Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed SB 1070 into law last Friday. Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the ACLU and others insist the law is unconstitutional. Even our misguided President declared it “misguided” and said the DOJ would look into the legality of the new law.

Most of the concerns that have been voiced are disingenuous and completely without merit. This is a summary of a rebuttal to those lies published in an editorial yesterday in the N.Y. Times, believe it or not. The author, Kris W. Kobach, is a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. He served as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.

Here are the major points and the rebuttal to each:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them.

The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements. Since the federal laws aren’t being enforced, this provision is necessary and fair.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct.

The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Nobody will be randomly stopped unless there is this totality of circumstances suspicion.

If a police officer pulls over a minivan for a traffic violation and it is crammed with a bunch of people of any color or race, the officer may have reasonable suspicion that the driver is a ‘coyote’ and the passengers are being transported illegally in a known area of immigrant smuggling.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling.

Actually, Section 2 of SB 1070 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license.

Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents, native or alien, to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.

State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter.

While it is true that Federal authorities hold primary responsibility for immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being preempted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.

The hysteria continues as open-border politicians condemn what amounts to actual enforcement of Federal statutes in existence. When the Feds let you down, do what you have to do to restore actual Law and Order.

Ramírez gets it right again . . .

Step One: Sign the petition.
Step Two: Share with everyone on your Facebook pages.
Step Three: Use the ‘I Support Arizona’ image on your Facebook and Twitter profiles.

When I signed it, there were already over 30,000 signatures.

Sign the petition at this link. You can read the bill (pdf) at this link.

Via The Patriot Post:

President Obama called the Arizona [immigration] law misguided. What’s misguided, Mr. President, is the federal government’s ongoing refusal to enforce the laws that are already on the books.

Read the Arizona law. Parts of it are word-for-word the same as the federal statutes which continue to be all but ignored.

 - CNN’s Jack Cafferty

Emphasis mine.

As a future resident of Arizona, I emailed Governor Jan Brewer and congratulated her on the Arizona immigration enforcement law and the Arizona Constitutional Carry law.

My moth orchids seem to be even more beautiful this year than the string I got last year. Click on the image to enlarge.

Stormy weather ahead . . .

I really don’t know the official name for these tiny orchids, but I have these orange ones, some yellow ones and some purple ones growing on the patio this week. Click on the image to enlarge.

The German name translates into ’spring gold.’ These beautiful canary yellow spider-like flowers have been coming to our patio for the last two years.

We acquired the original epiphyllum cutting from our local botanic garden in 2008. It produced a couple of flowers soon after we got it home. This year it’s on track to have a dozen or more flowers.

I took this shot this morning on the patio just as soon as the sun peeked through the clouds. Click on the image to enlarge.

It looks like I will be getting a lot of these beautiful hot pink cactus flowers this spring and summer. There are dozens of buds on the peanut cactus this year. Click on the image to enlarge.

One major consideration in Shopping Homes is the crime risk in areas where we might decide to settle. I found a real estate appraisal website, eppraisal.com, where area demographics for a given locale may be found. The crime data that they use is almost ten years old, so it has likely changed some; the data came from year 2000 census statistics. I’m sure that the crime rates, even though they may have changed, will have remained in proportion to those shown.

I chose to compare between Phoenix, the largest city in Arizona, Tucson, second largest and two neighboring smaller towns, one close to Phoenix and one close to Tucson. The numbers in the graphs are incidents per 10,000 people and break down to Personal and Property crimes. (We tend to take property crimes personal, however, but that’s beside the point.)

First, let’s look at Tucson and Marana, both in the southern Valley of the Sun and in Pima County. Interstate 10 runs through or beside both, and both are considered good places to retire. Both towns have a fairly high property crime rate but have a relatively low violent crime rate when compared to cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

Note that the scale and the personal property crimes are considerably higher than in Tucson proper. Auto theft and burglaries seem to be the major problem in Marana and, to a lesser extent, in Tucson.

Next, let’s look at Phoenix and Wickenburg, closer to the center of Arizona and both in Maricopa County (think Sheriff Joe). Phoenix and the surrounding area are also considered to be nice places to retire. Again, the Phoenix Metro area experiences a lot of property crimes and has been growing in personal crimes due to illegal aliens and drug cartel problems. Wickenburg is isolated from the Northwest Phoenix metro area by virtue of a small range of hills and a distance of about thirty-five miles from the town of Surprise, AZ. Us Highway 60 connects the two.

The vertical scales are different between these two graphs, but inspecting the numbers reveal a very low rate of both personal and property crimes in Wickenburg. We’re inclined to believe that the combination of lower new home prices and lower crime rates makes Wickenburg our very likely choice.

Scott Adams and the Dilbert crew nail the manner in which this administration reports statistics.

These images are just astounding . . .

April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

Be sure to click on the image above to view full-size and then go to the SDO Website.