Comprehensive

Iraqi President Talabani has arrived at the US for a three-week trip and entered the Mayo Clinic. He claims he’s just there to lose some weight. If I were Iraqi, I’d feel insulted that more time wasn’t spent on developing a better transparent lie.


As last week’s R debate showed, we’re going to hear many more cries of “9/11! 9/11!” from presidential candidates this election cycle. I wonder how much purchase it will still have in 2012, 2016, 2020...

The immigration bill sucks, of course, in many, many ways. Since it is a comprehensive immigration bill, it sucks comprehensively. Indeed, much of it (the two-year-on, one-year-off temporary work provision, going back to one’s country of origin to apply for American citizenship, the border-security bits having to be completed before anything else) seems purposely designed to fail. Or to be so punitive as to offer no incentives for current illegal immigrants to leave the legal shadows. Few coyotes will be put out of work by this bill. It will be interesting to see if any congresscritter publicly criticizes the failure of the provisions for bringing in family members to acknowledge the existence of homosexual immigrants. And I’m curious if the bill really, as Bush said Saturday, “affirms that English is the language of the United States.”

But my question is, how did this Republican issue become such a priority that the Democratic Congress seems likely to pass some version of this turd? Why are they wasting time on it at all, when there are so many issues that need attention and on which positive progress could be made?

Caption contest: