How Obama Spent His Summer Vacation

How Obama Spent His Summer Vacation
Day Two: Grant Illegal Immigration Waivers
By John Ransom
8/22/2011

Prepare for the rhetoric to heat up in the debate over border security, the Constitution and the use of executive power to selectively prosecute individuals who the administration deems undesirable.

If you’re a coal company or a community bank, you’re screwed. If you’re a community organizer here illegally from Kenya or Juarez?

Hurra! for you.

“Reacting to intense pressure from the Latino community and aware that President Obama will need their votes in 2012,” writes Albor Ruiz in the NY Daily News, “the White House announced with great fanfare last Thursday a plan to stop the deportation of some undocumented immigrants.”

With the announcement Obama spent his second day on vacation casting around for the Hispanic support that he ignored for the first three years of his reign.

In a development that’s drawing well-deserved outrage from conservatives and lukewarm plaudits from progressive activists, the administration announced a new policy of selectively enforcing illegal immigration laws.

In short they’ve granted illegal immigration waivers to their friends, just as I predicted in my May 12th column Crass and Cynical on Illegal Immigration.

“Today’s policy announcement clearly demonstrates the Obama administration’s defiance of both the constitutional separation of powers and the will of the American public in its relentless effort to gain amnesty for illegal aliens,” said Federation for American Immigration Reform President Dan Stein according to Boston.com

In trouble with everyone else because of the deficit, the debt, the economy, inflation, unions and the general plague of locusts that he’s brought down on the country, Obama’s trying to shore up support with progressives who have been on the verge of abandoning him recently.

Indeed one of his wise-guys from Chicago, Rep Luis Gutierrez has been critical of Obama in the past months, hinting that perhaps Hispanic progressives will look at not turning out for the president precisely because Obama’s done nothing on illegal immigration. Gutierrez recently noted that on illegal immigration “[Obama] has the power to make things better right now without the Congress having to pass any new laws.”

Obama took the hint.

So Obama’s now going to do for illegal immigrants what he did for gays, unions, Chicago and all of his other cronies: He’s going to ignore enforcing the laws he doesn’t like. He’s granted a blanket waiver for every illegal immigrant, like he did for his favorites under healthcare “reform,” the Defense of Marriage Act, the new, improved union-run NLRB, the EPA and the rest of the red and screw tape crowd he’s using to hold the gun on us.

This is exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the climate of regulatory uncertainty hurting the confidence of the country.

As citizens we don’t even know that if a law gets passed to make something either legal or illegal that it will have any effect whatever. All we are left with is a parody of John Kerry’s famous “I was for the war before I was against the war”- we all obey the laws, while we break them.

That’s even presuming the numbnuts at the White House or that nut house we call Congress are proposing bills that honestly attempt to solve problems like the debt crisis, illegal immigration, bank reform, healthcare costs.

Which of course they aren’t.

The easiest way to create a tyranny in the United States is to create laws that are so vague that the government can decide to selectively enforce them. By doing so you create a permanent underclass of citizens who is wholly dependent on the government as to whether they are treated as criminals or voters.

And the effects go beyond government. Selective enforcement becomes attractive to anyone who would like to stifle dissent.

Conservatives have a long-standing complaint that Facebook regularly buries or otherwise deletes posts that don’t jive with the progressive agenda. On Sunday ZDNet reported that Facebook removed a posting from the account of Arizona governor Jan Brewer that was critical of Obama’s new “backdoor” amnesty policy.

“Facebook said it was sorry for deleting the post; the company issued a statement saying that ‘the post was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience,’” writes Emil Protalinski on ZDNet. “The social network said it mistakenly removed the post, but did not provide further details, such as whether the removal resulted from complaints by other Facebook users.”

Of course they didn’t.

With the kind of regulatory heft the president has, and is willing to use, you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side either.
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How Obama Spent His Summer Vacation
Day One: Kill Power Plants, Kill Jobs
By John Ransom
8/20/2011

Prepare for your electric rates to go up, Chevy Jolt drivers.

Under new interpretations of old rules, the EPA will shortly be forcing the shutdown of about 20 percent of coal-generated electric capacity in the United States. Since coal generates about half the electricity demanded in the US, the country will have to find other, more expensive ways of making up about ten percent of electric capacity at a time that the administration wants electric to be the clean fuel of choice.

Maybe Obama doesn’t understand that he can’t import electricity from Brazil.

In addition to the loss of generating capacity, the Commerce Department estimates that the new rules could kill up to 60,000 jobs, says Heritage, while an industry trade group says that the rules will cost $129 billion, according to the Washington Post.

During the 2008 presidential campaign then-Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden both claimed that if elected they would institute policies that make it cost prohibitive for coal-fired plants to operate in the United States.

Looks like this is one promise they’ll keep.

“So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can,” Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in a clip the paper likely tried to suppress, “it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

While the Obama campaign scrambled at the time to say that their comments were taken out of context, Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association issued a statement that rings true today.

“Senator Obama,” said Carey in November 2008, “has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short- sighted, inexperienced politician willing to say anything to get a vote. But today, the nation's coal industry and those who support it have a better understanding of his true mission, to 'bankrupt' our industry, put tens of thousands out of work and cause unprecedented increases in electricity prices.”

The administration is using new interpretations of long-ago passed emission standards- standards that no administration has tried to enforce- along with vague, esoteric “visibility” standards to target older, coal-fired plants. Critics say that the EPA fails to make a case that the plants present a danger to public health or visibility, as the EPA seemed to admit when they issued a stay against adoption of the rules earlier this year.

“The stringency and cost of the new regulations provoked an outpouring of protest and some 5,800 comments” writes Heritage, “citing technical and statutory errors. Some 21 governors and more than 100 Members of Congress also raised objections. Ultimately, EPA officials were forced to acknowledge their failure to ‘calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality.’”

But as Obama tries to shore up his base of support amid blistering criticism from progressive groups, look for Obama to continue to use backdoor regulatory means to enforce, ignore or otherwise interpret laws to benefit special interests that support the president’s agenda.

Earlier this year Obama scrapped Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, instructed the Justice Department to ignore enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act and just this week announced that the administration would be suspending deportation of illegal aliens in an effort to avoid enforcement of immigration laws.

Obama has been subject to criticism from Hispanic leaders, who are still stuck on the Democrat plantation, after the administration bragged that they deported more illegal immigrants than the Bush administration.

In addition, the president has issued more job-killing regulations than any of his predecessors- at least 75 of them through mid-year 2011, at a cost of $38 billion just for adoption. Total economic costs of federal regulations are sky-rocketing to $1.75 trillion says the federal government’s own Small Business Administration.

In short, the coal group got it right in November 2008.

President Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a short- sighted, inexperienced politician willing to do anything, saying anything and pay anything to get a vote.

Even while on vacation, day one.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.