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Congress these days is such a drag. Despite the president’s glorious return to his perch at the top of the executive branch, the legislature remains full of men and women who stubbornly persevere with such retrogressive notions as legislative independence and local representation. For a president with a second-term agenda that is too vital for even the slightest pause, that’s a royal pain in the crown.

Trouble is, it’s rather hard to bypass Congress with any regularity without inviting the opprobrium of the court system or of the American public — or, preferably, of both. What, then, to do?

Keep reading this post . . .

Amnesty Gang Throws Law-Abiders Under the Bus
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013

President Obama and the bipartisan Gang of Eight in Washington who want to create a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of illegal aliens have sent a message loud and clear to those who follow the rules: You’re chumps!

Have you patiently waited for months and years for the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to slog through your application? You’re chumps!

Have you paid thousands of dollars in travel, legal and medical fees to abide by the thicket of entry, employment, health and processing regulations? You’re chumps!

Have you studied for your naturalization test, taken the oath of allegiance to heart, embraced our time-tested principle of the rule of law, and demonstrated that you will be a financially independent, productive citizen? You’re chumps!

Unrepentant amnesty peddlers on both sides of the aisle admit their plan is all about votes and power. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain continues his craven, futile chase for the Hispanic bloc. Illinois Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez is openly salivating at the prospect of millions of new illegal aliens — future Democratic Party dependents of the Nanny State — who could be eligible for Obamacare and a plethora of other government benefits despite clear prohibitions against them.

These cynical pols insist that the rest of law-abiding Americans and law-abiding permanent residents must support Washington’s push to “do something” because “11 million people are living in the shadows.”

To which I say: So? There are 23 million Americans out of work. Why aren’t they Washington’s top priority anymore? Didn’t both parties once pledge that j-o-b-s for unemployed and underemployed Americans was Job No. 1? Why is the very first major legislative push of 2013 another mass amnesty/voter drive/entitlement expansion?

If Washington is really concerned about people “living in the shadows,” how about prioritizing the jaw-dropping backlog of 500,000-plus fugitive deportee cases. These are more than a half-million illegal aliens who have been apprehended, who had their day in immigration court, who have been ordered to leave the country, and who were then released and absconded into the ether. Poof!

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pols pretended to get serious about fixing the broken deportation system and enacted absconder apprehension initiatives to track down these national security risks. But over the past dozen years, only 100,000 out of 600,000-plus fugitive illegal aliens targeted by the program have been found. Why isn’t the search and removal of these repeat offenders more important than giving “11 million people living in the shadows” a “pathway to citizenship”?

Question: If border security and immigration enforcement are truly a priority to our elected officials, why must these two basic government responsibilities be tethered to benefits for line-jumping illegal aliens? See whether any politician can answer without sputtering about “11 million people living in the shadows” or invoking the over-worn race card.

(By the way, we all know that moldy “11 million” statistic can’t be right. Open borders groups have cited it for nearly 15 years as amnesty measure after amnesty measure attracted new generations of illegal aliens to the country.)

You know who else deserves more attention and compassion than “11 million people living in the shadows”? The 4.6 million individuals around the world who legally applied for sponsored green cards and followed the established legal immigration process. They’ve been shunted aside while the Obama administration ushers illegal alien “DREAM” waiver winners to the front of the line.

As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies points out: “It is clear that there is no way the roughly one million or more potential Dreamers can be accommodated by (the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service) without noticeably slowing down the processing of legal immigrants (emphasis added). The agency already processes six million applications a year without the amnesty add-ons.

There have been nearly a dozen major amnesty laws, affecting at least five million illegal aliens, passed since the Reagan 1986 amnesty. These beneficiaries and their families have crowded out legal immigrants and increased their application waiting times in untold ways. GOP Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas asked the Obama administration last summer to disclose data on how much the DREAM waiver amnesty alone has affected adjudication/processing times for everyone else. The White House has failed to answer the request.

Want a reality check? Not one of the past federal amnesties was associated with a decline in illegal immigration. Instead, the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has tripled since 1986. The total effect of the amnesties was even larger because relatives later joined amnesty recipients, and this number was multiplied by an unknown number of children born to amnesty recipients who then acquired automatic U.S. citizenship.

Hopelessly naive (or stubbornly self-deluded) freshman GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida insists that any new recipients of the Gang of Eight’s Grand Pander scheme will have to “go to the back of the line and wait behind everybody who applied before them, the right way.” Rubio emphasizes to conservative talk show hosts that there will be background checks and rigorous vetting.

But as I’ve reported for the past two decades, the background check process has been corrupted under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration turned immigration policy into a massive Democratic voter recruitment machine through the Citizenship USA program. Naturalization officers simply abandoned background checks wholesale. In 2003, an INS center in Laguna Niguel solved the massive backlog problem by putting tens of thousands of applications through a shredder. And in 2006, I exposed how some high-immigrant regions rewarded adjudication officers with bonuses for rubber-stamping as many applications as possible without regard to security.

You want “comprehensive immigration reform”? Start with reliable adjudications, fully cleared backlogs, consistent interior enforcement, working background checks for the existing caseload, and efficient and effective deportation policies that punish law-breakers and do right by law-abiders.

And please don’t pretend that piling millions of new illegal aliens onto an already overwhelmed system is going to fix a darned thing. Chumps.

What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat? After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama’s response have been?

My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of practicing the “politics of division” or some such and denied it.

Keep reading this post . . .

President Obama and the bipartisan Gang of Eight in Washington who want to create a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of illegal aliens have sent a message loud and clear to those who follow the rules: You’re chumps!

Have you patiently waited for months and years for the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to slog through your application? You’re chumps!

Keep reading this post . . .

It’s not quite on a par with 9/11 truthers or Obama birthers, but recently a number of liberal commentators have descended into the fever swamps of denialism by rejecting the most basic facts about our debt and deficit. Mind you, they are not arguing about the best policies to reduce the debt — taxe hikes vs. spending cuts — but actually denying that the problem exists at all.

Paul Krugman, for example, pronounces the debt problem “mostly solved.” Matt Yglesias of Slate asks, “What sovereign debt crisis? There certainly isn’t one in the United States.” Bruce Bartlett, every liberal economist’s favorite former conservative, adds that “our long-term budget situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe.”

Keep reading this post . . .

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh said of comprehensive immigration reform, “I don’t know that there’s any stopping this; it’s up to me and Fox News, and I don’t think Fox News is that invested in this.” After Limbaugh’s interview today with Marco Rubio, I wonder how invested Limbaugh is in stopping the comprehensive immigration reform express.

Rubio has been designated by the Senate’s immigration leftists — Schumer, Durbin, McCain, and Graham — as the man who will sell to conservatives their agenda of amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens. Rubio appears to have done a good sale’s job on Limbaugh.

Rush started out by asking a great question:

The first question I have for you is, why are we doing this? It seems like Washington has a pattern, and that is, when the Democrats want to do something, the media gets behind it, the Democrats get behind it, and it becomes something that has to be done and therefore the Democrats set the stage, they start the ball in motion. The Republicans then react to it, say, “Okay, that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it, but here’s our way of doing it.” Why are we doing this now?

Rubio answered:

The president clearly outlined that he was gonna push on this, the media was gonna focus on this, the Senate Democrats were gonna push on this issue, and I thought it was critically important that we outline the principles of what reform is about. . . .In the absence of stepping forward with our own principles, the left and the president will tell people what we stand for, and it’s not necessarily gonna be true.

This is fine as far as it goes — Republicans should define their position rather than having it defined for them. However, this begs the question of what the Republican position on immigration should be. In Rubio’s mind, as in the mind of Schumer, Durbin, McCain, and Graham, reform should include, among other things, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

But, as Rush asked, Why? Of course, the Democrats were always going to push for citizenship for illegals — it’s a vital element of their plan to obtain permanent political supremacy. But Republicans need not capitulate. The House can block whatever the Senate Democrats push; even Senate Republicans could do so if they were united. With Rubio on board with the Dems, however, it will be politically difficult for even the House to avoid the amnesty/path to citizenship steamroller.

Thus, Rush’s question stands: Why capitulate on amnesty and the path to citizenship?

Unfortunately, Rush didn’t press the point. Instead, he raised the separate concern of how to make sure that the border enforcement component of the deal Rubio is pushing — amnesty and a path for citizenship once the border is secure — will be fulfilled. The question is an important one to be sure, but it assumes that amnesty and a path to citizenship would be meritorious outcomes if the border were secured. But why? Rubio didn’t say and Rush didn’t ask.

Instead, Rubio touted his supposed powers of persuasion:

I am confident, I really am, maybe people don’t share this confidence, I am confident that, given a fair chance, I can convince most Americans, including Americans of Hispanic descent, that limited government and free enterprise is better for them and better for their upward mobility than Big Government is. Because that’s the reason why they came here. You look at people that come from Latin America. They come to get away from stale stagnant economies where the rich keep winning and everybody else keeps working for them because Big Government dominates those economies.

Rush was skeptical:

Well, is that the reason that a majority of immigrants come to this country today? I know it used to be. They wanted to be Americans. They wanted to escape oppression. They wanted to become citizens of the greatest country on earth. I’ve seen a number of research, scholarly research data, which says that a vast majority of arriving immigrants today come here because they believe that government is the source of prosperity, and that’s what they support. It’s not about conservative principles and so forth, not the way it used to be. Are the Republicans stuck in the past in misjudging why the country is attractive to immigrants today?

Rush might have added that even the immigrants of the past supported a leftist, big government agenda for many decades after arriving in America. But Rush was certainly spot-on in refusing to romanticize today’s immigrants.

Rubio responded by resorting to anecdote. Even he didn’t seem convinced by his response:

I haven’t done a scholarly study on the makeup. I can only tell you about the people I interact with, and I can tell you the folks I interact with, once they get into this country and they start to work and they open up their own business, they start to understand the cost of Big Government. I see it every day firsthand from people that have been here about eight to ten years. All of a sudden, they have their own business, they have a bunch of permits that they have to comply with, a bunch of complicated laws. Their taxes just went up a couple of weeks ago even though President Obama has been saying it’s only gonna go up on the rich, and the light bulb is going off that, in fact, Big Government, you know, rich means them even though they’re middle class and Big Government means less opportunity for them. So we have work to do, there’s no doubt about it.

Rubio’s personal observations do not trump the data. Hispanic immigrants vote overwhelmingly for the party of big government. The Republican position on immigration reform probably contributes to this phenomenon at the margin, but it can’t explain it. The waves of immigrants who preceded the Hispanics also voted overwhelmingly for big government liberalism, and for the same reason — they were a resentful underclass.

Rush switched the focus to President Obama. He argued that the president has no real interest in achieving border security.

This enabled Rubio to tout the Gang of Eight, whose blueprint for reform includes improving border security. Rush countered that this will not prevent the Democrats from calling the Republicans anti-Hispanic if they block reform on the grounds that it won’t bring about real border security.

Here, I think Rush misses the game the game of “good cop, bad cop” the Democrats are playing. Obama is the bad cop — the pro-immigration extremist. Schumer and Durbin are the good cops, insisting on (faux) border security. Obama will gladly take what the good cops are offering because it’s also what he craves — the path to a permanent Democrat political majority. Meanwhile, out of fear of the bad cop, Rubio and company probably will ultimately agree to what the good cops are insisting upon — that, by hook or by crook, the border is certified as secure so that millions of illegal immigrants can become citizens.

In any event, Rubio seemed to win Rush over:

Well, what you are doing is admirable and noteworthy. You are recognizing reality. You’re trumpeting it, you’re shouting it. My concern is the president wants to change the reality. My concern is the president wants people to believe something that isn’t true is, and that is that you guys are not being truthful of what you say, that you really don’t want an improved life for Hispanics, that you really are still racist. He’s not gonna give that up. Look how far he’s gotten with this so far. You know, it’s an enviable task that you’ve got.

Rush seems to be suggesting that Republicans should support legislation that includes amnesty and a path to citizenship in order to rebut Obama’s claims that Republicans are racist. In my view, Republicans shouldn’t be cowed into supporting bad ideas in order to avoid charges that the Democrats will always level, based on one pretense or another, against them.

Rush’s next-to-last question was: “What do you think the result will be if this effort fails?” For me, the more pertinent question is: What will be result be if Rubio’s effort to bring about amnesty and a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants succeeds?

One result, I believe, will be the inability, for decades, of the Republican party to win more than the odd election as a conservative entity.

Read all about it:

Here.

Here.

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Here.

Here.

Here.

And here.

There’s an old saying that goes “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Thanks to Twitter, conservative media, and citizen watchdogs who have the audacity to question monopoly lib media narratives, truth can now catch the lie at the speed of tweet.

Nil desperandum.

Numquam cede.

Brendan Marrocco is the first Iraq War veteran to survive losing all four limbs in a bombing

His chief surgeon, Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, said Marrocco’s operation was “the most expensive and complicated arm transplant surgery ever performed.”