Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and an advocate of expanding local immigration efforts, said Arpaio's office — like every other local police agency — can detain people suspected of immigration violations for a day or two until federal authorities come to pick them up.(emphasis added) This is almost humorous, if it wasn't so transparently biased and if its source wasn't so unduly influential at framing public debate. I'll be eager to see future background info on every legal scholar with a Liberal opinion.
In the past, Arpaio could have held such immigrants for longer than two days and conducted investigations of smuggling rings, Kobach said.
'It's really a slight narrowing, but it's not much,' said Kobach, who worked as an immigration law adviser to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from 2001-2003.
Hey MSM, we need you to be our eyes and ears for the news, not our brains.
4 comments:
You do realize that, in the same article, the liberal attorney whose view of the case is set in contrast to Kobach's gets a very similar snippet, right?
Presumably, we could all use our brains to figure out whether the opinions offered by "Dan Pochada, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union," are accurate or schewed by ideology to the left or to the right. We could go out and read up on immigration law and Sheriff Arpaio and the details of the stops he's been pulling.
But we might be reading the AP article because we want a brief summary of what happened and what both sides are claiming. In which case, it's informative to know what someone with solid, conservative, legal credentials on the issue claims and what someone with similar, liberal credentials claims.
Your real objection seems to be that the AP article didn't pretend that Kobach is a totally neutral player and some kind of objective expert, rather than a clear partisan on this issue. But he's plainly the latter, whether his legal views happen to be accurate or not, and the AP is simply being informative by telling its readers that.
Yeah, N.S., I didn't see the "similar snippet," but I did note the purported balancing of experts. I guess I should be satisfied that they included the perspective of someone other than "Lydia Guzman, president of the Hispanic civil rights group Somos America," and the ACLU lawyer suing the Sheriff. But I see no indication that Kobach is a spokesman for the Sheriff or offered himself as such. The over-qualification of the professor-but-wink-wink-Ashcroft-lackey still kind of irritates me.
But thanks for the comment.
I'm missing the context here. Is Kobach saying something controversial? Perhaps some telling conservative point that a liberal writer wants to discredit?
I found the story on Fox here. I read it a few times, and the story does cover a controversial political figure. But the wisdom the professor imparts seems mundane.
As a young child of a friend once remarked, I'm not picking up what you're putting down.
Burr,
I'm not sure you're missing anything, as N.S. has asserted. But I agree with your point that Kobach's contribution was hardly controversial and not all that "Conservative," which--to my point, accredits him even more as an expert who need not be rebutted or "qualified" by the writer.
Post a Comment