:Reasonable Force

From an email to supporters (from an Op-ed in USA TODAY):

By Jim DeMint

We do not need the Senate immigration bill to secure the border.

Congress has already passed laws authorizing border security, but the Homeland Security Department has failed to fully implement them. The administration already has the authority to build hundreds of miles of border fencing, hire and train 6,000 border patrol agents (bringing the total number of agents to 18,000), end catch and release and create a national employment verification database. Essentially, all of the security benchmarks in the current Senate bill are already law.

Unfortunately, proponents of this bill would have us believe that none of these security measures can be implemented unless we pass a bill that grants amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. In short, security is being held hostage in return for amnesty.

What’s worse is that backers of this bill are hoping Americans have a short memory.

In 1986, the government was trying to figure out how to deal with a porous southern border and roughly 3million illegal aliens who resided in America as a result.

It was decided that granting amnesty was acceptable as long as the border was made secure and immigration laws on the books were enforced.

Looking back, we see that amnesty was granted, but the border was never secured.

Now here we are, more than two decades later, with a new generation of Washington politicians pushing a similar proposal but expecting different results. Only this time, the illegal population has skyrocketed and unsecured borders pose a far graver national security threat in an age of terrorism.

This is a completely backward approach. Common sense demands that we put first things first. That means shelving amnesty proposals and making national security our first priority. Before we address the problem of the illegal population, we need to prove to the American people that we will keep our word.

Those who support this bill tell us we must pass it because the status quo is unacceptable. True. Millions of illegal aliens and a dysfunctional immigration system have created huge problems for our nation. But the most pervasive problem now is the 20-plus years of broken promises to secure the border and enforce our immigration laws. Americans agree this status quo must be rejected, and we must enforce our laws.

It is time for our government to do right by America. It’s past time to right the wrong of 1986. Only then will we have the credibility to address the problem of the current illegal population.

As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice …

Help keep conservative leadership in the US Senate. Click here to donate to Senator Jim DeMint’s campaign.

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FrontPage magazine.com :: The Other D-Day by Victor Davis Hanson

What can we learn, then, on this anniversary of the Normandy campaign?

By any historical measure, our forefathers committed as many strategic and tactical blunders as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq — but lost tens of thousands more Americans as a result of such errors. We worry about emboldening Iran by going into Iraq; the Normandy generation fretted about empowering a colossal Soviet Union.

Of course, World War II was an all-out fight for our very existence in a way many believe the war against terror that began on September 11, 2001, is not. Even more would doubt al Qaeda jihadists in Iraq pose the same threat to civilization as the Wehrmacht did in Europe.

Nevertheless, the Normandy campaign reminds us that war is by nature horrific, fraught with foolish error — and only won by the side that commits the least number of mistakes. Our grandfathers knew that. So they pressed on as best they could, convinced they needn’t be perfect, only good enough, to win.

The American lesson of D-Day and its aftermath was how to overcome occasional abject stupidity while never giving up in the face of an utterly savage enemy. We need to remember that now more than ever.

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Forty years after the Six Day War that resulted in Israeli control of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, Honest Reporting provides an informative look at the events that precipitated what some erroneously view as a Jewish incursion against Palestinian land.

For starters, the land in question was controlled by Egypt and Jordan, neither of which were being called on at the time to relinquish the territory for a Palestinian state, even by the Palestinians themselves.

Second, Israel conducted its famous lightning strike on Egypt’s air force in response to a clear build-up for war on the part of its neighbors who were unequivocally dedicated to her destruction.

On May 18, the UN caved in to Egyptian demands that the UN Emergency Force withdraw from the Sinai peninsula. Days later, on May 23, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which cut off Israel’s only southern port in Eilat from international shipping. Closing off the international waterway was an act of war.

On June 3, 100,000 Egyptians were massed in the Sinai, and another 110,000 ready for deployment. By the time Israel launched its first strikes against the Egyptian air force on June 5, some 200 Egyptian tanks were massed opposite Eilat and 60,000 Jordanian soldiers under Egyptian command were deployed along Israel’s eastern borders. Although the war is named after Israel’s lightning success, Egypt’s casus belli took place in May. [Source: Six Day War quiz]

Frankly, faced with Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weaponry, it gives me some comfort knowing that Israel is there. Unlike the United States, which could be prevented from taking appropriate action by its appeasement wing, the Jewish state simply cannot afford to allow such capability in the hands of her unhinged enemies. Hopefully, we will not make her go it alone.

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I’m pretty excited about this breakthrough by researcher Marin Soljacic at MIT. He and his team have devised a method to transmit power wirelessly that should enable homes of the near future to forgo the usual sockets and cables that have become so essential to powering the myriad of devices we depend on everyday.

From an MIT press release:

Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers, and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate. A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. The team members are Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Prof. Peter Fisher, and Prof. John Joannopoulos (Francis Wright Davis Chair and Director of ISN), led by Prof. Marin Soljačić. Realizing their recent theoretical prediction, they were able to light a 60W light-bulb from a power source seven feet (more than 2 meters) away; there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The MIT team refers to their concept as “WiTricity” (as in Wireless Electricity). The work will be reported in the June 7 issue of Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

Think about it… wireless power! Awesome.

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