LA must discourage "sanctuary" to help public safety

Under the radar until a horrific event, Sen. David Vitter’s largely lonely crusade to compel cities to put public safety before ideology now may play a visible role in the campaign for Louisiana governor this year.

Recently, a woman in San Francisco was killed seemingly randomly allegedly by an illegal alien with a long rap sheet of violent crime, deported five times. But he had been under city detention fewer than three months previously – except that San Francisco, as part of the “sanctuary movement,” long ago began to refuse to forward information about illegal immigrants it detains to the federal government, even though legally local law enforcement agencies must do so. Following the law enables the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to take custody of and deport them.

It’s no accident that “sanctuary cities,” or those like San Francisco with an official policy of law enforcement not asking about citizenship status, are larger cities with higher proportions of immigrants that have higher crime rates. Given that population studies of the nation’s jails show these contain disproportionately more non-citizens than their incidence in the general population, and that a sample of diverse local jurisdictions reveals the proportion of illegal aliens jailed is much higher than their estimated population proportion, it’s likely that sanctuary cities (which would not keep citizenship statistics) have even higher and more disproportionate numbers of illegal aliens imprisoned. While the valid data about this are uncoordinated, overall they point to increased numbers of illegal aliens elevate criminal activity.

Uncertainty should make ganja law go up in smoke

So Louisiana finally took the plunge this regular session and went for making dispensing of medical marijuana in the state a future reality. Except that, as things turned out, regardless of the law it may be impossible to do it with no good reason to do it anyway.

While the state actually has had on the books the concept of legal medical marijuana for almost a quarter of a century, until this year a legal mechanism to distribute it was missing. That changed with the enacting of Act 261, which lays out details for the growing of it, the process to prescribe it, and how to dispense it, with three different agencies to issue appropriate regulations to fill in the blanks.

Unfortunately, this rendition seems to have created more questions and ambiguity than it was intended to resolve. The law gives first dibs on production to Louisiana State University or Southern University, and that the LSU Agricultural Center seems willing to undertake this at one of its 19 locations in the state. But this looks only to cover the cultivation of it, not the processing into one common medicinal use forms, oil (the law prohibits the form of rolled leaves designed for smoking or any other raw or crude variant such as in flakes).

CSA symbols, used rightly, promote understanding

Like herpes, the manufactured conflict of the display of the (Third) Confederate (Battle) Flag keeps coming back, but in the latest outbreak including the passengers of Confederate memorials of any kind. Ironically, reactions to a repressive regime of the past invite a different kind of repression.

The latest controversy, kicked off by a tragic mass murder in a South Carolina church, quickly descended into nonsense when that led to intensified cries to banish the flag from polite society. Never mind that the alleged killer didn’t burst into the house of worship and proceed to impale people with poles with that flag hanging from them; the only connection the flag had to the incident was he was pictured with one and he appears to be a white supremacist (having tried and discarded other extreme views). In particular, complainers wanted these flags removed from government property.

As this space has noted previously, flying this flag as a singular symbol adds nothing to the public weal. While it can represent admirable qualities of a society over which it flew, the fact is it also was the banner of a breakaway enterprise set against many other admirable qualities of American society and, as its leaders admitted, primarily because they wanted to continue slavery. So it if one wants to celebrate certain values, why not choose to fly the American flag, which has the presumed same positive aspects as any version of the Confederate flag, minus the baggage of condoning slavery?

Sociopathic left ramping up its hatred of Jindal

It’s a reflection of the impoverishment of liberalism that explains why Gov. Bobby Jindal rankles so much its faithful, if somewhat less balanced, followers.

Last week, the Jindal campaign asked Twitter enrollees to send in questions to him that he could address at a campaign appearance. A few sent were useful and a few others provocative, but serious in intent in both cases. Yet many were unserious and hateful, which begs the question of why a relatively low-polling Republican candidate for president would trigger such emotional, thoughtless responses.

It’s because, as this space pointed out long ago when it became clear Jindal would win the 2007 governor’s contest, that Jindal articulates well conservative themes and he is from an ethnic minority group. Worse for those of the immature bent, since then increasingly he has addressed issues that unmistakably reflect his evangelical Catholicism.