While Obama yucks it up at the White House, the 'little people' deal with the fallout of the Democrats open-borders policy.

Pinal county is in the middle of Arizona on an east-west axis, and in the lower tier from south to north.

I suppose I've become numb to the insults, but the sight of the Democrats in Congress giving a standing ovation to the President of Mexico when he insults Arizona, is pretty gratifying.

Biden and Pelosi wore anti-Arizona wristbands. It doesn't get better. The 2nd and 3rd in line to be President of the UNITED States stand up in the inner sanctum of America to applaud an enemy of the government of Arizona, one of the UNITED States of America. It's as tho all the liberal political class wore t-shirts on primetime tv which said: "HEY, DOPES, YOU BELIEVED US WHEN WE SAID WE'RE AMERICAN, BUT WE'RE REALLY SCUMBAGS AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! ENJOY!"

The names of all who applauded Calderon should be made infamous in American history textbooks, but special honour should go to AG Eric Holder and Boss of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, former Az governor. Did you see in the video how the pair rose to clap Calderon only when all the other liberal apparatchiks were up ? Holder and Napolitano; traitors AND cowards.

I've often said that Obama is the best thing that's happened to America in my lifetime and a friend just sent a link to a good piece on that theme:

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.
.......
Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure the America that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world.

It's wonderful how tone deaf the liberals are. Maybe they became über-cocky during the Bush years. The cultural Marxists used to realize that their project depended on corroding society via Conservatives In Name Only who buy into all the crap like 'Social Justice', but a Carter or an Obama can provoke a Reagan/Thatcher backlash. But the horrid truth is that those heroes, Reagan and Thatcher, failed utterly to delay the social victory of the Frankfurt School whose pupils occupied and purged the Academy, the Law and the Media.

Now the backlash is more like an earthquake. Politically speaking, it's better than actually finding Obama's birth certificate in Manchuria.

Thanks, Obama. You're bringing back America.

That's an an apt comment to this:

Mickey Kaus is one of my favorite bloggers, and now he's moved to Newsweek, which seems to be a better deal for Newsweek than for Mickey.

Nevertheless, they are paying him, so he feels duty-bound to produce his usual bald insights--this time on the issue of immigration reform. Most of you won't be surprised that its largely a two step process--enforcement then amnesty.

What Kaus makes clear though is why its never going to happen.

Why hasn't this obvious two-step plan been pursued? If it had been pursued, consistently, over the past decade, legalizers would have their amnesty by now. The answer must be that the "reformers" do not want one of the two steps. My friend "L" suggests that the politicians who say they're reformers don't really want Step Two, the amnesty. They want the prospect of a future amnesty to dangle as a carrot in front of Latino voters. If they ever actually achieved that amnesty, the carrot would be gone.

People are usually surprised and perplexed when I point out that institutions created to solve a problem have a vested interest in insuring that the problem is never solved. Think I'm crazy? Well, look at the schools. The quality of student performance is nearly the inverse proportion of the per pupil funding. The schools suck, but are nevertheless highly-successful institutions because the reality is that they exist not to turn out young educated minds, but perpetuate themselves with ever larger budgets.

But, for the non-cynical pro-legalization reformers, it has to be that they don't really want Step One, greater enforcement. Why not? If you've ever been to an immigration reform rally, you know that the movement is propelled in large part, by Latino ethnic solidarity. The first pro-reform rally I attended, in 2006, featured hundreds of Mexican flags. The last one, in DC this year, was conducted at least 50% in Spanish. No non-Latino immigrant groups were in evidence. A Step One policy that was actually effective in keeping out millions of worthy, job-seeking Latinos is simply more ethnic self-abnegation than this movement can stomach, even if it's the essential precondition for legalization.

Many voters, even those who approve of both steps, sense this logic--it's almost a proof--and therefore don't trust reformers to keep the "enforcement" half of the "comprehensive bargain." That distrust makes voters insist even more strongly that Step One come first--and that it precede Step Two by a significant period of time (years, not months) to make sure it sticks. This of course makes Step One even less palatable to the reformers, of course--which in turn magnifies voter distrust, increasing their insistence on "enforcement first," which in turn ... etc., etc.

This leaves me to ponder an unusual proposition--what if we treated illegal immigration like smoking?

By making smoking socially unacceptable, society has put a serious dent in the practice. I find myself almost astonished when I see someone smoking and to be perfectly frank, I can't help but entertain a poor opinion of someone engaged in the practice. (Before you ask--no, that's not the reason I'm so hard on Obama, but it doesn't help matters...). If people felt the same way about hiring illegal aliens, most would eventually find their way back to their villages.

Some ads, a few Oprah shows and this thing would be done.