The daily Astorian., February 10, 2017, WEEKEND EDITION, Page 4A, Image 4

OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the
good things they do to make the North Coast a better
place to live, and also those who should be called out for their
actions.
SHOUTOUTS
The travel moratorium:
A hopeless disaster
By CHARLES
KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post Writers Group
W
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Dave and Kerry Strickland hold a photograph of their son Jordan in
their home in Knappa. Jordan died in July 2015 from a heroin overdose.
This week’s Shoutouts go to:
• Kerry Strickland of Knappa and others for forming and
launching Jordan’s Hope for Recovery, a nonprofit outreach
organization that hopes to act as a reference point and connect
those with addictions with resources to help them fight the bat-
tle to recovery. With the help of family and friends, Strickland
founded the organization in the wake of her son Jordan’s death
in 2015 from a heroin overdose. The organization is an affiliate
of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence,
and it conducted a launch party earlier this week where it
debuted its new website, jordanshope.org, that provides infor-
mation about recovery and accepts donations.
• The Talent Search program at Clatsop Community
College, which recently helped two Knappa High School
seniors, Devin Vandergriff and Angeleen Somoza, to each
win the prestigious Oregon state Horatio Alger Scholarship,
which is worth $10,000 through four years of college. The
Talent Search program serves more than 650 students from
sixth through 12th grades in cooperation with the Astoria,
Warrenton-Hammond, Seaside and Knappa school districts.
The program’s mission is to help students succeed in school
and develop a clear vision of their educational choices beyond
high school.
• Long Beach Mayor Jerry Phillips, who is spearheading his
city’s beautification efforts by working to clean up ramshackle
lots and bedraggled buildings. Phillips says the properties with
the most pressing health and safety risks are the city’s top prior-
ities, and he’s prodding property owners to do the work on their
own to avoid having to use the city’s tax dollars “to pay for
things people should be taking care of themselves.”
• The Northwest Coast Trails Coalition, which recently
conducted a weekend work party to complete a project to con-
nect two walking trails at Clatsop Community College. The two
trails were combined into a new single trail that skirts the edge
of the north side of the college’s parking lot, rounds the north-
east corner and now connects with the upper trail.
• Astoria’s Astor Lodge No. 215, Vasa Order of America,
which is celebrating its 105th year. The Swedish-American fra-
ternal organization’s members recently conducted their annual
meeting and recognized longtime members as well new mem-
bers who have joined the lodge. The organization seeks to ben-
efit its members by sharing Swedish and Scandinavian culture
and heritage.
CALLOUTS
This week’s Callouts go to:
• The Oregon Housing and Community Services state
agency, which won’t finish a statewide affordable housing
inventory before the end of the legislative session. Lawmakers
may be asked to consider allotting millions of dollars for
affordable housing, and the inventory would give legisla-
tors, agencies and nonprofit housing investors a more accu-
rate picture of what affordable housing exists and what feder-
ally backed projects are at risk because of expiring contracts
with homeowners. The agency was singled out in a state audit
in December on the subject, and while the audit was underway,
Gov. Kate Brown hired Margaret Salazar to head the agency
and direct improvements. A spokeswoman for Salazar said the
agency is making progress on finishing the inventory.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about? Let
us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a look.
ASHINGTON — Stupid
but legal. Such is the
Trump administration’s
travel ban for people from seven
Muslim countries.
Of course, as with
almost everything
in American life,
what should be
a policy or even
a moral issue
becomes a legal one. The judicial
challenge should have been given
short shrift, since the presidential
grant of authority to exclude the
entry of aliens is extremely wide
and statutorily clear. The judge who
issued the temporary restraining
order never even made a case for its
illegality.
But even if the immigration ban
is ultimately vindicated in the courts,
that doesn’t change the fact that it
makes for lousy policy. It began life
as a barstool eruption after the San
Bernardino massacre when Donald
Trump proposed a total ban on
Muslims entering the country “until
our country’s representatives can
figure out what the hell is going on.”
Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked
with cleaning up this idea. Hence
the executive order suspending entry
of citizens from the seven countries
while the vetting process is reviewed
and tightened.
The core idea makes sense. These
are failed, essentially ungovernable
states (except for Iran) where
reliable data is hard to find. But the
moratorium was unnecessary and
damaging. Its only purpose was to
fulfill an ill-considered campaign
promise.
It caused enormous disruption
without making us any safer. What
was the emergency that compelled
us to turn away people already in the
air with already approved visas for
entry to the U.S.?
President Donald Trump said he
didn’t want to give any warning.
Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’
would rush into our country. … A lot
of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
Rush? Not a single American has
ever been killed in a terror attack in
this country by a citizen from the
notorious seven. The killers have
come from precisely those countries
not listed — Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan and
Kyrgyzstan (the Tsarnaev brothers).
The notion that we had to act imme-
diately because hordes of jihadists
in these seven countries were
about to board airplanes to blow up
Americans is absurd.
Vetting standards could easily
have been revised and tightened
without the moratorium and its
Gary Cosby Jr./The Tuscaloosa News
Assistant Professor Sarah Steinbock-Pratt holds a sign as she lis-
tens to speakers at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala.,
who gathered Thursday to support an open campus and oppose the
travel ban imposed by President Donald Trump. notforsale
attendant disruptions, stupidities,
random cruelties and well-deserved
bad press.
In the end,
what was
meant to
be a piece
of promise-
keeping,
tough-on-terror
symbolism
has become
an oxygen-
consuming
distraction.
The moratorium turned into a
distillation of the worst aspects of
our current airport-security system,
which everyone knows to be 95
percent pantomime. The pat-down
of the 80-year-old grandmother
does nothing to make us safer. Its
purpose is to give the illusion of
doing something. Similarly, during
the brief Trump moratorium, a
cavalcade of innocent and indeed
sympathetic characters — graduate
students, separated family members,
returning doctors and scientists —
were denied entry. You saw this and
said to yourself: We are protecting
ourselves from these?
If anything, the spectacle served
to undermine Trump’s case for
extreme vigilance and wariness
of foreigners entering the United
States. There is already empirical
evidence. A Nov. 23 Quinnipiac poll
found a 6-point majority in favor
of “suspending immigration from
‘terror prone’ regions”; a Feb. 7 poll
found a 6-point majority against.
The same poll found a whopping
44-point majority opposed to “sus-
pending all immigration of Syrian
refugees to the U.S. indefinitely.”
Then there is the opportunity
cost of the whole debacle. It risks
alienating the leaders of even non-
affected Muslim countries — the
57-member Organization of Islamic
Cooperation expressed “grave con-
cern” — which may deter us from
taking far more real and effective
anti-terror measures. The admin-
istration was intent on declaring
the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist
organization, a concrete measure
that would hamper the operations
of a global Islamist force. In the
current atmosphere, however, that
declaration is reportedly being
delayed and rethought.
Add to that the costs of the
ill-prepared, unvetted, sloppy roll-
out. Consider the discordant, hostile
message sent to loyal law-abiding
Muslim-Americans by the initial
denial of entry to green card
holders. And the ripple effect of the
initial denial of entry to those Iraqis
who risked everything to help us in
our war effort. In future conflicts,
this will inevitably weigh upon
local Muslims deciding whether to
join and help our side. Actions have
consequences.
In the end, what was meant to be
a piece of promise-keeping, tough-
on-terror symbolism has become an
oxygen-consuming distraction. This
is a young administration with a
transformative agenda to enact. At a
time when it should be pushing and
promoting deregulation, tax reform
and health care transformation, it
has steered itself into a pointless
cul-de-sac — where even winning
is losing.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
On visas and vetting
ou hear people say — even the
president’s appointees — that
his first responsibility is to protect the
people of the U.S. But you have to
wonder how seriously he takes this
matter.
There is an archipelago at the tip
of South America called Tierra del
Fuego. It has about 130,000 peo-
ple, and has lots of farms and mines.
President Trump’s recent restriction
on entrance visas, and his program of
extreme vetting to the U.S., ignores
Tierra del Fuego.
Y
No terrorist, as far as I know, has
ever come from Tierra del Fuego, but
that doesn’t matter because you don’t
know when someone will come
from that place and try to blow up
New York City (including the Trump
Tower). As his spokesmen have said,
you never know who might be hatch-
ing a plot against the U.S.
On the other hand, there is
Texas. One of the citizens of that
state got into Washington, D.C.,
and spent eight years there. He was
even extremely vetted by the U.S.
Supreme Court, but that guy came
close to bankrupting the country. He
also sent many thousands of Ameri-
can soldiers to die in the Middle East
to protect the citizens of our great
country. Yet no visa, nor any vetting
of any citizen of that state, is required
to get into the rest of the U.S. Why?
Well, there is a lot of oil Texas.
I’m not a politician, but it seems
to me the least one could require of
the leader of the free world is to have
some follow through in his immigra-
tion plans.
J. LAMBERT
Hammond