Thursday various & sundry

Off prompter, Obama bares his statist soul: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Of course he thinks that. When it comes to other peoples’ money. But he certainly seems to enjoy his own wealth. Edited to add JP Friere’s take on Obama’s $5 million-plus income.

An aside from Andy McCarthy’s immigration piece:

In his spare time, on April 8, President Obama signed an arms-reduction treaty with Russia. He urges swift ratification of the accord even though, as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton observes, important provisions are still being negotiated. In the spirit of the times, though, the pact would become the law of the land before those details are finalized, while its authors either don’t know what it says or are lying about it. Administration officials told Arizona Republican Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain — who will be central to the Senate’s ratification debate — that the treaty referred to missile defense only in the hortatory, non-binding preamble. Yet when the senators looked at the treaty’s binding terms, they found, right there in black and white, a provision (Art. V, para. 3) that would require the United States to refrain from placing “defense interceptors” in existing missile launchers — a severe compromise of American national security.

Read the whole thing.

In Quincy, IL, it’s the riot squad vs. your gramma. There must have been a threat we’re not privy to, right? But the photos tell a story of, er, a disproportionate response. Supply your own bingo/peach cobbler jokes.

Too bad more of that strength hasn’t been applied at our borders.  Gov. Jan Brewer makes an impregnable case for signing Arizona’s new law: The federal government dropped the ball, and her state’s citizens are being harmed.

Brewer, on whether AZ feels “abandoned” by nat’l leaders on immigration: “Since I’ve been governor since last January, I have written numerous letters to the administration in regards to securing our borders with absolutely no response. So we have been facing this crisis, and it’s devastating the people of Arizona. And I feel as governor I have a responsibility to protect the citizens. We’ve been inundated with criminal activity. It’s been outrageous.”

More Brewer: “And we’re not going to put up with it any longer. And I hope that now we’ve got senate bill 1070 signed and ready to go into law that we’ll get somebody’s attention. But it is the federal government’s responsibility to secure our borders. Our states cannot sustain it.”

Brewer, on Obama calling the bill “misguided”: “He has a right to say whatever he wants to say. But ‘misguided’ — I think he’s wrong. I have a responsibility to the people of Arizona. And I’m sure he’s concerned because of the brouhaha and over-dramatic comments about racial profiling. I made perfectly clear when I signed the bill that we would not tolerate racial profiling. It’s illegal.”

And even before he became president, Obama was a force against, rather than for, securing our borders. Jennifer Rubin quotes Lynn Sweet from 2008:

“When it came time to putting that bill together, he was more of a problem than he was a help. And when it came time to try to get the bill passed, he, in my opinion, broke the agreement we had. He was in the photo op, but he could not execute the hard part of the deal,” Graham said,” Graham said.

J-Ru comments:

So will Broder add Obama to the list of culprits? Well, here’s an easy way for Obama to redeem himself: have the McCain-Kennedy bill reintroduced and fight for its passage. After all, there is a large Democratic majority now. Or does Obama want an issue, and not a bill? We’ll find out whether he’s up to his old tricks — or whether he really is interested in solving the immigration problem, which Arizona and the other states must cope with.

I think we all know the answer to that one.

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