GOP, consider this your final warning...

Coming off John McCain's rather rambunctious Town Hall, we now have this:

Immigration reform’s chances in the House are looking bleaker after one of the top Republicans tasked with shepherding a bill to passage ruled out a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), chair of the Judiciary Committee that will mark up any House legislation on the issue, told NPR this week that he will not support a bill that eventually grants citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in America.

“People have a pathway to citizenship right now: It’s to abide by the immigration laws, and if they have a family relationship, if they have a job skill that allows them to do that, they can obtain citizenship,” Goodlatte said. “But simply someone who broke the law, came here, [to] say, ‘I’ll give you citizenship now,’ that I don’t think is going to happen.”

Okay, for one thing...before you panic too much over this: don't. This doucebag Bob Goodlatte is not the only person in charge of Immigration reform. He's just in charge of it in the House. There is this thing called the Senate, which will have a pathway to Citizenship, and there will be a Conference Committee, so my guess is it gets stuck back in there somehow.

But in the end, it goes back to what I said before.

Republicans, this is your final warning.

This is your last chance...by which I mean, your last chance to survive as a party.

Believe it or not, as Democrats, the purely craven political calculation here (i.e., if we were thinking like you) is to have this bill fail, and have your fingerprints all over it.

That's the best case scenario for us. You kill Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and leave an entire emerging (and young) majority of Latinos in Democratic Hands for generations to come, and you Republicans become the 21 Century Version of the Whig Party.

And it's this close to happening.

Fortunately, we Democrats give a @#$% about Governing...so we might ultimately save you from yourselves.

But it's time for Latinos to flex their muscles yet again. It's time for you to participate in the other, less fun side of electoral politics...the flooding of phone calls to various Congressional Offices.

I've heard it from the President, I've heard it from Latino Groups: a pathway to Citizenship is a must.

Well, time to let 'em know it's a dealbreaker...LOUDLY.

Something to keep an eye on...

@senjohnmccain again feels compelled to remind Sun Lakes crowd "we can't send them all back." #immigration
— BrahmResnik (@brahmresnik) February 19, 2013

TPM has more on the story, but if you're a Republican, you are sweating bullets right now.

Think about it.  If you are a GOP Pol, you know your future, in fact the entire future of the party comes down to how well you behave on Immigration reform.  With more and more Latinos coming of age, and more and more of your own base dying off, the trend appears that starting with the 2016 Presidential Election, the old Republican Party will not see power for a generation.

Yeah, that bad.

The solution is simple, come up with a massive Immigration Reform plan.  Behave well.  Show the Latino/Hispanic population of this country that you don't hate them.  And for a majority of the GOP Caucus in the House and Senate, that's absolutely true.  They don't hate Latinos/Hispanics.

Problem is, the base of the Party does.  They genuinely hate Latinos and Hispanics, and want to see the lot of them,  legal or no, bounced from the country.  Heck, they probably want to see speaking Spanish turned into some kind of felony.

This Town Hall was on a border state, which has been reliably Republican.  It has a massively unpopular (and massively unconstitutional) Immigration Bill that's unpopular everywhere...except among the people of that Town Hall.

The people of Arizona, moreso the Republicans of Arizona know that they're staring into the eyes of death (of their party).  They know that young Latinos will not rest until the white, racist, anti-Immigrant GOP is burned to the ground, and yet this is how they react??

I want to see how McCain reacts when he gets back to town, but in my mind, knowing how ultimately spineless McCain is, the odds of us getting comprehensive Immigration reform this year or any time before 2014 just took a hit.

Bad news for our friends and neighbors, but very good news if you're a Democrat.  The Republicans are going to destroy themselves and hand you power as they do it.

President Obama to sit down with Telemundo AND Univision on Wednesday!

Yep yep yep!

President Obama will be sitting down for a pair of interviews with Jose Diaz Balart of Telemundo and Maria Elena Salinas of Univision on the topic of immigration reform on Wednesday, per the White House. The interviews will air at 6:30 PM EST.

President Obama's Speech on Immigration Reform for Jan. 29, 2013 (VIDEO)

There's a lot to go through as far as analysis. You can start with Adam's Server's piece at Mother Jones, then the basics from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, as well as Think Progress's over at their Tumblr site.

Stronger Together: Immigration - 2012 Democratic National Convention Video

Is the GOP about to spend the next couple of Election Cycles in the wilderness?

Possibly.

Let's start off with Andrew Sullivan:

After Obama's end-run around Romney on deferring deportations of young native-born Americans who have broken no law apart from being born, the Latina Oprah, Cristina Saralegui, puts her invaluable imprimatur on the president. It's getting more and more necessary for Mitt to max out his percentage of the Caucasian vote:

Most polls this spring show Obama running near the 52 percent he won among those upscale white women in 2008, and also remaining very close to his 80 percent showing among all minorities. If Obama can hold that level of support from those two groups, Romney could amass a national majority only by winning nearly two-thirds of all other whites—the men with college degrees, and the men and women without them. To put that challenge in perspective, Reagan, while winning his historic landslide, carried a combined 66.5 percent of those three groups. To defeat Obama, in other words, Romney may need to equal Reagan.

So, Romney may be forced to turn to White voters in an unprecedented fashion (i.e., run a more racist-slash-racial campaign than he's used to) in order to compete. Yet, if the Senate, specifically the Republican Senate hadn't bowed down and caved to George W. Bush 43 at every possible turn:

“The importance of the Hispanic vote to President Barack Obama’s reelection chances is practically impossible to overstate,” writes Frank Wilkinson over at Bloomberg View. He’s almost certainly right.

So here’s my question: If President George W. Bush, working with Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, had passed comprehensive immigration reform in 2005, would Democrats have a chance this year? I see how they could have won in 2008, amidst a financial crisis and Bush fatigue. But it’s harder to see how they’d win in 2012 if the Hispanic vote was split.

Hey, Alabama! Stephen Colbert TOLD YOU SO (about your B.S. Immigration Law)!!!

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

And yes, here's Colbert's complete actual Testimony in front of Congress:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The President's Speech before the National Council of La Raza (VIDEO)

President Obama's speech on Building a 21st Century Immigration System (VIDEO)

"It's almost as if Republicans say they care about deficit reduction, until they're offered a chance to actually reduce the deficit."

Steve Benen, at his vicious best.

Attention Deficit Hawks!  According to the CBO, the DREAM Act will reduce the Deficit (not by an earth-shattering number), but it save money!

But none of y'all care about that, because Conservatives are fiscal frauds of the first order:

The DREAM Act, which has traditionally enjoyed strong bipartisan support, provides a path to citizenship for these young immigrants -- graduate from high school, get conditional permanent residency status, go to college or serve in the military, and become eligible for citizenship.

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office made the pitch even easier.

On Thursday, CBO estimated the bill would reduce the deficit by $1.4 billion over the next decade. The figure reflects a $1.4 billion increase in on-budget deficits, and a $2.8 billion decrease in off-budget deficits, CBO noted. Only on-budget figures are considered under pay-as-you-go budget rules adopted by the House.

This probably won't change a lot of minds; nearly all Republicans, including those who helped write the DREAM Act, have decided the bill constitutes "amnesty."

That said, the CBO score does bring to mind a fairly consistent trend in recent policy debates. For all of the obsessive attention, especially from the right, focused on reducing the deficit, Republicans have a nasty habit of rejecting ideas that actually help close the budget shortfall.

The Democratic health care reform proposal lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic student-loan bill lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic effort to let Bush tax cuts for the rich expire would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic energy/climate bill would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic effort to reduce bloated Pentagon spending would lower the deficit ... and most Republicans oppose it.

It's almost as if Republicans say they care about deficit reduction, until they're offered a chance to actually reduce the deficit.

If I didn't know better, I might think GOP officials don't think a deficit-reduction measure "counts" unless it undermines struggling families in some way. That couldn't be, could it?

In Florida, Canadians and Western Europeans will be presumed to be here legally, and not required to document it.

How many times do I have to say it?  For the GOP, its completely about race.

Florida is one of at least 20 states designing an immigration bill similar to Arizona’s SB-1070, which requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they think might be in the country illegally. State Rep. William Snyder (R) introduced the legislation in August, and Rick Scott, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for governor, favors such a bill.

Snyder has denied criticisms that such legislation could be used to discriminate against Latinos, saying in a recent radio interview that “race, ethnicity, and national origin cannot be used in making arrests. It’s immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.” However, the bill he introduced does appear to do just that — it exempts all Canadian and Western Europeans from extensive scrutiny. The exception, first reported by the Miami New Times, says a person will be “presumed to be legally in the United States” if he or she provides “a Canadian passport” or a passport from any “visa waiver country.” Four Asian nations and all 32 Western European countries make up the visa waiver list.

So under the proposed law, Canadians and Western Europeans will simply be presumed to be here legally, and they are not required to document it. “That language makes it clear that police are targeting only a specific minority,” Susana Barciela, policy director at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, told the New Times.

TPM: So who are you going to believe, the Mainstream Media asks, us or your lying eyes?

I'm flashing back to 2008, where every single news outlet was telling me that Hillary was winning the election, and my eyes were telling me that Barack Obama was winning.

Nowadays, the same Media is telling us how much the Corporate Money scandal doesn't matter to voters when the polling shows it obviously does.

Josh Marshall over at TPM posts this question from Alan Abramowitz about the modeling for the Gallup Generic ballot:

But that's not the most implausible result in the latest Gallup likely voter survey. Among nonwhites other than blacks, a group that comprises about 13% of likely voters, a generic Republican is leading a generic Democrat by 10 points, 52% to 42%. That's a group that voted Democratic by a 2-1 margin in the 2006 midterm election. Moreover, it's a group that has never given a majority of its vote to Republican candidates for Congress in any election since the advent of exit polling. According to the 2006 exit poll results, about two-thirds of these "other nonwhite" voters are Latinos. How plausible is it that at a time when the Republican Party is closely associated with stridently anti-immigrant policies that Latino voters are moving in droves toward Republican candidates? Not plausible at all, especially when Gallup's results are directly contradicted by other recent polls of Latino voters.

The GOP's Anti-Latino "Western" Strategy?? (VIDEO)

First, go back and watch Rachel's report on the Southern Strategy. Then watch this:



Replace "African-Americans" with "Latinos", and tell me what you see.

Rachel Maddow notices that there hasn't been much of a price to pay for racist comments this year (VIDEO)

This is what Rachel does well, broad historical perspective with evidence.



Followed up by an interview with Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

The NAACP makes it plain: The Tea Party is a platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.

Following up on Tuesday's posting about the Grad Student who unilaterally declared that the Teabaggers were not racist (with the Washington Post's help), it seems that the NAACP officially begs to differ:

The NAACP reignited the debate over the extremism of Tea Parties on Wednesday, releasing a report alleging ongoing ties between hate groups and the movement, which the civil rights organization criticizes for giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.

"The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties' self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government," reads the introduction to "Tea Party Nationalism," a joint project with the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. "Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues."

On a call with reporters, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous was quick to point out that his organization has no problem with the Tea Party movement as a whole. "We have no problem with the Tea Party existing," he said. "We have no problem with the Tea Party expressing its views in the great debates in our great democracy. We do, however, have a problem when prominent Tea Party members who have direct ties to organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, are allowed to use Tea Party events to recruit people for those white supremacist groups. ... And most importantly, we have a problem when the majority of the Tea Parties stand silent and doesn't loudly condemn that sort of behavior."

The complete report/website is available here.

Like I said before, I have been on this earth for 40-plus years, I know what the code-words are.

Joe Miller: "If East Germany could, we could." (VIDEO)

Uhhh, never-gonna-be-Senator-in-a-million-years Joe Miller...are you sure that East Germany is something you need to be bringing up right now?



If you want to hear the comment for yourself:

Marc Ambinder on the President's DADT Decision, to appeal or not to appeal. There are good reason on both sides.

Now this is good reporting.  Damn good.  The measure is simple.  Did I learn something.  I did, and how!

No choice but to put the whole piece up.  It all fits too neatly together.


I said it was to preserve a possible deal in the Senate. Ambinder says it to preserve a good relationship with the Pentagon, something I hadn't considered.

I gotta go with the Advisers who are saying just stop it.  The policy is dead.  Stop fighting it.  If the President doesn't have cred with the Pentagon by now, screw 'em.

Also, Ambinder toward the end of the piece puts a little highlight on the Senate Deal that fell apart from the Joe Biden Interview. Looks like the main culprit ws the DREAM Act.  (And why put the DREAM act into the Defense Spending Bill?  To help Harry Reid with Latinos in Nevada.  And who put the DREAM act into the Defense Spending Bill?  The Senate Majority Leader.  And who's the Senate Major--oh never mind.)

According to news reports, the Justice Department is preparing to ask a federal judge to stay her ruling ending enforcement of the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy banning gays in the military. But my sources insist that, as of last night, the White House, meaning President Obama, had not signed off on that course of action even though the Justice Department sent the White House a legal brief in near-record time.

Perhaps the decision has been made by now, but the last time I checked, senior officials were still debating both what to do and how to do it, cognizant that an appeal of the ruling could turn the party's activist base from petulant to pissed off in a matter of seconds.

There are no neat delineations in the universe of who is arguing for what, but there are several schools of thought about what Obama should do.

One group of advisers thinks that he needs to appeal the ruling because he can't get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" without the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is liable to gum up the works if it thinks the administration wants to dispense with the previously agreed upon timetable, which includes the completion of a major Department of Defense study about integration. A corollary argument here is that the National Security Staff is acutely aware of how difficult the military and Pentagon civilians can make life for the president in many unrelated endeavors. This group believes that if Democrats are successful in the Illinois, Delaware, and West Virginia Senate races -- not an impossible scenario by any means -- that Senate could very well schedule a clean and clear vote in a rump session.

Other groups of advisers believe that Obama should appeal the ruling, but concurrently ask -- or order -- the Department of Defense to take interim steps to halt all current investigations and not to initiate any new ones until the legal proceedings have been completed, or until the Senate authorizes the change in law. Within the Department of Defense, some senior officials are thinking about ways this might work. Others oppose any change to the timetable.

And then there's a group of advisers who appear to be as fed up with the maneuvering as Rachel Maddow is, and who want the president to make a public statement effectively saying, "Enough is enough. We've done this as orderly as we can. We can't control everything. But the policy is dead, as of today." Even under this scenario, gay soldiers wouldn't have access to spousal benefits just yet -- the DoD does need time to figure out how it would all work.

I don't know which way the administration is leaning. I do know that President Obama gets angry every time he's heckled by "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protesters. He thinks he's doing everything he can given the constraints imposed on him by reality.

Any petition for an emergency stay will argue that the government is in the process of ending the gay ban, and that an orderly winding down is preferable from the standpoint of national security, according to someone who has been briefed on it. The government would ask the court to allow the Pentagon the time it needs to complete its study into the effects of integrating openly gay service-members. Judge Virginia Phillips gave the administration 60 days to decide whether to appeal her ruling, but the administration seems to think that it will be easier for Congress to pass legislation ending the ban in a lame duck session if it continues to show deference to military leaders.

Though the Justice Department's political leadership opposes "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," it does not want to set a precedent of allowing courts to change internal Defense Department regulations without input from the executive branch.

Speaking in Europe, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that he thought Congress, and not the courts, should act to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," AFP reported.

The White House believed it had 60 votes to end the ban in September but lost momentum when Majority Leader Harry Reid added immigration-related provisions to the defense appropriations act, causing several senators to switch their votes.

The Pentagon plans to complete its study in December, and it is likely to conclude that integrating gays will not impact readiness, morale, or national security. Already, Pentagon officials are figuring out how they might handle the logistics associated with spousal benefits and housing for same-sex partners.

So how do you really feel about Illegal Immigration, Mrs. Whitman???

My guess? Meg Whitman's had better days.

Steny Hoyer: With friends like these...who needs Republicans?

Truth be told, I grew up in Steny Hoyer's Congressional District (the Maryland 5th...the fightin' 5th!). I can actually remember when it was Gladys Noon-Spellman's district, but that was a loooong time ago. He's always been a mixed bag of allegedly pragmatic politics, but this week has been particularly embarassing for those of us who voted for the man.

First, he stepped forth (on Fox News for pity's sake) and called Stephen Colbert's testimony before the House Judiciary committee's subcommittee on Immigration "an embarrassment".

"I think his testimony was not appropriate," said Hoyer, during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." "I think it was an embarrassment for Mr. Colbert more than the House."

"You asked me, Chris [Wallace] whether the testimony was appropriate," he added. "I think it was not appropriate."

Really Steny? You think this was embarrassing?

I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. And that’s an interesting contradiction to me, and um… You know, “whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,” and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now. A lot of people are “least brothers” right now, with the economy so hard, and I don’t want to take anyone’s hardship away from them or diminish it or anything like that. But migrant workers suffer, and have no rights.

Yeah, I'm sure Stephen Colbert wishes he had that one back.

Not your finest moment, Steny.

And in a attempteed one-man filibuster almost as strange and stoopid as Chris Dodd's one-man crusade to keep Elizabeth Warren from heading up the Consumer Protection Agency, Steny seems to be hell-bent on preventing a vote in the House on Middle Class tax cuts.

Did I mention the Speaker of the House (above him) and the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (also a Marylander) are both in favor of holding a vote these cuts?

Steny? Not so much?

Or is this some bold move to garner support among the Corporate Dem set so that after a November Bloodbath, he can pivot their support into becoming House Minority Leader or Speaker?

UPDATE 10:08am, Pacific: Fingers crossed, but the Judy Chu (aka, the woman who asked Stephen the pertinent question in the video) represents the San Gabriel Valley and I will hopefully get a chance to meet her at this Sunday's Oktoberfest in Pasadena!

Colbert: "I yield the balance of my time. USA, number one." (VIDEO)

"This is America. I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American. Then sliced by a Guatemalan, and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian."