Gang warfare in the United States Senate

Just off the Senate floor, a dozen Democratic and Republican senators huddle twice a day to decide whether proposed changes to a bipartisan immigration compromise are acceptable tweaks or fatal blows to their fragile agreement.
Survival of the deal that would allow 12 million unlawful immigrants to stay in the U.S. legally - regarded as the best chance to overhaul immigration this year - depends in large part on how effective this "Gang of 12" is in insulating the plan from major changes.

-- Associated Press, May 24

Observe how the Senate immigration bill -- potentially the most important piece of legislation that will be proposed in your lifetime, with almost limitless effects on the size and composition of the United States -- is being decided on. It tells you something about the strategy for getting the bill passed.

It is in the hands of 12 out of 50 U.S. Senators. Not in a regular committee meeting, with testimony from witnesses, visibility to the public, and a time frame protracted enough so that the lawmakers can ponder the bill and, if they are so moved, reconsider their positions. No, this is simply a group of power brokers playing a game among themselves.

They sit in overstuffed crimson leather chairs; Senate aides and senior White House officials look on. The team pores over lists of proposed amendments from both parties. Some are deemed acceptable, while others are deal-breakers that must be killed or modified to avoid alienating a key bloc. "There is a real commitment to absolutely do our best to see that the agreement is not unraveled," Kyl said. "We're trying to avoid killing the deal."

So, let's put this in plain English. Because there is widespread disagreement over the bill among their colleagues (not to mention the public), a handful of Senators, behaving like medieval royalty working out a treaty among their kingdoms, work unceasingly to make sure that it's a done deal before the final vote is taken. All the possible amendments must be accepted or rejected by this oligarchy.

If this bill, in the AP's words, "unites conservatives and liberals who regard enactment of an immigration measure this year as an imperative that can deliver political benefits and long-standing policy objectives to their respective parties" (slyly worded to imply that amnesty is in everyone's best interest), why is the Senate behaving like the Soviet Politburo rather than a deliberative body?

It's symbolic of how this unpopular and dangerous piece of legislation is being handled: keep it within a cabal as far as possible; insulate it from debate and amendment; get it through before the pressure to kill it builds to overwhelming proportions. Some "compromise." Some "solution."

American Muslims' middle class, mainstream suicide bombers

American Muslims are more prosperous than Western Europe's Muslims and less likely to support Islamic extremism than Muslims in most other nations, according to a landmark survey released yesterday. Most American Muslims are satisfied with their communities and believe they can get ahead if they're willing to work hard, according to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. ...

"We find the Muslim Americans we interviewed largely assimilated. They're happy with their lives," said Andrew Kohut, president of the nonprofit research center. "They're moderate on many of the issues that sharply divide Muslims and Westerners around the world."

-- New Jersey Star Ledger, May 23

The first nationwide survey of Muslim Americans revealed that more than a quarter of those younger than 30 say suicide bombings to defend Islam are justified, a fact that drowned out the poll's kinder, gentler findings suggesting that the community is mainstream and middle class.

"But the survey also found that only 40 percent of the overall American Muslim population would even admit that Arabs were behind 9/11. They're in denial, refusing to take moral responsibility, and the radicals will feed on this," Dr. Jasser said. ...

The survey, which estimates the U.S. Muslim population to be 2.3 million, emphasized the more positive findings, billing the group as "middle class and mostly mainstream," socially assimilated and happy.

-- Washington Times, May 23

Which paper do you read? Actually, if you follow both of these stories to the end, they contain pretty much the same information. It's the emphasis that is obviously different. The New Jersey paper is published in a state with a large Muslim population, so the story highlights how "moderate" they are, according to what they tell poll-takers. The Washington Times is a conservative paper.

And we are constantly told by the mainstream media that they are superior to the blogosphere because they are "professional" and can be trusted, while bloggers are just nutters with opinions.
Well, I'll tell you a little secret: the "professionals" of the mainstream media all have rings through their noses, and follow their employers' party line if they want to keep grazing in the fields instead of being given tickets to the meat-packing plant.

Another howler from the Washington Times piece:

"I'm not surprised that the press picked up on the bad news, because that's what sells. I'd like to see another ethnic group get asked the same question," said Laila Al-Qatami of the District-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Sure, Laila, whatever you say. No doubt a survey of American Jews, and people of African, Chinese, or Polish descent would show that 26 percent of them believe suicide bombing to defend their group is legitimate.

Once, within the lifetimes of many living Americans, revelations like those in the survey would have been enough to start an uproar and lead to a prohibition of further Muslim immigration. But that was another time, and another America, before self-preservation lost out to political correctness.

Send not to know for whom the bill tolls

It tolls for the death of a 230-year-old America that, for all its crises and faults, was the most successful example of self-government since ancient Athens (and which has lasted much longer).

Maybe a pun on John Donne's well-known line is too frivolous for the gravity of the situation; sorry, I couldn't help it. But the immigration bill that the Senate will begin considering today is indefensible on any rational and ethical grounds, and the case against it has been made in far more detail and more eloquently than I can do by Lawrence Auster, Randall Parker, Vanishing American, and countless other bloggers and writers. It goes beyond ordinary politics and any rationale that people of good will can disagree about.

This is the kind of measure that authoritarian governments are prone to, a pure power play cynically designed to boost the control of self-serving, malevolent interests through vote buying, in open defiance of the wishes of the majority of citizens. It mocks the rule of law and ignores the common good. It is also fueled in part by the ideology of transnational progressivism, which wants to replace nationhood as a set of specific traditions, culture, language, and patriotism with a what is being called a "proposition nation," one whose only characteristic is an all-purpose concept of diversity.

The bill to be debated this week is backed by a bipartisan clique whose members, nevertheless, believe that it will strengthen their own party's grip on government by rewarding somewhere between 12 million (the official, and dubious, figure) and 30 million (by other estimates) criminals and their families and descendants -- mediated only by a few mild inconveniences to the migrants that will likely be ignored in practice, as the "enforcement" provisions of the 1986 law that opened the floodgates were quickly forgotten. Beneficiaries if the bill passes will be big business, which has decided it cannot do without a huge population of modern-day serfs; a social work Establishment licking its chops at the prospect of a major inflation of its client base and thus of its budget and powers; ethnic zealots who would reclaim the United States for their own groups; and radical leftists who want to see America diluted to the point of an ungovernable, Balkanized society as payback for its past sins, real and imagined.

Even if the bill is passed in the Senate and something along the same lines gets through the House, and is signed into law by our egregiously thought-challenged president, I predict that it will no more end the struggle than the Missouri Compromise avoided the Civil War. Indeed, it can only increase the fissure in society between a non-responsive government and a large percentage of the population, already seething over years of having its values ignored by an insular Congress, president, academia, and mass media and an imperial judiciary which has taken on an authority subject to no checks and balances. It will produce a country divided against itself, in Lincoln's famous words, and the consequences will represent the greatest threat to civil society since his time.

The bill, America, tolls for thee.

If it's amnesty, it's not a "compromise"

Enemies of the people: They're laughing at your expense.

The so-called compromise worked out between el Presidente Bush and his cronies in the allegedly opposition party is anything but a compromise. To call it that, as so many of our Old Media hack reporters have done, is the latest stroke of dishonesty in the campaign to flood the country with low-wage, low-IQ, uneducated workers from the Third World.

As summarized by NumbersUSA, the provisions of the bill will include:

• An immediate amnesty for nearly all 12-20 million illegal aliens who will get legal status for residence and jobs (with the assurance of getting green cards no later than 13 years);
• Mandatory workplace verification and some extra enforcement to try to slow the flow of the next 12 million illegal aliens enticed by the amnesty;
• Tripling of the rate of chain migration of extended family from around 250,000 a year to around 750,000 a year for about a decade; and
• New flows of 400,000 temporary foreign workers each year, bringing their families and having anchor babies who will be given U.S. citizenship.
  

This is amnesty, pure and simple. Illegals will be rewarded with citizenship, or the right to remain in the country, for breaking the law, a departure from traditional legal and ethical codes that is breathtaking in its audacity. But that's the plan of el Presidente, his Democrat pals who are privately congratulating themselves at their fantastic good luck in working with a nominally Republican president on behalf of a measure that will ensure permanent control of the government by Democrats, and his Republican allies who bark and fetch for their corporate masters.

Presumably the second item is the excuse for labeling the bill a compromise. Does anyone seriously expect an administration that has never made an effort to "try to slow the flow" of illegal aliens is going to start once it has legalized The Invasion? El Presidente is so contemptuous of the anger and flat-out opposition he has generated by putting the United States up for sale to big business that he isn't even bothering to wait until amnesty has passed and he's signed it. He's already chipping away at provisions that might inconvenience any migrants. The Boston Globe today carries this note:

The Bush administration insisted on a little-noticed change in the bipartisan Senate immigration bill that would enable 12 million undocumented residents to avoid paying back taxes or associated fines to the Internal Revenue Service, officials said. An independent analyst estimated the decision could cost the IRS tens of billions of dollars.

A provision requiring payment of back taxes had been in the initial version of a bill proposed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. But the administration called for the provision to be removed due to concern that it would be too difficult to figure out which illegal immigrants owed back taxes.

How much do you want to bet that the various other pseudo-border-enforcement details will be determined to be impractical by politicians who'll be happy to see them scuppered?

This amnesty should be defeated. El Presidente Generalissimo Bush and his ruling junta should be impeached for treason.

Mexican Dream Act

George W. Bush, Mexican ambassador to the United States, is urging Congress to scrap provisions of his cherished Mexican Dream Act, now being debated in the Senate, that would hold businesses responsible for failing to check the immigration status of employees. According to the Washington Times:

The Bush administration, trying to win an immigration agreement with Democrats, is backing away from safeguards designed to target businesses that hire illegal aliens and to prevent a repeat of the rampant fraud that resulted from the 1986 amnesty.

Fraud? What's that? Don't these nitpicking critics understand that no one is illegal, and national borders are a relic of an unenlightened past? How can a country that has invaded and occupied another without troubling itself about declaring war insist on claiming borders of its own?

Newly appointed head of a Mexican drug intelligence unit
models the latest fashion in bullet holes.

When Bush gets his way and The Invasion is legalized, we will get more than low-wage construction workers and apple pickers from south of the former border. We'll get the Mexican narco-state big time.

[Mexican President] Calderon sent in 24,000 troops to retake cities and states with the most serious violence — Michoacan , Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana and Acapulco. Soldiers, less likely to be tainted by corruption than local police, burned crops and hauled away drug dealers of all levels.

Calderon warned Mexicans not to expect a short war, but it has proved even harder than that. Drug lords are now engaging in unprecedented battles with the army. Five dead soldiers this past week in Michoacan amounts to that state's worst single death toll in a decade, and they weren't the only casualties.

The drug lords have also gone all-out on assassinations. On Monday, Joe Nemisio Lugo Felix, a top narcotics intelligence official, was killed in his SUV in Mexico City. They also kidnapped, strangled and shot a federal investigator in Tijuana and gunned down a police chief in Acapulco.

--Investors Business Daily

Dear God, I humbly beseech your forgiveness for ever supporting a madman whose dream is a nightmare for the citizens of the entire nation he considers flyover country.

Tolerance for me, jihad for thee

Foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) yesterday expressed grave concern at the rising tide of discrimination and intolerance against Muslims, especially in Europe and North America. “It is something that has assumed xenophobic proportions,” they said in unison.

Speaking at a special brainstorming session on the sidelines of the 34th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM), the foreign ministers termed Islamophobia the worst form of terrorism and called for practical steps to counter it.

--Arab News, May 17

PAKISTANI Christians living in a town beset by pro-Taleban militants sought government protection yesterday, a day before the expiry of an ultimatum warning them to convert to Islam.

About 500 Christians in Charsadda, a town in the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, received threatening letters earlier this month telling them to close their churches and convert by 17 May or face "bomb explosions".

--Scotsman.com, May 17