteed rioting, property damage, and – when the odds are at least six-to-one in their favor – maybe even a little assault and battery.  They are one major reason why the antiwar movement went precisely nowhere in the last decade, and if they’re metastasizing in ‘illegal immigrants’ rights’ groups, well, that’s good news for the people opposing those groups…

Because of the Democrats’ decision to make immigration a priority.

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) decision to walk away from Senate talks on climate change and energy legislation – at least for now – has prompted the measure’s remaining architects to scuttle Monday’s planned unveiling of the bill.

[snip]

Graham is upset over Democratic plans to take up immigration legislation this year – he accuses Democratic leaders of pushing forward immigration “haphazardly” and calls it an election-year political gambit.

Of course, it’s an open question about how broken up Senate Democrats really are to not have to take up that particular piece of pandering to religious fanaticism just quite yet. It will be also interesting to see how this will affect the immigration bill debate: considering that even John McCain is sounding like he’s had a Road to Damascus (or road to the Arizona primary) moment, it is going to be very weird if Graham ends up supporting the immigration bill. (more…)

[Insert "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" trope here.]

Via Tim Blair, American border enforcement is apparently now a pub game:

The United States has unveiled an unlikely weapon in its battle against drugs gangs and illegal immigrants at the Texas-Mexico border – pub-goers in Australia.

The drinkers are the most far-flung of a sizeable army of hi-tech foot soldiers recruited to assist the border protection effort.

Anyone with an internet connection can now help to patrol the 1,254-mile frontier through a network of webcams set up to allow the public to monitor suspicious activity. Once logged in, the volunteers spend hours studying the landscape and are encouraged to email authorities when they see anyone on foot, in vehicles or aboard boats heading towards US territory from Mexico.

(more…)

(H/T: Technomancy for Fun and Profit)

Quick background: last year, USMC Sgt. Michael Ferschke was killed in Iraq while conducting door-to-door searches. He left behind his Okinawan-born, pregnant wife Hotaru Ferschke, who he had married a month before by proxy; and, of course, there were problems with her visa. Wizbang wrote about it here and here; Senator Lamar Alexander‘s (R-TN) office has been working on getting this fixed from the start, of course (I understand that some other (Tennessee?) lawmakers also assisted, but I couldn’t find details); between them and the USMC, they’ve made arrangements for Mrs. Ferschke to enter the country on a temporary visa, now that her son is born (more here).
(more…)