Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty July 8, 2014 Let's Show Some Compassion at the Border . . . for American Citizens, Too! Of course: President Obama is holding off for now on seeking new legal authority to send unaccompanied migrant kids back home faster from the Southern border, following criticism that the administration's planned changes were too harsh. The Acela Corridor Establishment's conventional wisdom is that "comprehensive immigration reform" ought to legalize the 11 million or so in the country illegally. The same crowd now insists any proposal involving sending the kids back to their home countries is insufficiently compassionate. How about some compassion for the communities currently trying to deal with the tsunami of unattended children? Here's how the AP describes one stretch of our border in Mission, Texas: The influx of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has grown so large that it now requires its own transportation system: government buses that spend each night idling on a Texas roadside, awaiting the latest arrivals . . . Just since October, the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector has made more than 194,000 arrests, nearly triple that of any other sector. In the first week of June alone, agents in this area south of Mission arrested more than 2,800 people, most from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, making it the highest-volume arrest zone on the entire U.S. border. More than 60 percent were children . . . Across the river is a garbage dump and a Reynosa slum that reaches nearly to the bank. Smoke from burning garbage sometimes drifts across the river so thick it's difficult to see. At the river's edge, discarded pieces of clothing, orange life vests and deflated inner tubes litter the sand. A few days earlier, as a reporter in a kayak approached a hairpin bend in the river, a cartel sentry on a bluff 20 feet above the river slammed a magazine into his assault rifle. He asked where the paddler had come from and who gave him permission to be there. A radio squawked at his waist. The cartel controls what crosses the river. That's part of why Napoleon Garza doesn't bring his kids here to fish like he did as a child. Garza recently drove through one of the many gaps in the border wall to cut a tree stump from property owned by his uncle. "When they built the border wall, everything ended because they left a big old gap right here that so happened to be where our land is," said Garza, 38, who sells firewood for a living. How about some compassion for the U.S. Border Patrol personnel trying to humanely deal with a problem they were never trained to address? Suddenly they have to do the job of the Centers for Disease Control as well: Approximately 40 immigrants in detention at one center in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's San Diego Sector have active cases of scabies, a source tells National Review Online, and they could soon be spreading it to the general public. A Border Patrol agent who helped process illegal immigrants at the Chula Vista Border Patrol Station on Sunday tells NRO that the 40 immigrants infected with scabies arrived on a plane that landed July 4, carrying about 140 immigrants total. The agent says the people at FEMA who are responsible for doing the medical screening of the immigrants before they're transferred to California should be fired. "Management's more concerned about processing and getting rid of them as quickly as possible than looking at decontamination," the agent says. "And [the released illegal immigrants] go out in the community, get on the public transportation, go where they need to go, and it could result in another infestation of scabies being spread everywhere." But the San Diego Sector was already dealing with a scabies outbreak when the latest batch of illegal immigrants arrived. Two agents at the Brown Field Border Patrol Station developed rashes on July 3 after processing illegal immigrants from Texas, according to a letter obtained by NRO written by Ron Zermeno, health and safety director of National Border Patrol Council Local 1613. Zermeno confirmed the veracity of the letter and the facts contained therein to NRO. How about a proposal that anybody who wants these kids to stay in the United States has to open their home to them? The loudest Acela Corridor advocates of "comprehensive immigration reform" live their lives far from sustained contact with any actual illegal immigrants. Perhaps there's an outside chance that they employ some illegal immigrants as gardeners or housekeepers. Perhaps they bus or wait the tables at their favorite restaurants. But they live very far from the problems that mass illegal immigration brings. They certainly don't face downward pressure on wages from illegal immigrants getting paid under the table. They don't encounter gangs. They live far from the violence and their only encounter with a drug cartel is a secretive encounter with their smuggled product. Here's another proposal: If Obama gets the $2 billion he wants to build the infrastructure to process these illegal immigrants, the holding facilities have to be built in places like Hyde Park in Chicago, the Upper West Side in Manhattan, Billionaire's Row in San Francisco and Marin County, California, Burlington, Vermont . . . Is China Another Bomb Waiting to Go Off? When I run into Ambassador John Bolton in the Fox News green room -- which is increasingly frequently -- I ask him, "Okay, what part of the world is keeping you up at night now?" Last time he answered with a chuckle, "Oh, the usual . . . all of them." We've watched chaos, violence, and tension in a long list of trouble spots lately: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel and its neighbors, North Korea, Nigeria, Mexico and our southern border . . . It's easy to forget China in all that. But the news is ominous over there, too: As Chinese and Vietnamese ships ram each other in the contested waters, and Chinese and Japanese fighter jets play games of chicken in Asia's disputed skies, the risk of military escalation is growing. Even more significantly, the standoff is generating bad blood between Washington and Beijing and could torpedo cooperation on important global issues, including the Middle East, climate change and nuclear proliferation . . . "U.S.-China relations are worse than they have been since the normalization of relations, and East Asia today is less stable than at any time since the end of the Cold War," said Robert Ross, a political science professor at Boston College and associate of Harvard's John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Today is the official publication date for Act of War, the new novel from Brad Thor, a fearless conservative and friend of Morning Jolt. I don't think I'm spoiling too much to say that Thor's latest features the Chinese government up to no good . . . and surprisingly willing to make provocative and dangerous decisions. We're used to thinking of China as a rising superpower, with an increasingly advanced military and the resources of a rapidly expanding economy and about a billion people. But Thor's book wonders aloud if the conventional portrait of an increasingly strong and confident China is wrong. What if they're weaker and have bigger problems than we can see? What if their leadership actually growing more fearful and desperate? For starters, China's invested heavily in Iraq . . . an investment that may go up in flames depending upon how the fight with ISIS develops: Beijing is Baghdad's biggest customer for oil exports, in part because Chinese firms were willing to accept lower profit margins, play by the central government's rules, and tolerate the security risks created by the country's political instability. Now, with Iraq on the brink and militants threatening an invasion of Baghdad, China may have the most to lose. Chinese state-owned firms have invested a total of $10 billion in the country. The state-owned energy giant, China National Petroleum Corporation, is the single largest foreign investor in Iraq's oil sector. Iraq is China's fifth largest oil supplier. Between 10,000 and 15, 000 workers, in addition to the ones being rescued today, are still in the country. China went through a similar lost investment and endangered workers in Libya in 2011. It is surpassing us as the world's largest oil importer this year, and their
largest oil fields are mature and prone to declining production. Oh, and there's also the big looming problem of "reduced ability to grow food in China. About 20% of China's agricultural land is already polluted, rivers are drying up or being diverted for industrial use, and these problems are only getting worse." What happens when you add up a huge population, dwindling domestic resources, key foreign investments going up in flames, volatile relationships with neighboring countries and a paranoid, autocratic leadership that enjoys saber-rattling at the best of times? I don't know, but I fear we're about to find out. Oh, and remember, we owe them $1.3 trillion or so. IKEA's 'No Firearms' Policy, Protecting You from the Menace of Off-Duty, In-Uniform Police Chiefs Sure, you may think you have heard the dumbest "no firearms allowed" policy story of all time. I'll bet this one tops the worst you've ever heard: In 35 years in law enforcement, says the Takoma Park Police chief, he's never had this happen. He's never had a store tell him that he would have to leave his service weapon in the car or leave the store -- especially when he was in his police uniform. But that's what happened July 4 in the Ikea in College Park, where Takoma Park Police Chief Alan Goldberg had stopped in with his daughter. Goldberg was in uniform because he had worked that morning at the city's July 4 parade, and would be back on duty that night for fireworks. In between, he stopped at Ikea to shop for furniture for his daughter's new apartment. And that's when a loss-prevention officer at the store approached him.
"He says we have a no firearms policy, and you're either going to have to leave or you can lock your gun in the car," Goldberg said. The store has signs posted on the front door that read "Weapons Free Environment." Neither of those options seemed a good one to the officer. "It isn't the most prudent thing to do to walk around the store in uniform with an empty holster," he said. "And I am not going to lock my gun in a commercial parking lot, with people watching me put it in there. That's just ludicrous." The chief demanded to see the store's written policy, but he only got it today after News4 contacted Ikea. The retailer released this statement: We regret that there was a misunderstanding of our weapon policy in our College Park Store. Our weapon policy does not apply to law enforcement officers. We are taking steps to ensure that this is clear for all our co-workers. In that IKEA employee's defense, if there is an attempted robbery of the store, all IKEA employees are trained to defend themselves with giant Allen wrenches . . . 
. . . and then detain the would-be robber in an easily-assembled elegant light wood cage: 
ADDENDA: I guess this is not the internal poll that New York Democrat Sean Eldridge was hoping to find this morning: I'm told that the secret Global Strategy poll confirmed that and that for all that money spent—$965,000 from his own checkbook—"poor" Sean was losing miserably—in the vicinity of just 25 percent of the vote to [Rep. Chris] Gibson's 60 percent. A Wall Street Journal contributor runs the numbers and calculates that Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most unread best-selling book of the year. . . . Reminder: My friend Patricia Rucker is still fighting to become a West Virginia state delegate. Help her out if you can . . .
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