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If you want to annoy the left, then raise your children to be like Texas senator Ted Cruz

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Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz
Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz

Here’s a profile in National Review of my one of my favorite senators.

Excerpt:

The party’s highest-profile Texans, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, tended to match inarticulateness with cowboy swagger and lend themselves to mockery as intellectual lightweights. Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School, yet no one naturally thinks of him as an Ivy Leaguer. The two Lone Star State governors played into the Left’s stereotypes so nicely that if they didn’t exist, the New York Times editorial board would have had to invent them.

Cruz is different — a Princeton and Harvard man who not only matriculated at those fine institutions but excelled at them. Champion debater at Princeton. Magna cum laude graduate at Harvard. Supreme Court clerkship, on the way to Texas solicitor general and dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cruz is from the intellectual elite, but not of it, a tea-party conservative whose politics are considered gauche at best at the storied universities where he studied. He is, to borrow the words of the 2008 H.W. Brands biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a traitor to his class.

Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an element of shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell exclaimed on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements.

[…]In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted Cruz’s schooling and concluded that his tea-party politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an “intellectually curious, liberal-arts conservative.” Note the insulting assumption that an interest in books and ideas immunizes someone from a certain kind of conservative politics.

One of the Left’s deepest prejudices is that its opponents are stupid, and Cruz tramples on it. At hearings, Cruz has the prosecutorial instincts of a . . . Harvard-trained lawyer. Watching Attorney General Eric Holder try to fend off Cruz’s questioning on the administration’s drone policy a few months ago was like seeing a mouse cornered by a very large cat.

Cruz hasn’t played by the Senate rules that freshmen should initially be seen and not heard. In fact, he joined the upper chamber with all the subtlety of a SWAT team knocking down a drug suspect’s front door.

For people who care about such things — almost all of them are senators — this is an unforgivable offense. At another hearing, as Cruz says that the highest commitment of senators should be to the Constitution, another senator can be heard muttering that he doesn’t like being lectured. Chairman Pat Leahy (probably the mutterer) eventually cuts him off and informs him he hasn’t been in the Senate very long.

Cruz lacks all defensiveness about his positions, another source of annoyance to his opponents, who are used to donning the mantle of both intellectual and moral superiority.

And here’s a quick review of where Ted Cruz came from:

Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, invigorated the crowd during tonight’s FreedomWorks Free the People event.

Describing his own personal journey escaping Cuba and working hard to build a life for himself in the U.S., the elder Cruz noted comparisons that he believes exist between Fidel Castro’s governance and President Barack Obama’s executive actions.

Upon rising to power, he said that Castro, like Obama, spoke about hope and change. While the message sounded good at the time, it didn’t take long for socialism to take root in his home country. And he paid the price.

For his part in the revolution — one that many originally assumed would yield a more vibrant country — Cruz was punished while in Cuba.

“I was in prison,” he said. “I was tortured, but by the grace of God I was able to leave Cuba on a student VISA and came to the greatest country on the face of the earth.”

Cruz described his efforts working as a dishwasher in America and paying his own way through the University of Texas. From there, he built a life for himself — one that was filled with experiences that caused him to greatly appreciate the country that had given him so much.

His plight in Cuba colored his American experience

“You can’t understand a loss of rights unless you’ve experienced it,” Cruz told TheBlaze following the speech.

His unique perspective leaves Cruz with the ability, he argues, to see the troubling signs surrounding socialism. Young people in America today, he told TheBlaze, take for granted the rights and privileges that the U.S. has afforded them.

Fascinating.

Now people always complain when I say that I am trying to find a wife with the background, education, experience and temperment to raise effective, influential children. I have a whole list of influential people I want to clone, in fact. I want a William Lane Craig, a Wayne Grudem, a Michael Licona, a Guillermo Gonzales, an Ann Gauger, a Jennifer Roback Morse, a Scott Klusendorf, a Mark Regnerus, and… a Ted Cruz. And I’ve saved the money to be able to get at least a few of those, too. The truth is that I had some of the experiences that Cruz’s father had, and if he can make a Ted Cruz, then so should I be able to. They have to come from somewhere!

Now of course it’s hard to guarantee outcomes when it comes to raising children, but there are some things you can prepare for. You can study things you hate that are hard, and save your money for Ph.D tuition. You can go to grad school yourself and publish research. You can look for a wife who shows the ability to nurture people so that they get better and rise higher. And maybe, you might just raise the next Ted Cruz. I think the old adage “if you aim at nothing, then you will surely hit it” is a good saying for marriage. If you are going to put hundreds of thousands of dollars and decades of your life into a marriage, then you should aim at something. You might hit it. You’re not just there to make another person feel good – you’re there to make the marriage serve God. Raising influential, effective children is one way of doing that. But it doesn’t happen by accident. And it isn’t necessarily going to be “fun”.

News

Should illegal immigrant children from Latin America be treated the same as those from Canada and Mexico?

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Charles Krauhammer in the Mercury News.

Excerpt:

As is his wont, President Obama is treating the border crisis — more than 50,000 unaccompanied children crossing illegally — as a public relations problem. Where to photo op and where not. He still hasn’t enunciated a policy. He may not even have one.

[…]These kids are being flown or bused to family members around the country and told to then show up for deportation hearings. Why show up? Why not just stay where they’ll get superior schooling, superior health care, superior everything? As a result, only 3 percent are being repatriated, to cite an internal Border Patrol memo.

Repatriate them? How stone-hearted, you say. After what they’ve been through? To those dismal conditions back home?

By that standard, with a sea of endemic suffering on every continent, we should have no immigration laws. Deny entry to no needy person.

But we do. We must. We choose. And immediate deportation is exactly what happens to illegal immigrants, children or otherwise, from Mexico and Canada. By what moral logic should there be a Central American exception?

And:

Stopping this wave is not complicated. A serious president would go to Congress tomorrow proposing a change in the law, simply mandating that Central American kids get the same treatment as Mexican kids, i.e., be subject to immediate repatriation.

Then do so under the most humane conditions. Buses with every amenity. Kids accompanied by nurses and social workers and interpreters and everything they need on board. But going home.

One thing is certain. When the first convoys begin rolling from town to town across Central America, the influx will stop.

When he began taking heat for his laxness and indecisiveness, Obama said he would seek statutory authority for eliminating the Central American loophole. Yet when he presented his $3.7 billion emergency package on Tuesday, it included no such proposal.

Without that, tens of thousands of kids will stay. Tens of thousands more will come.

Why do they come? The administration pretends it’s because of violence and poverty.

Nonsense. When has there not been violence and poverty in Central America? Yet this wave of children has doubled in size in the past two years and is projected to double again by October. The new variable is Obama’s unilateral (and lawless) June 2012 order essentially legalizing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came here as children.

Message received in Central America. True, this executive order doesn’t apply to those who came after June 15, 2007. But the fact remains that children coming across now are overwhelmingly likely to stay.

Do you know what would be interesting? I think it would be interesting if the people who feel that having the government giving money to the poor had their current net worth and future earnings confiscated to pay for the $17.5 trillion national debt that we have now. The rest of us who prefer to use the money we earn for other priorities, like apologetics and Christian ministry, can continue to oppose wasteful spending. I wonder how many of the do-gooders would take that offer? Let them pull their children out of high-priced universities and sell their expensive suburban homes to pay for the things their mouths speak about.

I have my own life to live. I don’t see the politicians sitting next to me at work helping me earn my salary. Why don’t they spend their own money on the things they care about, and leave me to spend mine on the things I care about? I don’t get up to go to work every day for secular socialist priorities.

News

Obama’s open border policy introduces risk of viral outbreak, infectious diseases

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Doctors and nurses at an alien detention camp are threatened with arrest if they talk about the risk of contagion from the influx of unaccompanied children into the U.S. Give us your poor, your tired, your infected.

Last weekend, at least two confirmed cases of the swine flu virus were detected in minors being held in two separate detainment facilities in South Texas, a stark reminder that the conditions created by President Obama’s orchestrated invasion of the U.S. are ripe for viral outbreaks that jeopardize the health of American citizens.

It was reported last week that at least one swine flu diagnosis cropped up at the makeshift immigrant-processing center at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. As reported by Fox News’ Todd Starnes, doctors and nurses working there were threatened with arrest if they talked about the appalling conditions and the health risks posed by such stopgap encampments.

Workers guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which was hired by the Department of Health and Human Services to run the Lackland Camp, said their cellphones and other communication devices were taken from them.

“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told Starnes.

“We were under orders not to say anything.”

But there’s much to talk about, and the administration is not telling us about the humanitarian crisis of its own making.

“Most of the border minors are being kept in overcrowded facilities ridden with poor hygiene,” Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, a preventive medicine specialist with practices in Tucson and Dallas, told Breitbart News last week, adding, “this is the ideal condition for a viral outbreak.”

[…]One worker told Starnes that children in the camp had measles, scabies, chicken pox and strep throat. Her concern was that the children had already been transported to Lackland from somewhere else. These unaccompanied minors are also being disbursed among the general population into the hands of adult relatives who are illegal aliens themselves.

[…]Border Patrol agents in Murietta, Calif., are testing positive for tuberculosis. Hand and foot disease, and Chagas, a tropical parasitic disease, both previously eradicated from the area, are on the rise. The possibility also exists in these conditions for diseases such as dengue and the Ebola virus to hit the U.S., considering that among the influx are illegals from Central and South America, the Middle East and even West Africa.

Is Obama to blame for this? He sure is.

Republicans also have said the surge in families with children and children traveling alone shows the Obama administration has not done enough to secure the border and can’t be trusted to carry out enhanced border security should Congress pass a comprehensive immigration bill that also offers legal status to undocumented immigrants.

The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction on immigration issues, has scheduled a June 25 hearing titled “An Administration-made Disaster: The South Texas Border Surge of Unaccompanied Alien Minors.”

“Word has gotten out around the world about President Obama’s lax immigration enforcement policies and it has encouraged more individuals to come to the United States illegally,” the committee said in a message posted Monday on its official Facebook page.

Other prominent Republicans have taken Obama to task for not making it clear that the incoming immigrants will have to return to their countries of origin.

“It’s the result of the president sending the message that if you can get here and you are a young person, you can stay,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told The Arizona Republic. “The president has got to openly say that if you come here illegally, you can’t stay. And until he does that, you’re going to see this flood of young people, which is absolutely unacceptable.”

Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., on Friday visited the Nogales detention facility, which he described as makeshift and reminiscent of the sort of emergency shelter the Federal Emergency Management Agency might erect after a natural disaster. He said he was barred from taking photos of the children, who he said were kept in cagelike chain-link enclosed spaces.

“I lay this all at the president’s feet,” said Salmon, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “It’s anything but compassionate to have a policy that seems to welcome people to cross over the desert and risk rape and loss of life and dehydration. … If President Obama really cares about families and children, then he should make it really clear that there is no amnesty here, and if you come, you will be immediately deported. That’s the only deterrent, because the waves are going to keep coming unless we clarify that.”

My biggest concerns about the border have always national security, violent criminal activity by illegals and the strain on the social services (education, emergency room health care, etc.) caused by people who don’t pay into the system, but only make withdrawals from it. I’d never even thought about this risk of communicable diseases.The Democrats favor lax immigration policies because they know that the children of naturalized illegal immigrants will be citizens, and are almost guaranteed to vote Democrat because they are the party of big government and dependency. Lax immigration policies make sense to Democrats, it’s how they increase their pool of support for bigger government.