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Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Friday, September 13, 2013
Corinth, Miss.
GOP will be forced to shift to center on immigration While illegal immigration is an issue that has always generated more heat than light in Mississippi, the issue has been a clear winner for Republicans. Even before the GOP began to evolve along the current Sid Salter intra-party fault lines of mainColumnist stream Chamber of Commerce types and the hardline Tea Party conservatives, Mississippi Republicans were always safe talking about the need to tighten border security and the abiding threat of immigrants “stealing” jobs from willing citizen workers. Even former Gov. Haley Barbour — whose views on immigration were downright moderate after Hurricane Katrina and throughout his second term — paid lip service to gettough immigration policies in his initial 2003 gubernatorial bid. But this year, Barbour has been at the core of a growing Republican shift to the center on immigration. Barbour is helping lead a bipartisan group including former governors and cabinet secretaries who have recommended that immigration reform include a path to citizenship that begins with granting immediate provisional status before concomitant enforcement and border security improvements are made. “I believe if there is a rigorous path to citizenship that does have rigorous requirements, I’m comfortable with it,” Barbour told reporters. There are reasons that Republicans are making that centrist shift and altruism really isn’t part of the equation. Smart political strategists are watching the nation’s demographics and working the nation’s future electoral mathematics. A recent bit of data from the Census Bureau makes the case for that new math. One in five married households now has at least one spouse who was born outside the U.S., according to the bureau. Three states and the District of Columbia have 12 percent or more households where one spouse is Americanborn and the other is not. The Census Bureau found 21 percent of married households in the U.S. in 2011 had at least one foreign-born spouse. For national politics, the handwriting is on the wall that hardline immigration policies will increasingly alienate growing numbers of swing voters who can decide control of the White House and strongly impact congressional districts drawn to include significant immigrant populations. Census data indicated that Hawaii had the highest percentage of such households, at 16 percent. Mississippi, South Dakota and West Virginia had the lowest percentages, each at 2 percent. Estimates of Mississippi’s immigrant population vary, but the Pew Hispanic Center estimated Mississippi’s illegal immigrant population at 45,000 people or about 1.6 percent of the state’s total population. So while Mississippi will likely continue to be fertile ground for tough illegal immigration rhetoric, that rhetoric won’t have much impact on state politics outside GOP primaries. But in national politics, the large immigrant populations in states like California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York, Arizona and New Jersey will be able to strongly influence elections. Tough immigration talk in Mississippi may well continue to be a winner in state politics, but Republicans will find the lack of immigration reform that contains a path to citizenship a tough sell in the next presidential election — and the Census numbers suggestion that degree of difficulty will be one that grows. (Daily Corinthian and syndicated Sid Salter can be contacted at 601-507-8004 or sidsalter@sidsalter.com.)
Prayer for today Father, we pray we are faithful in doing our part. Just like water, soil and air produce good vegetation, so also the Bible, prayer, and worship produce godliness in the believer. Amen.
A verse to share “Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;” — Jeremiah 16:14
Worth quoting Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time. — Lyndon B. Johnson
Syria and Obama: ‘Roosting chickens’ Chickens are coming home to roost for Barack Obama, both at home and overseas. When he first entered the White house, to worldwide acclaim, and backed by huge majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, he could do whatever he wanted -- and could do no wrong, in the eyes of the mainstream media. People believed whatever he said, whether about how he would cut the federal deficit in half during his first term or how people could keep their current insurance and their current doctor under ObamaCare, which would also insure millions more people and yet somehow lower the costs at the same time. If he could have done these things, it is hard to know what he could have done for an encore. Walking on water would have been an anticlimax. Of course he did none of these things. The Obama administration added more to the national debt in his first term than President Bush had in both his terms put together. As for ObamaCare, health care costs have already gone up, and many people’s hours of work have already gone down, as employers seek to escape the huge costs of ObamaCare by hiring part-time workers,
who are exempt. As for foreign policy, President Obama began by betraying Thomas a pre-existing Sowell A m e r i c a n commitment Columnist to allies in Eastern Europe, to supply them with an anti-missile defense system. These nations had risked the wrath of Russia by allying themselves with the United States, but Obama blithely talked about pressing the “reset button,” as he flew off to Moscow to try to cut a deal with the Russians behind their back. His boorish behavior toward one of our oldest and most important allies (Britain) and his insulting behavior toward the Prime Minister of our staunchest ally in the Middle East (Israel) were more of the same. Meanwhile, Obama fawned over the rulers of other nations, bowing deeply before the king of Saudi Arabia and the emperor of Japan, in a gesture of subservience that no other president had ever stooped to. But the adoring media never asked the most obvious question: “What kind of man is this, who feels a need to lower his own country?”
President Obama was caught by a microphone that he did not know was on, telling Russian President Medvedev to assure “Vladimir” that he could be more “flexible” with him after he was past the 2012 elections, and was no longer constrained by the American voters. Far from getting Putin’s respect, he deservedly earned his contempt. When Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry, went to Moscow for the first time in that official capacity, Putin kept him waiting for hours before bothering to see him. At home, when Republicans in Congress tried to suggest some changes in the ObamaCare legislation, back when it was being rushed through Congress too fast for the Congressmen to read it, Obama’s response was to remind the Republicans that he had won the election. Now these and other chickens are coming home to roost. President Obama needed Republican votes in Congress to get a majority that would put Congress on record as backing his planned military actions against Syria. And he by no means was certain to get all the Democrats’ votes. Obama also wants international political cover for his planned military action
against Syria. But our old ally, Britain, failed to give us even political backing, much less troops. British Prime Minister David Cameron lost the vote on that issue in Parliament -- the first time a British Prime Minister has lost such a vote in Parliament since the 18th century. Some other nations have given us verbal support -and only verbal support. When it comes to actual military action, some of the Europeans will fight to the last American. Finally, Barack Obama tried to drum up support from the American people whom he has lied to and deceived, time and time again. Tuesday night, was he able to rekindle the old magic again with his rhetoric? Or have those chickens come home to roost as well? Was President Obama able to convince people of the urgency of what he wants to do, when he has already delayed so long the Assad regime has had ample time to hide the chemical weapons and otherwise prepare to minimize whatever Obama does? (Daily Corinthian columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell. com.)
A no safer police state is legacy of 9/11 The 9/11 attacks comprise one of those events that you remember where you heard of it and how, like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was for old-timers and JFK’s assassination was for middle-timers. I had recently retired (for the first time) and was sitting at an outdoor café in Bethesda, Md. A stranger came up and said: “A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.” I immediately thought of that time decades before when a plane had plowed into an upper floor of the Empire State Building in a fog. This had to be some version of that. “What a terrible thing,” I said. I have a gift for understatement. As the morning wore on the bad news mounted. Another plane hit the Trade Center. Thousands dead. The Pentagon itself hit. There were reports of a fourth hijacked plane, possibly on its way to Washington, that crashed in Pennsylvania. At the end of the day, al-
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
publisher rterry@dailycorinthian.com
editor editor@dailycorinthian.com
Willie Walker
Roger Delgado
circulation manager circdirector@dailycorinthian.com
press foreman
Donald Kaul Other Words
though we didn’t realize it at the time, we had become a different nation — one less confident and more fearful than the one we’d been on Sept. 10,
2001. It was, as much as we hate to admit it, one of the greatest, most effective sneak attacks in the history of modern warfare. A handful of Islamic extremists armed with box cutters — box cutters! — in one swift strike had reduced to rubble the reigning symbol of American capitalism, set ablaze the headquarters of our military establishment, and come oh so close to putting a flying bomb into our nation’s political heart. Our days as a fat, dumb, complacent democracy were over. Within months we’d gone to war in retaliation for the attack, even though the ghostly nature of our attackers made a coherent war im-
possible. That was followed by another war, that one absolutely incomprehensible to many of us. In the meantime we subjected ourselves to an ever-increasing level of surveillance redolent of East Germany and a surrender of privacy more Orwellian than Jeffersonian. We became aware that modern warfare now includes the torture of prisoners and that the murder of civilians was part of its “collateral damage.” And while there were protests, we as a nation accepted all of it. Which is where we sit right now, 12 years on, no safer than we were but more of a police state. I had been very much against the presidency of George W. Bush. He was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was happy when, at long last, the public picked Barack Obama to replace him. Obama, alas, has been a disappointment. Rather than reverse the bellicose foreign policies of BushCheney, he has adopted a course I call “Bush Lite.” He’s a master of the half-
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measure. He repudiates wars but lets them go on because they are difficult to unwind. He tries to help friendly forces in the Middle East but not too much because, after all, who knows how friendly they really are? Most of all, he refuses to make his case. Take his health care plan, for example. You have heard 100 times more from the Republicans about what a bad idea it is than you have from Obama about its virtues. Most of what the Republicans are saying about it is nonsense but he doesn’t take the trouble to point that out. So now he finds himself out on a limb, virtually alone, trying to sell his plan to punish Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas — except I don’t know what the plan is. So far as I know, no one does. He’s reduced to reaching for a rescuing hand from that loathsome slug, Vladimir Putin. Such is the legacy of 9/11. (OtherWords and Daily Corinthian columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. OtherWords.org)
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