1. The Phillies are toast in '10 unless they find a closer.
2. Sandra Bullock deserves far better than a tattooed biker.
3. In a volatile election year, the politicians in D.C. would rather detonate grenades in their mouths than tackle the immigration issue.
I'd bet that Democrats and Republicans alike would rather talk baseball or celebrity gossip; unfortunately, they're stuck these days with a hot political issue that has little foreseeable upside - for either party. That's why the prospects this year for comprehensive immigration reform are roughly equivalent to the odds of a bipartisan Senate resolution extolling the music and media savvy of Lady Gaga. It's easy to see why the Senate Democrats, and the White House, have been so tempted lately to put immigration on the front burner - if only as a cudgel they can use to pound the GOP.
The new Arizona law empowering cops to stop and question brown-skinned people, on merely the "reasonable suspicion" that they might be illegal immigrants, was enacted by a Republican regime, and thus becomes fresh grist for the Democratic argument that the GOP is inhospitable to Hispanics. Which happens to coincide with the Hispanics' growing perception that the GOP is inhospitable to Hispanics. Democrats are eager to reap the apparent political rewards.
Hispanics are now the nation's largest minority group, the fastest-growing cohort in the electorate, and they tend to punish intolerance at the polls. Immigration reform, with a path-to-citizenship provision, was actually a George W. Bush priority - until the party caved in to its angry white conservative base.
In the subsequent 2008 election, a surge of Hispanic voters greased Barack Obama's victories in heretofore red states such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, and even Indiana, thereby validating pro-Bush commentator Fred Barnes' '07 warning that the GOP "won't return as America's majority party if it lets the
Hispanic vote slip away."
But some conservatives cannot seem to help themselves. Just the other day, a California congressman named Duncan Hunter insisted that American citizens be kicked out of the country if their parents are illegal immigrants. Duncan somehow overlooked the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has decreed since 1898 that the children of foreigners automatically become citizens if they are born on U.S. soil. The high court has based several such rulings on the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, which in turn takes its inspiration from English common law. It's fascinating how often the people who want to "take the country back" seem so ill-educated about the Constitution they profess to revere. READ FULL STORY
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