Specifically, I outlined in my original post that we have to make a decision before we can act. We have to decide whether terrorists are Border-less Nation-States, or whether they are Common Criminals. I believe we should decide that they are Common Criminals.

Part of the way we deal today with organized crime is that we cut off their money supply. The American mafia had its heyday during Prohibition, funding itself off illegal booze. Once we made beer legal again, that cut a lot of funding out from under them. We’ve got a veritable war going on in Mexico right now, and why is because of illegal drugs. This is why I called our relationship to oil an addiction. We break our addiction, we cut off the money supply, we remove organized crime’s funding.

The diplomatic part of the solution is the same as we have now for international crime. We have good relationships with entities like Interpol. We have extraction agreements with various countries. The diplomacy we need is not with the terrorists, its with the good guys who want to help us fight them.

By the way, I don’t expect that our cops who are deployed internationally to fight terrorist crime are going to look like your average Mountie. I expect they’ll look a lot like Special Forces units, or drones.

Afghanistan looks to me like policing actions against bad guys and building relationships with good guys, like part of the solution I envision.

Iraq I am not so sure about. To me it looks like maybe we are protecting our addiction to oil. Or maybe we are engaging in one of the “humanitarian” actions you mention. That kind of aid is OK by me, but I’ll ask you to acknowledge that giving is actually a Liberal’s Perspective.

To answer your questions, I don’t think we can fix terrorism without fixing energy. And if we fix energy, that’s only part of the solution to terrorism. If we are the world’s premiere terrorist-fighting force, if we have clean energy technology the rest of the world wants to buy, those seem like pretty good things for America and her position of global leadership.

I believe what we accomplished in the early years of our recent wars was justified, but to me, war is a broad topic that covers a few very different aspects:

* National Defense (protecting or avenging ourselves)
* Foreign Aid (non-military operations aimed at helping those affected by war)
* Military Support (non-combat operations performed by the US Military)
* Military Operations (direct combat operations performed by the US Military)

How we feel about a particular war really depends on whether we are protecting (or avenging) ourselves or someone else… whether we are fighting someone else’s war or helping them fight their own… whether we are providing necessary (and wanted) humanitarian aid or whether we’re sticking our noses in where we shouldn’t have.

But here’s a couple of questions for you:

* If we fix terrorism, does that change how we look at the energy problem and our role in the global economy?
* Can we fix one independently of the other and still achieve the optimal result?
* If we fix both, how does that change our position as a global power and what should we expect in the form of side effects?

P.S. What scares me more than a politician who believes we need to fight a full-scale war is the one that believes there’s a diplomatic solution to terrorism.

Until recently, the New Hampshire State Police used a loophole in our state law to arrest and hold illegal immigrants on criminal trespassing charges. Long story short, a case was heard by the NH Supreme Court , they found in favor of the plaintiff and the NHSP can no longer hide behind that loophole. If the NHSP had been empowered to uphold a federal law, there would have been no need to hide behind such a loophole in the first place.

A quick comment about funding. I don’t have stats available, but it makes sense that the border states are the ones with the biggest issue, so that would be the most reasonable place to start. It also makes sense that if there is a so-called surge, many of the law-abiding immigrants who are here illegally would respond by taking measures to change their status. I think that has one big side effect: it gets them in the system — after all, they’re the ones we most likely want to keep — but it opens the door to come down hard on the others.

In a nutshell, the startup costs should be significantly higher than the maintenance costs if the execution is quick, efficient and successful.

However, what you can do is react to it as quick as possible. And you can take a conservative rather than permissive approach to any rapid burst of growth, especially if it is limited to certain sectors.

It’s also dangerous to regulate after violations occur. As I said above, often today’s crimes weren’t crimes yesterday. They’ll say, “What we were doing was perfectly legal.” And our American Way does not allow us to punish crimes retroactively.

Plus, what if the violation is catastrophic? You don’t want to wait until after a nuclear plant explodes to fine the builder for it. You want to be proactive about the regulation.

But it’s certainly true that the most egregious failure is not punishing those who have clearly done wrong.

Any politician who is against regulation should not get our vote. In fact, I think any politician who says or does anything, inside or outside the public sphere, to dirty the Name of Regulation, should not get our vote.

In particular, we need our Executive Branch to understand the value of regulation.. They need to believe in it, act on it, and appoint individuals at every level who are qualified to do it right. So we need our Presidential Candidates to stand strong on this principal.

I think we also need more pay for more “regulators.” I am not talking about vast new swaths of big government. What I mean is, we need incentives that attract more and better talent from industry. All the smart guys in finance are making dough on Wall Street. Money is part of what will bring more of them over to our side, as people who help our government regulate. That’s just a free-market principal, and we shouldn’t think the operation of our government is exempt from it.

Part of this is suggesting that Congress needs to empower our regulators and set for them general principals, but not to advise them on execution. We probably need less involvement from Congress beyond a certain level of detail.

I’ll offer one more point, which is to beware what I call the Tory Argument. Often I hear people saying we can’t do this or that because corporations and the wealthy won’t invest, hire, or innovate like we want them to. If it’s truly bad for business, that’s one thing, that we can predict and calculate. But this sounds a little like the Tories saying they didn’t want to fight King George because if he won, he’d lop off their heads. Near as I can tell, we are still willing to die for our democratic freedoms. We need to take a similar unyielding stance for our economic freedoms. The Corporatists are not owed impossible profits and an ever-increasing share of our wealth simply because their grandfathers had a little gumption.

(I suspect we’ll fast get into the Land of Capital Gains Tax and Trickle-Down Economics. Let’s do that on a separate thread.)

Can we agree that we need comprehensive legislation that includes both better enforcement and quota reform?

Can we agree that any politician who waffles on either of these points, emphasizes one and ignores the other, or tries to break the 2 issues into separate legislation, will not be getting our vote?

And, can we agree that any politician who commits to doing this, but doesn’t explain to us how he is going to do it, isn’t getting our vote either?

Let’s face it, if we can all agree what we are going to get done, the thing we need to debate is how we are going to get it done. It’s time for our politicians to share that level of detail with us, to submit it to the control of our democracy, and to commit not just to general principals but specific actions.

How about they commit to this? Even this level of detail seems pretty simple to me.

Congress can…

Decide how many of the current 10 million illegal immigrants we need and want in this country. It’s probably a high percentage, like 6 million or 8 million. Also decide how many we need and want as citizens, and how many we need and want as documented workers. We should take their demand for citizenship or worker status as part of the equation.

Create a path to full citizenship or documented worker for that number of immigrants. (I know some people would really like to see them leave here and come back in. But I am not sure that’s any more enforceable or efficient than just tracking them down where they are. I’m standing on practicalities here, not principals.)

Make the path to citizenship considerably harder to achieve, with more frequent check-ins, acheivables, and milestones. Make the path to worker status relatively easy to achieve, but also set per-visit, lifetime, and required-egress time limits, and make worker status actually impede your path to citizenship.

Protect citizens such that, if there is a question of citizenship status, certain additional verifications must be performed within a certain time period, or the subject will be considered a citizen until concretely proven otherwise.

Give Border Patrol, FBI and local law enforcement more money to spend on enforcement. And do it with few or no strings attached. It’s the job of the executive branch and of those agencies to know how to do the job best. We don’t need micro-management from Congress.

The Executive Branch can…

Put that money into the basics we already have — find, verify, remove — with our existing agencies — Border Patrol, FBI, and local law enforcement.

Enable rapid sharing of appropriate military technologies — surveillance drones, cargo scanners — with these agencies.

Enable rapid sharing of intelligence amongst these agencies and others such as the CIA, NSA, and military.

Empower and fund FBI, DoJ and local law enforcement to go after employers of illegal immigrants.

Create a national system for quickly verifying the citizenship status of an alleged criminal in custody.

Work with international agencies to prevent illegal ingress.

You can’t have an effect without a cause and the people who understand that best — the ones whose job it is to provide plausible explanations for how we got to where we are from wherever we started — aren’t they the ones who are most qualified to drive regulation as appropriate based on what really happened?

I believe there’s a stigma surrounding the word regulation and it’s often misinterpreted to mean big government. I blame Congress to a great degree for that because the process of regulating seems to me to be seriously flawed.

Regulation shouldn’t be about limiting what companies and organizations can do as much as it should be about holding them accountable for what they’ve done. I think we fail miserably on both sides of the house with respect to the latter.

I think the biggest problem I have is that other than elections, there is no litmus test for what Congress does. They pass laws that can have significant effects on our future, but neither the chambers nor agencies are ever required to to perform a retrospective — to look at the results between points a and b and to measure those results against what they were trying to accomplish.

We heard all about the financial reforms on the campaign trail… but will we we hear about it again in 9-12 months in the context of “did we solve the problem”? Or will we hear about it in the context of some campaign speech years from now where someone’s pointing the finger at someone else saying “where was the oversight”?

Years ago, they used to have a terrible time in D.C. with the road construction contractors not getting their equipment off the highways before rush hour started… so DOT was allowed to impose stiff penalties — something like $50,000 for every five minutes of unscheduled lane closures. I don’t think a week had gone by before one of the contractors had a violation and had to chalk up a huge chunk of change. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only fine DOT ever collected because there were no further violations.

You can have regulation, but it has to be sensible and you can’t have regulation without oversight — but neither will be effective unless you also have a system of checks and balances to keep every one honest.

I’m a Native American. This is the only home that me and my ancestors have ever known.

In the 1950’s, the Commonwealth of Virginia issued my mother a driver’s license so she could drive a school bus. Next to “race”, it said “Negro” — because the great Commonwealth didn’t recognize the American Indian as a race and if you weren’t white, you were automatically a Negro.

Both of my brothers began their education at the Sharon Indian School in King William County, Virginia. In a nutshell, the county was obligated to provide an Indian school because there was no way they were going to allow the Indian kids to attend the county’s public (and predominantly white) school. That lasted until the 60’s brought about integration laws, the county boarded up the school and declared it off limits until it was returned to the tribe in 1987.

I’m always surprised by the number of people who live their tidy little lives believing that stories like these only existed in the ancient past or old western movies.

In 2002, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act was introduced in Congress. And again in 2003 (S.1423)… and again in 2005 (S.480)… until the House version (H.R.1385) was finally passed by in 2009, but still awaits Senate approval.

Now there’s another bill that has been aptly dubbed The Native American Apology Resolution. This one is seriously overdue given that my uncles, cousins and brother fought for this country in two wars and did so proudly. It’s difficult for me to fathom the fact that my uncles were so proud to wear a uniform for a country that wasn’t very proud of them.

Now that you understand who I am, I think you’ll understand why my core beliefs are pretty basic:

1. I believe you should take care of your own children before you try to adopt strangers.
2. If you want to live in my house, you have to live by my rules.
3. If you’re living in my house and don’t want to live by my rules, it’s well within my right to ask you to leave.
4. Human rights apply to everyone.
5. The Preamble to The Constitution of The United States begins with “We, the People of the United States”. The Constitution does not apply to illegal immigrants.
6. The Bill of Rights are Amendments to The Constitution of The United States. It does not apply to illegal immigrants.

I get very angry when I someone suggests that illegal immigrants should have the same rights as naturalized or American-born citizens. I get angry when a state with an immigration problem gets slapped for trying to protect their own because the government can’t or won’t. I get angry when politicians campaign on lax immigration policies to get votes. I get angry when I have to provide proof of citizenship to my employer while the government says that requiring the same of potential illegals is racial profiling.

I’m all for giving immigrants a reasonable and open path to citizenship, but my biggest fear is that this is another one of those issues where the law applies only to law-abiding citizens… so I’m also in favor of giving violators a speedy trip back to where they came from. We have immigration laws. We need to fix the ones that are broken, establish news ones that make sense and right or wrong, enforce them all.

And to all those who believe we should just open our doors to anyone who wants to be here, my message is simple: you came, you’ve seen The New World… now go home.

You figure out where you are and where you want to be.
You make a small course correction and wait for it to take effect.
You assess the impact and measure it against your original goal.
And you keep doing that until you’re back on course.
Doing it any other way increases the crash potential exponentially.

That’s how I think our government should work and that’s why I consider myself a conservative. I worry more about how fast the pendulum swings than how far.

When I look at a President’s (or Congress’s) effect on the economy, I only look at the period beginning six to nine months in and ending six to nine months after he’s left office. Because many people believe that the long-term effects of the decisions made today won’t be felt for at least six months. And that’s the biggest reason I’m worried about the health care bill — too much too fast.

I couldn’t help but notice that you you only quoted #’s for Iraq (Bush’s wrong war?) and omitted Afghanistan (Obama’s “right” war?). If you can’t locate the numbers, let me know. Hint: I’m pretty sure you won’t find them on usliberals.about.com

I didn’t weigh in on your original post because the first person that posted had already set a pretty negative tone. (But I do think I disagree with you).

I must be a liberal. The way I have decided that is: as I have watched the political pendulum swing left and right over the years, I’ve never felt like it has swung too far to the left. So then people that never feel like it has swung too far to the right are conservatives. People that feel like its always too far right or too far left are moderates.
And people that were happy for a while are either moderate conservatives or moderate liberals.

So, of course I’m never happy after any election. But, its hard to imagine that anyone (except the very rich) are happy with what’s going on these days. I remember thinking during the 2008 campaign “why would anyone want to be president?”, and that was before the financial meltdown!

So, now the question is: While its easy to criticize all the things are leaders are doing, what is it that our leaders should be doing?
And for me, balancing the budget” or “cutting spending” are not specific enough to have any meaning.

And finally the point I might have tried to make:
With all the noise an bluster about this and that, to me the elephant in the room is the fact that we’re fighting two wars that we simply can’t afford. Even if we could afford to fight these wars, there is no objective, there is no “other government” to negotiate with, and there’s no way to agree on what would constitute a way to end these wars.

So Obama is spending $2B for a huge diplomatic trip to India… That bothers me much less than:
- Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion
- U.S. 2009 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $7.3 billion as of Oct 2009
- U.S. 2008 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $12 billion
- Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq - $390,000
- Etc