Just POlitics

Border drama

The Mexican border and immigration policy brought to the forefront the problem of millions of illegal immigrants who cross into the United States. Mexican President Vicente Fox has threatened to sue in international and American courts to prevent Arizona volunteers that make up the Minuteman Project that is organized to stop the flow of illegal immigrants.

Counter charges were brought against Mexico by George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary and a fellow at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. Grayson authored a study that shows that Mexico’s mistreatment of Central America immigrants into Mexico blatantly violates those immigrants’ civil rights.

In another study shown in the State Department's Human Rights Practices report, released last month, abuses are cited at all levels of the Mexican government, and it charges that Mexican police and immigration officials not only violate the rights of illegal immigrants, but traffic in illegal aliens.

President Bush in meetings with President Fox referred to the Arizona volunteers as vigilantes and told Fox that he would continue to work on passing immigration reform. Bush, however, said that he could not promise that Congress would pass it.

"I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America. I'm for enforcing the law in a rational way," President Bush said.

U.N. reform: not

Days after the United Nations offered a sweeping reform package that would take Libya and Sudan out of seats on the Human Rights Committee, it once again showed how ill-managed that institution is.

Iraq was stunned by the news that the U.N. would pay $300,000 in legal fees to the person who helped Saddam Hussein rip off the Food-for-Oil program and commit wholesale atrocities and crimes against humanity against Iraq citizens.

"I am shocked and dismayed that the U.N. Secretariat has agreed to pay Benon Sevan's legal fees from assets belonging to the Iraqi people," said Iraqi Ambassador Samir Sumaida'ie.

U.N. officials said they had promised to pay for Sevan's lawyers in October 2004, well before he was found by the U.N.-sanctioned Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) to have steered contracts and personally benefited from his job.

The U.N. also tried to justify the payment because Sevan was continuing in his official capacity and was cooperating with the I. I. C.

Social Security Report

The Social Security Report announced yesterday stated that Social Security would fail to be able to pay 100 percent of benefits a year earlier, 2041, than previously reported. However, the Washington Post decided that it was an opportune time to report on how much worse off Medicare is than Social Security. Many liberals who do not want anything done about Social Security have tried to divert the debate to Medicare. It is true that future projections point to the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are far worse problems than Social Security.

However, if we can’t fix Social Security how are we ever going to fix the larger problems? Here is an excerpt from the Post article:

In the past five years, the date when Social Security would begin taking in less in taxes than it pays in benefits has actually slipped, from 2015 to 2017, the public trustees wrote, while the date of Social Security trust fund exhaustion has been pushed back from 2037 to 2041. Looking 75 years into the future, Social Security's cost, measured against the size of the economy, has also improved, from 6.8 percent of the gross domestic product projected in 2000 to 6.4 percent projected in yesterday's report.

In contrast, Medicare's financial outlook has deteriorated on all fronts. The year Saving and Palmer joined the board, Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund was projected to begin paying more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2010. Instead, it reached that point last year. The point of trust fund exhaustion has moved up from 2025 to 2020.

Judiciary’s supremacy

The NY Times writes about the judiciary’s supremacy over the other two branches of government. In the article the Times seems oblivious to the beginnings of a revolution dedicated to overthrowing this supremacy in the vein of Thomas Jefferson’s view of the Constitution. One has to wonder if some of the judges who have made decisions in Florida will be impeached:

The United States Congress and the governor of Florida have devoted extraordinary and all but single-minded energy to keeping Terri Schiavo alive. But all they have achieved so far is a bitter lesson in judicial supremacy.

It is a lesson as old as Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case in which Chief Justice John Marshall famously said that "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," and as fresh as Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that decided a presidential election.