JULY 5, 2019, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
Opinion
Accessing private information
Personal privacy is a triggering is-
sue for most Americans. They don’t
want the government, business or
people they don’t know to go rooting
around their lives.
The privacy issue takes
on a different face when
it comes to a loved one,
especially when technol-
ogy, such as cellphones
and computers, is in-
volved.
In cases of death, get-
ting access to information is vital to
executors of wills and survivors. Un-
fortunately, passwords for phones,
computers and other devices are not
always shared with family members.
There is information that is important
for survivors to access and fi nalize the
affairs of their loved one.
Information regarding fi nancial ac-
counts, on-going payments and more
can be locked away forever without
the cooperation of the companies
that maintain cellphones and online
accounts such as social media sites.
Without a password, survivors are
locked out of accessing information.
Providing access to secure accounts
is not an easy step. Companies must
manage their liability, they cannot just
open accounts to those who say they
are survivors. There has to
be stringent steps to assure
that those gaining access
are the ones who, without
question, have the right to
access.
Ideally, spouses would
share their passwords. Bar-
ing that, one option is to
legislate who, and how, someone gets
access to a deceased person’s private
information.
Any legislation would have to be
written succinctly including pro-
viding immunity from civil action
to companies that provide access on
good faith. No amount of legislation
can account for the actions of humans.
Things never get so complicated and
irrational as when a person passes.
The death of a spouse or loved
one is devastating enough without
the added complications of trying to
wrap up their lives.
— LAZ
our
opinion
Sanctuary America?
The star of the fi rst Democratic
presidential primary debate, Sen. Ka-
mala Harris, D-Calif., was attorney
general of California and, before that,
district attorney for San Francisco.
This put her in the van-
guard of the Golden State’s
sanctuary state and sanctu-
ary city policies.
Now, it seems, all the
2020 Democratic hope-
fuls—and Harris in partic-
ular—are trying to turn the
United States into one big
sanctuary country where
crossing the border illegally
is analogous to jaywalking.
That’s why all 10 Democrats raised
their hands Thursday night when
asked if they wanted to make crossing
the border without documentation a
civil rather than criminal offense. They
all also raised their hands when asked
if they wanted to provide health care
to unauthorized immigrants.
During the debate, Harris framed
the practice of shielding undocument-
ed immigrants from federal immigra-
tion enforcement this way: “I know it
as a prosecutor. I want a rape victim
to be able to run in the middle of --
to run in the middle of the street and
wave down a police offi cer and report
the crime against her.”
It was a variation of an argument
crafted earlier by Sen. Dianne Fein-
stein, who as mayor of San Francisco
pushed through the city’s fi rst sanctu-
ary policy in 1985. It applied to un-
documented migrants from El Salva-
dor and Guatemala. The law, expanded
to all undocumented immigrants by
city voters in 1989, would make San
Francisco safer, DiFi argued, because
undocumented residents would not be
afraid to report crimes to city police.
But as the policy expanded, it didn’t
just protect otherwise law-abiding im-
migrants—hard-working adults who
came here to work and raise a family.
It also has shielded gang members and
criminals who harm women and chil-
dren, as Harris well knows.
San Francisco’s 2013 Due Process
for All ordinance prohibited local law
enforcement from holding unautho-
rized immigrants for federal immi-
gration offi cials unless the inmate had
been convicted of a violent felony in
the past seven years. What could go
wrong? Many a career car thief or
repeat drug offender has enjoyed the
same protection as the rape victim
Harris said she wanted to protect.
The most famous benefi ciary was
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate. After he served
time for his seventh felony drug con-
viction, the feds sent Garcia Zarate to
San Francisco on a 20-year-old mar-
ijuana charge. The district attorney
inevitably did not pursue the moldy
case, and so Garcia Za-
rate walked out on the
street, where he found
a gun used to kill Kate
Steinle on a summer
evening in 2015.
Please tell me: What
country passes laws to
protect career criminals
and repeat offenders
from being deported?
In his fi rst term, President Barack
Obama had a smarter take when he
directed federal offi cials to target un-
authorized immigrants who were “vi-
olent offenders and people convicted
of crimes.”
He expanded the Secure Commu-
nities program, piloted by President
George W. Bush, which cross-checked
fi ngerprints taken at local jails with
immigration databases. It was a smart
plan. In fi scal 2013, The Los Angeles
Times reported, 82% of deported indi-
viduals had been convicted of a crime.
During the debate, however, Harris
railed against Obama’s use of Secure
Communities because, well, “The pol-
icy was to allow deportation of people
who by ICE’s own defi nition were
non-criminals.” (Actually, that’s also
the defi nition of Thursday night’s de-
bate team, as they all said they’d like to
make unauthorized border crossing a
civil offense instead of a crime.)
Mark Krikorian of the pro-en-
forcement Center for Immigration
Studies observed that Harris referred
to rape as a “real crime”:
“That’s a standard sanctuary city
line,” says Krikorian. “At this point,
it’s now Democratic Party orthodoxy
that only people that have broken ‘real’
laws should be subject to deportation.”
And those crimes would have to
be tried and convicted and have been
committed recently to warrant re-
moval. The “tool in the toolbox” of
being able to deport an undesirable
newcomer who’s not supposed to be
in the United States in the fi rst place,
Krikorian warned, would disappear.
What would happen if Demo-
crats were to end criminal penalties
for crossing the border? Does anyone
think there would be fewer unautho-
rized immigrants or more? And would
they be more law-abiding otherwise
or less?
debra j.
saunders
(Creators Syndicate)
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Endless self-regard on world stage
By MICHAEL GERSON
I worked for a leader who was
sometimes accused of lacking in the
smarts department. But no one I
know who spent time with Presi-
dent George W. Bush was left with
that impression.
Bush took an almost gleeful sat-
isfaction in picking holes in argu-
ments, as any half-pre-
pared briefer quickly
learned. He was also an
avid reader of history. (I
remember him passing
along to me Judgment
Days: Lyndon Baines
Johnson, Martin Luther
King Jr. and the Laws That
Changed America and A Godly Hero:
The Life of William Jennings Bryan af-
ter he had fi nished with them.)
Most important to Bush’s politi-
cal rise, he has a remarkable facility
for reading the emotional contours
of small groups. If someone is feel-
ing ignored or reluctant to contrib-
ute a relevant point, Bush zeroes in
to make him or her feel comfort-
able and included. During the 2000
campaign, I recall a briefi ng on hu-
manitarian military interventions,
attended by all of Bush’s fi rst-string
foreign policy advisers. Not being
one of them, I was seated at the
periphery, in a chair with my back
to the wall, trying to avoid notice.
About halfway through the meet-
ing, Bush paused and said to the
group: “You know what I’d really
like to know? I’d like to know what
Mike Gerson thinks about this.” I
sputtered something so forgetta-
ble that I have forgotten it. But the
memory of feeling valued remains.
People close to President Trump
may well have similar stories of un-
suspected sharpness and acumen.
But if this is a secret, it is a well-
kept one. Trump has said he has no
time to read. “I never have,” he said
in 2016. “I’m always busy doing a
lot.” People who brief him report
a gnat-like attention span. Trump’s
frequent accusation that others are
stupid or “low IQ” sits uncomfort-
ably with his own shocking igno-
rance of history, science and eco-
nomics. Most recently, he seemed
to understand “West-
ern-style liberalism” as
local governance in Los
Angeles and San Fran-
cisco. Asked his view of
busing, he judged it “a
primary method of get-
ting people to schools.”
Does presidential ig-
norance matter? A few presidents—
like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham
Lincoln—rose through the power
of brilliant writing and rhetoric.
Ulysses S. Grant wrote a memoir of
enduring literary value. The 1912
presidential election pitted the au-
thor of The Naval War of 1812: A
Complete History (Teddy Roosevelt)
against the author of Congressional
Government: A Study in American
Government (Woodrow Wilson).
There is not, of course, a neces-
sary connection between brilliance
and judgment. And it is true that
writers tend (sometimes unfairly) to
prefer the kind of intelligence ex-
pressed in writing.
That said, it is evident that
Trump’s combination of ignorance
and arrogance exposes the United
States to needless global ridicule. His
misunderstanding of basic econom-
ics—particularly his insistence that
China will pay tariffs rather than
U.S. consumers —has led to bad and
dangerous trade policy. But Trump’s
most consequential defi cit may lie
in his emotional intelligence—what
political scientist Joseph Nye de-
fi nes as “the self-mastery, discipline
other
voices
and empathic capacity that allows
leaders to channel their personal
passions and attract others.”
This ground is also covered by
the term “temperament.” And we
are seeing what happens when pres-
idential temperament is entirely
absent. Trump’s lack of self-mastery
often makes his interventions in for-
eign and domestic policy spasmodic
and unstrategic. His incapacity for
empathy results in cruelty—see the
migrant children at the border—
that strikes at the moral core of
American greatness. Trump is un-
able to fi nd any value in the views
of a political opponent, which puts
both national healing and useful
compromise beyond his abilities.
He is only capable of governing on
behalf of those who support him,
making him vulnerable to manipu-
lation through fl attery.
This is bad enough in the con-
text of American politics. It is worse
on a global scale. Ultimately, the
lack of presidential temperament
leaves Trump unable to distinguish
between American friends and au-
tocratic rivals who playa on his own
vanity. And this allows strongmen
such as Russian President Vladi-
mir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman to murder,
intimidate and attack Western liber-
alism under the protective cover of
Trump’s narcissism.
This is a more disturbing matter
than gaps in the president’s knowl-
edge. Those who dismiss the im-
portance of presidential tempera-
ment must reckon with the fact that
Trump’s endless self-regard is being
exploited—and easily exploited—
to undermine the interests of the
United States.
(Washington
Group)
Post
Writers
Are we lurching toward war?
We’ve been at war with other
countries over the last sixty years
where outcomes have not been as
predicted and promises unfulfi lled.
They have brought huge losses in
military and collateral lives and dev-
astated our treasury. Meanwhile,
needs at home go unattended. Ob-
jective observers promise that a war
with Iran will be quite different from
those with Iraq, Libya, Somalia and
Afghanistan.
The biggest difference is where
a loss for us could be the outcome.
Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo has remarked
that it would “only” take
2,000 air strikes to elim-
inate Iran’s nuclear facili-
ties. He sees it as “easy”
to place 20,000 Marines
on the northern coast of
the Persian Gulf to secure
the Strait of Hormuz al-
though U.S. forces would face 1.7
million Iranian regulars and militia.
Pompeo is confi dant the U.S. Navy
can cope with literally thousands of
supersonic missiles fi red at our ships.
Then there are the S-300 missiles
Iran now operationally owns.
Of course, the U.S. could use
nuclear weapons to kill every man,
woman and child in Iran. That
would add up to about 80 million of
them and a U.S. reputation for use
of weapons of mass destruction that’d
hound our nation for time immemo-
rial. In all this, 326 million lives are
in the hands of only three Americans.
Trump’s National Security Advi-
sor is 70-year-old John Bolton. Born
in the U.S., he has never been in the
military, having escaped the draft vis-
a-vis Vietnam. He’s become notori-
ous by his advocacy for war with Iran
for at least twenty years. Anyone who
knows anything about the Muslim
religion and its war with Christian-
ity, dating back to the fi rst Crusade
in 1071, recognizes control of Islam’s
devotees is as easy as a trip to Mars
via a Cessna.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
He’s a 55-year-old who’s appreciated
advantages in life many
an American could envy.
He graduated from the
U.S. Military Academy
and from Harvard Uni-
versity law school to
become a lawyer. How-
ever, this man is accused
of harboring contempt
for blacks, gays and
Muslims. He’s a dedicated hawk. Al-
though he received his fi rst college
degree at West Point, and learned the
art of war there, he has avoided com-
bat although he’s apparently eager to
put other Americans in harm’s way
by warring in Iran.
In his effort to reverse every-
thing done by the Obama Admin-
istration, one of President Donald
Trump’s fi rst acts was to take the U.S.
out of the nuclear agreement with
Iran, followed by the imposition of
heavy sanctions. His actions have
caused considerable harm to the Ira-
nian economy. More recently there
were the oil tanker incidents in the
Strait of Hormuz and the shooting
gene h.
mcintyre
down of an American a U.S. drone.
These actions have led to what ap-
peared imminent war not yet mate-
rialized. More Trump sanctions have
followed. No one seems to know
where Trump’s true sentiments lie.
The uncertainty with him is his de-
cision-making inclinations, generally
understood as based on the last per-
son with whom he spoke. Last week,
Republicans in the U.S. Senate gave
Trump and his two favorite hawks
(Bolton and Pompeo) the power to
order military strikes without con-
sulting with or even notifying the
U.S Congress.
Another war anywhere in the
world will lead to more lives lost in
vain, further depletion of the U.S.
treasury, and the return of Ameri-
can military personnel with physical
injuries and mental problems like
PTSD. Meanwhile, instead of war
with Iran, our government, among
others allied in the effort, should
lead with a plan to implement an
intervention that’d control the brutal
lawlessness motivating Guatemalans,
Hondurans, Nicaraguans, etc. to seek
sanctuary here in the United States.
(Gene H. McIntyre shares his
opinion regularly in the Keizertimes.)
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