As part of his attempt to assert himself as the border hawk in his race against senatorial candidate J.D. Hayworth, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released an ad this weekend entitled “Complete The Danged Fence.” In his new ad, McCain is walking along the border in Nogales, Arizona talking to Sheriff Paul Babeu about the ten-point border security plan he recently outlined with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

MCCAIN: Drug and human smuggling. Home invasions. Murder.

BABEU: We’re out-manned. Of all the illegals in America, more than half come through Arizona.

MCCAIN: Do we have the right plan?

BABEU: Plan’s perfect. You bring troops, state, county, and local law enforcement together.

MCCAIN: And complete the danged fence.

BABEU: It’ll work this time. Senator, you’re one of us.

Watch it:

However, BeyondChron points out that Nogales is located in Santa Cruz County. Babeu is from Pinal County, which is 115 miles north in central Arizona. Chances are McCain didn’t feature a local border town police chief because that person probably would’ve told him his ten-point plan is a waste of manpower and resources.

Assistant Chief Bermudez of the Nogales Police Department told the Arizona Republic, “We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico.” “You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America,” stated Bermudez. While McCain’s plan calls for the deployment of the national guard, Bermudez points out, “Everywhere you turn, there’s some kind of law enforcement looking at you…Per capita, we probably have the highest amount of any city in the United States.”

Given the fact that Nogales is located within Santa Cruz County, McCain probably would’ve been better off seeking the advice of Santa Cruz County Sheriff Antonio Estrada. While McCain thinks the new Arizona immigration law SB-1070 is a “good tool” for law enforcement, Estrada has called it downright racist. “The way it’s tailored is very clear. You’re looking for brown-skinned individuals. That’s what you’re looking for,” said Estrada. “That’s what the whole purpose of the law is and that’s what they’ve always said. It’s people coming across the border illegally and they’re talking mostly about Mexicans.”

FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics show that “while the nation’s illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records…the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent.” More specifically, crime rates in Arizona border towns have remained flat over the past decade. Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of neighboring Pima County, has stated, “This is a media-created event…I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”

Politifact points out that McCain was against the idea of using National Guard troops before he was for it and once described “enforcement-first” policies like the one he just offered as an “ineffective and ill-advised approach.”

I recently returned from a trip to Israel and Palestine, where I had the chance to speak with a number of Palestinian officials about the challenges facing the Palestinian national movement. Near the top of the list, of course, was the problem of Israeli settlements. One official remarked to me that “We used to call Palestine ‘Swiss cheese,’” because of the pockets of Jewish settlements scattered throughout Palestinian land. “But now,” because of how Palestinian territory has been reduced to a series of isolated enclaves surrounded by a sea of illegal settlements and outposts, Israeli security zones, and Israeli-only highways, he said, “I call it ‘the New Philippines.’”

Another official, while trying to remain optimistic about the two-state solution, noted that it was difficult to take Israeli interest in such an outcome seriously as it continued to gobble up Palestinian land for Jewish settlements. “We know what Israel is doing,” he said. “It’s imposing its reality on the ground.”

Yesterday at Middle East Channel, Michael Sfard, a legal adviser to Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO that monitors violations of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Territories, posted an item describing how that reality is being imposed, even during the current “freeze.” The Israeli government “is compensating the settlers generously” for introducing a partial settlement construction freeze, Sfard wrote. “The reward is huge and expensive, and it is paid in the most precious currency Israeli leaders have: outpost legalization and planning approval.”

The settlers, ideological and patient in a manner that only messianic communities are, understand that while the construction moratorium is temporary, legalization of outposts and approval of construction plans will have long-term effects. They see the attraction in this barter for the long run and act accordingly. They play their role in the freeze game: They demonstrate against it, they send their young hooligans to clash with the Israeli army and police, they violate it publicly, but they do not declare the current government as their enemy, as they did when late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared a narrower construction moratorium — one that applied only to state-funded construction in settlements. The planning-and-outpost-legalization-for-temporary-moratorium deal has never been announced publicly or ever officially confirmed. We may only infer its existence by reviewing the evidence revealed in the last five months.

Sfard noted significant changes in three areas. The first involves settlement outposts illegal even under Israeli law (international law considers all the settlements illegal), which it now appears that the Netanyahu government is in the process of retroactively legalizing. The second involves a slowing of the process by which illegal outposts are removed (even though a vanishing few are ever actually removed, and most of those are quickly rebuilt by settlers, with Israeli troops looking on.) And the third involves accelerated planning for future settlements:

[S]ince the construction freeze was introduced, several major neighborhood plans for settlement where either approved or advanced in the relevant planning committees. Those plans include together thousands of housing units in extremely sensitive places, and some of them were pending for years while consecutive governments avoided advancing them. When negotiating the construction freeze, the U.S. administration did not listen to Israeli voices who repeatedly warned of the shortcomings in a construction freeze that did not include a planning freeze. The result, as anticipated, is severe, and its first signal arrived less than a week after the moratorium was declared: The West Bank planning committee approved a plan for a new neighborhood of 360 housing units in the Talmon settlement, deep in the West Bank. The plan retroactively Koshered 60 illegal houses already built and allowed the erection of hundreds of new ones. The plan was pending for years and the settlers have failed time and again to have it approved. In the same way other plans were advanced since the moratorium was declared, most of them far from the 1967 line and others in East Jerusalem.

The settlers are preparing for the day after the construction freeze; the day of the de-freeze. And when that day comes, they are certain a construction boom of significant scale will commence.

Needless to say, Netanyahu’s preparing for a massive Palestinian land grab when the partial moratorium expires doesn’t exactly speak well of his commitment to peace, or his seriousness about a two state solution, or do much for the credibility of Palestinian leaders who agree to enter into negotiations with him. Maybe it’s time for the U.S. and its partners to call on the Israelis to elect new leaders untainted by support for settlements.

The Wall Street Journal’s editors have unearthed damning evidence of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s radicalism, which is sure to derail her nomination. “Across her career,” the editors write, “Ms. Kagan has… been a reliable legal partisan“:

While Harvard dean, she joined three other law school deans in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on detainee policy, arguing that “immunizing the executive branch from review of its treatment [of detainees] strikes at the heart of the idea of the rule of law.” In a 2007 Harvard commencement speech, Ms. Kagan disparaged legal memos written by John Yoo as “expedient and unsupported legal opinions,” that “failed to respect the law.” So much for crossing the intellectual aisle.

Indeed, Kagan’s views on executive immunization from review of its treatment of detainees were so extreme that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed those views in the 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, in which Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion “[I]n undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.”

Likewise, Kagan’s view of John Yoo’s legal memos as shoddy and unsupported were shared by, among countless others, Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Yoo’s boss Jay Bybee’s as head of the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Goldsmith found Yoo’s work to be so weak that, in a virtually unprecedented move, he withdrew Yoo’s memo authorizing torture, going so far as to submit his resignation on the same day “to ensure that the decision stuck.”

In both of these cases, Kagan’s views were solidly within the bipartisan legal consensus, which was that the Bush administration’s positions on detainees and torture were not supported by any fair reading of the law. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is of course free to differ with that consensus, but it’s important to understand that it’s their views, not Kagan’s, who are marginal and extreme here.