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ALTHOUSE: Trellage is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary.

MEADE: French!

1861   Bp. S. Wilberforce Let. in Life (1881) II. xiii. 454   The earthly love becomes the trellice, up which the heavenly love creeps.
1894   H. Drummond Lowell Lect. Ascent Man 193   Language formed the trellis on which Mind climbed upward.

1712   J. Addison Spectator No. 477. ¶1   There are as many kinds of Gardening as of Poetry:..Contrivers of Bowers and Grotto’s, Treillages and Cascades, are Romance Writers.

President Barack Obama is apparently hitting the links today. He’ll be playing golf with two Republican senators, Saxby Chambliss and Bob Corker, and Senator Udall, a Democrat from Colorado.

Pres Obama will be playing golf this afternoon with 3 US Senators: Chambliss, R-GA; Corker, R-TN and Udall, D-CO.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 6, 2013

Sometimes the first step in building a thing of beauty is to dynamite the ugly, dying strip mall that occupies the real estate you want to build upon. We, the American Conservative Movement can rebuild once the junk gets cleared away. We just have to be ready, and we just have to avoid bailing the Progressives out of their own state-fueled death spiral of non-sustainability.

Brett Stevens of Amerika.org shows us how our society currently fulfills Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Currently, our society is chasing its own tail into the abyss. The books give us certain rules and facts, and we follow those; when that doesn’t work out, we redouble our efforts using the same rules and facts. Like robots, we cannot deviate from our programming because we’ve eliminated the people who can think outside the box.

The Heritage Foundation has released its long awaited study of the cost to American taxpayers of legalizing the current population of illegal immigrants. The study, available here, estimates the cost at $6.3 trillion, at a minimum.

Andrew Stiles at NRO does a good job of summarizing the study’s methodology and findings:

The study seeks to calculate the total amount of taxpayer-funded benefits and services illegal immigrants would, if given legal status, consume over their lifetimes, compared with the amount they would contribute in taxes. The various benefits and services taken into account include direct benefits such as Social Security and Medicare, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps and public housing, public education, and other services such as police and fire departments.

The study shows that, in 2010, the average illegal-immigrant household received $24,721 in government benefits and services while paying $10,334 in taxes, creating a fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $14,387 that must be borne by other taxpayers. That figure “would soar,” the study says, if those illegal immigrants were given legal status, and therefore made eligible for federal welfare programs, which even immigrant households here legally are more likely to receive than U.S.-born households. Under the Gang of Eight’s proposal, the average illegal-immigrant household would produce a net fiscal deficit of nearly $600,000 over the course of a lifetime, the study found.

The study analyzes costs during three phases:

During the ten-year “interim phase” after the bill is passed, in which illegal immigrants would be given legal status but would be ineligible for means-tested welfare programs and Obamacare, the average fiscal deficit for their households would fall to around $12,500 a year because of increased tax payments. Following this initial period, however, government spending would “increase dramatically” — once formerly illegal immigrants become eligible for those programs, average fiscal deficits would rise to about $29,500 per household. During retirement, when former illegal immigrants, now permanent residents or citizens, would be eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits, the net cost to taxpayers would remain high, at around $22,700 per retiree per year.

Because the average illegal immigrant is about 34 years old, restricting access to benefits during the interim phase would have only a “marginal impact” on the long-term aggregate cost. The study found that, under current law, illegal-immigrant households produce a combined fiscal deficit of about $54.5 billion per year. After legalization, that number would fall to $43.4 billion, but would climb to $106 billion once households become eligible for welfare benefits, and would increase still further to around $160 billion during the retirement phase.

The bottom line is that current illegal immigrants would receive around $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services over the course of their lifetimes, and would pay about $3.1 trillion in taxes. Hence, a net fiscal deficit of $6.3 trillion.

Moreover, this is a conservative estimate, according to the study authors Robert Rector and Jason Richwine. They say that it likely undercounts the total number of illegal immigrants that would ultimately be legalized and as a result would become eligible for welfare and medical benefits.

The Heritage Foundation study received plenty of preemptive criticism from supporters of amnesty, who knew what its methodology would be based on a similar Heritage study from 2007. Critics claim that the cost of amnesty should be calculated through “dynamic scoring,” which, of course, grants the studier lots of room for manipulation.

The Heritage Foundation shouldn’t be treated as the gospel, and we’ll attempt to report on the debate it precipitates. But I suspect that the study’s authors are right in concluding that “those who claim that amnesty will not create a large fiscal burden are simply in a state of denial concerning the underlying redistributional nature of government policy in the 21st century.”

**Written by Doug Powers

Shorter Obama commencement speech: “We’re from the government and we here to help you. Anybody who tells you otherwise is operating against your self interest.”

From Real Clear Politics:

U.S. President Barack Obama gives the commencement address to the graduating class of The Ohio State University at Ohio Stadium on May 5, 2013 in Columbus, Ohio.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us, it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.

Interesting. Obama said that those who warn others to be on the lookout for government tyranny run counter to the reason this “brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule” called the United States of America was formed, when in fact a stand against government tyranny is precisely why this country came into existence. Can somebody please flick the paradox switch on the teleprompter to the “off” position?

Thomas Paine wrote about the “government and society should be a single entity” approach in Common Sense, and concluded the two should never be indistinguishable:

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one;”

Click the pic to roll tape at RCP:

P.S.: I have no idea why comments are closed on this… trying to find out what the problem is.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Mark Krikorian shows how the Schumer-Rubio immigration reform bill falls short of what Sen. Rubio promised when he touted it in advance on conservative Talk Radio. Here are some of the particulars Krikorian presents:

1. Rubio emphasized that to gain legal status, immigrants would have to pay their back taxes. But the bill Rubio helped write requires only that applicants “satisfy any applicable federal tax liability” that has previously been “assessed” by the IRS. Krikorian points out that a tax is “assessed” only after a tax return has been submitted or after the IRS has conducted an audit. Since neither of these things happens with illegal immigrants working off the books, there aren’t any back taxes to be paid.

2. Rubio spoke often about requiring immigrants seeking legalization to learn English. Under his bill, however, illegal aliens can earn legal status without learning English. The language requirement comes into play only after illegal immigrants receive amnesty and seek to upgrade to full green-card status. And even then, the bill requires only that they enroll in a class, not that they demonstrate actual proficiency.

3. Rubio touted, and continues to tout, an exit tracking system designed to help the government figure out who has overstayed their visa. But, says Krikorian, the system provided for in the legislation would have to be in place only in airports and seaports, even though most foreign visitors cross land borders.

Moreover, Congress has already mandated an entry-and exit-tracking system at all border points. So the Schumer-Rubio legislation offers only a watered-down version of something the law already calls for.

4. “Securing the border with Mexico” is at the heart of Rubio’s pitch to conservatives. His bill purports to achieve border security by setting up benchmarks of surveillance of 100 percent of the border and apprehension of 90 percent of attempted infiltrators.

But the 90 percent apprehension figure is a joke. As we have discussed and Ted Cruz forced Janet Napolitano to admit, the government has no idea how many people are crossing the border without being apprehended. Therefore, it is impossible to determine whether we are apprehending 90 percent of those who attempt to infiltrate.

In addition, the 90 percent standard applies to just three of the nine sectors along the Mexican border. They are the so-called “high risk” sectors. The Schumer-Rubio legislation likely will lead to a shifting of enforcement resources to these sectors, at which point some of the other six sectors will become “high risk.”

5. Rubio claimed that if border security isn’t achieved for the three “high risk” sectors in five years, “it goes to a border commission made up of people that live and have to deal with the border and they will take care of that problem.” As we have noted, this isn’t true. The border commission is made up mostly of Washington-appointed members and has only the power to make recommendations.

Rubio purports to be the conservative ambassador to the Gang of Eight. But, as Krikorian concludes, he clearly has become the Gang of Eight’s ambassador to conservatives. And, in my view, an untrustworthy ambassador, at that.

“Dictatorships and Double Standards” is of course the title of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous Commentary article about how “human rights” liberals of the time were hard on our allies who had less than stellar human rights records, but supine in the face of totalitarians like the Soviet Union and its allies such as Cuba.  (Because, as we all know, Cuba’s literacy and universal health care are more important than bourgeois rights like free speech, etc.)

Niall Fergsuon

It’s time for an update, with reference to the juxtaposition of the treatment of Niall Ferguson and Dick Harpootlian, which shows liberal double standards at work once again.  (Repeat the old joke here, if liberals didn’t have double standards. . . etc.)  Ferguson, as you’ve likely heard, decided to tempt the PC gods by speculating at an investment conference last week that John Maynard Keynes’s economic philosophy—or at least his famous comment dismissing the long-run effects of his deficit-spending formula that “In the long run we’re all dead”—might have some relation to his homosexuality and lack of children.  This is not a brand new idea about Keynes, as Jonah Goldberg reviews here, but liberals have reacted as if Ferguson had questioned the saintliness of Gandhi or something.  And while the idea that attachment to posterity through our children is far from being outré, it does seems a stretch to reduce Keynes’s layered views to this sole anthropological dimension.  After all, lots and lots of heterosexuals with children believe in unsound economic and social theories, too.  What was Ferguson thinking?  Did he think, “Gee—I’d really like to see what it’s like to emulate Larry Summers?”  (Ferguson is the Tisch professor of history at Harvard.)

Gov. Nikki Haley

Meanwhile, Dick Harpootlian is the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party who remarked last week that voters there should “send [GOP Governor] Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from,” which comes on top of remarks he made about Haley last summer, as reported by Politico:

At last year’s national Democratic convention, he compared Haley to Adolph Hitler’s mistress, saying the governor “was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun.”

Harpootlian’s remarks, for which he has refused to apologize, have received a little coverage in the media and no outrage among sensitive liberals, while Ferguson has provoked the usual DefCon1 response from the sensitivity police.  Ferguson has issued an abject and unqualified apology, unlike Harpootlian.  Anyone think this will reduce the uproar about Ferguson at Harvard?  He’s likely about to find out just how far today’s PC dictatorship extends.

James Pethokoukis notes how this episode will be used to defend Keynesian economics, which is an odd mirror image of Ferguson’s blunder.

I have gone back and forth with Senator Rubio’s office as to whether the Gang of Eight’s bill is fatally flawed because of the vast discretion it gives federal bureaucrats, including the Department of Homeland Security, in implementing the act. On the subject of DHS discretion, Rubio’s office said to us:

I’d disagree with your description of the discretion given to the Administration as “vast discretion”, but the waivers & discretion that we do give is worth closer inspection, and we’re looking to address in the amendment process.

So this is obviously a key point. Today Senator Jeff Sessions’ office sent out this commentary on the scope of discretion that the bill gives DHS to ignore criminal behavior, among other things, in making decisions as to who stays in the U.S., and who is admitted to the U.S. under the act. It is lengthy but well worth your time, as in this case, like so many, the Devil is in the details:

Not only does the Gang of Eight’s bill allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to decide for herself whether weak, undefined enforcement measures (“triggers”) are met, but it grants her unprecedented discretion in determining whether an alien is allowed to enter the country, whether future illegal aliens can be removed from the country, and who is eligible for amnesty in the bill. The net effect of these waivers and discretionary authority is to permanently hamstring and undermine law enforcement and create a new, endless bureaucracy surrounding immigration proceedings. These provisions, carefully crafted by special interest immigration attorneys, serve only one purpose: to weaken current law and make future enforcement impossible.

* For instance, this bill would allow the Secretary to overlook convictions for crimes related to gang activity, child abuse, domestic violence, and drunk driving in determining whether an individual is eligible for admission to the country if the person’s admission serves “humanitarian purposes,” “ensure[s] family unity,” or is in the “public interest.” These standards are so broad as to render most current legal restrictions meaningless.

* S. 744 would also grant the Secretary of Homeland Security and Immigration Judges enormously broad discretion to block the removal of any future legal and illegal aliens—including convicted criminals—where such a removal is not in the “public interest” or would result in mere “hardship” to the alien’s U.S. citizen or permanent resident parent of a child, spouse or child.

* The bill would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security, when determining whether an individual is eligible for amnesty, to overlook that individual’s convictions for the following types of offenses that would otherwise render the alien inadmissible to the United States: a crime involving moral turpitude (which could include theft, child abuse, domestic violence, and a variety of other serious crimes); a controlled substance (non-trafficking) offense; and multiple drunk driving offenses (which, interestingly, is added as a ground of inadmissibility elsewhere in the bill), if the Secretary determines that granting the individual amnesty would serve “humanitarian purposes,” “ensure family unity,” or is in the “public interest.”

* In reviewing an application for the amnesty provided in the bill, the Secretary is explicitly barred from considering: document forgery, skipping court-ordered removal hearings, making false statements to authorities, multiple illegal re-entries, or felony arrests that did not result in convictions.

* Even those who have been deported are eligible to apply for amnesty under the bill. Current law requires the Attorney General to automatically remove an alien who re-enters the U.S. after being deported. Under S. 744, however, this would no longer apply to future deportees who re-enter the U.S. before reaching 18 years of age. It would also no longer apply to any deportee—regardless of age—whose removal the Secretary determines would not be in the “public interest” or would result in “hardship” to the alien’s U.S. citizen or permanent resident parent, spouse, or child. For instance, under this bill, an alien who was removed after committing a deportable offense—such as assault or a crime involving moral turpitude—and returns before the age of 18 is no longer deportable, as he would be under current law.

* S. 744 provides that an alien is ineligible for amnesty if he has been convicted of three or more misdemeanor offenses on different dates, other than minor traffic offenses (a term which is not defined). That means that an alien is eligible for amnesty even if he or she has been convicted of two misdemeanor criminal convictions, or even a theoretically unlimited number of misdemeanor criminal convictions, as long as the convictions occurred on the same date. That also means that an alien who committed a serious felony offense but had his charges reduced to a misdemeanor as the result of a plea bargain is eligible for amnesty. Despite these already lax requirements, the Secretary is given authority to waive the bar for even those with multiple convictions.

* S. 744 also provides that Immigration Judges have the authority to appoint attorneys to illegal aliens at government expense. The appointment of an attorney at government expense is unprecedented outside of the criminal court context.

Rather than enhance border security and ensure future enforcement of the law, S. 744 rewards illegal aliens with criminal records, and creates an incentive for people to illegally enter the United States in the future. In essence, if S. 744 passes as currently drafted, the following scenario is not at all unlikely: An individual who has previously been convicted of a crime and subsequently removed from the United States illegally crosses the border at one of the six sectors not addressed by S. 744. The United States Border Patrol apprehends that individual, and rather than simply expediently removing him from the United States, places that individual into removal proceedings before an Immigration Judge. The Immigration Judge appoints an attorney for the alien at taxpayer expense. The attorney assists the alien in demonstrating that any future removal would cause mere “hardship” to a qualifying relative. The Immigration Judge terminates the case and permits the individual to stay in the United States—presumably indefinitely.

Quite opposite from creating the “toughest” enforcement in history as the proposal sponsors’ promised, this legislation would devastate enforcement and officer morale and disastrously undermine the rule of law for years to come.

As everyone knows, the youth vote skewed heavily for President Obama.  The question now is – will voting this way become a lifetime habit for these people.  Or can they be turned back to the light of reason as they begin looking for the jobs they need to pay off their student loans.

Barack Obama’s violent Chicago domestic terrorist pal is still clinging to his bombs. Guilty as hell, free as a bird.

At Kent State this weekend, he defended the Weather Underground attacks, whitewashed the bloody consequences of his ideological zealotry, attacked the United States as the “most violent” country in the world, called John McCain a mass murderer, and glorified left-wing radicalism. Via the Akron Beacon Journal:

Ayers, a keynote speaker at Saturday’s annual May 4 commemoration of the National Guard shootings at Kent State in 1970 that left four students dead, spoke briefly after giving his talk before an estimated 350 people on the university’s Commons.

There is no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts, Ayers said in response to a reporter’s question. No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.

Lie.

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.

Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.

And as I’ve been recounting the past several weeks, Weather Underground/Black Liberation Army violence resulted in the deaths of untold law enforcement officers and security guards.

The man has no shame. No shame at all:

Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, co-founded the anti-Vietnam War Weather Underground group that bombed the U. S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other buildings in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. The radical Weather Underground took its name from lyrics in a Bob Dylan song.

The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence.”

Another 1960s leftover spoke:

Other speakers included Tom Hayden, 73, a 1960s antiwar activist, former head of Students for a Democratic Society, California politician, author and ex-husband of actress Jane Fonda.

“There’s no worse death than the death of forgetting,” Hayden said in his closing comments.

Oh, we will never forget.

The Left’s Sick Fetish for Cop-Killing Radicals

The Bloody Company Hollywood Keeps

Academia hearts the Weather Underground: Kathy Boudin at Columbia and NYU

Friend of Bill Ayers, cop-killing fugitive Joanne Chesimard (“Assata Shakur”), placed on FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list

The Black Liberation Army’s war on police

Another police ambush in Washington state

The war on cops

Flashback: Bill Ayers declares education “the motor-force of revolution”

Reading Bill Ayers

What’s on Bill Ayers’ door

Flag desecration of the day: Bill Ayers stomps on Old Glory

Ayers and Churchill: We’re victims and heroes

Ayers on GMA: Putting the “unrepentant” in “unrepentant terrorist”

Obama and Ayers: Radical collaborators

Barack and Michelle and Bill and Bernardine: The Obama/Weather Underground compendium