From the NYT:
Backing in G.O.P. for Legal Status for Immigrants
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER 12:12 AM ET
The House Republican leadership’s ideas for the nation’s immigration laws include a path to legal status — but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million adult immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Obviously, giving illegal aliens the vote is a stupid idea for Republican politicians. But so is giving illegals amnesty without "the path to citizenship." Hispanics are going to be told by the media, over and over, to feel racially insulted by Republicans over illegals getting only amnesty but not citizenship.
Is it too hard for GOP politicians to grasp that the whole ploy was a trap designed by Democrats that would have no good options for Republicans? How can choosing one poisoned apple or the other be better than walking away from both? Agreeing to amnesty is a massive defeat, substantively and symbolically, so why volunteer for it?
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53 comments:
It's very strange that I've started hating Republicans far more than Democrats.
BTW, amnesty barnstormer Ed Gillespie is running for Senate in Virginia. so I encourage everyone there to vote for Mark Warner.
But illegals already have both legal status and citizenship. In their home countries. Thanks to Pres. Eisenhower, among others, the "path" is well-paved and lit.
And dual citizenship is not "amnesty" it's a motherfreakin' gift.
"Agreeing to amnesty is a massive defeat, substantively and symbolically, so why volunteer for it?"
You miss the point. Our elites - of both parties - are in thrall to their globalist campaign donors who insist on open borders because they seek nothing less than the reduction of Americans to mere membership in their global cheap labor pool.
Republican support for amnesty and for continued massive legal immigration has nothing to do with party ideology, let alone with political principle (e.g., as laid out in the Preamble of our Constitution), as Republican shilling for amnesty is instead purely mercenary. For the same reason both G.W. Bush and Obama were all for the Big Bailout of the globalist corporate-financial elite.
>>>Is it too hard for GOP politicians to grasp that the whole ploy was a trap designed by Democrats that would have no good options for Republicans?
When one is stupid things are hard to grasp. The STUPID party.
What you describe is oddly similar to dilemmas professional wrestlers have faced in the past.
If anyone wants to do something about this, on Wednesday the Obama admin will be answering questions that are posted to Twitter using the #AskTheWH hashtag.
In a perfect world, every question would be something they'd have trouble answering. If they answer some of the questions, they'd look bad. If they refuse to answer other questions, then (once again in a perfect world) they could be made to look bad for their refusal. And, that would send a message to the GOP too: they wouldn't want the same to happen to them.
What's actually going to happen is the r/w braintrust on Twitter will fill space with jokes or bad questions, helping the Obama admin. Obama fans will fill space with deliberately weak questions (like the one who wants to meet Michelle, or "who will win the Superbowl?")
And, because of that, amnesty will roll on.
If anyone wants to change things, I have a few dozen Twitter-ready, hard-to-evade questions here. If you want to get involved, start tweeting them tomorrow and Weds. I also have a list of 30 admin hacks that I'll be tweeting them to (together with the hashtag).
If several other people did the same - and worked to block out r/w voices that will fill space with "jokes" - that would send a message. The more people who do it, the greater the message.
P.S. I'll be updating that post later Tues with the handles of the 30 hacks and more questions. I've also written a Python bot that will tweet a question every minute or two. That uses a MySQL db and would require some setup, but I can post it if anyone else will use it to do the same thing.
The basic question is: do current GOP leaders even care about tomorrows GOP? I think not.
Their is a sellers market in traitors these days. They are just selling out even though they know they are destroying the party just a few years ago. What do they care? They will be chillin' in some fat crib watching the country burn.
The basic question is: do current GOP leaders even care about tomorrows GOP? I think not.
That's the right answer. These guys are in safely gerrymandered seats and the demographic tidal wave won't turn them out until they're retired anyway. Helping out the party or their constituents is not going to be important as that post-congress lobbying gig.
they are destroying the party
If only. It's a lot worse than that: they're destroying the country.
the 11 million adult immigrants who are in the country illegally
There's another time-honored Frankfurt School tactic: Take an estimate of "40 to 60" and call it instead only "11".
It's the Inverse "Fish That Got Away" Method.
Chamber of Commerce traitors are behind this, I've dropped out economically as much as possible in areas of the economy dominated by illegal alien labor. E.g. I buy fresh produce from local farmers like Mennonites when the season permits. I avoid American corporate farms at all cost. No California navel oranges, lettuce, grapes, etc. No Florida orange juice. Yesterday I bought lettuce from Mexico, oranges from Israel, grapes from South Africa and garlic from China. Import the beans, not the beaners!
But illegals already have both legal status and citizenship. In their home countries.
Thanks to Pres. Eisenhower, among others, the "path to citizenship" is well-paved and lit.
The GOP: The Washington Generals of politics.
They are going to do it but doing it in 2014 is stupid. You risk ticking off your base when you need them to take back the Senate.
Do it in 2015 and create no path to citizenship. The watch Obama veto it since the Dems want votes. You'll create divisions in the Dem party since most illegal Hispanics just want to work and don't particularly care about obtaining citizenship.
White people must stop being so darn selfish and universalist and start voting as a bloc like all the other races. That's the only way you will get leverage. You are from a tribe - the greatest, prettiest and most creative in history - stop pandering and start showing it!
Africa for Africans
Asia for Asians
White countries for everyone
Outside of electoral calculations, it is seriously unwise to import a big permanent population of people who can't vote and don't get the normal benefits of citizenship, but still get to keep living here. You could hardly devise a better strategy for creating a resentful and angry minority group.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/26/Sen-Schumer-Tea-Party-Oppose-Immigration-Because-America-Less-White
Typical. Jews can be 'paranoid' and ascribe 'evil' motives to white gentles, but if someone said AIPAC, ADL, and the Democratic party are for anything that increases the power of Jews, he would be toast.
The biggest change in American white politics needs to be the awakening to the fact that Jews rule this country with a double standard bigger than Sarah Silverman's mouth.
@ 24AheadDotCom -- I agree with you that this president is never asked hard questions. The press likes to ask either softball questions or "gotcha" ones that are easily swatted away, i.e., "Does the president think the troubled ACA roll out will hurt Democrat chances in the mid-terms?"
Some of your questions are exactly what I would like to see asked, but others are sufficiently wonkish that listeners won't understand them and they politicians will be able to BS their way out of them.
Here are some questions I would like to hear (some too long for Twitter) asked:
"Why does a nation with high unemployment need immigration?"
"We often hear that our lowest-skilled workers are having the hardest time finding jobs, so why do we want to legalize millions more low-skilled workers?"
"Every month we hear Labor Department reports along the lines of 'the economy created 80,000 new jobs, but that was not enough to cover even population growth.' With that in mind, why do we bring in 80 - 100 thousand new job-seekers a month through immigration?"
"Mr. President, you often say that immigrants have created some of our most successful new companies, but you have only given as examples European or Asian immigrants. Most of our immigrants come from Mexico, so can you name some large companies started by Mexican immigrants?"
"Most of our population growth now comes from immigration as well as the higher birth rates of recent immigrants. We currently have 320 million Americans. What is our population goal--500 million, 800 million?"
I will wager one of three things is going on here:
1. Boehner et al are in thrall to the donor class and their lobbies.
2. Boehner et al are playing thimblerig with the donor class and their lobbies. Something Conor Cruise O'Brien once counseled concerning the supposed Trotskyism of the IRA: "the Irish Catholic Republican is for real; it's the foreign reds who are being fooled".
3. The elite mindset is such that they have no critical engagement with the issue. "Everyone" [they know] is in favor of 'immigration reform'. (Recall here Robert Bork's assessment of John Paul Stevens: that the man simply never associated with anyone he cared about who thought differently).
4. Boehner and Goodlatte are hoping for a lucrative gig with lobbying firms once they leave Congress. (Howard Baker, age 88 and Robert Dole, age 90, are still working for 'law firms'; at least Baker's home and office are in Tennessee).
It's wrong to think of the GOP as a political party. From its inception, it has been an astroturf scam run by rich capitalists. Once you get this, all their behavior is magically converted from inexplicable to easily explained.
Why are they doing it?
We all know the answer:
Chamber Pot of Commerce's daddy warbucks war chest.
You know, there's something really hypocritical in the way establishment Republicans are handling the immigration issue. They say we need to do amnesty to get the Hispanic vote, (you know, that huge tidal wave force that, to my knowledge, has at best in California elected statewide politics elected one Lieutenant Governor, Cruz Bustamante), but then their legislation is such that the newly legalized can't vote.
Again, there's no hypocrisy, really. It's giving the Chamber Pot their EL CHEAPO labor but the new EL CHEAPO labor can't vote for Democrats. (Unless they can, and will, as some of them will actually register to vote even though they legally won't be able to. Don't doubt me when I say that illegal aliens already are voting.)
How is it that none of the pro amnesty Republicans have been pinned to the ground on explaining their amnesty views? Paul Ryan has been particularly arrogant saying he would debate amnesty with anyone, but since making that statement, has he debated it with anyone?
He couldn't even handle a super friendly interview on Hannity a few months ago on immigration. If you are a Republican politician and you get flustered by Hannity, then somethings terribly wrong with your argument.
Interesting historical note, that one of the founding fathers of the Nativist / Know Nothing / American Republican Party movements was a first generation Jew, Louis Levin.
In 2010 the GOP base, i.e. Tea Party, was revved up enough to give the House to the GOP over the health care issue. So what does the GOP do in 2012? They nominate the one guy who enacted a similar law in a state, and thus effectively took the health issue off the table.
In 2014, the GOP base, and a decent size of the rest of the population, is worked up over obamacare. The stars are lining up for GOP success in November. But what does the GOP do? They decide to go against their base and push for amnesty. In effect they are going to kill any enthusiasm of people wishing to vote GOP in November. Any chances for winning big will be over. They will be lucky to keep a simple majority in the House.
Additionally, the amnestied illegals will get the right to vote, and the GOP will hasten its future doom.
Think about what this means. Most of us on the right believe national health care is bad, not just because the government can't run things, but because it further paves the way for more and more government control over the economy and our lives. The GOP talks the talk, but rather than winning in November and seriously attacking Obamacare, they are going to throw it away on immigration to cater to the Chamber of Commerce so that they can import more cheap labor when over 90 million Americans are no longer in the work force.
So the GOP, ostensibly the party of small government, is chucking its chances at repealing the greatest government intervention in our economy in over 50 years for the fool's gold of cheap labor that will have to replaced with more cheap labor after the current cheap labor is given legal status and access to government bennies.
This should be the final nail in the coffin to those who argue the GOP is the party of small government.
What these spineless turncoats don't understand is that the US Chamber of Commerce may not provide a golden parachute to every republican voting against their constituency. They could be SOL after doing their masters bidding.
Remember, these are the gentry Republicans. They figure cheap unskilled labor to coddle their kids, cut their lawns and pick their crops is more important than their constituency.
I've stopped contributing to these swine. Every con artist letter they send me, I make sure to return the postage-paid envelope inside with a scribbled note that they should plan to replace my money and vote with those of an illegal immigrant, since that seems to be the current "strategy" of the stoopid party.
Meanwhile, I'm using the money I save to stock up on sufficient emergency food, water storage, fuel, firearms, ammo, and other necessities for surviving the inevitable periods of extreme civil unrest that we're drifting towards. Everyone I know, no matter what their political persuasion, seems to have a dread that this country is on a path to dissolution that only the most extreme measures can prevent. It's as if a collective precognition is giving a sense of what's ahead. It reminds me of a passage in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, where he suggested that the obvious angst in Jacobian drama presaged the oncoming English Civil war.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100256645/how-scott-walker-and-the-conservatives-saved-wisconsin-america-take-note/
Another con dummy does a favor for libs.
Thanks to Pres. Eisenhower, among others, the "path to citizenship" is well-paved and lit.
Keep in mind Ike also launched Operation Wetback. Would that a president do the same today.
Why? Don't ask about the kayfabe. Just don't notice it's one party with two wings. Anyone who doesn't follow the progressive line is a heel with a role to play. For some reason establishment Republicans would rather see a Democrat elected than a Teaparty republican. Why?
http://youtu.be/L7SkrYF8lCU
Wall Street to the Fed?
Or Democrats to the GOP?
Mulling over some of the movies from this year as Oscar season approaches. Here's one question nobody's asking: between Her and Elysium, which vision of future L.A. is likelier to occur?
The present talk is that these GOP immigration proposals are to be voted on 'by late summer.' Does anyone truly believe there are many Republicans who will be wanting to vote for any form of amnesty three months before the election?
It's possible that Boehner and Cantor are getting ready to sell us out. My hope, though, is that this is simply a stalling tactic - turn the trolls to stone by chatting them up til the sun rises. I don't have much faith in Boehner. Twelve months ago I was prepared to believe he would sell us out, but now I'm beginning to hope.
Democrats are playing a dirtier plan. Of course they could've passed an amnesty sometime 2000-10, when they had absolute control of everything. Why didn't they? Because they wanted Republicans to take part of the blame; because they knew an amnesty then would be economically catastrophic; because their funding stream does not depend as much on the cheap labor lobby; because, perhaps most of all, they want to sit back and watch as the GOP leadership flagrantly betray it's base. To them, watching conservative, middle class Americans get betrayed by their supposed leaders is the greatest revenge of all.
Why do they do it? Simple.
1) People will keep voting for GOP so the party won´t just disappear in the near future.
2) They don´t care if they lose some seats. They´re all set for life: cushy jobs as consultants, CEOs, think tanks, etc
3) Their real job is to screw the middle-class,their main constituency. They play good cops, while the Dems play bad cops to Middle America. Get it? One party, two branches,left and right of Left, bad cop and good cop.Oligarchy at its finest.
4)GOP wants cheap labour and cheap nannies and gardeners. At all costs.
5)Under Globalism, national sovereignty and borders are meaningless. Get on with the programme, Steve!
6) What will the american electorate look like in 20 years time? Half Hispanic or nearly so. They want a piece of that, so the sham one party scheme lives on forever, or so they believe.
Keep in mind Ike also launched Operation Wetback.
Yes, I almost called him "Dwight 'O. W.' Eisenhower", but that would've been abridge too far.
"Hispanics are going to be told by the media, over and over, to feel racially insulted by Republicans over illegals getting only amnesty but not citizenship."
that will be the next step. after the illegals are given amnesty by a republican party nominally aware that they don't actually want them to vote, the left will begin SCREAMING that the mexicans are second class citizens and racist republicans want to keep them from joining in our great nation and becoming full blown citizens.
don't see how it could go any other way. any amnesty will lead to the mexicans becoming citizens, the mexicans voting, and the democrats securing a permanent one party system in the US. whether it happens right away when the amnesty goes down, or a few years later, after the liberals have been screaming for a couple years, it will happen.
Anon bc shared class.
Is it too hard for GOP politicians to grasp that the whole ploy was a trap designed by Democrats that would have no good options for Republicans? How can choosing one poisoned apple or the other be better than walking away from both? Agreeing to amnesty is a massive defeat, substantively and symbolically, so why volunteer for it?
I'm naturally an optimist, so first thing I thought when I read your question was that maybe the country club Republican set has masterminded a devious PR strategy in which the unwashed Tea Party rubes in Congress attack them, they take a dive, Amnesty is defeated, and everybody's happy.
Yeah, I know, I know...
Lucy, Charlie Brown, the football. Over and over.
Ryan Loskarn's suicide note
http://www.jesseryanloskarnslastmessage.com/333880300
Bill said...
It's wrong to think of the GOP as a political party. From its inception, it has been an astroturf scam run by rich capitalists. Once you get this, all their behavior is magically converted from inexplicable to easily explained.
Please easily explain how the immigration reduction bill signed by Warren Harding in his first fortnight in office was an Astroturf® scam run by capitalists.
To some of us it looks like the best bill ever to come out of Congress, a process we'd like to repeat. But you say it was a fraud. I'm having trouble seeing this.
At any rate, Republicans were latecomers to the scam game. The other party was running its own cheap labor program-- excuse me, labour programme (gotta watch those Websterisms)-- before Frémont, Lincoln, and Grant were born.
For some reason establishment Republicans would rather see a Democrat elected than a Teaparty republican. Why?
For the same reason you shop at Walmart rather than Nordstroms, or even Sears.
"The Stupid Party" was a description for the UK's Conservative Party -- "Tories" to Atlantic Monthly poseurs -- and it was embraced by them in self-deprecation. The idea was that Conservatives rejected social-science intellectuals on every point and would rather be "stupid" than scientifically up-to-date.
By contrast the U.S. Republicans, though originally representative of Midwestern industrial interests, were nearly dominated by Harvard/Yale intellectuals at through the later Reconstruction period and fin de siecle. This didn't outlast the waves of Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Slavic immigrants before and during WWI, with the GOP then moving more to the isolationist middle-class Protestant direction.
Reg Caesar, while giving your penchant for lame puns a moment's rest, please explain what is your strategy for getting rid of freeways-- subsidized air travel, 3-D printing, drones? I acknowledge ahead of time you may have formulated no serious answer.
SS: Agreeing to amnesty is a massive defeat, substantively and symbolically, so why volunteer for it?
'cuz they're the Stupid Party.
@Bert: It's very strange that I've started hating Republicans far more than Democrats.
Yep, me too.
Another con dummy does a favor for libs
I don't get it. I'm willing to hear the perfunctory criticisms of Scott Walker's establishment tics and lack of paleo purity, surely 100% accurate, but how do you claim he isn't winning? The state party provoked a huge overreaction from their government worker lobby (for relatively tepid reforms in contrast to Indiana and Ohio). In the upper MW the trend line looks bad for organized labor generally and public employees in specific, though they're still in the early rounds. You can blast him over the Dissident Right checklist, just don't make me laugh with this "ally of the liberals" crap. If your hurt feelings spring from you being one of the disgruntled Milwaukee bus drivers no longer able to bill 6 figures of overtime then I feel bad for your plight.
@ NYT: ...11 million adult immigrants...
I think the NYT is of by a million or twenty.
… what is your strategy for getting rid of freeways…?
Uh, my proposal was not to get rid of freeways, but to use them to get rid of unauthorized aliens. (One of those roads leads from my neighborhood to that bridge in Laredo.) I assumed that would be clear to anyone who got through Fun With Dick and Jane. My mistake!
"Path to citizenship" is their lame term, not mine. I just took it literally.
…you may have formulated no serious answer.
Those are reserved for serious questions.
I'm going to open a business selling canned beans. On every can, a picture of Ronald Reagan. The Republican base will fall all over itself to support Bean American and make me a rich man.
Bert said...It's very strange that I've started hating Republicans far more than Democrats.
Me too, since GW Bush. It started when he described the Minutemen as vigilantes to an approving Vicente Fox and got worse. I'm glad he's keeping a low profile as I get an unpleasant taste of bile in my throat whenever I see him on TV.
Marco Rubio, John McCain, Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham irk me worse than most Democrats, who, after all, just are what they are. The traitors on your own side always do you more harm than your avowed enemy.
Remember, these are the gentry Republicans. They figure cheap unskilled labor to coddle their kids, cut their lawns and pick their crops is more important than their constituency.
True, Republican Party too tie to Texas for votes and Texas is going Mexican. William Frey white Texans 5 and under only 31 percent.
The Republican Party no longer aspires to govern and has no meaningful governing agenda. It has become a business lobby, a bunch of hacks (elected officials, their staffs, party functionaries and campaign consultants) looking to do favors for corporate donors in exchange for income (if not immediately, when they leave office). So it is a matter of utter indifference to them that amnesty w/out citizenship won't work. It's not supposed to "work," it's just supposed to fool the annoying base while allowing Boehner, McConnell, et al., to do the bidding of the Chamber of Commerce. And in that sense, it may work: Republican voters may fall for it, or lose focus, and go back to voting for the party. But, if not, no big deal; the defeated congressmen will just become lobbyists, which is what they always really wanted to do. So ends the Party of Lincoln.
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