Jay Reding.com

Debra Saunders has a piece on why worries of an immigration backlash are unfounded. Getting tough on illegal immigration is not a political loser for the GOP – quite the opposite in fact. It won’t cause Hispanic voters to abandon Republicans either, as Saunder explains:

The Los Angeles Times duly reported, “Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state.”

Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.

That’s your backlash.

Don’t blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

The GOP has a major chance to make inroads with the growing population of middle-class Hispanics in America today – they’re socially conservative and quite serious on national defense. As many second-generation Hispanic immigrants further assimilate into American society, their voting behavior tends to become more in line with their social views. If anything, an increase in immigration helps the Democrats rather than the Republicans.

The fact that Hillary Clinton has actually tried to outflank Bush on the right on the immigration issue suggests how the political winds are shifting. Amnesty for illegals is not a particularly popular option, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal notwithstanding. The assumption that there are jobs that “Americans just won’t do” doesn’t seem to hold - chances are that Americans don’t do them because wages have been depressed or they’re jobs that could be accomplished through automation. Bringing in immigrants from Mexico to perform those jobs doesn’t strike me as an economically beneficial arrangement – cheap imported labor tends to lower industrial innovation (see the prebellum South for instance), and it also encourages Mexico to continue its dysfunctional politics since they have a nice release valve for their discontented citizens.

Legal immigrants end up bearing the brunt of the suspicion engendered by illegal immigrants streaming across the border. It’s one thing to make it easier for honest workers to come across the border on a contract basis – sealing the borders to everyone else. But to provide a legal form of support to cross-border human trafficking and the coyotes who are often involved in narcotics trafficking as well as smuggling human cargos is simply bad policy.

If Bush were smart, he’d put a guest-worker program right alongside tough border protection - but Karl Rove is making the political calculation that Hispanics are going to be crucial for electoral success in the US in future elections (true) and that cracking down on immigration harms the GOP’s chances at picking up the Hispanic vote (totally false). This calculation is neither sound policy nor good politics, and if Bush is going to get serious about reforming immigration, he can’t do so unless he’s willing to see beyond the myth of immigration backlash.

Israel has always had a somewhat byzantine political system, and with the results of today’s elections now being released it looks like it’s only going to get stranger. Ariel Sharon’s Kadima Party, which supports disengagement, has won a narrow plurality of seats in the 120-member Israeli Knesset. Kadima is expected to get about 30 seats, which is down from the 40 they were predicted to achieve when Ariel Sharon was still the leader of the party. The left-wing Labour Party, led by union leader Amram Mitzna is expected to get 20-22 seats. The formerly-ruling Likud Party of Binyamin Netanyahu has plummeted to 11-12 seats after the Kadima split.

As always, it’s the minor parties that really throw a wrench into things. The socialist Gil Party, or the Pensioner’s Party, did quite well, with an estimated 6 seats. Gil is like what would happen if the AARP decided to found their own party. The right-wing Y’israel Beitenu Party also picked up considerable support - possibly beating Likud with 13 votes. Y’israeli Beiteinu is a party that has a strong constituency with ethnic Russian Jews and advocates making many Israeli Arabs Palestinian citizens rather than recognizing them as Israelis. Led by Avigdor Lieberman, Y’israel Beiteinu picked up considerable support from Orthodox Jews and other right-wing parts of the Israeli electorate.

It’s likely that Kadima will reach out to Labour, which will help push through the disengagement issue, but will probably lead to gridlock on economic matters. Olmert and Kadima will have a very difficult time forming a stable government, as Kadima and Labour have some rather serious disagreements - and as Hamas takes control of the Palestinian Authority, it’s going to be harder for them to argue for continuing the policies of unilaterial disengagement from Palestinian areas.

The incapacitation of Arial Sharon has put Israeli politics in a state of flux as for the first time in Israel’s history, a party other than Labour or Likud has become the top party in Israeli politics. However, without the powerful force of Ariel Sharon, Kadima may not last long. Ehud Olmert must not only form a coalition, but keep it together, and that will be a very difficult task. Meanwhile, the threat of Hamas and other terrorist group remains. The next few days and weeks will be very interesting for determining the future direction of the State of Israel.

UPDATE: Binyamin Netanyahu is saying he’ll remain Likud’s leader, despite their third-place finish. Natan Sharansky would seem to be a better choice to me – much of Likud’s fall came from right-wing Russian Jews defecting to Y’israel Beiteinu. Sharansky’s background as a Russian dissident under Communism may help Likud pick up some of those votes.

Turnout was significantly lower than 2003, and many Kadima voters stayed home or voted for other parties, assuming that Kadima’s win was guaranteed. It would be interesting to see how the low turnout may have hurt Kadima and helped more radical parties like Y’israel Beiteinu.

Former Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger has passed away at the age of 88.

Charles Krauthammer goes after Francis Fukuyama for fabricating quotes in his new book. Fukuyama’s always been interesting, but consistently wrong. “The End of History” wasn’t - and now Fukuyama appears to be undermining his own prior thesis by arguing that maybe liberal democracy doesn’t work everywhere afterall. There’s something calculated about his rather sudden change of heart.

Krauthammer also notes something else of interest:

I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the enterprise: “The undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail.”

For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as “a virtually unqualified success” is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its ensured success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the root causes of Sept. 11: “The cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world — oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.”

Fukuyama’s book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of Sept. 11 — new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of “soft power” — is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his sympathetic reviewer, concludes that “neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.”

And that is precisely the problem. We face an enemy that has the avowed goal of obtaining nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and using them against us. Just one largescale attack with a WMD could have a profound effect on the US economy and our way of life. If New York City were rendered uninhabitable for decades by a nuclear blast, how would the US economy react? The world economy? Not only would tens of thousands be dead, but millions would feel the aftereffects.

The arguments that we can use “soft power” to deal with this threat are simply unrealistic and horrendously naïve. That is precisely the strategy we’re already pursuing with Iran, and it is quite clear that it simply is not working. The Iranians will likely have a working nuclear weapon within a year, and so far all diplomatic entreaties have achieved absolutely nothing. You can’t sweet-talk Osama bin Laden, and trying to use “soft power” to deal with the threat of Islamist terrorism is not only futile, but fatally so.

The reason I have supported the toppling of the Hussein regime and continue to do so is because the single greatest threat we face is a terrrorist group getting their hands on WMDs. We found nothing in Iraq, but the invasion of Iraq led directly to Qaddafi’s ending of his nuclear program and subsequent to that we were able to dismantle the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network - one of the biggest wins in the Global War on Terrorism to date. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s resources are not unlimited. Every resource they put into Iraq is a resource they can’t use elsewhere, and if a bunch of deluded Islamic radicals want to blow themselves up in Baghdad that’s better for us than if they decide to do so in London or New York. (Although the Iraqis are the ones who get caught in the crossfire, one of the reasons why we have the moral obligation to ensure they can defend themselves.)

But chief among all the rationales for the war in Iraq is the fact that it’s the only viable strategy for winning the larger war. The true root cause of terrorism is neither poverty nor the real and imagined sins of the US and Israel – the true root cause of terror is a disconnect between the ruled and the rulers in the Arab world. The autocracy of the Arab world ensures that the state is dominant everywhere - except in the mosque or madrassah. The only place where one can escape is through Islam. Even a tyrant like Hussein dared not challenge the supremacy of Islam. Is it any wonder that under those conditions that the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood that proclaims “Islam is the solution” would start sounding like the truth?

The only way to win this war over the long run is to introduce democratic concepts into the Middle East. They won’t take quickly, and this is an endeavor that will take generations, but already the idea of democratization is on the table in the Middle East in a way that it has never been before. We can’t expect Iraq to look like Iowa in the next 10 years, but we can and should expect it to start the transition from autocracy to democracy over the years.

The alternatives to that course of action involve either engaging in total war against all terrorist-sponsoring states, which is untenable, or sitting around and treating terrorism like a law enforcement problem, which is equally untenable. The threat of terrorism requires us to take a larger, more expansive view, and for all the Bush Administration’s many glaring flaws, they get that in a way that very few others do.

Fukuyama’s proposed alternatives don’t match the reality of the threat we face, and over the long term the invasion of Iraq may be seen as the watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East. However, we cannot achieve that if we surrender Iraq to those who would tear it apart. Arguing the issues of 2003 doesn’t get us there, and Fukuyama, like many critics of this war, don’t seem to have many particularly good ideas for how to deal with the here and now.

The Brussels Journal has a very interesting and detailed look at the failures of the European social welfare model:

Why is Europe performing so poorly? Europe’s deficient performance is incompatible with its huge potential as the world’s largest single consumer market. Its slow growth contradicts its unequalled industrial productivity and infrastructure, its outstanding education level and labour ethics, its favourable climate, “fair business” morality, and not in the least its tremendous potential provided by the opening of the iron curtain. Obviously Europe’s fairy-tale is not materializing. Nor are the inflated expectations prognosticated by Europe’s political elite at the launch of the Common Currency and the Lisbon Agenda.

The reality of Europe’s ailing economy contrasts sharply with its economic potential and with the massive resources employed to cure its ailing growth. The whole arsenal of Keynesian remedies has now been tried and has failed one by one. Massive deficit spending throughout the eighties and nineties has left Europe with a public debt unequalled in history. The size of Europe’s monumental public debt is only surpassed by the hidden liabilities accumulated in Europe’s shortsighted pay-as-you-go public pension schemes.

The fact remains that what’s happening in Europe right now could very well happen here – in fact, it will unless we start working towards changing our current course. Europe made a very conscious decision to try to create a state based off of certain utopian principles – that economic goods such as health care and housing were “rights” and that the best way to promote a healthy society was to have a more “fair” tax system. Years of massive social welfare spending, confiscatory taxation, and Keynesian economics have failed to produce economic growth or significant prosperity. In fact, with Europe’s unemployment rates in the double digits and their total labor underutilization even double that, it’s quite clear that trying to emulate a European model is trying to emulate failure.

At the same time, one European country does provide a model for how to grow an economy in the 21st Century. Ireland went from being 22nd in the OECD prosperity index to being fourth. The Irish economy has grown at an annualized rate of 5.6% for the past 20 years. Granted, that sort of growth isn’t sustainable over the long term, but in a generation Ireland went from being under conditions that resembled the Third World to being one of the most dynamic countries in the EU.

What did Ireland do? They were the first in Europe to truly embrace globalization. Irish leaders realized that high protective tariffs were stunting economic growth and preventing foreign investment. The Irish government engaged in a policy of free trade, slashed taxes across the board, and worked to attract foreign investment. Ireland also has the benefit of having a large diaspora in the United States - one quarter of US FDI to Europe is invested in Ireland.

Ireland has the exact opposite set of problems as the rest of Europe - Ireland’s population is rising rather than falling, and immigration is still strong. The economic boom has meant that prices on everything from real estate to pints of Guinness have increased dramatically. The Irish economic boom has left government coffers flush with cash - which encourages the kind of spending that isn’t sustainable as the Irish economy completes its transition. Yet for all those problems, it’s far better to have to deal with a rising population and high growth than the opposite.

Ireland’s flat tax structure and pro-growth policies have done better at providing an increased quality of life than the European social model has - and because of Ireland’s economic growth they’re better able to build infrastructure and invest in education, continuing that trend of growth. Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic need to understand that the quasi-socialist welfare state model doesn’t work. If you want solid economic growth and a better life for your citizens, you must embrace free trade, low taxes, and foreign investment. Ireland’s victory and Europe’s decline are living proof of what it takes to destroy and economy and what it takes to develop one. The question is which model this country will embrace over the next few years and which future we have in store for ourselves.

Captain Ed has a post on the disintegration of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s government. After a public spat with the highly popular Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko which resulted in her dismissal, Yushchenko has had a very difficult time delivering on his promised reforms. The Russian-oriented Party of Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovych got 31% of the vote, the Tymoshenko Bloc received 23%, and Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Party only pulled 15% of the vote.

It’s always hard to live up to such expectations, but the public fighting between the charismatic Tymoshenko and Yushchenko didn’t help at all, splitting the Orange Revolution and allowing the Kremlin-backed Yanukovych play a game of divide and conquer. Yushchenko also made the dramatic mistake of hinting at a possible coalition with Yanukovych despite the fact that Yanukovych was quite likely to have been involved in his attempted assassination by dioxin poisoning. Yushchenko will have to bury the hatchet with Tymoshenko if he wants any chance at retaining control of the government.

Ukraine remains a house divided between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, between the Western-looking and the Russian-speaking. These divisions have shaped Ukrainian politics for centuries, and continue to be a major factor today. The feelings that created the spectacle of the Orange Revolution haven’t necessarily disappeared, but the squabbles among the leadership of the revolution have stalled progress. If Ukraine is to continue to look away from the Kremlin to guidance, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko need to get their acts together and work towards the common good.

One of the editors of RedState and Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech is being accused of plagiarizing material for pieces written while in college and in National Review. The other editors of RedState are calling this a witch hunt and a smear job. Many of the attacks on Mr. Domenech are disgusting, vile, and idiotic. There is no doubt that the left “netroots” are engaging in McCarthyite tactics to try and suppress Mr. Domenech - acting like the unhinged bunch of moonbats they are.

At the same time, Ben Domenech has a lot of explaining to do. The plagiarism charges look like they have some merit to them. Is there an innocent explanation for this? Perhaps so. However, Domenech owes his readers an explanation.

If these charges are true, and they’re pretty damning on their face, Domenech must resign from his position at The Washington Post.Plagiarism is simply unacceptable, and inasmuch as Ben is being asked to represent our movement on a prominent national forum, he needs to take responsibility for his actions. It’s simply the right thing to do.

UPDATE: Ben Domenech has resigned from The Washington Post. He did the right thing.

UPDATE: A note of due disclosure, I have written for RedState in the past, where Domenech was an editor and a founder of the site.

UPDATE: Domenech talks about his resignation here. He states that he did not plagiarize any material himself - although he doesn’t address the issue of the NRO articles he wrote after college. National Review is already apologizing to their readers for one of his pieces which they seem to think was plagiarized from another reporter. Sadly, it seems like the allegations are fairly substantial.

At the same time, the smears against him were part and parcel of the left’s tactics these days - the threads about him at Atrios were tatamount to libel, and if he has recieved death threats I’d hope he’s sending them onto the appropriate authorities for investigation. One can simultaneously decry Mr. Domenech’s lack of judgement at the same time one decries the left’s McCarthyism - and one should do both.

UPDATE: Ben Domenech has publicy apologized for his plagiarism, and the editors of RedState have their comments. What Domenech did is inexcusable, and his professional reputation is gone - which is a truly sad thing to see. It would have been much better for him to have come clean at once rather than make a half-apology when the evidence was so damning - and it appears that the charges were indeed true.

Still, the guy is 24 - and he has gone through an experience that I couldn’t even imagine. Being in his shoes right now would be something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, no less a guy who has a well-deserved reputation for being a class act in all other affairs.