Sunday roundup

California Governor Jerry Brown is working full steam to obliterate what is left of this country's sovereignty - not to mention the last shreds of anything like a free-market approach to health care:

California legislators have passed a bill which would allow illegal immigrants to purchase insurance on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The bill first has to be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and then the change would need to be approved by the federal government.

If approved, the change would break another promise made by President Obama when selling the law to Americans. During a 2009 address to Congress Obama said, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.” He added, “This too is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” That was when Rep. Joe Wilson famously interjected, “You lie!” The break in decorum earned him an official rebuke. 

According to U.S. News and World Report, just two years after the program took effect it looks like the president’s promise is about to be undone in America’s largest state:

Obamacare explicitly bars people in the country illegally from its provisions, but a loophole called the “innovation waiver” allows for states to change portions of the law, as long as they make coverage available to more people and as long as the federal government doesn’t have to pick up the tab, among other requirements. The bill, which would require that a request for a waiver be filed, first must be approved by the state legislature and the governor before the waiver can be considered by the federal government.

Though the California bill does not come with federal subsidies that make health insurance more affordable to low- and middle-income people, critics fear it’s heading that way.

“This is a two-step process: Open the door to the exchanges, but when no one can afford to buy insurance you come back and add the subsidies,” says Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “This is the first step in another misrepresentation of the Affordable Care Act. It was sold to the American people on the fact that you wouldn’t have to subsidize health care for illegal immigrants.”

Speaking of illegal aliens:

The Boston Globe did the legwork here and what they have found is pretty insane:

They were among the nation’s top priorities for deportation, criminals who were supposed to be sent back to their home countries. But instead they were released, one by one, in secret across the United States. Federal officials said that many of the criminals posed little threat to the public, but did little to verify whether that was true.

It wasn’t.

A Globe review of 323 criminals released in New England from 2008 to 2012 found that as many as 30 percent committed new offenses, including rape, attempted murder, and child molestation — a rate that is markedly higher than Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have suggested to Congress in the past.

The names of these criminals have never before been made public and are coming to light now only because the Globe sued the federal government for the list of criminals immigration authorities returned to neighborhoods across the country. A judge ordered the names released in 2013, and the Globe then undertook the work that the federal government didn’t, scouring court records to find out how many released criminals reoffended.

Are you freaking kidding me? It’s bad enough the criminals were released. The idea the government failed to follow up to see if they reoffended is absolutely inexcusable. The Globe published a searchable database that I suppose victims can use in order to make sure the criminals aren’t still walking the streets.

It gets worse:

The public rarely learns about ICE’s decisions to release criminals until something goes wrong — because immigration is the only law enforcement system in the United States that keeps such records secret.

ICE maintains that immigration records are generally private, and therefore exempt from disclosure under federal law. But others say the public should know who is making these decisions and why.

“There’s a serious question of who ICE represents. Who do they work for?” said Chester Fairlie, a lawyer for the mother of Casey Chadwick, a Connecticut woman murdered last year by a released criminal — a case that is intensifying calls for reform in ICE. “Public safety should trump any claim of privilege or confidentiality. It doesn’t come from statute. It doesn’t come from law. It comes from ICE deciding that that’s how it’s going to do things.”

ICE of course, claims they are powerless to do anything because of a Supreme Court ruling that says the government is not allow to indefinitely detain immigrants. The problem would be easier to solve however, if ICE didn’t treat their records though the information contained within them is classified.

ICE was ordered to release those records and what it did was shine a light on what turns out to be egregious lies:

Clear answers are hard to come by in a system that aggressively keeps its records from the public.

For example, ICE had insisted in court records that reoffenders were “isolated examples.” To Congress, ICE officials suggested that reoffenders were rare, less than 10 percent.

But the reoffender rate among the immigrants on the Globe’s list is clearly much higher, at 30 percent.

I'll let John Hinderer at Power Line speak for me on the matter of Muhammed Ali:

Ali precipitated a shocking and apparently permanent decline in sportsmanship. The bragging and taunting that mars so many sports today can be traced directly to the antics of Ali. (Along the same lines, recently someone argued that we owe rap music to the infantile poetry Ali used to spout, barely with a straight face).

Ali’s admirers prefer not mention his true non-ring legacy, but when asked they don’t deny it. Today, the great college basketball coach turned sports talk host, John Thomspon, asked sports columnist Dave Kindred (author of a book on Ali and his clownish partner, Howard Cosell) whether Ali is to blame for the trash-talking that goes on in sports. Kindred said he is, but argued that it doesn’t detract from Ali’s legacy because, unlike today’s athletes, Ali did it good-naturedly and for fun.

Kindred has it exactly backwards. Today’s taunting — mostly celebratory in nature — is much better-natured than, for example, the kind of race-baiting through which Ali attacked Joe Frazier and others. And though today’s athletes may taunt each other non-stop during the game, they embrace and enjoy a laugh when the contest is over. 

Ali was not an embracer or a laugher. Often, he was as nasty and ungracious after the fight as before it. If you check out the almost unwatchable tape of Ali and Cosell reviewing the film of the Ali-Ernie Terell fight, you will hear a whiney, sulky, vindictive man-child who bears no relationship to the MSSM’s Ali.

I haven’t mentioned Ali’s politics, and it’s probably unfair to attack someone for the views he held at age 25. But Ali’s politics — his opposition to racial injustice and his refusal to serve his country during the Vietnam War — are at the heart of the plaudits he’s receiving these days from the MSSM and, indeed, the MSM. 

Thus, it’s fair to notice Ali’s embrace of Elijah Muhammad’s racist and criminal Black Muslim enterprise, and his willingness (assuming he had a choice) to be manipulated by it. Other high profile black athletes turned radical during the same era in an understandable response to the great injustices of the day. But to my knowledge, Ali was the only such athlete who threw in with the abominable Elijah Muhammad.

Hating one's own humanity is now all the fashion:

risten Stewart, the actor, is photographed at Cannes holding hands with her ex-girlfriend Alicia Cargile. Supermodel Cara Delevingne kisses her girlfriend, the singer St Vincent, on the front row at London fashion week. Seventeen-year-old Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg uses the Teen VogueSnapchat account to describe how “bruising” it has been “fighting against my identity as a black bisexual woman”. Model, DJ and actor Ruby Rose describes herself as “very gender fluid”, adding: “I feel more like I wake up every day sort of gender neutral.”

Twenty years ago these stories would have been accompanied by prurient “oohs” and much vivid speculation over what message these women were trying to send. Today such moments are everywhere, a sign that increasingly we define ourselves in less structured, more mutable ways.

And nowhere is that more true than within the millennial generation. Last week a survey of 33,728 Americans published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviourstated that there had been a huge increase in the number of people reporting same-sex experiences, and alongside this, a greater acceptance of people’s sexuality. The study concluded that 49% of all adults and 63% of millennials “expressed tolerance of these relationships”.

“It’s clear that people under a certain age are much more comfortable not just with same-sex relationships but with bisexuality, gender-fluidity and all sorts of other ways of living that fall outside the traditional binaries of straight and gay, male and female,” says journalist Laurie Penny, who describes herself as bisexual and genderqueer.

David Harsanyi at The Federalist says Libertarians, as always in need of alliances in order to swell the ranks of their voters, are squandering the chance to appeal to social conservatives.