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Joe Boscia| For The Times

First, voting is both a privilege and an obligation. To not vote is an abrogation of our responsibility as a citizen, and jeopardizes the type of elected government officials our nation needs. So please vote.

Second, it is not enough to just cast a ballot. Our vote must be an informed one. And that means doing our homework ahead of time. People who say they will decide when they get into the voting booth are uninformed and poor citizens. There are too many politicians pushing the need to make it easy to vote, but they never stress the requirement to vote intelligently.

No one should tell us who to vote for. That should be our choice. But that also means we should not just vote the way our parents or friends do, or simply along straight party lines. Our first president, George Washington, warned against political parties, because they become too powerful, and create permanent politicians, instead of citizen representatives. That prophecy has certainly come true. We have term limits for the office of president, but desperately need it for Congress.

Our presidential choice this year is between two very flawed candidates, so what should we do? I suggest we look at issues, and not the person. Read the party platforms, and look at the candidates past records. And look at their current stand on issues. Have they flip-flopped from what they said and believed in the past?

Will they and the people backing them bring you the kind of America you want to live in?

Here is a list of issues to consider. It is not all-inclusive. You may want to change the order around or add issues. But think about each issue carefully, and how each candidate will address it. Then make your choice.

This really is the most important election in a lifetime. So do a good job of being a responsible citizen.

Supreme Court picks. Will the candidate pick justices who will follow the Constitution as written, or make rulings based on their own beliefs or todays social opinions? Will the justices try to create laws from the bench, rather than leaving that to Congress? Remember, the picks will influence America for decades, as justices serve for life. This also applies to other federal judges they appoint.

National defense and terrorism. Is the candidate strong in these areas and will build an effective, balanced, and right-size military? Will he/she be tough on opponents and terrorists, not afraid but not precipitous in the use of force, but once used, use it overwhelmingly, and not incrementally?

Law and order, crime and drugs. Is the candidate strong against crime and drugs, and believe that there is no excuse for looting, burning and harming police, while still against unwarranted police actions? Does he/she believe that drug pushers need to be strongly dealt with, and drug users discouraged, or that these are non-violent crimes that should be leniently treated?

Governments role. Does the candidate believe the government is the servant of the people or the answer to all problems? Does he/she believe the federal government should be small, and leave many roles to the states, or build a bureaucracy of unelected government employees?

The economy. Does the candidate believe our private enterprise, capitalist system is the best, with the federal government only inserting itself when there are excesses, or believe the federal government should dictate the economy?

Does the candidate promote real jobs growth of well-paying positions created by the private economy, or phony stimulus programs that do not create long term, well-paying private sector jobs?

Does the candidate advocate a high minimum wage, in spite of evidence that it cuts jobs, especially for those at that job level?

Social issues. Is the candidate socially conservative and believes in the traditional family and morality as constant, or social activism and situational morality? Is the candidate for the rights of unborn children or womens choice?

Race relations. Does the candidate denounce intolerance, bigotry, and racism, while emphasizing that minorities have responsibilities to address the breakdown of minority families, absence of fathers, crime, antagonism toward police, etc.? Does he/she profess that all lives matter?

National debt and the deficit. Does the candidate have a viable plan to substantially reduce both, but especially the deficit, and is the candidate strongly committed to doing so? If not, he/she is mortgaging our future.

Immigration. Does the candidate believe anyone should be allowed into the country, no matter how they get here, or where they come from, or that illegal immigration needs to be stopped once and for all? What is his/her plan for the millions of illegals already here, especially the violent criminal ones? Does the candidate want to give free college education and healthcare to illegals, while you pay for yours? Does the candidate support Kates Law?

Sanctuary cities. Does the candidate condone sanctuary cities, or believe they need to be dismantled?

Government regulation. Should the government do more or less regulating our lives and businesses? Does the candidate believe that the increased regulations are stifling business growth, or necessary? Does he/she use environmental regulations in such a way as to kill business?

The environment. Does the candidate believe that while we have responsibilities to protect the environment, government actions must be balanced with common sense, restraint, and protection of business, the economy and society?

Personal integrity. Is the candidate a person of strong personal integrity, whose personal and professional life is above reproach? There is no such thing as personal performance being irrelevant to professional actions, such aslying, cheating, untrustworthiness, etc.

EEO/AA. Does the candidate believe that EEO and AA efforts are reverse discrimination and no longer used for their original intent, or they are still necessary?

2nd Amendment. Does the candidate support the right to bear arms, with reasonable limits, or that guns, not people, cause crime? Does he/she support actions like an assault weapons ban in lieu of the real problem of illegal gun sales and use, especially in our inner cities?

School choice. Does the candidate believe that the best way to stimulate better schools is to create competition through school choice, teacher performance systems, and parents who encourage learning? Or does he/she want to keep the ineffectual status quo, because the candidate is beholden to the teacher unions?

College environment. Does the candidate believe college is a learning environment where students should be exposed to ideas from the conservative and liberal sides or a protected place where activist professors and students impose their ideas on everyone and brook no disagreement? Do the colleges encourage teaching professors, or publishing and activist professors?

College tuition. Does the candidate promote college as a right that should be free, and college loans waived or lessened, or a privilege that should be equally paid for? Does the candidate believe that the cost of college is to a large degree the fault of college administrations that hike tuition all out of proportion to inflation, and spend money on sports that should be spent on academics?

Unions. Does the candidate support and seek support from unions, especially teacher and public employee unions?

Joe Boscia, a former infantry officer, is a resident of Beaver.

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Guest Op-Ed: Deciding your vote: Some thoughts on voting in upcoming election - The Times

This years protests in Portland and Bend, Ore., have many wondering how the Beaver States increasingly radicalized left will cope if President Trump is re-elected. After the 2016 election, a group of Oregonians submitted a petition for a ballot measure asking voters to consider secession. It went nowhere, but this year could be different. A 2017 Zogby poll concluded that a plurality of Americans (39%) believe states have a right to secede, so perhaps the idea isnt far-fetched.

Rioters in Portland laid siege to the citys federal courthouse for more than two months this summer. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who failed to control the chaos, is facing a serious re-election challenge from Sarah Iannarone, an avowed antifa supporter, who has outraised him and could win the nonpartisan contest.

But Portland isnt the only place in Oregon that seems to be drifting further from what passes for normal in the U.S. Consider the hysterical reaction of locals and election officials in Bend when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents attempted to take two illegal aliens into custody in August. Hundreds of protesters blocked ICE buses, and a 12-hour standoff ensued before agents could remove the men.

Bends political establishment defended the protesters. Ive never been so disgusted by my government and so proud of my community, tweeted John Hummel, Deschutes Countys district attorney. Bends Mayor Sally Russell added: In no way do I support ICE. Nor can our Bend Police Force, because Oregon is a sanctuary state and it is illegal. ...ICE is a Federal agency and frustratingly we have no power over the Executive Branch of our country.

ICE hasnt detailed the charges against Marco Zeferino and Josue Cruz-Sanchez, whose detentions triggered the standoff, other than to say they have violent criminal records and re-entered the U.S. unlawfully after prior apprehensions. But both men have arrest records reported by local media. Mr. Cruz-Sanchez pleaded guilty in 2018 to fourth-degree assault (domestic violence) and felony coercion for injuring and threatening his partner. In February 2019 he was arrested for burglary and a parole violation and pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal trespassing. Three months later, he pleaded not guilty to fourth-degree assault charges related to a separate incident.

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If Trump Is Re-Elected, Oregon Could Be Headed for a Crackup - The Wall Street Journal

Take it from someone who has been fighting the open-borders lobby for more than 30 years: If you think President Trump hasnt delivered on his immigration and border security promises, then you need to take a closer look at the record.

This administration has made incredible progress toward ending the toleration for lawlessness and mass unchecked migration that defined American immigration politics for decades.

Remember the situation that prevailed before Trump, when the Obama-Biden administration effectively gave amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in direct contravention of the law with a couple strokes of a pen called DACA and DAPA. Those blatant abuses of executive authority were basically ignored, even by establishment Republicans.

Despite its popularity among the Republican base and Americans as a whole, the attitude in Washington was one of unconditional surrender. Recall that in 2013, only some last-minute heroics in the Senate prevented a full-scale, irreversible amnesty. Even the knowledge that this weaknessconvincedtens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children to walk to our border alone, convinced they would be given permisos to enter the United States, did nothing to shake Washington out of the open-borders consensus.

Then came Donald Trump, and almost overnight, the issue was at the very forefront of the American political consciousness. As soon as it got a fair hearing, the immigration issue catapulted a Republican to the White House.

Unfortunately, some of the people who were motivated to vote based on immigration and the border in 2016 have allowed themselves to become disheartened by the open borders lobbys demoralization campaigns, which are designed to create the impression that President Trump hasnt kept his promises.

That couldnt be further from the truth.

Over the past three years, the refugee racket has been utterly crushed, to the open dismay of the globalist NGOs and resettlement experts who got richfloodingthe American hinterland with hundreds of thousands of unvetted people from some of the worlds mostdangerousplaces. In 2020, refugees are capped18,000, thelowestsince the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 opened the floodgates to the Third World.

Before President Trump, the people responsible for this travesty wereleveragingtheir connections in the Obama administration to tell states and towns all over America that they had no choice but to accept tens of thousands of military-aged Syrian men. Today, these refugee grifters are on the ropes. They and their friends in the left-wing media arefuriousthat they areno longer ableto override the wishes of American communities. And theyre desperately hoping for a Biden-Harris administration that would put them back in business.

Before President Trump, the ACLU and an army of immigration lawyers were turning our asylum laws into a secondary immigration system that could be used to circumvent limits put in place by Congress. Effectively limitless numbers of people could present themselves at the border, make a declaration of credible fear of persecution for anever-growinglist of social ills in their home country, and count on being caught and released into the United States.

Under President Trump, this farce has beendealta mortal blow. This administrations Remain in Mexico policy, along with agreements with Central American countries, haveput a stopto it. Genuine Central American asylum seekers now can stay in Mexico, safe from the political persecution they claim to face in their home countries. If American immigration courts find their claims valid, we are happy to allow them in just as the law is supposed to work.

We were also promised a wall, and a wall is what were getting. Itshappeningright now. You canseeit for yourself, verified by third parties: more than 340 miles built and standing, with more than 500 additional miles planned and paid for. And its working. The so-called caravans of 2018 and 2019 areoverand our border is more secure than ever.

For decades, Americanssaidthey wanted immigration levels to go down or stay the same, and we were consistently ignored by the Washington establishment. Thats over.Net migrationto the United States is just over half what it was in the last year of the Obama-Biden administration. The proportion of foreign-born people in the United States isfallingfor the first time since the disastrous 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

If you care about enforcing our immigration laws, rest assured President Trump has followed through as no president has before him. He has the open-borders lobby on the run.

Tom Tancredo is a former U.S. presidential and Colorado gubernatorial candidate who represented the states 6thCongressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009.

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Trump turned tide against immigration run amok | Opinion - coloradopolitics.com

By Carl P. Leubsdorf Dallas Morning News

Despite the polls, President Donald Trump is predicting an Election Day wave like youve never seen before. But his allies and associates in all three branches of government are hedging their bets with actions designed to extend his sway in key areas, even if he loses.

On Capitol Hill, the Republican-controlled Senate is moving to cement conservative control of the Supreme Court by confirming Trumps nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Executive branch officials are rushing to extend his deregulation efforts and fill many vacant jobs.

And the administration hopes the high court will help it complete the 2020 census under rules that would bolster Republican voting and financial power for the next decade. At stake is how congressional representation is calculated and billions of dollars in federal aid are allocated to states and localities.

The court recently overturned a lower court ruling, allowing more time for completing the census and minimizing a potential undercount of minorities and younger Americans. The court also scheduled a Nov. 30 hearing on the administrations latest effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the count, which could cost three states, including Texas, one member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The court vacancy that prompted the Barrett nomination is unique, the closest to a pending presidential election such a vacancy has been filled (though several were approved soon after elections). Filling lesser jobs and taking administrative actions is less unusual, though it usually occurs at the end of a second term, not during a re-election campaign.

The administrations most questionable act is its effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the census, which is constitutionally mandated every 10 years to determine population changes used to update allocation of U.S. House seats and federal funds.

A three-judge federal court in New York, in a unanimous decision by two appointees of President George W. Bush and one of President Barack Obama, said Trump exceeded his authority in directing the Commerce Department to provide two sets of numbers, one excluding the millions of unauthorized immigrants. The Constitution says the census should provide the whole number of persons in each State.

A study by Dudley Poston of Texas A&M and Teresa Sullivan for the University of Virginias Center for Politics concluded their exclusion could cost California, Texas and New Jersey one House seat each, and similarly benefit Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio. It could also cost big states with large numbers of undocumented persons substantial amounts of federal funds.

By law, the census must be finished by Dec. 31, with the president then required to notify Congress the whole number of persons in each State and the number of representatives to which each is entitled. The House clerk, in turn, is required to pass the latter number to each state.

But the administration is already hinting it may not complete its work until early 2021. More important, it is unclear if the new House, almost certain to be controlled again by the Democrats, can reject Trump proposals that benefit Republicans.

Earlier this year, fearing delays in part from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Commerce Department urged extending the census deadline until April 30, 2021, allowing more time to count those inhabitants who are traditionally harder to reach, mostly young people, minorities and poor people.

But the White House rejected an extension, presumably because that could give the final decision to the next administration if Trump loses re-election. Then, it decided to halt the count, lest it be unable to complete its calculations by Dec. 31.

Besides determining how many House seats each state will get for the next 10 years, the census guides legislative decisions on representation within the states and determines the location of recipients for the billions of dollars in annual federal aid, much of it for people below certain income levels.

The Nov. 30 hearing is the second time possible exclusion of illegals has reached the Supreme Court. Last year, it voted 5-4 to block the initial administration effort on grounds it failed to use the proper procedures.

But that could change this time, since the court will likely include Judge Barrett, named by Trump to succeed the late Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of the prior five-justice majority. The case may provide an early sign of whether Democratic concerns about her potential impact are justified.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that officials throughout the administration are rushing to fill jobs and extending efforts to revise or scrap regulations deemed to be anti-business. They include everything from easing restrictions for carrying highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains to requiring sponsors of candidates for immigration to provide detailed proof they can support the newcomers financially.

Many of these actions could be subject to congressional review under a procedure the GOP used four years ago to overturn some regulations implemented in the final weeks of the Obama administration. Overturning regulations requires a majority vote of both houses, plus the presidents signature, a possibility if Democrats sweep the board Nov. 3.

As with the census, this suggests that battles over Trumps initiatives wont necessarily end if or when he leaves office.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Write to him via email at: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

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Carl P. Leubsdorf: Hedging their bets, Trump allies look to cement gains - The Spokesman-Review

For more than five decades now, fear of migration from Bangladesh (and earlier Pakistans East Bengal province) has influenced the politics of Assam. To justify this, very high estimates of numbers of Bangladeshi migrants have been put out in the public domain in India.

In 1997, Union Home Minister Indrajit Gupta stated in Parliament that there were 10 million illegal Bangladeshi migrants residing in India. In 2016, the Modi government declared in Parliament that there were as many as 20 million Bangladeshis living in India illegally (which would mean nearly 2% of Indias population was actually Bangladeshi).

Indias Supreme Court, which has been a strong driver of nativist sentiment on this issue, went on to assume that the number of illegal migrants runs into millions and is in fact an aggression on the State of Assam.

One part of this nativist sentiment is ethnic with Assamese nationalists opposing the migration of both Hindus and Muslims from Bangladesh. The other part of this is communal with Hindu nationalist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party painting this as an influx of Muslims.

Adding to this is the pan-Indian stereotype of Bangladesh being much poorer than India, which drives Bangladeshis to across the border to find work.

This politics led to the Supreme Court in 2014 to mandate that the National Register of Citizens a list of bonafide Indian citizens be updated for the state of Assam. The process for verifying citizenship invented by the court was strict. Based on documents often generations-old, it had never used in any other part of the world.

While the push to update the NRC was powered by high estimates of illegal migrant numbers, the final result published in 2019 ironically ended up disproving them. The number of people who were found not to be verifiable Indian citizens was around 1.9 million more than ten times lower than the figure put out by the Modi government in 2016.

This gap between the estimates and final NRC figures caused shock in Assam. We are disappointed as the figure of 1.9 million exclusion is nowhere close to earlier figures of illegal immigrants, the All Assam Students Associations Samujjal Bhattacharya admitted.

In addition, the NRCs final list seemed to belie another enduring myth: that of mass Muslim migration from Bangladesh. While there is no official religious breakup in the list (and will probably never will be), senior BJP leaders from Assam have admitted that in reality Bengali-speaking Hindus and not Muslims had been the community most prominent in the NRCs final list of exclusions.

As a consequence, from being a strong supporter of the NRC, the BJP morphed overnight into a trenchant critic, even going so far as to petition the Supreme Court to re-verify the final list. The other side of the coin is that Assams Muslims of Bengali-origin largely support the current NRC and oppose plans to redo the process.

What explains this massive gap between projections and actuals when it comes to the magnitude and nature of migration?

Part of the answer might lie in a new economic projection put out by the International Monetary Fund on October 13 that shows Indias per capita gross domestic product will slip below Bangladeshs for 2020. In other words, Bangladeshis will soon be, on an average, (marginally) richer than Indians.

If this is the Bangladesh-India comparison, its not too difficult to work out what it would be with Assam, one of the Indian Unions poorest states. Currently Bangladeshs per capita GDP is around 1.5 times that of Assam. Moreover, it has been significantly higher since 1971 the year Bangladesh became independent as well as the cut-off year for the NRC.

Living standards diverge even further if measured using human development indicators. The average life expectancy of a Bangladeshi is nearly a decade more than that of a resident of Assam. At 41, Assams infant mortality rate the number of infants who die before the age of one per 1,000 births is 1.5 times that of Bangladeshs (26). In Bangladesh, the maternal mortality rate the number of mothers who die for every 1 lakh childbirths is 173 but jumps to 215 in Assam.

It is thus hardly surprising that the politically-driven estimates of massive economic migration were not borne out by the actual NRC figures.

Instead, what is often elided in this discussion is that one of the main drivers of migration from Bangladesh has been religious persecution. It is well established that the 1971 Liberation War was the peak period of migration from Bangladesh. Much of this was driven by the fact that the Pakistan Army specifically targeted Bangladeshi Hindus. As many as 90% of refugees who fled Bangladesh during the war were Hindu.

And 1971 wasnt the only instance of religious persecution within Bangladesh driving outmigration. Many of the other triggers for migration from Bangladesh post 1971 were also communally charged, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 (after which Bangladesh declared itself an Islamic state), riots in the early 1990s related to the Babri Masjid in India and communal violence after the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party took power in 2001.

This history means that the proportion of Hindus in Bangladesh has decreased by more than half from 20% in 1970 to a little above 8% today. Rana Dasgupta, general secretary of the Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Unity Council, a Bangladeshi human rights group, says that this precipitous fall is explained by the mass migration of Bangladeshi Hindus to India.

Bangladeshs political trajectory and the quantum of Hindu outmigration since 1971 thus might explain the NRCs religious breakup. It would also help make sense of why the three Muslim-majority border district of Assam have actually seen an NRC-exclusion rate less than the state average even as that of the Hindu-majority border district of Cachar is higher.

This modern Bangladeshi history is often unknown or skipped when Indians talk of illegal immigration so much so that Scroll.in had to publish a factual rebuttal to the widespread myth that the Assam NRC is anti-Muslim after the final list was published in 2019.

Nativist politics that targets immigrants is a regular feature of rich, developed Western countries such as the United States or Great Britain. However, this is much rarer in a poor country of Indias income level. Assams politics, where there are fears of mass economic migration from a richer country, might thus be unique.

The final NRC data has thrown the BJP into a tizzy with the party now scrambling to change the final list. To add to that, with Bangladesh now approximately as rich as India and growing much faster Indian politicians might find the narrative of a massive influx of economic refugees more difficult to push.

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Has Bangladeshs economic rise taken the wind out of the NRC narrative? - Scroll.in