Hasta La Gadget!

It’s becoming clear to political observers that libertarians are emerging as a key swing vote, if not an official party. Republicans may have won a number of close races by appealing to these libertarians, so their views on policy cannot be ignored.

Figuring out those libertarian views on immigration are therefore very important in the wake of President Barack Obama’s primetime speech announcing his executive order on immigration.

Poster for a Latin American Libertarian Party

So I contacted Alex Nowrasteh for that policy perspective. He’s the immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. We met at the Association for Private Enterprise Education annual meeting in Las Vegas in the Spring of 2014.

Q. What is your reaction to the executive order. Is it a good plan?
A. Viewed narrowly from the policy perspective only, the President’s executive order improves policy, will lead to wage and economic growth, and decreases the humanitarian harm done by our restrictive immigration policy.
Q. How do you feel about it being an executive order? Do you prefer that Congress acted on immigration?
A. A bill passed by Congress would have been vastly superior. A bill could have offered a permanent solution, expanded legal immigration opportunities, and avoided the dubious constitutionality of a far-reaching executive order.
Q. What do you think the chances Congress will act on immigration?
A. There is a very good chance that Congress will use this opportunity to counter Obama’s actions by passing their own package of immigration reform bills. This executive order could have poisoned the well for future immigration reform bills, but I’m not convinced there was much water in that well to begin with.

Democrats seemed more supportive of the idea. In a “moveon” email to me, Helen Chavez (the widow of Cesar Chavez), wrote:

Tonight, President Obama kept his promise to me and to the American people by using his power to help many of the immigrants who toil in our fields, make beds, clean rooms, cook meals, work in construction and manufacturing, and care for our young and elderly. They serve our country in the military. I’ve known the farm workers all my life. Like other immigrants, they take jobs most other Americans won’t take, for pay most other Americans won’t accept, and under conditions most other Americans won’t tolerate. Big parts of our economy can’t survive without immigrants.

All President Obama did is what President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush did: allowing some immigrants to stay and work here. Most of the immigrants who qualify have been in this country for some time. They have clean records. What the President did is just temporary, and he acted only after Republicans in the House of Representatives repeatedly refused to pass a bipartisan bill that already passed the U.S. Senate. President Obama did the right thing on immigration. Please join me in thanking him for his leadership. At the same time, we should urge Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform that will solve this problem once and for all.

Republicans had a different plan. They seem opposed not only to the fact that it is an executive order, but object to the policy itself. House Speaker John Boehner noted in an AFP article carried by Yahoo News “The president has said before that ‘he’s not king’ and he’s ‘not an emperor,’ but he’s sure acting like one.” There are threats to defund such a policy, make a court challenge. Even calls for impeachment can’t be far behind.

As you can see, Libertarians are more supportive of the President’s idea, but not his methods. Both parties would do well to consider their views, a possible compromise that could end the gridlock on immigration.

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John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.

From the opening of Anita Diamant’s heartwarming novel, The Boston Girl, (Scribner), when Addie Bauman, an 85-year-old grandmother recounts her life story to her granddaughter, I was struck by the similarities between the Jewish cultural beliefs and mores in Boston in 1915, when Addie’s story starts, and in Iran, where I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s.

Mameh, Addie’s mother, complains that Addie is “ruining her eyes from reading. No one wants to marry a girl with a squint.” During my teens, I walked around with a perpetual squint because, Who would want to marry a girl who wears glasses? And don’t even start me on the tsoris bombarded on my head for being an avid reader. When Addie’s older sister, Betty, attempts to carve an independent life for herself, Mameh stops mentioning Betty’s name in public. She calls Betty, “A real American … making it sound like a curse.” After we moved to America, my own father, alav ha-shalom, when faced with an opinion from his children and grandchildren that differed from his own, would shake his head in resignation and sigh, “This is America, after all,” as if that was enough to explain his family’s transgressions. When Addie asks her parents if her sister is in love with the man she is about to marry, the answer is, “Not yet … You learn to love someone when you make a life together.” That’s what I was told, when my parents chose my husband.

The story of Addie is the story of every immigrant and the difficulties of adapting to and accepting an unfamiliar culture. Despite being in my twenties when I arrived in this country, I, too, had a hard time conforming as fast as my children expected me to. I had imported my antiquated beliefs and continued to cling to them, as if embracing the new way might break the last remnants of my frayed relationship with the country I once called home. So much so, it broke my heart when my daughter moved out of the house before she was married. I understand Mameh’s anger at Bettie’s unconventional decision to move out of the house. It does not matter that four of them live in one room. “Girls were supposed to live with their families until they got married and the only kind of woman who went on her own was a ‘kurveh’. That’s ‘whore’ in Yiddish.”

In an intimate and calm voice that contradicts the setting we enter, Addie invites us to eavesdrop on her heart-to-heart with her granddaughter, leading us through significant historical events–the Depression, First and Second World Wars, the flu epidemic, Prohibition, and the burgeoning feminist movement. She also talks about her life growing up in Boston in a one-room tenement apartment with a father, who found refuge in the neighborhood shul, “where no one yelled at him,” and a rigid mother, whose loss taints her every breath, making it impossible for her to accept anything new. We learn that Addie’s mother was pregnant when she was forced to immigrate to America. “Someone accused my father of stealing a silver cup from the church. In those days, that was the same as a death sentence for a Jew, so he came to America….” The memory of arriving by ship is one of the most moving in the story.

This is a time of sweatshops and child laborers, a time when most colleges do not accept Jews. A time when it is not common for women to wear pants, revealing a bare shoulder is considered racy, and no one would think of hiring lady lawyers. Despite all the obstacles and restrictions, Addie, an early feminist, goes to work in a shirt factory and then in a local newspaper, where she eventually writes her own column, not an easy feat. Love, like everything else in life, does not come easy to Addie, but the ups and downs of that journey, too, are what makes Addie Baum the Boston Girl she becomes.

In The Boston Girl, Anita Diamant, the bestselling author of The Red Tent, demonstrates the ease with which she is able to navigate her way from biblical times to the early twentieth century, each historical, familial and cultural detail rendered with attention to detail and authentic accuracy.

Dora Levy Mossanen is a frequent reviewer for the Jewish Journal. Her latest novel is “Scent of Butterflies,” www.doralevymossanen.com.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the U.S. Catholic bishops ask their parishioners to donate to the needy, but this annual special collection is not charity. Rather, the funds are earmarked for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), which since 1970 has supported grassroots community organizing.

How can that be, in an institution so famously hierarchical? Indeed, on a public radio segment about parish closings, when I noted [at 7:35 here] that there needs to be more transparency (particularly ​about the​ legal fees related to the cover-up of pedophile priests), I added, “But what do you expect from a top-down institution?” Then there is the fact that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is known for loudly promulgating stances that gender rights activists, and a growing percentage of the public, consider profoundly unjust.
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Even more Americans are in favor of progressive economic policies — most people, actually — and here the USCCB is with them. ​Indeed, o​n every issue not related to sex/gender, official, traditional Church teaching is not conservative. Many bishops do obscure that fact, given that most of them likely vote Republican. Even so, the USCCB has long taken a progressive position on most issues, as with the bishops’ call for curbs on perceived corporate excesses, from questionable trade deals to agribusiness tax subsidies, and this places them on the opposite side of the Catholic justices on the Supreme Court — notably with regard to the Citizens United decision that characterized financial political contributions as free speech.

Moreover, the hierarchical nature of the Church is less all-encompassing than it seems, as indicated by, for example, the Catholic doctrine about the importance of one’s conscience. And as I noted on that public radio call-in segment, “We are a top-down institution, but we are also…the Church as the Body of Christ: Christ in the center, and the most important people being the marginalized.”

In this vein, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development constitutes one of the nation’s largest organizations in support of grassroots community organizing. “The belief that those who are directly affected by unjust systems and structures have the best insight into knowing how to change them is central to CCHD,” its website notes, adding that “CCHD works to break the cycle of poverty by helping low-income people participate in decisions that affect their lives, families and communities. CCHD offers a hand up, not a hand out.”

This pattern of support dates from the very ​founding of community organizing by Saul Alinsky: a Jewish, self-proclaimed radical who, in a sense, was joined at the hip with Bishop James Sheil of Chicago. “Alinsky brought his ideas first to Bishop Sheil…by 1940 Alinsky and Bishop Sheil had formally organized the Industrial Areas Foundation,” according to a study of the IAF.

Bishop Richard Sheil of Chicago, center, and community organizing founder Saul Alinsky, right, 1940s

Conservative Catholics have long objected, and when former community organizer Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, they attacked the Campaign for Human Development. But although the word “Catholic” was added, and although CCHD now makes clear that it does not solely fund community development, the organization’s basic mission remains unchanged. Its “Community Organizing” webpage* states that “community organizing involves bringing people and groups (often including churches) together to collectively address issues of common concern, for example, availability of affordable housing, access to services and businesses, decent education, and jobs with living wages, and other issues of economic development and justice.”

Part of the IAF community organizing network: Austin Interfaith (including the bishop of Austin, in black suit), lobbying for labor rights. ​

Alinsky protégé and “genius grant” recipient Ernesto Cortés, Jr. cites Catholic social teaching as influential in the development of community organizing, and when the nation’s largest denomination holds that Thanksgiving-week special collection of mostly small donations, it will be supporting one element in a broad-based coalition aimed at empowering ordinary folks. As Ernie Cortés notes, “The only answer to organized money is organized people.” For all the efforts that are furthering that vision, we can truly give thanks.

*[© 2009, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. All rights reserved. This work may be reproduced in whole or in part without alteration for nonprofit educational use, provided such reprints are not sold and include this notice. Rev. 9/20/2011]

Henry Ford once famously stated any Model T buyer can have a car painted any color he wants… so long as it is black. Fast-forward a century and Ford’s long-time competitor, Chrysler, is telling a similar tale to potential buyers of new Dodge Durangos and Jeep Grand Cherokees. Blame an extensive equipment update at Chryco’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant for restricting new SUVs to white, gray, silver or black paint jobs.

Behold, the redesigned Outlander. This is the second edition in Mitsubishi’s Outlander lineup, the first coming in 2014. This model has a new and improved look to it, coming with a smoother fascia and a wider array of options. Here at the LA Auto Show 2014 we’re seeing the 2015 Outlander GT, that being the version with Super All-Wheel Control … Continue reading