Godiva or Rapunzel? You be the judge:
The Biden administration seems to be flying in people from Latin America: there’s an app for that
What do we make of this?:
Efforts by open-border Democrats to blame the growing big-city migrant crisis on Texas and its program of busing illegal immigrants north are being upstaged by a new investigation showing that President Joe Biden has secretly flown hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Latin American airports to 43 U.S. cities.
The unusual program, kept from the public, involved at least 320,000 illegal immigrants the administration admits are “inadmissible” immigrants, far more than previously reported.
Despite facing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the Center for Immigration Studies, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has refused to identify the 43 airports it is dumping immigrants at after direct flights from Latin America. …
New in its investigation is the administration’s claims it is keeping the cities secret because it is concerned “bad actors” might “undermine law enforcement efforts to ‘secure the United States border’ if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry,” the center said, citing an email it received.
The program at issue is Biden’s scheme of letting illegal immigrants use an app to gain access to the U.S. without having to travel through Mexico.
“The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” said Todd Bensman, the report’s author.
This isn’t even new information, although I only recently heard of it. But here’s an article from last September about what appears to be the same thing:
Illegal migrants aren’t just overwhelming the border — President Biden is flying them secretly to airports around the country.
More than 200,000 people from four countries have landed over the past year, according to data obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request.
In January, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security began implementing the cornerstone of its current strategy: a series of new “lawful pathways” measures designed to decrease the historically high crowds at the southern border before they become a political problem.
DHS cajoles tens of thousands of intending illegal border-crossers per month to instead go on the CBP One smartphone application, and make an appointment with US officials at land ports of entry instead of crossing illegally. …
But one of the least noticed, mysterious and potentially most controversial of the new rechanneling programs that use the CBP One app allows migrants to take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to their American cities of choice, flying right over the border — and even over Mexico.
For this measure, Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Colombians request “advance travel authorizations” through the same CBP One mobile app and take commercial flights (“at their own expense”) directly into US airports, where US Customs officers parole them into the nation, sight unseen, and in numbers publicly unknown.
It appears to me that the motive is to make it seem as though fewer people are coming here, because all eyes are on the border and this bypasses the border (or rather, overflies it). None of the articles I’ve read indicates whether the legal basis for all of this is asylum claims, but I’m assuming it is. I hope Trump hammers away at this during the campaign, especially the secrecy angle.
Michelle Obama says no to running in 2024
“As former First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,” Crystal Carson, the director of communications for Obama’s office, said in a statement provided to ITK on Tuesday.
Obama supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, her office said.
Note the “several times” bit. Michelle has been consistent in that regard; see this, for example, from a year ago:
“I’ve never expressed any interest in politics. Ever,” admits Michelle. “I mean, I agreed to support my husband. He wanted to do it, and he was great at it. But at no point have I ever said, ‘I think I want to run.’ Ever. So, I’m just wondering: Does what I want have anything to do with anything? Does who I choose to be have anything to do with it?”
She continues: “Politics is hard. And the people who get into it — it’s just like marriage, it’s just like kids — you’ve got to want it. It’s got to be in your soul, because it is so important. It is not in my soul. Service is in my soul. Helping people is in my soul. Working with kids? I will spend my lifetime trying to make kids feel seen and find their light. That I will do. I don’t have to hold office to do that. In fact, I think I’m actually more effective outside of politics, because sadly, politics has become so divided.”
However, statements like that over the years have never stopped the speculation – and the hope among Democrats, and the anxiety among Republicans. Those feelings of hope and fear come from a perception that Michelle Obama would win in 2024. I have no idea whether that perception is correct, but I realize that it may be. However, I’ve been consistent in saying I believe her when she says she will not run.
Ah, but she might be drafted, say a lot of people. I just don’t see it. I don’t for a moment believe that she’s not interested in politics itself in the sense of her being very much in favor of leftist outcomes and willing to help leftist campaigners. But for whatever motives, she doesn’t want to be the one in charge. What’s more, the Obamas have reason to support Biden: they have a lot of influence in his administration, and a 2024 win will only increase that influence as his cognitive abilities sink further.
Nikki Haley quits
Haley has suspended her campaign.
It was merely a question of “when” rather than “if.” Also, I’m sure she would unsuspend it if somehow the anti-Trump lawfare – or anything else – were to put Trump out of commission. But for now, it’s just Trump, the last Republican standing.
Some reflections here from Byron York:
[Haley’s loss] tells us, as if we needed another reminder, that the GOP cannot return to the days of leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. …
Each Republican candidate running in 2024 had to reckon with Trump’s complicated legacy — and then with Trump himself. Some tried to be super Trumpy. Some tried to be anti-Trumps. Some tried to be old school. None succeeded.
All had to recognize one fact: For the GOP, there was no going back. …
But there are still those Republicans who are nostalgic for a more orderly GOP. And many of them looked to Haley as their final hope, at least for now, of making that happen. Haley spoke passionately about the “chaos” that surrounds Trump — and indeed, he is a man facing 91 felony counts and all the trouble that entails. She promised a return to a calmer and more disciplined Republican Party. Her problem was that there were not nearly enough Republicans who want that, too. Some love Trump, others don’t love him but like his results, and others think that for all his flaws he is what the GOP needs to fight a Democratic Party dominated by progressive activists. Some would even like to move on from Trump but don’t believe there is another Republican on the scene with the strength and talent to lead the party in a new direction. In any event, Haley has lost, and those supporters who want to change today’s Republican Party will have to wait for new circumstances to bring new leaders.
I agree with York that there’s no going back. But I think most of Haley’s support was not from never-Trumper Republicans at all, it was from right-leaning Independents and moderate Democrats. Also, in the list of things that draw Republicans to Trump, he left out a very important point, which is that a great many Republicans recognize that although the attacks on Trump are tailored to him, the left will attack any Republican who runs. Not necessarily during the primaries; then the left will shore up their preferred candidate. But once a nomination is secure, the left and the MSM invariably takes the proverbial gloves off and the GOP nominee is fair game, no matter how moderate. Look what they did to Romney.
The question is whether such attacks will stick, and to how many voters. Trump made that task easy with many voters, because he really is a difficult personality who rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But Trump is also a charismatic personality to a lot of people, and he has a track record as president that compares very favorably indeed with Biden’s. That’s what accounts for his popularity – that and the correct perception that the left has persecuted him in ways that really do threaten our republic.
[ADDENDUM: Senator Sinema of Arizona isn’t running for re-election. Does this help or hurt Lake, the Republican in the race? Perhaps it helps her, because her Democrat opponent is further to the left than Sinema was. But I don’t know; Lake’s track record isn’t good, and she is “Trumpy” enough (without his history of accomplishment) that she puts off a lot of people.]
Open thread 3/6/24
It’s a newt:
It’s Super Tuesday …
… although it doesn’t feel very suspenseful.
Nonetheless, here’s a thread to discuss the results, and here’s a list of all the states involved.
A very touching video
Here’s how one of the littlest ex-hostages is doing:
Let there be light: the Webb
According to the Big Bang theory, in the beginning of the universe there was darkness. The Webb telescope is shedding some light on how light came to be:
According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.
“This discovery unveils the crucial role played by ultra-faint galaxies in the early Universe’s evolution,” says astrophysicist Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.
“They produce ionizing photons that transform neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the Universe’s history.”
More at the link.
The EIGER Project, led by Simon Lilly (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), just published a series of three papers in The Astrophysical Journal, in which they used the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) alongside ground-based observations from the Very Large Telescope, Magellan, and Keck Telescopes to observe one of the brightest, most distant quasars known, SDSS J0100+2802.
This quasar’s gas-guzzling supermassive black hole generates a brilliant beacon of light that illuminates the gas all along the line of sight between us and it. Astronomers can thus use the quasar to probe the state of gas around intervening galaxies — especially faraway galaxies that might be associated with reionization.
“We had the perfect complementarity of the world’s best ground-based telescopes, giving us the quasar spectrum,” Lilly says, “and the beautiful Webb, which was able to get spectroscopic data on a large number of galaxies at this very interesting epoch.”
I don’t pretend to actually understand this and how it was done. But I get a glimmer …
Laurence Tribe on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision
Laurence Tribe is a law professor at Harvard specializing in the US Constitution. But leftism and partisan Trump-hatred so blinds Tribe that he sounds incredibly stupid here.
Maybe he really is incredibly stupid, but I doubt it – at least, not in the intellectual sense. But this is what he says:
So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court, saying there is ample evidence here in a trial which was fully fair and applied constitutionally appropriate standards, ample evidence to disqualify this oath breaking insurrectionist.”
He added, “In other words, they could’ve gone in either of two directions and there’s only one possible region reason for going in the direction they did. That was that they were doing a favor to oath breaking insurrectionists, in particular, one Donald J. Trump. That is not the way a court should behave. Yes, in a 100 years from now, that is still going to be a lesson in how court should not decide cases. It will be a lesson in how a court by a 5-to-4 decision can fundamentally destroy the Constitution’s deliberate protection against office holding by oath breaking insurrectionists.”
This was not a 5-4 decision, and it is purposely misleading to say it was. The judgment was 9-0. Four justices concurred with the other five, writing two separate concurring opinions as to their reasons.
But there is also a fundamental problem with other parts of Tribe’s assertion, such as this: “So all of the Supreme Court needed to do to avoid allowing any one state to impose a rule on the nation or to impose what it thought would be chaos to 50 different states going 50 different ways was to remember something that this court normally emphasizes, it is the Supreme Court of the United States. All they have had to do was affirm the decision of the Colorado court …”
How does giving a single state court the power to do that have the result of preventing other states from doing it, or preventing some states from banning Trump and others from banning Biden? As far as I can see, what he writes there is nonsensical. And that’s even before you consider other issues such as who does have the power to declare a person an insurrectionist and what criteria should be used. What did the 14th Amendment intend?
And yet, as I said, I don’t think Tribe is stupid. I think he is blinded by his hatred of Trump, so blinded that he convinces himself of nonsensical things. He is not alone, either. He lives in a bubble in which there is plenty of ideological agreement with him and he is lauded for his views.
Tribe has had a lot of practice, too:
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'”
“Queers for Palestine”
The existence of a group called “Queers for Palestine” is one of the more ironic and absurd emblems of our time:
A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International’s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.
Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing”—a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.
This article is from a month ago:
LGBTQ+ Palestinians in danger due to their sexual orientation can request asylum in Israel, the Tel Aviv District Court for Administrative Affairs ruled on Sunday, according to KAN news.
Judge Michal Agmon-Gonen approved the appeal of a Palestinian from the West Bank who had been rejected by the Population Authority due to his being Palestinian. The Population Authority’s position is that all Palestinians are not subject to the UN’s Refugee Convention, and, therefore, Israel is not obligated to provide asylum to any Palestinians.
The Palestinian who filed the appeal has been living in Israel since 2015 and claims that his life is at risk in the Palestinian territories due to his sexual identity. In the appeal, the Palestinian described how he was pushed into coming out to his parents after he refused to marry the woman they had chosen for him and how his father responded by attacking him and calling for additional relatives to assault him as well.
After realizing his life was in danger, the Palestinian ran from his home and got into Israel. After hiding in Israel for a while, the Palestinian contacted the Civil Authority through an organization that helps LGBTQ+ Arabs to request a residency permit. The request was refused at first but after further proceedings, he received a temporary permit.
It is identity politics that dictates to gay people on the left that it is necessary and desirable to support groups designated as “brown” and “oppressed” over any other groups. The facts (that Israelis and Palestinians are both mostly Caucasian groups, and that there are more black Israelis than black Palestinians as well) don’t matter and actual oppression (of gay people or Christians or anyone else) doesn’t matter either. Identity politics are not just destructive, they are often based on lies.
Open thread 3/5/24
Important video from Ayaan Hirsi Ali on jihadis in Britain and other European countries
I know it’s long. But once again, you don’t need to watch the whole thing to get the gist of it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali knows whereof she speaks; she’s looked at the problem from both sides now: