Fast Forward

More stuff that got left behind this week....

***If Islamic fundamentalism is a cancer on the West, left-wing multiculturalism is its AIDS, paving the way for the former to metastasize and overwhelm the "patient." Just ask the Canadians, who still, even after this week's blessedly foiled but hair-raisingly home-grown Islamist terror plot, don't realize that they're "sick," let alone how bad the "illness" really is.

***Russian democracy is about to die again. But then at current demographic rates, in a century or so Russians will be extinct altogether, so perhaps the two are related.

***The American economy about which so many Americans are (allegedly) so distraughtly pessimistic is creating jobs faster than employers can find qualified people to fill them. Instead of a job shortage what we have now is a labor shortage. But nobody knows it because the Extreme Media relentlessly propagandizes a perpetual neoDepression and the Bush Administration continues to do nothing to tout its economic accomplishments.

It's enough to make one wonder whether Dubya ever really believed in tax-cutting at all beyond its utility as a re-election tool.

***The American Bar Association: one more Bolshevik institution whose extremism has been flushed out into the open by pandemic Bushophobia.

***Look who's coming to the rescue of the White House and Senate Republicans on the immigration standoff now: one of their biggest thorns in the side on fiscal policy, Representative Mike Pence (R-IN):

Pence's plan, to simplify more than a little, would offer working papers in the United States to any illegal who returned to his or her country of residency and asked for them. The job of processing these applications would be handled by private-sector firms who (it is presumed) would work faster and more effectively than the Immigration bureaucracy....

The plan is bad on its merits. Even if it could be made to work smoothly and without corruption and cheating, just consider this: Which illegals are most likely to take up its offer to return home, wait for a week, and collect their papers? Surely it would be those who had arrived most recently - that is, those with the strongest continuing connection to their home country (including relatives to stay with while they awaited their papers) and the fewest demands upon them to interfere with taking a week off or maybe two or maybe longer. (For who knows how long this process would really take? And what migrant would be fool enough to trust a promise of speedy action from any department of the US immigration bureaucracy, public or private?) In other words: The illegals most likely to accept Pence's offer are precisely those who would be most likely to leave the country altogether under an attrition strategy.

And who would be the illegals least likely to accept? Those with the most to lose - who could least afford to be trapped on the wrong side of the border if something went wrong: those who owned houses or a citizen spouse or had children enrolled in US schools: in other words, those with the strongest claim to some kind of regularization and legalization.

The likelihood is in other words that Pence's plan would a) not solve the problem of long-term illegality inside the US, would b) aggravate that part of the problem that is most easily fixed, while c) creating a permanent conveyor belt of quasi-legality to bring further inflows of Mexicans into the United States.

So how can this "compromise" possibly be a godsend for the border erasure crowd?

Its appeal owes much more to its attempt to reconcile two competing imperatives: to avoid doing anything that looks like an amnesty (on the one hand) and (on the other) the unwillingness to upset employers and alienate Latinos by actually removing illegals from US soil. Under the Pence plan, the illegals stay, but the forms of legality are observed - and by the way the day on which the illegals acquire citizenship and start voting for Democratic congressmen is postponed well past the retirement date of most of today's Republican congressmen.

And the appeal is very genuine. I have heard more than one congressmen and congressional staffer, supposedly committed to the no-amnesty point of view, praise the Pence plan as a way forward - or even endorse it outright. Congress usually moves very slowly, but sometimes it can move bizarrely quickly, and I would not be at all surprised to see this plan emerge suddenly in the House-Senate conference, whizz through both Houses on fast votes, and land on the president's desk to be signed in early September. Combined with some kind of compromise on the estate tax, the Pence deal would allow Republican congressmen to tell their constituents that they had achieved something since last November - while incidentally positioning Mike Pence as the savior of his party, a crucial ally of a beleaguered president, and a natural future Speaker of the House.

What does this tell me? That Pence is just as ambitious as the former House Majority Leader he helped bulldoze out of Congress; and, more to the point, it is the pro-enforcement forces on the House side that are weakening under the bogus argument that no bill is worse than a bad one and looking for any face-saving way out that they can.

On the bright side, the Iraq war/Hurricane Katrina appropriations bill that had been crammed full of some $16 billion of extra pork by the Senate emerged from conference committee $14 billion lighter, showing that our esteemed legislators are capable of some level of fiscal responsibility after all - when they're made aware that their constituents do, after all, have them by their shorthairs, and when their constituents are made aware that legislators' shorthairs are, after all, in their hands.

***One more reason why I just love Big Time.

A day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman "Snarlin'" Arlen Specter backhands the Vice President for "trying to head off subpoenas of the phone company executives" vis a vie the NSA terrorist surveillance program (i.e. protecting Executive Branch powers against Legislative encroachment), Cheney fires right back with a like "rebuke" that this is [drumroll] a classified program critical to national security (that has already been compromised six ways from Sunday) that doesn't need any more compromising by Legislative supremicists (and RINOs) like Specter. And, oh by the way, Cheney is perfectly entitled to speak to Senate leaders and members of Specter's committee since he is [drumroll] the president of the United States Senate.

Once more I will say it: I TOLD YOU SO....

***Lastly, I've heard of "mud-throwing" in politics, but this is the stuff of baboons - perhaps an appropriate updated symbol for the Democrat Party.