This is an interesting breakdown on the different stands of restrictionist thought. Mickey Kaus starts off with his own position:
My party line, in clip and save form, was:
The immigrants we get, including illegal Mexicans, are mainly hard-working potential citizens, like waves of immigrants before them;
The problem, as Mark Krikorian argues, is that we’ve changed, and the world has changed. We don’t need unskilled labor like we used to. Our native unskilled workers are having trouble earning a living.
The main reason to limit immigration flow, then, is to protect wages of Americans who do basic work. We desperately need a tight labor market. We won’t get it as long as millions of people from abroad respond to any tightening by flooding our work force.
The most important thing, then, is getting control of that number by securing the border — stopping illegal immigration. Once that’s done we can argue about what the legal number should be (and what should be done about current illegals).
But if wages are rising, it could be a reasonably big number! See point 1;
There are second-order worries about cultural assimilation, especially the huge flow from Mexico, a nation a day’s drive away many of whose citizens (polls show) don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of our Southern border.
One solution is to let in more people from other, non-Mexican cultures — Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians, etc. We want diversity! Ha ha. That joke never gets old.
But Kaus also notes that Ann Coulter (whom I’ve generally ignored over the last several years or so due to her tendency to say outrageous things solely for media attention) has some cognizant points for even more restriction of even legal immigration. The points Kaus summarizes seem to be from her book Adios, America:
1) Cultures differ, and culture matters: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” said Daniel P. Moynihan in his finest try for Bartlett’s.** Does anyone really doubt this? If businessmen can make millions babbling about corporate “culture” — If Reddit can have a culture — why can’t we talk about the cultures from which immigrants come?
Snip.
2) Some cultures are “better” at becoming American than others: The fatal mistake, in Coulter’s eyes, was Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act, which “snuffed out the generous quotas from countries that had traditionally populated America–England, Ireland and Germany”–and added “family reunification” policies, allowing recent immigrants to bring in their relatives [not just their nuclear families], and those relatives to bring in their relatives, until entire Somali villages have relocated to Minneapolis.”
Snip.
3) Crime, in particular is an issue: Coulter was driven to focus on immigration, she says, out of frustration when she discovered that the government makes it virtually impossible to find good statistics on the amount of crime committed by immigrants:
Every time you think the government has finally produced a real number of immigrants convicted of crimes in America, there’s a catch. Legal immigrants will be excluded, convicted criminals whose country of birth is unknown are left out, Hispanic criminals will be classified as white …
Like Trump, Coulter thinks the actual amount of immigrant crime is “staggering.” Unlike Trump, she doesn’t claim the Mexican government is intentionally sending us bad actors. She argues culture, not conspiracy (or genetics). The habits we don’t like — a non-progressive view of women, for example — are characteristic of many “peasant” cultures. Mexico just has the closest.
Snip.
4) Legal immigration matters: When I first heard the restrictionists at the Center for Immigration Studies lump illegal and legal immigration together, I thought they were weird. After all, border-controllers spend a lot of time fending off the charge that they’re “anti-immgrant.” The usual response: “That’s not true! I’m not against immigration! I’m against illegal immigration,” etc. And if you want to get control of the situation — well, that almost by definition means targeting illegal immigration (while allowing whatever immigration you decide to permit).
Yet if you worry about the effects of uncontrolled immigration on wages and culture, you have to admit that legal immigration, if large enough, could have exactly the same wage-depressing and culture-dissolving effect. Scott Walker got in huge trouble a few weeks ago when he dared to suggest setting the level of legal immigration low enough to allow U.S. workers to find good jobs. Had he joined Numbers U.S.A? No. He was just carrying the logic of supply and demand to its conclusion.
Snip.
5) Diversity sucks! According to Coulter, my idea of a Los Angeles in which Korean immigrants live with Latino immigrants to produce a vibrant synergistic whole is insane. Diversity is “a train wreck.” Her big gun in this argument is the inconvenient work of a beloved liberal professor, Robert Putnam:
Contrary to his expectations–and desire –Putnam’s study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbors, their local leaders, and even the news. People in diverse communities gave less to charity, voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy …It was not, Putnam said, that people in diverse coummnities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn’t trust anyone.
Snip.
6) We need a moratorium on immigration: You don’t need to accept any of Coulter’s heresies — cultures are unequal, diversity is bad, maybe today’s immigrants really are more problematic than previous waves — to oppose the smug consensus CW favoring “comprehensive” immigration reform. It’s enough to recognize that a) too much immigration bids down pay at the bottom, and that b) we’ll never control immigration if we try to do an amnesty before the border is secure (because the border security arrangements will promptly be undermined, as happened after the last amnesty)….She wants a 10 year “total immigration moratorium,” on the grounds that any loopholes will be abused and expanded by the immigration bureaucracy. “Just shut it down.”
I agree with all Kaus’ points and about half of Coluter’s. One exception to that moratorium I’d make is letting in the very best knowledge-workers around the world, people with critical technical skills (advanced programming, chip design, etc.) that can be done anywhere in the world in the Internet economy, so it would be best for them to do the work here. (Of course, since even that program is currently abused (“My cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint, let’s write the rec so only he can apply so we can get him over here…”), the minimum wage threshold to qualify should be something like three times the national average wage.)
Even though this is an old post on an old book, the basic dynamics Kaus/Coulter outline are still highly relevant, if not more so after the election of Donald Trump.
The American public wants a halt to illegal alien entry into America and limitations on immigration. The ideological core of the Democratic Party wants open borders at any cost. Something has to give.
Hope all of you had a happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm before you go off to engage in mortal combat to save $5 on an improved deframbulator.
“If Americans outside the big blue cities don’t care about the social obsessions of aging hippies, indoctrinated millennials, and frigid feminists, then they’re wrong. You can probably fix everything by redoubling your efforts to show them how horrible they are.”
“Why pretend to respect their opinions when you don’t respect their opinions. They like guns and America and Jesus, and frankly those things are, at best, embarrassing if not downright horrible. I mean, #Science, right?”
“Why bother assembling and analyzing the facts when you know what the answer will be, what it must be: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and whatever other faux-phobias that come slinking out of academia to give you an excuse to hector and nag normal people.”
If you want to see politics based on emotionalism over reason and a borderline-religious devotion to an iconic figure, forget the Trump Army; look instead to the Cult of Clinton.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election, all eyes, and wringing hands, have been on the white blob who voted for him. These “loud, illiterate and credulous people,” as a sap at Salon brands them, think on an “emotional level.” Bill Moyers warned that ours is a “dark age of unreason,” in which “low information” folks are lining up behind “The Trump Emotion Machine.” Andrew Sullivan said Trump supporters relate to him as a “cult leader fused with the idea of the nation.”
What’s funny about this is not simply that it’s the biggest chattering-class hissy fit of the 21st century so far — and chattering-class hissy fits are always funny. It’s that whatever you think of Trump (I’m not a fan) or his supporters (I think they’re mostly normal, good people), the fact is they’ve got nothing on the Clinton cult when it comes to creepy, pious worship of a politician.
By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine—the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I’ve come across.
Trump supporters view their man as a leader “fused with the idea of the nation”? Perhaps some do, but at least they don’t see him as “light itself.” That’s how Clinton was described in the subhead of a piece for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter. “Maybe [Clinton] is more than a president,” gushed writer Virginia Heffernan. “Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself,” Nothing this nutty has been said by any of Trump’s media fanboys.
“Hillary is Athena,” Heffernan continued, adding that “Hillary did everything right in this campaign…She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second.”
That’s a key cry of the Cult of Hillary (as it is among followers of L. Ron Hubbard or devotees of Christ): our gal is beyond criticism, beyond the sober and technical analysis of mere humans.
Snip.
As with all saints and prophets, all human manifestations of light itself, the problem is never with them, but with us. We mortals are not worthy of Hillary. “Hillary didn’t fail us, we failed her,” asserted a writer for the Guardian. The press, and by extension the rest of us, “crucified her,” claimed someone at Bustle. We always do that to messiahs, assholes that we are.
And of course the light of Hillary had to be guarded against blasphemy. Truly did the Cult of Hillary seek to put her beyond “analysis for even one more second.” All that stuff about her emails and Libya was pseudo-scandal, inventions of her aspiring slayers, they told us again and again and again.
As Thomas Frank says, the insistence that Hillary was scandal-free had a blasphemy-deflecting feel to it. The message was that “Hillary was virtually without flaws… a peerless leader clad in saintly white… a caring benefactor of women and children.” Mother Teresa in a pantsuit, basically. As a result, wrote Frank, “the act of opening a newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.”
Then there was the reaction to Clinton’s loss. It just wasn’t normal chattering-class behavior. Of course we expect weeping, wailing videos from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton about how Clinton had been robbed of her moment of glory; that’s what celebs do these days. But in the media, too, there was hysteria.
“‘I feel hated,’ I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt, holding my bare neck,” said a feminist in the Guardian. Crying was a major theme. A British feminist recalled all the “Clinton-related crying” she had done: “I’ve cried at the pantsuit flashmob, your Saturday Night Live appearance, and sometimes just while watching the debates.” (Wonder if she cried over the women killed as a result of Hillary’s machinations in Libya? Probably not. In the mind of the Hillary cultists, that didn’t happen—it is utterly spurious, a blasphemy.)
Then there was Lena Dunham, who came out in hives—actual hives—when she heard Clinton had lost. Her party dress “felt tight and itchy.” She “ached in the places that make me a woman.” I understand being upset and angry at your candidate’s loss, but this is something different; this is what happens, not when a politician does badly, but when your savior, your Athena, “light itself,” is extinguished. The grief is understandable only in the context of the apocalyptic faith they had put in Hillary. Not since Princess Diana kicked the bucket can I remember such a strange, misplaced belief in one woman, and such a weird, post-modern response to someone’s demise (and Clinton isn’t even dead! She just lost!).
It’s all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn’t even realize it’s doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one second, in Heffernan’s words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.
A word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week-and-a-half, and it’s revolting to watch.
For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again.
What kind of president will Trump be? It’s a tad too early to say, isn’t it? The media are supposed to tell us what happened, not speculate on the future. But its incessant scaremongering, the utter lack of proportionality and the shameless use of double standards are an embarrassment, one that is demeaning the value of the institution. The press’ frantic need to keep the outrage meter dialed up to 11 at all times creates the risk that a desensitized populace will simply shrug off any genuine White House scandals that may lie in the future (or may not).
Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter, the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.
“One by One, ISIS Social Media Experts Are Killed as Result of F.B.I. Program.” My reaction: 😊 (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More of those “mostly peaceful” protestors we keep hearing about, this time in North Dakota (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The reason the micro-group of neo-Nazis got attention is the media. It’s not the Right. This is an active attempt by CNN and others to paint all conservatives as anti-Semites. It’s disgusting.” Or why Richard Spencer is the new Westboro Baptist Church: A tiny, unimportant thing constantly hyped by the mainstream media as a way to paint Republicans as evil. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Mickey Kaus wonders if Democrats are finally willing to flip to an enforcement-first approach, giving up on amnesty to take the issue off the table and win back working class white voters. That idea makes a lot of sense, which is why I’m sure Democrats will never go for it…
Palestinians are shootinge each other, since the border wall makes it difficult to shoot Israelis. “The violence, much of it directed at a Fatah leadership seen as corrupt and out of touch.” Has there ever been a single moment in the history of “Palestine” when their leadership wasn’t “corrupt” and “out of touch”?
More Trump dividends: France cancels umpteenth Israel-Palestine summit because nobody gives a rat’s ass.
Twitter suspends the account of their own founder. That’s some mighty fine vetting process you’ve got going on there, Jack… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Who, exactly, is in charge of these cities and city agencies about which African Americans do have many legitimate complaints? Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago: Not exactly famous enclaves of conservative Republican political dominance. Because Dallas is in Texas, people sometimes forget that it is a city like any other American city, and Democrat-dominated. In Dallas, as in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, that Democrat domination is due in great part to a black Democratic voting bloc.
Eventually, someone is going to figure out that the black progressives protesting municipal arrangements in places such as Baltimore are protesting the municipal arrangements created by black progressives working for the interests of the Democratic party. Dallas’s racial politics aren’t as one-sided as Detroit’s, and neither are its party politics; it is Democratic, but not as lopsidedly Democratic as, say, Philadelphia. It even has had a Republican mayor (the office is technically nonpartisan) within living memory. No doubt somebody in Dallas already is trying to figure out a way to blame that mayor for the murder of those five police officers.
“Friends and family tell us that Alton Sterling was a great guy. That may well be the case, but he is also a convicted sex offender felon with a violent temper, who had six arrests for battery, two domestic violence charges, multiple illegal weapons charges, and who had fought with police over weapons before.”
SuperGenius tries to rob gas station, ends up shooting himself in the groin. I also wonder if he’s the towering intellect that managed to clip his own driver’s side mirror at the pump in the video…
With the Iowa Caucuses happening next week, I thought I’d finally concentrate on the big contest shaping up between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. I’m backing Cruz, but this election year has been so odd I couldn’t possibly predict the outcome.
Cruz was elected, as were so many other TEA Party candidates, to go to Washington and to stand for conservative principles in the face of opposition from both sides of the aisle, and unlike so many others, he did what he said he would do. He didn’t sell out, he didn’t jump on the DC gravy train, and he didn’t turn his back on his grassroots supporters or on his stated ideals and principles.
Trump says he’ll be raising money for veterans groups during the debate. Veterans groups: leave us out of your stunt.
Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t think you can make Ted Cruz wilt. I don’t think there’s any kind of heat that’s going to cause him to shrink. He rises to the occasion. The thing about Ted Cruz is that you never have to doubt his conservatism.”
Why the Iowa caucus rules will help Cruz…and Hillary Clinton.
Finally, if you haven’t seen National Review‘s “Against Trump” symposium (and my own issue hasn’t shown up in the mail yet), here it is.
Going to try to do one of these a day between now and Iowa. Keep in mind that I’ve been reporting on Ted Cruz here since he announced his senate run, for which I endorsed Cruz. If you’re just tuning into the election now, there’s a lot of information there on just how hard Cruz has been fighting for conservative causes…
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has agreed to hear a challenge to Obama’s unconstitutional illegal alien amnesty.
In a ruling that could short-circuit one of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, a federal court has allowed U.S. tech workers to challenge extensions of foreign laborers’ status here.
The case of Washington Alliance of Technology Workers v. the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has “major implications” for the president’s ability to expand the number of work visas and the terms or durations of those visas.
Mickey Kaus suggested that the separation of powers issues in Obama’s executive order might prompt the courts to move a lot more quickly than usual on the case. The District Court ruling suggests that he may be right.
Here’s a really solid Washington Post insider piece on how Republicans won, and Democrats lost, the election. “From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama.” That piece is also notable for David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff, going on record at how Obama screwed them. “The disagreements underscored a long-held contention on Capitol Hill that Obama’s political operation functioned purely for the president’s benefit and not for his party’s.” Read the whole thing.
“Tuesday’s voting was a wave alright—a very anti-Democratic wave.” Among the myths exploded: It wouldn’t be about Obama or ObamaCare, and women or their ground game would save Democrats.
“The actual truth is that Obama simply doesn’t do his job, because he is lazy, and he refuses to do the non-glamorous, non-“fun” parts of his job such as compromising, horsetrading, or working out the details, because he is a committed die-hard ideologue who also suffers from an intense Messianic complex in which he can only be the conquering hero.”
Pretty much everyone on both sides of the mediasphere/punditocracy was shocked by last night’s defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by David Brat.
Here’s a quick roundup on thoughts and reactions to Cantor’s defeat:
If David Dewhurst’s flailing campaigns hadn’t already destroyed consensus wisdom that money is everything in a political race, Brat’s vitory provides further confirmation. “As of mid-May, Brat had raised only about $200,000, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Cantor raised more than $5.4 million for this election cycle.”
The media will play up Cantor’s loss by claiming it was about immigration. They will be wrong, but it will be useful for the rest of us. Immigration reform is now DOA in the House of Representatives thanks to David Brat.
But Cantor really did not lose because of immigration alone. Immigration was the surface reason that galvanized the opposition to Cantor, but the opposition could not have been galvanized with this issue had Cantor been a better congressman these past few years.
He and his staff have repeatedly antagonized conservatives. One conservative recently told me that Cantor’s staff were the “biggest bunch of a**holes on the Hill.” An establishment consultant who backed Cantor actually agreed with this assessment. That attitude moved with Cantor staffers to K Street, the NRSC, and elsewhere generating ill will toward them and Cantor. Many of them were perceived to still be assisting Cantor in other capacities. After Cantor’s loss tonight, I got a high volume of emails from excited conservatives, but also more than a handful of emails from those with establishment Republican leanings all expressing variations on “good riddance.”
Cantor’s constituent services moved more toward focusing on running the Republican House majority than his congressional district. K Street, the den of Washington lobbyists, became his chief constituency.
“Cantor lost his race because he was running for Speaker of the House of Representatives while his constituents wanted a congressman.”
The American Conservative Union has long been a mouthpiece of the Republican Establishment and in the past few years has basically been K-Street’s conservatives. Their scorecard reflects the Republican-ness of a member of congress far more than the conservativeness of a member of congress. Just consider that Mitch McConnell was considered more conservative in 2012 than either Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn.
In contrast to the American Conservative Union, Heritage Action for America takes a more comprehensive approach to its scorecard, it does not try to help Republican leadership look good, and is a better barometer of a congressman’s conservativeness. The ACU had Eric Cantor at a 95%. Heritage Action for America has him at 53%.
And as long as I’m quoting Erickson:
Republican consultants are really pissed they’ve invested all this time in ass kissing staffers who suddenly aren’t powerful.
Because [Cantor] didn’t have to worry too much about getting re-elected every two years, his political ambition was channeled into rising through the hierarchy of the House leadership. Rise he did, all the way up to the #2 spot, and he was waiting in the wings to become Speaker of the House.
The result was that Cantor’s real constituency wasn’t the folks back home. His constituency was the Republican leadership and the Republican establishment. That’s who he really answered to.
Guess what? Folks in the seventh district figured that out.
Snip.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was Eric Cantor: the soul of an establishment machine politician, with the “messaging” of the small-government conservatives grafted uneasily on top of it.
So yes, you can now tear up all those articles pronouncing the death of the Tea Party movement, because this is the essence of what the Tea Party is about: letting the establishment know that they have to do more than offer lip service to a small-government agenda, that we expect them to actually mean it. Or as Dave Brat put it in one of his frenzied post-victory interviews, “the problem with the Republican principles is that nobody follows them.”
I would have settled for his challenger, Dave Brat, getting more than 40%. I was all ready to (legitimately) spin that as a warning shot across Cantor’s bow. Instead, Brat went and actually beat Cantor–decisively, by 10 points, 55% to 45%. He and his campaign manager Zachary Werrell obviously ran a very effective race with minimal resources–against Cantor’s millions. Independent anti-Cantor actors like the We Deserve Better group — and various local conspiracies we don’t even know about — probably played a role as well.
But the main issue in the race was immigration. It’s what Brat emphasized, and what his supporters in the right wing media (Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin) emphasized. It’s the charge Cantor defended against—by conceding the issue and posing as a staunch amnesty opponent. But Cantor had signed onto the GOP’s pro-amnesty “principles” and endorsed a poll-tested but irresponsibly sweeping amnesty for children (a “founding principle” of the country, he said). Brat opposed all this, even as illegal immigrant children were surging across the border in search of a Cantor-style deal.
Brat won this immigration debate. Cantor lost. It’s basically that simple.
Kaus also notes that it puts a stake in the heart of MSM “Republicans are really OK with amnesty” BS.
What does it mean for House leadership?
Those conservatives, suddenly smelling blood in the water, might now be emboldened to push for a wholesale change in leadership—ousting Boehner and McCarthy in this November’s conference elections, and entering the next Congress with a new top three.
“It should frighten everyone in leadership,” one conservative House Republican, who exchanged text messages on condition of anonymity, said shortly after Cantor’s defeat was official. “They haven’t been conservative enough. We’ve told them that for 3 years. They wouldn’t listen.”
The GOP lawmaker added: “Maybe they will listen now.”
Cantor’s internal polling (conducting by the McLaughlin Group) showed him up by 34%, when he actually lost by 10 points. I guess McLaughlin failed to note the results were +/-44 points. That’s some mighty fine polling methodology you have going on there, John…
Brat on his victory: “Dollars do not vote. You do!”
Brat offers Washington insiders a lesson in humility. Bonus: “The 10th Amendment is the big one; the Constitution has enumerated powers belonging to the federal government. All the rest of the powers belong to the states and the people.”
Harping on a theme he’s harped on before, Mickey Kaus dinged Ted Cruz (again) for not opposing illegal alien amnesty with the single-minded focus Kaus thinks he should. (“You didn’t clap loud enough! Tinkerbell is dead!Amnesty is Alive!”) This criticism is misguided:
Mickey Kaus is a Democrat and an ObamaCare supporter, albeit an entirely more reasonable example of each than usually found, as well as an amnesty opponent. Thus dinging Ted Cruz for fighting ObamaCare rather than amnesty is basically saying “A Republican senator is fighting hard against a program I support but not fighting hard enough against a program I oppose.”
Those doubting Cruz’s opposition to amnesty should take another look at what he said about it back when I interviewed him in 2011:
Cruz fought and voted against amnesty when it was before the Senate, but now it’s before the House. Given that whole “bicameral legislature” idea, the issue is beyond Cruz’s legislative purvey.
While I won’t go so far as to declare amnesty dead (as some have), if only because the GOP establishment seems to have a limitless appetite for suicidal compromise, its chances this legislative session do look slim, and all that was accomplished without Cruz taking the leading role against it.
Given all that, Kaus continuing to harp on Cruz’s appears to be of an idee fixe on Kaus’ part than real criticism.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, which, as we all know, finally brought long-lasting peace and stability to the Middle East. “Decadal stasis points to the sterility of the Arab-Israeli diplomatic process.”
How often does Defensive gun use occur? “From about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”
PPP’s poll data showed Giron was in trouble, but they didn’t release the poll, ostensibly because they didn’t believe it. That may be the case, but their explanation is suspect, given they actually testified in court as part of the effort to get the recall effort thrown out. Also, they didn’t do Giron and the gun-grabber side any favors by suppressing the results (the Liberal Reality Bubble strikes again). Bonus: Pollster Twitter slap fight!
To a visitor from India, America looks like a classless society. “I’ve noticed that most Americans roughly have the same standard of living. Everybody has access to ample food, everybody shops at the same supermarkets, malls, stores, etc. I’ve seen plumbers, construction workers and janitors driving their own sedans, which was quite difficult for me to digest at first since I came from a country where construction workers and plumbers lived hand to mouth.” (Hat tip: Ace.)
Rep. Peter King of Long island is running for President. Expect GOP voters to greet his campaign with the same enthusiasm with which they greeted Jon Huntsman’s.
In The Atlantic, Molly Ball claims that amnesty proponents are winning August. And I wouldn’t count on it being dead when the Republican Establishment shows no sign of giving up it’s suicidal longing for it.
In course of discussing why Texas won’t turn blue anytime soon, Nate Cohn in The New Republic gives away the game as to why Amnesty is so vitally important to Democrats, saying the expect 300,000 more Democratic votes from Amnesty in Texas alone. For Democratic strategists, every illegal alien is just an Undocumented Obama Voter.
Whether it’s dead or not, it certainly won’t do any harm to call or write your Representative’s office and remind them that you categorically oppose amnesty in any way, shape or form. And it wouldn’t hurt to mention your support for defunding ObamaCare while you’re at it…
