Feast of St. Paul of the Cross.*
The Greenhouse Effect.
Liberals don’t want to pass an immigration law: they want to exploit the situation in Arizona so as to rev up their base for 2010 and beyond. Under the demagogic leadership of The Great One, the Harvard lawyer whose papers are held in security from readers to see, all they need is to let Him do an angry standup read …and send Looie the Weasel (Rep. Luis Gutierrez) and Al the Sharp One (Al Sharpton) out to fire up the base for 2010. But of course liberal journalists are weighing in with excited responses. Yet there was one systemic failure from a prime liberal yesterday.
Thus for sheer incompetence, I give you the famed Greenhouse Effect, the analysis of dire consequences by the lefty who covered the Supreme Court for 30 years for The Times. Writing angrily in The Times on the Arizona law yesterday, she pontificated that Arizona fascists have passed a law curtailing “a new crime”—
“…a new crime of BREATHING WHILE UNDOCUMENTED”!
But guess what? Although she is…ahem…Senior Research Scholar in Law, Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at…where else?...Yale Law School, she made a rookie journalist mistake by getting hold of and commenting on an outdated copy of the law! Gulling a paper to print a welter of inaccuracies based on the outdated law would get a cub reporter bounced. If there were any justice equally meted out, it should nullify anything Greenhouse writes from now on. But of course it won’t.
Here’s the story of her journalistic hit-and-run.
When you go to the bill’s webpage you see “bill versions.” There are three different versions…(a) as introduced, (b) Senate engrossed and (c) House engrossed. The House engrossed version was the one actually signed by the governor. Which means that the fire-breathing Linda had her paper fulminating in error.The Times meekly came across with an apology and correction late yesterday.
The following didn’t make the error. They just blew their tops anyhow to excite the base. These include…
Barack Obama (“misguided and threatens to undermind basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans”)…
…E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post (“shameful!”)…
… the tag-along lip synch and newly coined lefty David Brooks of The New York Times (“Terrible&hellipan invitation to abuse”) and
… the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker (“hearkens back to apartheid”).
Actually, the bill is well-crafted and definitely needed for many reasons.
These include the current tsunami of illegals and drug pushers streaming past the Arizona border and the failure to enforce its borders by a timid Obama administration as well as the failure of the Homeland Security department and Dem congress…some Republicans included…to act because of paralytic fear they will alienate the Hispanic vote—including building a
fence that would take care of most of the problem.
But let’s be clear: no one…utterly no one…goofed with more pathetic intensity than the woman who has been over-educated and hyper-praised far more than her meager intelligence warrants—Linda Greenhouse.
If officers stop a person for some legitimate reason and suspect that he or she might be in the U. S. illegally, they are required to check with federal authorities on his/her immigration status. What’s so terrible about that?
The heart of the law is this: “For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or law enforcement agency&hellip where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made when practicable to deteremine the immigration status of the person&hellip.” Hellip means group.
Liberals have zeroed in on “reasonable suspicion” saying the law would give cops the power to pick anyone out of a crowd at random and force them to prove they are in the U. S. legally which might force wholesale deportations of Hispanics. But they don’t understand the phrase “lawful contact.” How would it work? Kris Kobach, a law professor from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who guided its language told The Washington Examiner:
“The most likely contact where this law would come into play is a traffic stop. Arizona already has a state law on human smuggling. An officer stops a group of people in a car that is speeding. The car is overloaded. Nobody has identification. The driver acts evasively. They are on a known smuggling corridor. Under the new law, the officer would get in touch with the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check on their status.”
But what if the driver has shown the cop his driver’s license? The law says that if someone produces a valid Arizona driver’s license or other state-issued identification he/she are presumed to be here legally. There is no reasonable suspicion.
Now I ask you: What’s so unreasonable or fascistic or Nazi-like about that? Only to liberal Democrats who want to excite their base…or to Linda Greenhouse who doesn’t have the latest copy of the law.
You really have to hand it to Capitol Fax. Loyal-loyal-loyal yellowdog Democrat-Lefties to the end. Here you have Alexi Giannoulias with a raft of scandals including his own ineptitude as state treasurer in handling Bright Star…but he will usually have a defender…sometimes grudging to be sure…in this most prestigious of the state’s…ahem…objective daily news bulletins—one, I admit, which is virtually indispensable—on state politics and governance.
But even CF pointed out yesterday that old Soulful Eyes Quinn, all a-twitter about Bill Brady’s not distributing copies of his tax form to all the reporters (necessitating that the poor dears had to copy stuff by hand—ugh!), forgot that he did the same thing when he released his.
Still, on the big issues…pro-tax hike…tell us where to cut the budget `cause it’s all muscle, no fat, no bull…CF can be counted upon as a loyal Dem partrner. Fighting against those who want Alexi out, CF insists the treasurer will stick-stick-stick to the end (I personally hope so because I want to elect Brady). Then it turns favorably to Kristin McQueary the always liberal-predictable pundit working for…where else?...the Southtown Star, in the Sun-Pravda firmament.
“Are voters ready for him?” she wrote the other day. As if to tell us they are not.
Just check the polls, m’dear McQueary.
Now…am I GOP predictable? What—you don’t remember all the times I beat up on Big Jimbo? Jim Edgar? Mark Kirk? And…in the recent past…Brady?
Still, he’s inestimably better than Quinn who can’t even govern when he has a full-legislature of his party: the height of ineptitude.
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*: St. Paul of the Cross [1694-1775]. St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge is our weekday parish, named after the founder of the Barefooted Clerks of the Holy Cross and Passion—the official name of the Passionist Order. He was born Paul Francis Danei, at Oveda, near Genoa, Italy the eldest son of an impoverished businessman of noble lineage. Born up devoutly, he refused the prospect of a lucrative marriage. After serving a year as a volunteer in the Venetian army fighting the Turks he spent several years in prayer and contemplation before he decided to form a new congregation which received papal approval.
With his brother John Baptist, who was ordained with Paul at Saint Peter’s by Benedict XIII, he started a movement that led to 140 monasteries and a few convents. Both brothers worked together from their very first congregation at Monte Argentaro which was designed to focus on the passion of Christ which was to be communicated to Catholics through mission work in the parishes. So outstanding was their work in conversions and with the seriously ill and dying, that the Order found itself in great demand throughout Italy. Paul had a great goal—to reconvert England: never recognized but which carried him through many years of ill-health. He died at the age of 80 and his canonization was effected in 1829.
St. Paul of the Cross church in Park Ridge began as an offshoot of Immaculate Conception parish in the Norwood Park section of Chicago which is Passionist. As a kid I well remember one of the most colorful pastors in the archdiocese, Msgr. Francis Mary Smith who led the parish for 34 years and was a model of voluntary poverty. I remember him for three major reasons. First, he had the worst toupee a man could ever find which every so often would slide down over his forehead where it remained until it would cruise down his nose whereupon he would push it upward. Second, on a very-very hot morning in July in the mid-`40s I found myself sitting directly behind him on a Chicago Surface Lines bus.
He was reading his breviary which was so tattered and weak in its binding that he struggled to keep its pages together with his right thumb. Buses then had no air conditioning and the lady directly ahead of him, pulled open a sliding window to get some air…precisely at the time when Msgr. Smith had raised his thumb to his lips to wet it so he could turn a page. About half the contents of the breviary flew around the bus and all the way down to Milwaukee and Foster occupants were picking up the pages and giving them to the Monsignor who worked diligently putting them in numerical order. When I departed the bus he was still working diligently. Someone whispered to me, “don’t you think he can afford a new prayer book?” Answer: Yes. But the Monsignor was as tight as a tick.
Third, when he came on as the pastor St. Paul of the Cross was a little ramshackle shed of a church seating 340 built in the `20s. He kept it that way and for decades people stood up in the back and in triple echelon to hear Mass. Eventually Samuel Cardinal Stritch called him in and said, “You have enough parishioners in Park Ridge who are fairly wealthy. Why have you been so reluctant to build a new church?” Msgr. Smith alluded to his own reputation of being tight as a tick but then said: “Well, Eminence, if you look around, whenever a pastor builds a new church, shortly afterward he dies.”
Cardinal Stritch was not particularly moved by this and said: “Francis, if that’s what’s been holding you back, understand this: We all must die. Now I urge you in collegial terms to get on and about the job of building your congregation a new church.” This Msgr. Smith did—the cornerstone laid by Cardinal Stritch in 1953.
And sure enough a few years later, Msgr. Smith died. I believe that as he lay upon his death bed in Park Ridge he firmly believed that if he had stuck to that little frame church he’d be with us even today.
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