The Department of Homeland Security recently decided to issue a new set of rules that will force local police who are enforcing immigration laws under the 287g program to focus on arresting immigrants charged with violent and serious crimes (as opposed to those who commit minor offenses). That’s bad news for Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio who’s been known to terrorize and raid immigrant communities for little reason at all.

Last week, Arpaio announced that he refused to cooperate with Department of Justice authorities investigating allegations of racial profiling brought against his police department. Yet, DOJ investigation or not, it now seems that Arpaio’s immigration enforcement days might soon come to an end. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has indicated that local law enforcement officials will no longer be able to pull someone over for a broken tail light and deport them the next day. Instead, they will have to prosecute every crime, or, more formally, “pursue all criminal charges that originally caused the offender to be taken into custody.”

As usual, Sheriff Joe Arpaio thinks it’s all about him, telling a local Phoenix news station:

“I don’t think they like my crime suppression operations. I also feel this is somewhat going toward amnesty…we’ll see if I agree with any changes that they make…You know what, I’ll be doing another crime suppression really soon. You think I’m going to stop? Because of all this heat? I’m not stopping. I’m going to continue to do my job.“

Watch it:

Arpaio also defiantly told the Wall Street Journal, “If I’m told not to enforce immigration law except if the alien is a violent criminal, my answer to that is we are still going to do the same thing, 287g or not.” But Arpaio might not have much of a choice. Napolitano indicated that all law enforcement agencies currently operating under the 287g program have 90 days to review the rules and will have to re-sign an agreement with the Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency (ICE). Secondly, DHS’ decision has nothing to do with amnesty, rather, its purpose is to make sure local law enforcement officials don’t lose sight of what their main mission should be: keeping communities safe. That’s something Sheriff Arpaio’s office has failed at miserably.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon praised DHS’ decision:

“Todays announcement carries another message for our community. Let me be blunt, this confirms that Homeland Security has taken the concerns about Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s abuses and misallocation of resources seriously. He can no longer hide behind the illusion that breaking up families at car washes and amusement parks is somehow making us safer as a community.”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Cheney staffer John Hannah argues that George W. Bush deserves more credit for what is happening in Iran. Hannah thinks that the fact that there were protests against the Iranian government during Bush’s term proves that Bush’s belligerent stance toward Iran worked. Interestingly, Hannah doesn’t cite a single Iranian who agrees with this. On the other hand, many Iranians have said that Bush’s hard line policies and bellicose rhetoric, specifically his 2002 “axis of evil” speech, were terrible for Iran’s moderates.

One of those is Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sane’i, a key clerical supporter of the Green movement. Reacting to the “axis of evil” speech shortly after it occurred, Sane’i said that “a great injustice has been done to the supporters of democracy and freedom and true Islam due to Mr. Bush’s speech.”

Another is Iranian reformist parliamentarian Ismail Gerami-Moghaddam, who said in 2007 that the speech “led the Iranian people to grow increasingly skeptical of American slogans. In another sphere, our political rivals … attacked us. They said sympathizing with a country that puts us in the ‘axis of evil’ will take you down a dead-end road, and they were actually correct.”

Meanwhile, in World Affairs Journal, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen uses his preferred argumentative strategy of just making things up to present Bush’s war on terror as a huge success. In a particularly egregious instance, Thiessen writes that “as the Bush administration ratcheted up pressure on the enemy, terrorist violence across the world plummeted,” citing a “study by the IntelCenter [that] examined the 63 ‘most significant’ attacks launched by al-Qaeda and its affiliates over a period of nearly 10 years”:

It found that by mid-2007 the number of Islamist attacks across the world had declined by 65 percent from a high point in 2004 — and fatalities were down by more than 90 percent. The bottom line: The Bush administration’s strategy of staying on offense worked.

The IntelCenter study (pdf) Thiessen cites, however, specifically excluded “attacks that occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other insurgency theaters.” This is like touting a drop in the crime rate by specifically ignoring areas where crime has shot up.

On this point, in January Assaf Moghadam reported in West Point’s CTC Sentinel (pdf) that, since 1981, Iraq suffered some 1,067 suicide terrorist attacks (a number that has gone up since the report was published) which accounts for more than half of all suicide attacks since 1981.

Moghadam continues:

The sheer volume in which this tactic has struck Iraq is even more impressive since no suicide attacks were recorded in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

This is what Bush’s strategy of “staying on offense” has meant for the Iraqi people — years of suicide attacks, reprisal attacks, and waves of sectarian cleansing that have utterly transformed the face of the country. It’s important to understand that luring terrorists to Iraq to blow themselves up in markets and mosques wasn’t some tragic side-effect of Bush’s policy, it was in fact a goal of Bush’s policy, one that Marc Thiessen is proud of.

Leaving aside the spinning of the Bushies, which is to be expected, the evidence we have strongly indicates that the extremists themselves perceive Obama and his policies as a far greater threat than Bush’s.

Al Qaeda-linked theorist Abd al-Aziz al-Julayyil recently wrote (translated by Thomas Heghammer) that “The most important fruit of Bush’s policies was the wake-up call it produced among Muslims in terms of realizing the true nature of their enemy, reviving the creed of loyalty toward Muslims and dissociation from infidels, and raising the flag of jihad in several battlefields.” Bush’s policies also resulted in “infamy suffered by America on the world stage and the demise of its false discourse on human rights; in the world’s eyes America itself became a proponent of oppression and a threat to human rights.”

But, according to al-Julayyil, Obama’s approach is “weakening [Muslims] enmity toward America and makes them more positively inclined toward her future policies. It is numbing them, reducing their hatred toward infidels, and making them stop fighting.”

It’s interesting that the only people who can be found to speak up for Bush’s policies are former administration hands and conservative movement pundits. The people who were the objects of those policies, however, disagree in almost every respect.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on Jorge Ramos’ Sunday morning show, “Al Punto,” this weekend and suggested that the best way to deal with the 12 million undocumented workers currently living in the U.S. would be to convince them to go back to their home countries for a couple years in exchange for a temporary guest-worker visa:

RAMOS: Mr. Speaker, in your book, “Winning the Future,” you wrote, and I’m quoting, “everyone currently working in the United States illegally must return to their home country to apply for the worker visa program”…Is this realistic? Do you really think 12 million undocumented workers will voluntarily leave the United States?

GINGRICH: What I said was that we should have a program to have a legal guest-worker system. We should be very clear that we want to increase legal immigration…I think symbolically, you know, the McCain-Kennedy bill said you have to pay a $5,000 fine to the U.S. government. You can fly home, get the visa, and come back for less than $5,000. So you’re asking me — is it possible over a 2-3 year period that every person at some point go home and get the guest-worker permit — because you couldn’t do this in week. This would have to be a transition of 2-3 years. I think virtually everybody would it if they knew we were serious…

Ramos pressed Gingrich further to make sure he was serious:

RAMOS: Let me very clear about this, so you would actually ask 12 million undocumented people to voluntarily leave the United States so that they can become citizens?

GINGRICH: I’d ask them to go home, get the card, and come back. And again, how many people go home anyways on a regular basis?

In theory, Gingrich’s proposal sounds nice. In practice, his ideas spell a national nightmare.

To begin with, most undocumented immigrants don’t “go home on a regular basis.” In fact, most don’t go home at all because leaving the U.S. carries the high risk of not being able to get back in. Gingrich also doesn’t take into account what will happen to the millions of U.S. born children of immigrants or the vacant jobs and homes that would be left behind. He doesn’t provide any details on how exactly the U.S. government would be able to convince a population of immigrants who have feared few things more than deportation by federal immigration authorities that the government can suddenly be trusted overnight. Either way, it seems unlikely that a temporary worker visa that carries no promise of permanent residency or citizenship will serve as a strong incentive to uproot one’s entire family and return to an impoverished country for an undetermined number of years. Michele Waslin, Senior Policy Analyst at the Immigration Policy Center points out:

“Americans want a fair, practical solution. Expecting 12 million people — many of whom have lived and worked here for years and have US citizen children — to leave the U.S. and wait for a visa in a line that doesn’t currently exist seems rather farfetched.”

Despite his English-only stance, Gingrich has started both a Spanish-language twitter feed and website. When asked if he plans on running in the 2012 presidential race, Gingrich said he will come back and talk about it in January of 2011. Watch it:

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that former Vice President Dick Cheney gave “direct orders” to the CIA, compelling the agency to withhold “information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years.” Despite news organizations’ efforts to contact him, Cheney has yet to comment on the revelation.

Following the revelation, congressional Democrats have called for an investigation into the hidden program, which the Wall Street Journal reports involved “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” But on the Washington Times’ America’s Morning News radio show today, Cheney’s daughter, Liz, lashed back at his critics:

CHENEY: There’s this big piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning that says that it was a number of different concepts for ways that we could capture or kill al Qaeda leaders in the days after 9/11. I am really surprised that the Democrats decide that that’s what they want to fight over. I mean, if they want to go to the American people and say that they disagree with the notion that we ought to be capturing and killing al Qaeda leaders, I think it’s just going to prove to the American people one more time why they can’t trust the Democrats with our national security.

Cheney claimed that complaints by Democrats that the program was concealed from Congress are surfacing only because they are “very worried about Speaker Pelosi” and the attacks on her over her claim that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding. Listen here:

Of course, Cheney is dodging the issue of whether Bush and Cheney fulfilled their obligations under the National Security Act of 1947, which says that congressional intelligence committees must be “kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

Cheney also responded to news that Attorney General Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices,” calling it “shameful.” She added that her father is “very angry” about the development:

CHENEY: His reaction to the story that we may well be prosecuting folks, I’m happy to talk about that. … You know, he is very angry, as you’ve heard him say publicly. You know the notion that this administration is going to come into office and they’re going to prosecute the brave men and women who carried out this program that kept America safe. It is, it is un-American. It’s something that hasn’t happened before in this country, in terms of somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration. He’s been very public about that.

Cheney says that Holder would be investigating people “who carried this program out according to the Department of Justice opinions,” but Newsweek reports that Holder is more concerned about “startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions.”