Now that US District Judge Susan R. Bolton has emasculated the Arizona immigration law (best critical analysis of her ruling we’ve read so far is here), there’s some solace to be found in the determination of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County to do all he can to make Arizona as hot a perch as possible for “undocumented aliens”.

From Newsmax:

Arpaio, whose county includes most of the Phoenix metropolitan area, promotes himself as “America’s toughest sheriff.” He has limited county inmates to two meals a day, banned “sexually explicit material” in prison, reinstituted chain gangs, and set up a “tent city” as an extension of the Maricopa County Jail.

On Wednesday a judge blocked the most controversial sections of Arizona’s new law and put them on hold. The law will still take effect on Thursday, but without some of the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws.

Nevertheless there are reports that opponents of the new law plan to block Arpaio’s jail on Thursday in an act of civil disobedience.

“There’s a rumor that they’re going to block our jails down the street,” Arpaio says in an exclusive Newsmax interview.

“You know what? They’re not going to block our jails. They’re going into the jail if they block our jail. I’m not going to succumb to these demonstrators keeping law enforcement from booking people in our jail. So we may have to take some action.”

Arpaio also vows to conduct a “crime suppression operation” on Thursday.

“This morning we raided another business and arrested five more illegal aliens with false identification. On Thursday we’re going to do our 17th crime suppression operation and go out with our volunteer posse and deputy sheriffs and catch criminals. We’ve done 16. Just by chance about two-thirds [of those arrested] happen to be here illegally.

“People say, why are you doing it on the day that the law may be put in effect? Well, should I wait? We’ve been enforcing the other state immigration laws and we’re still the only ones doing it. We’re going to continue doing our job.”

Arpaio was asked about concerns that the federal government will refuse to cooperate with a handoff of illegal aliens to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency after they are apprehended in Arizona.

“There’s been some rumbles that maybe ICE will not take the illegal aliens off the hands of law enforcement,” he responds.

“So we may have a little problem, but not that big, because most of the time we arrest illegal aliens we have them on another charge and we book them into our jail.

“After people do their time and we have them deported, if [ICE doesn’t] accept many of those people who are going to be deported, the only alternative is that they may be released on the street.

“So let’s see what the federal government does. I know they’re not happy with this new law. They’re not happy with me, because I had 100 deputies trained by Homeland Security, trained to work on the streets and function as federal officers, but they took that away when the new administration took office.”

There have been media reports that with the law taking effect, many Hispanics are moving out of Phoenix this weekend — as evidenced by a recent increase in yard sales to dispose of items before they move. Arpaio calls that “hype” and said “they have garage sales every week. Go into any Hispanic neighborhood and they’re having garage sales.

“But a lot of them are moving out. I’d like to take a little credit for that, because they’re accusing me of breaking up families, they’re accusing me because people don’t want to go to church, they don’t want to go to school because they worry about the sheriff coming in and arresting people that are here illegally.

“Consequently many people have moved out. Of course they don’t all go to Mexico. They go to the sanctuary state called California and other states where they don’t care about illegal immigration. But many of them are moving out, moving back to their home country. That’s great. Now let [them] get the proper paperwork and come into this country legally.”

Newsmax also reports (here) that Sheriff Arpaio’s office is responsible for about 25% of all deportations of illegal immigrants from the US since 2006.

Joe Arpaio: hero and star of a real-life Western epic.

 … of Islam? Well, that’s the reference but …  Obama has five pillars on which to rebuild the US economy. 

In yet another ‘major speech’ – he likes to make them as often as possible among flags and cameras, becoming ever more like all the other dear leaders of the peoples who have centrally-planned economies –  he declared yesterday (in small but central part): 

We must build our house upon a rock.  We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

It’s a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century:  new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations.  That is the new foundation we must build.  That must be our future – and my Administration’s policies are designed to achieve that future. 

So the First Pillar is a continuing interference in, and tighter control of the economy by the federal government 

The Second Pillar is reinforced leftist indoctrination in the schools under stricter federal government authority 

The Third Pillar is the provision of insecure and very expensive energy, its uses ever more regulated by the government so that lives become poorer and harder

The Fourth Pillar is the establishment of nationalized healthcare, being a huge extension of the welfare state and the augmentation of  governmental power of decision over the life and death of every individual  

The Fifth Pillar is a fantasy, a pretense, a fairy story that future federal budgets will get smaller and the monstrous deficits  will be ‘halved’ in a blink of the dear leader’s eye.  

Here’s a first-hand account of the goings-on in that devilish covern, the deceptively named UN Human Rights Council (read more here):    

The Inquisition is back, and this time it has set up shop at the United Nations. Consider the resolution “Combating the Defamation of Religions” passed by a comfortable margin last week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva (and passed by the General Assembly every year since 2005).

The resolution decries a “campaign of defamation of religions,” intensifying since 2001, in which “the media” and “extremist organizations” are “perpetuating stereotypes about certain religions” (read: Islam) and “sacred persons” (read: Muhammad). It urges UN member states to provide redress “within their respective legal and constitutional systems.” Capitalizing on cartoon riots and Western anxieties over the excesses of the war on terror, the language conflates peaceful criticism of Islam with anti-Muslim bigotry and seeks to stifle speech in the name of “respect for religions and beliefs.”

In my capacity as UN representative for the secularist think tank Center for Inquiry, I spent a surreal two weeks at the Council participating in the negotiations over the language of this resolution, sponsored by a 57-member intergovernmental body called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC.

After one of these sessions, I found my way into a private conversation with the chair of the negotiations, a delegate for the government of Pakistan. We were soon joined by the representatives of the US, Canada, and the European Union. There we were, “the West,” standing at the front of an empty conference room, gingerly trying to reason with this feisty, yet solicitous, Pakistani diplomat.

The American delegate noted that, “History shows that criminalizing speech doesn’t work,” when the chair interrupted her to propose a case he hoped would hit home. Suppose someone were to say that the Virgin Mary was not a virgin but a promiscuous woman? What could be the purpose of this statement, he asked, except mockery?

Canada pointed out that ‘defamation’ has a specific legal meaning—involving the spread of falsehoods that harm some individual—which is not applicable to cases of religiously offensive speech. For starters, religious personages like Mary and Muhammad are not alive, so they’re not, legally speaking, persons who can be harmed. Undeterred by the Canadian’s reductio ad absurdum, the Pakistani delegate responded that this is precisely why we need the authorities to protect them against insult: they are not around to defend themselves.

Never mind how one would demonstrate, in a court of law, the falsity of a scurrilous rumor about a far-distant and long-gone (and quite possibly never-there) religious figure. Ironically, all the world’s heretics could never do more damage to the reputations of gods, saints, and prophets than has already been done by their devoted followers. The odd thing about God is that no matter how much He is slandered, his livelihood never seems to suffer as a result. One of the perks of being a necessary being, I guess, is that you never lose your job no matter how unpopular you become. In that respect God may be the ultimate bureaucrat. I didn’t bring this up.

It would all be absurdist comedy if it didn’t have such grave consequences. Defamation of religions resolutions are far worse than useless; they are a direct threat to human rights. While they will have no impact on blasphemy in western democracies (which already censor themselves far too often), they serve to legitimize the suppression of peaceful political and religious dissent elsewhere—first and foremost in the Islamic states themselves.

 

 Thomas Lifson reveals in The American Thinker:

Another piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama has been revealed, greatly strengthening the picture of a man groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the land.

The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within. The party only lasted until 1998, when its strategy of "fusion" failed to withstand a Supreme Court ruling. But dissolving the party didn’t stop the membership, including Barack Obama, from continuing to move the Democrats leftward with spectacular success. 

Good news is rare these days.

Read some here.