Relax, a Mere 41,000 Illegal Immigrants Failed to Appear as Scheduled

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CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The U.S. has picked a long and difficult path to beating ISIS. Containment-plus.

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SLIDESHOW: Meet the Iraqi Army's newest gunship. The Mi-28 Havoc.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

September 26, 2014

Relax, a Mere 41,000 Illegal Immigrants Failed to Appear as Scheduled

The news cycle is pretty crowded, but meet your next big campaign-trail applause line: Our government should not agree to be a sucker when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Why, it's almost as if some people in our government think we shouldn't deport anyone at all:

Tens of thousands of young families caught crossing the border illegally earlier this year subsequently failed to meet with federal immigration agents, as they were instructed, the Homeland Security Department has acknowledged privately.

An official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that about 70 percent of immigrant families the Obama administration had released into the U.S. never showed up weeks later for follow up appointments.

Demote Harry Reid This Fall

The ICE official made the disclosure in a confidential meeting at its Washington headquarters with immigration advocates participating in a federal working group on detention and enforcement policies. The Associated Press obtained an audio recording of Wednesday's meeting and separately interviewed participants.

On the recording obtained by the AP, the government did not specify the total number of families released into the U.S. since October. Since only a few hundred families have already been returned to their home countries and limited U.S. detention facilities can house only about 1,200 family members, the 70 percent figure suggests the government released roughly 41,000 members of immigrant families who subsequently failed to appear at federal immigration offices.

The official, who was not identified by name on the recording obtained by the AP, also said final deportation had been ordered for at least 860 people traveling in families caught at the border since May but only 14 people had reported as ordered.

Speaking of government incompetence . . .

Four Years Later, Somebody Gets Indicted over That Lavish GSA Conference

The arc of the universe bends towards justice . . . but it also bends very, very slowly:

A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a former government official at the center of the General Services Administration's Las Vegas conference scandal on five counts of fraud.

Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of California said former GSA Western Regions Commissioner Jeffrey E. Neely fraudulently sought reimbursement for personal travel and expenses by submitting false claims. Only two counts relate to the Las Vegas conference, while the others are linked to travel to Long Beach, Calif, Guam and Saipan.

The indictment alleges that Neely, 59, of Garnerville, Nev., also lied when GSA employees questioned him about the spending, saying it was for government business.

That conference was in October 2010.

Funeral Services for the Anti-War Movement Will Be Held Next Week

Howard Kurtz writes the obituary of the anti-war movement. Born in 2003, the movement experienced sudden difficulties in January 2009, struggled and limped along for the past few years, and finally collapsed on the street in front of the White House last week:

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink was asked why so few on the left oppose Obama. "'He's totally defanged us,' she said, citing his party, his affability — and his race. 'The black community is traditionally the most antiwar community in this country. He's defanged that sentiment within the black community, or certainly voicing that sentiment.'"

Defanged. Wow, those are damning words.

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative who largely became an Obama booster, is equally incredulous:

"The way in which Obama supporters have lamely acquiesced to this reckless war fomented by a dangerous executive power-grab is more than a little depressing. It strikes me as uncomfortably close to pure partisanship. I can't imagine them downplaying the folly of this if a Republican president were in charge."

As Joe Weisenthal noted, Democrats largely abandoned the antiwar movement the moment Obama took office:

Commander Salamander, back in 2011: "There never was an anti-war movement. Deep down, I think -- most of us knew that anyway. It was an anti-Bush movement. War had nothing to do with it -- it was all about the Left finding a way to regain power."

And now for some end of the week Friday fun . . .

Part III of Television's Bygone Cult Hits: The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

For all of my favorite cult hits, the reason for their cancellation is pretty clear. Twin Peaks grew too weird. Max Headroom was too weird from the beginning. But for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, it wasn't that the show was weird or even bad; it was just very different from what the audience expected, based upon the title and main character.

Perhaps the show would have lasted more than two seasons if it hadn't been initially pitched to viewers as a weekly version of the adventures they enjoyed in the theaters. I remember watching the first commercial, during an ABC airing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it seemed like the greatest idea for a television show ever: "From riding with Pancho Villa . . . to the battlefields of World War I . . . to running guns up the Congo . . . he lives a life others only dream of!"

The series even had its own Drew Struzan poster. You may not recognize the name, but you've seen his work:

If the show been touted as "The Henry Jones Jr. Chronicles," maybe audiences would have tolerated the pacing that was much slower than the films, the much less frequent action scenes, and the lengthy history lessons. But audiences expected an action-adventure series with a bit of historical drama thrown in; Young Indy offered the reverse.

Perhaps in today's viewing world, with a lot of cable channels offering their own high-quality, big-budget, bold hour-long series with and without commercials, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles would have enjoyed a long run. Otherwise, the show offers a bit of an unnerving cautionary tale for storytellers who want to mash genres or defy audience expectations.

Those who fume about the Star Wars prequels might see Young Indy as a canary in the coal mine for George Lucas's storytelling instincts, as a lot of the prequel flaws pop up here: Odd pacing, long scenes of dialogue about politics, and glimmers of Lucas's future heavy-handed preachiness. Slavery is bad, okay? Hunters shouldn't hunt species to extinction. Women and minorities should be respected. War is bad, m'kay?

But even with the flaws, there's still a lot to love about this bygone show. For starters, even if audiences didn't get a weekly one-hour Indiana Jones movie, they still got a weekly one-hour movie, with lots of on-location shooting in places like Mexico, central Africa, Egypt, and the Alps, elaborate period sets with dozens of extras, and often decent actors and future stars playing historical figures.

Elizabeth Hurley, Daniel Craig, Catherine Zeta Jones, Max Von Sydow . . .

The whole thing must have cost a fortune; the show looks fantastic and feels authentic. Episode after episode takes viewers to a time and place that made for awesome settings: The World War I battlefields of Verdun, Thomas Edison's workshop, the archeological digs of Howard Carter, Moscow as the Communist revolution takes hold. All the ingredients for a hit arrived on set.

I'm struck that Sean Patrick Flannery never quite reached stardom, despite this desperately underrated performance, with the whole world expecting a young version of Harrison Ford.

You could sense George Lucas's irritation with viewer expectation in the interviews touting the second season, all but begging the audience to stop waiting for rolling boulders. It wasn't supposed to be the Indy we already knew; it was the story of a kid growing from naïveté, to youthful idealism, to idealistic patriotism, to cynicism and disgust with the atrocities of war, to a return to some restored faith in the world.

Lucas recently re-released the series on DVD, sometimes awkwardly editing two episodes into one longer movie. This has some flaws, as new form usually features "bridging" scenes with actors Corey Carrier (Indy, age 9-ish) and Flannery (teenage Indy), taped several years later. Perhaps most egregiously, the new format chops up the original pilot episode that featured two stories revolving around the same relic.

But the new form does give a clearer sense of how Indy was supposed to grow. The gist is that as a teenager, Indy went to visit his cousin in Arizona and they crossed the border into Mexico, looking for fun and trouble. The town was raided by Pancho Villa and his band, and Indy first becomes a prisoner, then a recruit to Villa's army. From there, Indy runs off to join the Belgian Army in World War I, survives a wide range of dangerous adventures in Europe and Africa, and doesn't see his father until the war ends. After the war, he has a few adventures readjusting to American life. One of the last episodes, set after the closing minutes of World War I, features Indy and his bumbling, rotund Belgian sidekick Remy hunting for a giant diamond called the Peacock's Eye -- which later is featured in a scene at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Plinkett of Red Letter Media, in his lengthy, off-color dissection of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, offered the idea that Indiana Jones fans don't really care about Indy as a character – where he came from, what his ultimate fate is -- they just want to be him.

Perhaps. But there was potential there for a fascinating character, even if that character was different from the guy with the fedora we first met in the Amazonian jungle in 1980.

ADDENDA: Don't forget to drop by the Heritage Foundation today!

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