[mike777]

I assume at the very least China and Russia have full access to these govt records In Western Europe.

I noted my local newspaper had article about Netherlands Army. Per article they have cut military spending to the point they tell training soldiers to not fire their rifle but shout bang bang...

This per a memo issued by Defense Ministry to commanders during the month of July.

It makes one wonder how much or little money is spent on cyber security.

Here in the USA govt personal records have been hacked including military and our spies.

[barmar]

One of the issues in the US is that many government records are managed at the state level, not federal. In particular, the states track births and deaths, and I don't think there's a standard procedure for them to notify other agencies of deaths. As a result, it's not uncommon for Social Security to keep making payments to deceased individuals.

[mike777]

barmar, on 2015-August-27, 18:03, said:

One of the issues in the US is that many government records are managed at the state level, not federal. In particular, the states track births and deaths, and I don't think there's a standard procedure for them to notify other agencies of deaths. As a result, it's not uncommon for Social Security to keep making payments to deceased individuals.

Yes

This is just another example of divided government. Information is power, and the approach of dividing that power up among competing interests.

Most of the rest of the world seems to prefer to that consolidate power in a few hands.
-------------------

OTOH the opposite problem is to make government so diffuse that it seems the state is ungovernable, see Italy etc....

[cherdano]

cherdano, on 2015-August-17, 12:34, said:

Disagree. Someone leading all primary polls deserves to be treated seriously - it does say something about the primary and its voters, no matter how unlikely the candidate is to win.

http://www.vox.com/2...ke-donald-trump

[helene_t]

Flem72, on 2015-August-26, 20:03, said:

Here's the bare bones of an idea: Allow an American citizen to sponsor an immigrant family. Conditions: Family certifies that no one is on welfare and that family members who earn file tax returns; family members of age immediately enter citizenship qualification stream; sponsor indemnifies USA against all deportation costs should family member(s) violate the sponsorship agreement.

Once a friend of mine had to apply for a visa extension in Denmark. I had to sign that I would pay the costs of prosecuting, imprisoning and deporting her in case it would be necesary. So what you suggest is not just fantasy.

[kenberg]

helene_t, on 2015-August-28, 08:19, said:

Once a friend of mine had to apply for a visa extension in Denmark. I had to sign that I would pay the costs of prosecuting, imprisoning and deporting her in case it would be necesary. So what you suggest is not just fantasy.

That's friendship!!!!

[kenberg]

Eugene Robinson opined today that Trump really might win the nomination. I doubt it, but let's think about it a little. Going back to the OP, I don't think we could lay such a result at the feet of Citizens United. As Robinson notes, Trump is getting all the free publicity he can handle. Moreover, and this was news to me, Ben Carson is in second place. Now a successful neurosurgeon makes a decent living, but I doubt that it his money that is driving his success.

If either the Republicans as a party, or all of us as a country, are going to overcome this, we need to accurately think through what is driving it. The professional wrestler Jesse Ventura did become governor of Minnesota. My understanding is that he didn't do such a bad job of it, but still I think it should give us pause.

Jesse Ventura may know how to slam an opponent to the mat, Donald Trump may know how to get rich through creative bankruptcy, and Ben Carson is a fine neurosurgeon. They should all continue doing what they do best.

[barmar]

Don't forget that a B-list actor did make it all the way to the Presidency 35 years ago. We currently have a comedian (Al Franken) in the Senate, and pop singer Sonny Bono was in there earlier.

Familiarity to voters and charismatic personality can go a long way in politics. Positions espoused during the campaign can be practically irrelevant, since we know that they'll say whatever the voters want to hear, and many campaign promises are broken.

[Thiros]

And we haven't even gotten started on Arnold Schwarzenegger

[kenberg]

Thiros, on 2015-August-28, 12:55, said:

And we haven't even gotten started on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Talk to the hand!


Of course you and barmar are right, it's not new. I do think that Donald Trump is a different ball of wax. The difference, approximately, is this: People who voted for Reagan, perhaps to a lesser extent for Schwarzenegger, had a fair idea of what they would be getting. These two had a social philosophy and political views. But Trump? His only value is himself. He enjoys pushing people around, so I guess he is selling the vicarious pleasure of watching him be insulting, coarse and pushy but if anyone thinks that he has the best interests of anyone except himself in mind they are wrong.

[blackshoe]

You already have a government granted id number. Why do you need a name too? Get rid of names!

[blackshoe]

kenberg, on 2015-August-28, 08:58, said:

Jesse Ventura may know how to slam an opponent to the mat, Donald Trump may know how to get rich through creative bankruptcy, and Ben Carson is a fine neurosurgeon. They should all continue doing what they do best.

Do we really want to be governed by professional politicians? Or professional bureaucrats?

[kenberg]

blackshoe, on 2015-August-28, 20:08, said:

Do we really want to be governed by professional politicians? Or professional bureaucrats?

It perhaps will not surprise you that my response is sort of mixed. Saying that Reagan "was an actor who became president" skips over a fairly active political life in between. There was reason enough to believe that if you agreed with is views, it would be reasonable to vote for him. Trump, and before him Ross Perot, present different problems. They have total contempt for professional politicians. I don't share this general contempt, although some individuals certainly earn it.

Analogies are always risky but: At various times I have thought a doctor treating me for this or that is not as good as I would like him/her to be. I switch to a different doctor, I do not go to a faith healer who thinks the entire medical profession is composed of quacks.

The Trump/Perot mantra runs along the lines of "We business people know what works, just apply the same approach to running the country". Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Probably no one has been really prepared for the challenges of being president. Previous experiences can help, and they also can, for better or worse, develop a point of view. Dwight Eisenhower came to the presidency without previously (as far as I know) holding elective office. He had vast experience both in planning large scale operations and in being in charge of carrying them out. No doubt his life in the military also gave him a certain way of thinking through issues, and this can be an asset or a liability. Being president is not like being a general, not like being a CEO, not like solving a math problem, it is unique.

In short: There is no certain way to predict who will be successful as a president, but the arrogance of Mr. Trump is very troublesome.

[cherdano]

blackshoe, on 2015-August-28, 20:08, said:

Do we really want to be governed by professional politicians?

I do. Take Larry Lessig as an example. I completely agree with his goals. But based on how is running his campaign, he would be a disaster as president.

http://www.vox.com/2...essig-president

[PassedOut]

Interesting story about assistance from Mexico 10 years ago: When Mexicans crossed our border to feed Americans in need

Quote

I was serving as the No. 2 at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City in August 2005 when Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. The storm’s track posed no danger to Mexico, and we followed events like most expatriate Americans — aghast, but at a distance.

But not Mexicans. They were watching the same scenes of floating corpses and botched relief efforts in New Orleans. My chief contact at Mexico’s Foreign Ministry called to say the Mexican army had two field kitchens that could feed storm victims who had made their way to Texas, he said, and the navy had two ships that could help with cleanup efforts in New Orleans.

I told my contact the offer was very generous, noted that many countries had offered assistance, and added that the State Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency would decide which offers to accept. He said it was too late for that. The convoy had already left Mexico City on its way to the border, and the ships were ready to steam from Veracruz.

The Mexicans that I know (both legal and illegal) behave like those in this story. It's impossible for me to take a hard line against folks I know and respect, and I dearly wish that I could declare an amnesty myself.

In a way, the illegal immigration situation here reminds me of how it was necessary for gays to come out before their situation could improve. Most people don't like dumping on folks they know. But it's very difficult for illegals to come out openly because the consequences of doing so can seriously hurt family and friends too.

[mike777]

Regarding illegal immigrants, I think the big issue is the jumping of the queue.
Now if you are for open borders, fair enough then we do not need a queue.

I happen to be in favor of borders and a queue. I just wish to move it along faster.


As far as "dumping" on those who jump the queue, sure dump on them, otherwise just have an open border and no queue.

[PassedOut]

For many years, Mexican illegals were recruited vigorously by US employers. The employers enjoyed the competitive advantage of paying low wages to workers in no position to complain (or to attract the attention of the police), and the workers earned a lot more money than they could in Mexico, sending much of it back home to assist their extended families. For both sides, it was a classic win-win.

A similar situation occurred in the mid-1800s with the Chinese, and the Post has an interesting story today about the Supreme Court case that clarified the 14th amendment's "birthright citizen" provision: Donald Trump meet Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American cook who is the father of ‘birthright citizenship’

Quote

It was the fall of 1895, and Wong Kim Ark was puzzled and alarmed as he bided his time on the steamship Coptic in San Francisco Bay which had returned him from a visit to China. His papers were in order. He had seen to that. The required statement, certification from white men that he was born in the U.S. and therefore a citizen, were in order. He had traveled to China for a visit and had little trouble being readmitted.

On this occasion, however, authorities denied him entry, returning him to the ship on which he had arrived, and from there to another ship, the Gaelic, and then to the Peking. For four months, the only certainty to Wong’s life was the tides on San Francisco Bay where he awaited word of his fate.

What he could not have known was that he was about to become a “test case” brought by the United States government, egged on by a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, in an effort to undermine the 14th Amendment “birthright” provision which made Wong a citizen in the first place as the plain and simple language of the amendment said that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

For the Chinese in America, this was the “exclusion era,” a radical shift for the U.S., which for the most part, since its creation as a republic, had encouraged people to come to its shores. In the beginning, as America built its railroads, mined its gold and farmed the valleys of Northern California, the Chinese were welcomed as well in America. They streamed in by the thousands.

But as the Depression of 1873 took its toll on white working men, they began to look for scapegoats. Mob violence, arson, and overt racist derision swept through California, powered by slogan “the Chinese must go.” Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, designed to put an end to the flow of Chinese into the U.S. But that was not enough for the building anti-Chinese wave.

Thousands of children had been born to Chinese in the U.S. and birthright citizenship was the next target, just as it is today for many Republicans, notably Donald Trump, in their campaign aimed at the children they call “anchor babies,” whose parents enter the U.S. illegally just to make sure their children enjoy the benefits of citizenship. The U.S. is “the only place just about that’s stupid enough” to to do that, he has said, thus providing an incentive for illegal entry. Bills to do just what Trump is advocating have been around for years and have gone nowhere, and many, but not all, scholars believe such a change would need to confront the almost insurmountable task of amending the Constitution.

Young men like Wong were not called “anchor babies” by critics then, but rather “accidental citizens,” said University of New Hampshire legal historian Lucy Salyer, “citizens by the accident of birth” as the dissenting justices in Wong Kim Ark’s Supreme Court case would put it.

What he did not know was that “they were looking for some poor chump,” Salyer told the Washington Post, to make an example of, at the nation’s highest court. And that “chump” was Wong Kim Ark. So there it was, the intimidating-sounding case of The United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, a cook.

Yet he won.

It's interesting to note how current the dissent reads:

Quote

The dissent, written by Justice Melville Fuller and joined by John M. Harlan, challenged the premise that children like Wong Kim Ark were in fact, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at all. “They seem in the United States to have remained pilgrims and sojourners, as all their fathers were,” he wrote.

“‘The true bond which connects the child with the body politic is not the matter of an inanimate piece of land,’ they wrote, ‘but the moral relations of his parentage. . . . The place of birth produces no change in the rule that children follow the condition of their fathers, for it is not naturally the place of birth that gives rights, but extraction … To what nation a person belongs is by the laws of all nations closely dependent on descent; it is almost an universal rule that the citizenship of the parents determines it — that of the father where children are lawful, and, where they are bastards, that of their mother, without regard to the place of their birth, and that must necessarily be recognized as the correct canon, since nationality is, in its essence, dependent on descent.”

While this feudal principle was common in other countries, the dissenting argument was an extraordinary claim for the nation of immigrants, that the citizenship of the child followed “descent,” a concept known as “jus sanguinis,” or right of blood, rather than the soil on which the child was born, a principle known as “jus soli,” or “right of the soil. And it never saw the light of day again at the Supreme Court.

So far, anyway.

[barmar]

It does seem like the 14th Amendment is overly simplistic. If a foreign family comes here for a 2-week vacation, and the mother gives birth to a child, should that child really be afforded citizenship? It seems like the condition of the parents being in the US when the child is born -- the reason they're here and the length of time -- should play some part.

But as it's written, that isn't really permitted. I believe "subject to the jurisdiction thereof", probably only excludes children of people with diplomatic immunity.

[PassedOut]

barmar, on 2015-August-31, 09:33, said:

It does seem like the 14th Amendment is overly simplistic. If a foreign family comes here for a 2-week vacation, and the mother gives birth to a child, should that child really be afforded citizenship? It seems like the condition of the parents being in the US when the child is born -- the reason they're here and the length of time -- should play some part.

But as it's written, that isn't really permitted. I believe "subject to the jurisdiction thereof", probably only excludes children of people with diplomatic immunity.

I have a niece with dual citizenship, US and Japanese. From the Japanese viewpoint, she was supposed to choose one or the other at age 22, but few bother to do that. (Don't ask, don't tell.) But even if she simply gives up her US passport to placate the Japanese, she remains a US citizen. I don't want that to change for future generations.

Her husband is a Korean national who lives in New York City, but our niece spends a good part of each year in Italy. She is a scholar of Italian literature. (Her parents love Italy, and she traveled there growing up.)

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2015-August-31, 08:38, said:

For many years, Mexican illegals were recruited vigorously by US employers. The employers enjoyed the competitive advantage of paying low wages to workers in no position to complain (or to attract the attention of the police), and the workers earned a lot more money than they could in Mexico, sending much of it back home to assist their extended families. For both sides, it was a classic win-win.

A similar situation occurred in the mid-1800s with the Chinese, and the Post has an interesting story today about the Supreme Court case that clarified the 14th amendment's "birthright citizen" provision: Donald Trump meet Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American cook who is the father of ‘birthright citizenship’


It's interesting to note how current the dissent reads:


So far, anyway.

For me, the answer to the of Wong Kim Ark would be: The law when you were born said that your birth in the USA made you a US citizen. So you are a US citizen.


Nothing in this says that the wisdom of the law cannot be debated. But if the law made him a citizen, he is a citizen. As the excerpt from the article says, he had his papers, they were proper. To me, this means that even if the law were now to be construed, or misconstrued, to say such births in the future were not to confer citizenship, for Wong Kim Ark it was a settled matter.

The language of the amendment seems pretty clear. Maybe not wise, but clear.


Of course the law also says that crossing the border without proper procedures is illegal. That's also clear.