From THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

Illegals granted Social Security
By Charles Hurt

Published May 19, 2006

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social
Security benefits based on past illegal employment -- even if the job
was obtained through forged or stolen documents.

"There was a felony they were committing, and now they can't be
prosecuted. That sounds like amnesty to me," said Sen. John Ensign, the
Nevada Republican who offered the amendment yesterday to strip out
those provisions of the immigration reform bill. "It just boggles the
mind how people could be against this amendment."

The Ensign amendment was defeated on a 50-49 vote.

"We all know that millions of undocumented immigrants pay Social
Security and Medicare taxes for years and sometimes decades while they
work to contribute to our economy," said Sen. John McCain, Arizona
Republican.

"The Ensign amendment would undermine the work of these people by
preventing lawfully present immigrant workers from claiming Social
Security benefits that they earned before they were authorized to work
in our community," he said. "If this amendment were enacted, the nest
egg that these immigrants have worked hard for would be taken from them
and their families."

Mr. Ensign was among 44 Republicans and five Democrats who voted to
block such payouts.

"It makes no sense to reward millions of illegal immigrants for
criminal behavior while our Social Security system is already in
crisis," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican. "Why in the
world would we endorse this criminal activity with federal benefits?
The Senate missed a big opportunity to improve this bill, and I doubt
American seniors will be pleased with the result."

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, said it would be unfair to
deny illegals the benefits.

"We should not steal their funds or empty their Social Security
accounts," he said. "That is not fair. It does not reward their hard
work or their financial contributions. It violates the trust that
underlies the Social Security Trust Fund."

Within hours, the vote had become an issue in this fall's
elections, raised by a Republican challenger to Sen. Debbie Stabenow,
Michigan Democrat.

"Instead of protecting the retirement security of Americans who are
earning an honest living and abiding by the laws of our country, Debbie
Stabenow sided with people who are here illegally and abuse our Social
Security system," Oakland County, Mich., Sheriff Michael Bouchard said
in a press release. "Allowing illegal immigrants to use their illegal
work history as credit towards receiving Social Security benefits shows
that Debbie Stabenow has forgotten who she is supposed to be working
for in the U.S. Senate."

The Senate also yesterday approved an amendment to adopt English as
the nation's official language, while reversing course from the day
before on protections for U.S. workers who will face new competition
from unskilled immigrant labor under the Senate bill. In addition,
senators voted last night to kill an amendment that would have
specified that the guest-worker program will not provide visas that
would provide a path to citizenship.

On Wednesday, senators narrowly approved an amendment to require a
foreign worker to have a job lined up in the United States before
applying for a green card. The purpose, supporters say, is to ensure
that the job market isn't flooded with foreign workers. Also, it
prevents foreign workers from coming to the United States only to wind
up unemployed and dependent on public assistance.

But yesterday, the Senate essentially gutted that amendment by
allowing foreign workers to apply for permanent residency without
having a job lined up.

"What that means is that up to 200,000 unskilled workers a year
would become eligible for a green card, regardless of economic
conditions, regardless of whether that worker has been actually
employed for four years, and most importantly, regardless of whether
there are unemployed U.S. workers available to fill those jobs," said
Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.

From VDARE.COM:

It’s Alive! Bush Betrayal Tries To Climb Out Of Coffin
By Steve Sailer

After letting Ted Kennedy and John McCain lead the fight for his illegal immigration cave-in earlier in the year, President Bush has now re-emerged to push publicly for the amnesty and guest worker plans that have obsessed him from his first days in office.

In tandem with the May Day "show of force" by hordes of marching illegal aliens, the impact on Bush's popularity appears to have been brutal.

President Bush's public approval ratings have dropped this month to Nixon-during-Watergate levels. According to the Gallup Poll, Bush's rating among Republicans has been plummeting a point per day for the last two weeks!

And yet Bush can't resist going back for more of the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-him. He is still prodding the Senate to pass his disastrous immigration legislation—what we have called “The Bush Betrayal.” On Friday, Senate Democratic minority leader Harry Reid and the White House's main man on Capitol Hill, Republican majority leader Bill Frist, announced that the misbegotten bill they almost shoved through earlier this year is now ready again to be voted on by the Senate.

To cover up this historic sell-out of the American people, Bush reportedly will address the nation Monday night (8 pm EDT) and announce some cosmetic toughening-up measures.

The White House's working philosophy seems to be what I call "marketing major post-modernism": the belief, often acquired through osmosis while studying public relations or advertising in college, that some egghead over in Europe proved that there's no such thing as truth or reality, so … spin away!

The New York Times reports, in effect, that Bush operatives believe they just haven't been clever enough in their lying:

"White House officials said Mr. Bush had always understood the need to protect the border as a former governor of a border state, Texas. But they acknowledged they had perhaps erred in not emphasizing that understanding as they pushed provisions granting illegal immigrants working here legal status, angering Republicans." (Bush to Unveil Plan to Tighten Border Controls, by Jim Rutenberg, May 13, 2006)

This is comically mendacious. As President, Bush has killed off the last remnants of the once grand-seeming grand compromise in the 1986 immigration legislation, in which amnesty for current illegal aliens was supposedly to be combined with strict employer sanctions to prevent new illegal immigration. As VDARE.com's Edwin S. Rubenstein noted:

"Under the Bush Administration worksite arrests of illegal aliens fell some 97 percent, from 2,859 in 1999 to 159 in 2004."

It is rumored that the President will announce that National Guard troops will be headed to the border. (Why the National Guard? Don’t we have an Army?) [VDARE.COM note: It's been repeatedly suggested that using the Army for border control would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, designed to prevent the Army from being used on Americans. (E.g. Raoul Lowery Contreras, in the middle of an attack on us here: “It is illegal to put troops on the border.") No, it wouldn't. Aside from the multiple modern exceptions to the Act, what is at issue here is a matter of guarding the border from foreign invaders. This is what armies are for.]

My question: Exactly how can the Bush Administration round up enough National Guardsmen when so many are deployed—as VDARE.COM’s own Allan Wall was—in Iraq?

The answer: it can't.

The Washington Post reports:

"One defense official said military leaders believe the number of troops required could range from 3,500 to perhaps 10,000, depending on the final plan. Another administration official cautioned that the 10,000 figure was too high." [Bush Weighs Deploying Guard to U.S. Border, by Lolita C. Baldor, May 13, 2006]

Sounds impressive!

But do the math…

-Our Mexican border is 1952 miles long.

-There are 168 hours in a week, so each Guardsman would be on duty on the border for, say, one quarter of that or 42 hours per week. (That is unreasonably optimistic, considering how much work time these days is devoted to training, leave, sexual harassment seminars, diversity sensitivity workshops, and the like.)

So, if each one of the 3,500 National Guardsmen was on patrol an average of, say, 21 hours per week (which is 1/8th of the 168 hours in a week), that would provide one soldier per 4.5 miles of border.

For some reason, I'm not reassured.

Particularly because this deployment would certainly be withdrawn as soon as Bush feels what might be called a "decent interval" has elapsed.

Some of the news stories on how the Bush Administration is going to "militarize" the border sound like the first draft of an Evelyn Waugh story. The New York Times’ Rutenberg reports:

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met at the Pentagon with Mexico's defense minister, Gen. Gerardo Clemente Ricardo Vega. Officials said they had discussed, among other things, potential United States help in training and equipping Mexican forces at the border."

Of course, Mr. Rumsfeld is part of the same Administration that is evidently tipping off the Mexican government on where the Minutemen are guarding the border.

So we can only imagine what he's been passing along to a foreign military that has staged hundreds of incursions onto American soil while escorting Mexican drug and immigrant smugglers.

The Bush Administration has seemed never to notice that Mexico is not the 51st state, but a foreign country—one that is engaged in a slow-motion invasion of America.

Of course, Bush will make no mention of any attempt to actually, well, deport the illegal aliens he has allowed to sneak in—even though there are many ways short of mass round-ups that public policy could encourage them to leave.

And Bush is unlikely to propose the one border enforcement step that couldn't be quickly reversed once public attention is diverted: an Israeli-style security fence along the entire frontier.

But even if Mr. Bush announces Monday that he favors a fence, the plain fact is that he simply can't be trusted to provide any honest leadership on such a project at all. It would be easy for him to delay its construction for, roughly, ever.

Here’s just one obvious opportunity for obstruction: environmental impact.

Look at the endless delays in California golf course construction. It only took 18 months to build the superb Barona Creek golf course outside San Diego—because it is on an Indian reservation immune to the less crucial environmental regulations. In contrast, Barona Creek's designer Todd Eckenrode told me that he had other courses that were still on the drawing board after 8 to 12 years due to environmental impact hassles. The TPC Valencia course north of Los Angeles was proposed in 1985 but didn't open until 2002. Most of these delays are driven by the Not-In-My-Back-Yard interests of neighbors rather than by legitimate conservation needs.

Construction of a 14-mile fence along the border in San Diego began 13 years ago. But the final three miles next to the ocean are still not finished due to wetlands lawsuits.

Congress has the right to override environmental regulations, which they finally did last year to get the San Diego fence project moving again. But that won't happen on a national fence unless we voters demand it as part of the initial legislative package.

Just as the public was betrayed on immigration by its elected leadership in 1986 and 1996, we can expect more of the same in 2006.

This is shaping up to be a disastrous moment in the history of the Republic. The full impact of immigration legislation does not become visible to voters for decades (and, apparently, not to Senators for centuries). If recent history repeats itself, Congress won't consider immigration again until 2016.

Why is Bush doing this? I have suggested that his motives are dynastic—that he is selfishly sacrificing the GOP to build a family vehicle, much like Brian Mulroney sacrificed the Canadian Progressive Conservative party in a vain effort to build a personal fief in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Brenda Walker speculates he is a "MexiChurian Candidate."

What he is not is an American patriot.

So, my fellow Americans, it's now or never—unless Tom Tancredo’s Immigration Reform Caucus in the House of Representatives can persuade Republicans there to hold the line.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features his daily blog.]

From Socialist Worker Online (hard to write that without laughing):

Dave Marsh on a new album by Bruce Springsteen:
We Shall Overcome

May 19, 2006

ON HIS new album, Bruce Springsteen sings some of the most celebrated songs of struggle in U.S. history.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions honors socialist folk singer Pete Seeger, collecting a small part of the music Seeger helped to spread during his decades of making music and political activism.

Some of these songs--like “We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”--are inseparable in anyone’s mind from the great struggles for justice and social change in U.S. history. Others--the early 19th century antiwar ballad “Mrs. McGrath,” or “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away,” about the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression--are less known, but shot through with a political message that could be about today’s headlines. Still others--like “Erie Canal” or “Shenandoah” or “John Henry”--probably reside in the recesses of your brain from singing them in grade school.

Springsteen makes all of them his own, setting them to a comprehensive range of American musical styles, all performed by a rollicking 18-piece band, complete with fiddle and horn sections.

The life of these songs-out-of-the-pre-musical-recording-past is documented in liner notes on Springsteen’s Web site (go to www.brucespringsteen.net and click on "Liner Notes") by DAVE MARSH, author of two biographies of Springsteen and numerous other books on music, and editor of Rock & Rap Confidential, a monthly newsletter on music and politics. Dave talked to ALAN MAASS about We Shall Overcome.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CAN YOU talk about the sources for the music on this album?

BASICALLY, THE songs come from three traditions. The most important are the African American tradition and the British Isles folk tradition.

There’s also a category of work songs, which overlaps. “Shenandoah” is a work song, even though the lyric isn’t anything to do with work. “Pay Me My Money Down” is a work song that started out in South Carolina, and then gets adopted by sailors and becomes a work shanty for sailors, especially in the Caribbean. It’s usually done with a calypso beat--that’s how the Weavers did it, and that’s how the Kingston Trio did it.

The oldest songs are the songs from that Anglo-Scottish-Irish tradition. The oldest of all is “Froggie Went a Courtin’,” which was first written down and published in 1549. But I would be willing to bet you that by then, it was probably very antique.

The songs from the African American tradition divide into two categories. One category is spirituals and hymns. There are four of them on the album: “We Shall Overcome,” “Eyes on the Prize,” (which is more commonly known as “Gospel Plow” or “Hold On”--it has many names), “Jacob’s Ladder” and “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.”

All of these songs were used as freedom songs during the civil rights movement. “We Shall Overcome,” of course, has been used in many other movements. There’s a whole history of that song in the labor movement, and how it got from the church to the labor movement is a very fascinating story.

But there are other songs, too, that are based in the African American culture. One would be “Pay Me My Money Down,” because that was originally sung by Black stevedores on the South Carolina coast. Also, there’s “John Henry,” who has always been understood to be African American, even though none of the lyrics in this version and very few of the lyrics in any version ever say so explicitly.

THESE ARE songs that tell stories, but they’re also protest songs. Can you talk about how politics comes through in a song like “Mrs. McGrath”?

“MRS. McGRATH” is an Irish song that actually sounds like it should have been written in the early 20th century, around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising--and in fact, it was used then.

But it actually comes from the Napoleonic period--from the time of the peninsular campaign in Spain and Portugal against Napoleon. There were tens of thousands of Irish natives inveigled into the British Army, and this song simply reflects that. But, of course, the story is so universal that it sounds like it could be about now.

But I want to go back to your question, because the songs on this album are not protest songs--with the exception of “Pay Me My Money Down” and, metaphorically, “Mrs. McGrath.”

“We Shall Overcome” is not a protest song. “Eyes on the Prize” is not a protest song. They’re much more complicated than that--the ones that have been used for expressly political purposes. “John Henry” isn’t a protest song, although it makes a very strong criticism of the way capitalism works people to death.

The reason to me that this is important is that these songs have all sorts of purposes. And the purpose to which Springsteen has turned them, I think, is almost the opposite--a celebratory purpose, an affirmation.

At the end of “John Henry,” when his wife, Polly Ann, picks up the hammer, that’s an affirmation of all sorts of things. It’s an affirmation of the power of labor. It’s an affirmation of solidarity. It’s an affirmation of female power. It’s a statement that we won’t quit.

So calling them protest songs makes them sound like something much more limited than what they are.

Look at “We Shall Overcome,” which is the most famous so-called protest song of them all. I think it’s probably the most famous American song of the 20th century worldwide--and not incidentally was never widely recorded, was never played on the radio, except in news clips.

If you look at “We Shall Overcome,” there are protest elements, but it contains everything. There’s the verse “We are not afraid,” and that’s not a protest. That’s something else--that’s spitting in the eye of the people who want to keep you afraid. There’s a fascinating story about how that verse came to be written, at the Highlander Center [a civil rights training school] in the late 1950s, and a girl came up with it during a Klan raid.

Listen to “O Mary, Don’t you Weep,” and imagine that you’re a Mississippi prison guard in Parchman penitentiary. You’ve got all these Freedom Riders locked up in their cells, and what they’re singing is “Pharaoh’s army got drownded.” Well, you’ve got to understand that you’re working for pharaoh.

Actually, there was this whole history in the civil rights movement of jailers and prison guards punishing people for singing these songs. Southern Black people, when they sing these songs, in church or in protests--they’re loud, and they’re aggressive.

So it’s not as simple as protest. I think that’s a prime political point.

CAN YOU talk about how songs like “We Shall Overcome” grew and changed over the years?

THEY USED to call it the “folk process,” which sort of gilded the lily a bit, but the idea was that these songs sort of sprouted up out of the people, and then the people carried them forward, and changed them as circumstances or imagination warranted.

They didn’t get the beginning of the process right. I think every song probably has, initially, an individual creator. But it’s also true that every song, once it’s sung, becomes part of the cultural storehouse of the whole human species. And this speaks directly to the intellectual property wars of our time, and the attempt to impoverish and incarcerate people for listening to or using music.

So every song has its individual, specific history. But the history of all of them, if they’ve survived for any length of time, is that somebody picks them up and puts themselves into them. It’s always particular to the people who are singing them, and it’s always a link back to the origins--you’re looking backward while you look forward.

The example I’d use is the least recorded song that’s on the album, which is “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away.”

It was written by Sis Cunningham, who edited Broadside magazine, which was a magazine of topical and protest songs--songs that were written mostly about immediate social issues. It was a very left-wing publication founded by Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds, another folk-style songwriter. And then Sis Cunningham and her husband Gordan Freisen ran it for about a decade, in the midst of both the folk revival and the civil rights and antiwar movements.

I think what happened is that Sis and her brother wrote a version of “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away” that Pete Seeger recorded in 1961, but never put out on a record. Then Sis put the lyrics in Broadside late in the game--in 1966 or 1967.

Broadside would often put out compilation albums of its songwriters, and one of the compilations had her singing this song. Then that song was put out on a Broadside collection--a box set that Smithsonian Folkways issued.

So what you’ve got is the originator’s version, which actually comes after the first adapter’s version. And then the song lies there for 30 years, and nobody sings it, and nobody hears it.

In 1994, there was a box set of Pete’s stuff issued on Columbia, called A Link in the Chain. It had a few un-issued tracks, and the first of them was “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away.” I wrote the liner notes, I can remember listening to the song over and over, and thinking, “Wow, how did I miss this?”

The automatic assumption of everybody was that it was a Woody Guthrie song. Bruce assumed it was a Woody Guthrie song until I told him otherwise.

But Bruce finds it, and his version is radically different from either of the other versions, and the reason it’s radically different is he sings it as if it’s a Bruce Springsteen song, and he puts the whole force of his personality through this story. And I think that’s the process right there. Because that song now will find a life, I believe.

Another great example that’s also on this album is “Buffalo Gals.” “Buffalo Gals” was a canal song from the Erie Canal period. The Buffalo gals had nothing to do with Buffalo soldiers. The song is about prostitutes on Canal Street in Buffalo, New York, at the end of the Erie Canal.

It was written in 1844, and it was widely sung on the boats. Then it sort of vanished after its time was up. Then, in 1944, it was revived by a dance band and recorded as “Dance with the Dolly.”

And now, this Christmas, when you see It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ll notice that not only do Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart sing this song while they’re skipping down the street at the beginning of the romance, but it’s the overture to the whole movie. The theme song of It’s a Wonderful Life is “Buffalo Gals.”

That’s exactly 100 years from its inception, and it’s a totally different musical landscape.

Plus, Pete would sing it, as well as various other people, and then “Buffalo Gals” comes around to this version, which is somewhere in between--actually closer to that dance version of the 1940s, but Bruce has got this big folk band playing it.

That’s another thing--why this is a folk album in people’s heads has a lot more to do with its title than with its music. That’s partly what’s tricky to explain to people about it.

It is a folk album, but there are also the song origins and these other things. For example, when you get into Sam Bardfeld’s klezmerish-jazz fiddle, it evokes a certain kind of music that’s actually Eastern European folk music. Sam doesn’t consider that to be his style, but I don’t know how you can listen to the beginning of “O Mary, Don’t You Weep” and not hear that.

THERE’S A perception about folk music that’s it’s musically tame. Bruce himself in the liner notes talks about how “rock n’ roll kids” like himself didn’t know much about Pete Seeger’s music. But then you hear this album, and right from the first song, it’s anything but tame.

I DID an interview with Bruce for my Sirius satellite radio show, and he talked about this in a much more complicated way. He said that when he was a kid, he would be at the beach, and young people would be standing around with a couple of acoustic guitars, singing folk songs. And he said he always wished he could be in that circle.

I think that’s a great social metaphor and political metaphor, if you want to understand where he comes off.

But this side of the music has always been there. It’s the side of rock and roll that’s not about individual, self-destructive rebellion.

At the same time, though, the specific folk repertoire has been captured by what I call--in Forever Young, a book I wrote about Bob Dylan in 1964--the folk police, who are there to make sure that these songs remain desiccated and drained of fun and vitality.

Basically, Bruce’s idea was that everybody knows these songs--or at least some of them--but they don’t know what to do with them. Well, the answer of what to do with them is in the last line of the album, from “Froggie Went A Courtin’”: “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself.”

That’s the other exciting idea that’s here--that music is not about crafting, in a very specialized-labor kind of way, songs and recorded performances. Music is an activity.

There’s a great musicologist called Christopher Small, who wrote a book called Music of the Common Tongue, where he talks about why African American music replaced what we now think of as European classical music as the vernacular music of its time. He begins by saying that English is a deficient language for explaining music, because it thinks that music is a noun, and music is really a verb. We need the verb “musicking.”

Musicking is what this album is about. Bruce talks about this in the liner notes--that this album is about the making of the music.

But we forget that we’re living in this kind of ass-backwards period of history. Throughout the history of human beings, from the earliest campfires, we’ve had music--at least as long as we’ve had spoken language. Actually, there’s one study I’ve read that suggested that we’ve had music longer than we’ve had fire.

There was a great column by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal, saying that this was a survival thing--because music is about cooperative labor, and it was a way to bind us together. So all those work songs take on a much more central importance, among other things. And the idea of possessing those songs and treating them as property becomes even more outrageous.

Before 1890 or so, there was no recorded music, so if you wanted to hear something again, you had to do it yourself, or someone had to do it in your house, so that was a much more participatory event.

Even up to about 1950, music was still dominated by music publishers--people who produced written scores. That was the performance. It’s when the recorded thing becomes bigger than the published thing that the tail begins to wag the dog, and people stop performing and become much more passive about music.

The folk revival and Beatlemania were sort of the last gasps of a kind of different relationship. And in England, with punk rock, the do-it-yourself thing had many meanings, and one of them was to make your own music. That becomes much more of an activity. I think that’s another part of what this record does.

DID SPRINGSTEEN listen to a lot of the earlier versions of these songs, or did he come up with his own ways of arranging the music?

THAT WAS one of the smartest things he did--he sort of went into it with a willful ignorance.

He certainly heard Pete’s version of many of the songs. But when I interviewed him, he talked about how he didn’t go back and listen. He was trying to find his ways through the songs, and I think that’s another reason it works--because it’s completely out of bounds. I’m actually surprised that he hasn’t been attacked more by folk purists--by people who think there is a right way to sing these songs.

One of his assistants went on the Internet and grabbed lyrics for the songs. On a song like “Froggie Went A Courtin’,” there’s like 200 verses. A verse is two lines long in that song, but still, that’s a lot of lines. So he picked and chose.

Some of the stuff is hybridized. Not every version of “John Henry” has Polly Ann. Similarly, many versions of “Froggie Went A Courtin’” end with a snake and a cat coming in and eating everybody. And at least one version that Pete Seeger sings has the frog and the mouse reproducing and creating furry tadpoles.

I had my own problem with the album in one respect. If you understand “We Shall Overcome” as a movement song and an expression of the “beloved community” of the civil rights movement, here’s a guy who changes the key line from “deep in my heart” to “here in my heart,” and adds in front a “darlin’.”

And it’s sung very quietly. It’s everything that a movement version wouldn’t be. It felt almost solipsistic to me.

Until I saw him sing it live in New Orleans--where even Soozie Tyrell, the violin player, was wiping tears out of her eyes--I didn’t really understand why this is a time to sing “We Shall Overcome” that way.

Bruce has said that his theory behind doing this song is that it’s about a guy hiding in an alley. And he knows right from wrong--he knows what the possibilities of human beings are. Well, first, he has to convince himself. And then he has to convince the person he loves most in the world. And they have to go out and convince a few more people.

He did exactly the same thing on “Eyes on the Prize.” On the version of “Eyes on the Prize” on the album, you can hear him building the song like that--which to him is a metaphor of building the movement.

Bruce is in an interesting place right now. I was shocked a little by the middle verse that he wrote for the song “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” which he’s playing in concert. And I was also shocked by the lack of reaction to it.

In it, the guy goes out and gets his 16-guage shotgun and shells to deal with the flooding of New Orleans. To me, the implication of that is armed revolution. And that shows you the bind we’re in, because now we’re back to that isolated guy in the alley, with just his wife and him, going to fight it out, until they can find some allies.

I was actually very surprised that this verse didn’t excite some Bill O’Reilly frenzy.

THE OTHER undercurrent to this album is that it’s a tribute to a singer who was a communist, and who was blacklisted for it. It’s a pretty serious statement for Springsteen to champion Pete Seeger’s music, isn’t it?

THIS IS my interpretation of it--not Bruce’s, because I don’t know his--but Pete cuts several ways. The other thing that’s in there is Pete Seeger, great American, which he is--Pete Seeger, patriot even. Pete Seeger, lover of American culture, teacher of American culture. And beyond that, Pete Seeger, world citizen and person of courage.

So I don’t think it’s as simple as Pete Seeger the communist. But I don’t think that Pete Seeger as a communist is eliminated either.

How you reconcile this with working for John Kerry for president, as Bruce did, is a very good question. But a better question is what does releasing this record have to do with Vote for Change, and what does this portend for the next group of Democrats who try to swindle artists into supporting them.

I frankly don’t know. If Hillary Clinton was counting on that support, I’d say she’d be in some trouble--that’s just a guess. But none of the Democrats are going to address the stuff that’s on this album.

The other political undercurrent in this record is the war, which except for “Mrs. McGrath,” never comes up. And yet, I think it’s probably in every note on the record. And in the concerts, it’s explicit and getting more so. The other night in Paris, Bruce sang “Bring ’Em Home,” Pete’s antiwar song.

What do we know if we’re serious about our politics? We know that we need a movement, and we know that movements start out of human need. Therefore, writing the right song or singing the right song can’t start a movement.

But it can do about a hundred other things as the movement gets rolling. It can spread the word. It can enliven spirits. It can express the issue. It can give you comfort when, inevitably, you lose a battle. There are a whole bunch of things a song can do.

This isn’t going to generate a more productive antiwar movement--that’s up to the rest of us. But we have another tool.

From Opinion Journal:

Debunking the Debunkers
C.S. Lewis's message to "Da Vinci Code" fans.

BY JOSEPH LOCONTE

Friday, May 19, 2006

Religious leaders and others distressed by Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code"--and its movie debut this weekend--might take a cue from an Oxford don steeped in medieval literature, C.S. Lewis.

A former atheist, Lewis became one of the most beloved Christian authors of 20th century. He was not only a master at exposing the fault lines of modern, secular thought. As a layman, Lewis also could see the weaknesses of the church with unusual clarity--a skill he likely would apply to the furor over this latest challenge to orthodox belief.

There are few things more easily corruptible, Lewis observed, than religious belief and practice. "We must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better," he wrote a friend, "it makes him very much worse." Stories like "The Da Vinci Code" and Michael Baigent's "The Jesus Papers" carry a special appeal for people who are vividly aware of the historic failings of the church: the anti-Semitism, the persecutions, the soul-crushing legalism, right down to modern-day sex scandals.

As a scholar and a devoted churchman, Lewis was familiar with them as well. "If ever the book which I am not going to write is written," Lewis cautioned, "it must be the full confession by Christendom to Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty." Nevertheless, Lewis would insist that a confession of Christianity's sins does not absolve us of the obligation to think: Conspiracy theories are no substitute for calm and clear arguments about matters of faith.

In a short yet brilliant 1959 essay, "Fern Seeds and Elephants," Lewis debunked the debunkers of his own day--those who held that the Gospels were the product of myth, legend and outright deception. He began by drawing attention to the "shattering immediacy" of the Gospel stories, the often brash realism of Jesus' encounters with ordinary people.

Mark's Gospel, for example, sets the scene of Jesus' arrest this way: "A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind." We're never told who the man was or what happened to him. Luke describes a tax collector named Zacchaeus, who was too short to see over the crowds following Jesus. "So he ran ahead," Luke reports, "and climbed a sycamore tree to see him." It's irrelevant to what follows. Likewise, the Gospel of John tells of a woman caught in adultery and dragged before Jesus, who "bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger." Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes of it.

Any serious reader of the Gospels knows that their many references to the divinity of Jesus are thoroughly embedded in these earthy details. Here is a narrative style that anticipates the modern, realistic novel. "I have been reading poems, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life," Lewis wrote. "I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this."

Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive coverups presented in fanciful works such as "The Da Vinci Code" ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first "conspiracy theory" about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples "may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead." Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you're determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. "I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds," Lewis explained. "I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else."

Sounds like good advice to moviegoers this week--for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

Mr. Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a regular commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

Still Dodging Immigration's Truths
By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers.

Does this look like a harmonious future?

But you couldn't glean the danger from Bush's speech Monday night. Nor will you hear of it from most Democrats and (to be fair) the mainstream media. There is much muddle to our immigration debate. The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily.

Testifying recently before Congress, University of Illinois economist Barry Chiswick -- a respected immigration scholar -- said this of low-skilled immigrants:

"Their presence in the labor market increases competition for low-skilled jobs, reducing the earnings of low-skilled native-born workers. . . . Because of their low earnings, low-skilled immigrants also tend to pay less in taxes than they receive in public benefits, such as income transfers (e.g., the earned income tax credit, food stamps), public schooling for their children, and publicly provided medical services. Thus while the presence of low-skilled immigrant workers may raise the profits of their employers, they tend to have a negative effect on the well-being of the low-skilled native-born population, and on the native economy as a whole."

Hardly anyone is discussing these issues candidly. It is politically inexpedient to do so. We can be a lawful society and a welcoming society simultaneously, to use the president's phrase, but we cannot be a welcoming society for limitless numbers of Latin America's poor without seriously compromising our own future -- and, indeed, the future of many of the Latinos already here. Yet, that is precisely what the president and many senators (Democratic and Republican) support by endorsing large "guest worker" programs and an expansion of today's system of legal visas. In practice these proposals would result in substantial increases of low-skilled immigrants.

How fast can they assimilate? We cannot know, but we can consult history. It is sobering. In 1972 Hispanics were 5 percent of the U.S. population and their median household income was 74 percent of that of non-Hispanic white households. In 2004 Hispanics were 14 percent of the population, and their median household income was 70 percent of the level of non-Hispanic whites. These numbers suggest that rapid immigration of low-skilled workers and rapid assimilation are at odds. Some immigrant families make huge advances, but many don't and newcomers represent a constant drag.

The difficulties are obvious. Competition among them depresses wages. Social services are stretched thin. In 2000 children of immigrants already represented a quarter of all low-income students in U.S. schools, an Urban Institute study reports. The figure is probably higher today. The study also reports that immigrant children are rapidly spreading beyond the six states where they had traditionally concentrated (California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York and New Jersey). This may explain why immigration has suddenly become such an explosive issue. A reader e-mails: "There are children in my son's school who aren't able to speak a single word of English, and it is causing such frustration amongst the staff and other children . . . I am afraid for my son's future."

There are striking parallels between how we've treated immigration and aging. In both cases, the facts are hiding in plain view. But we've chosen to ignore them because candor seems insensitive and politically awkward. Who wants to offend the elderly or Latinos? The result is to make our choices worse by postponing them. A sensible society would long ago have begun adapting to longer life expectancies, better health and greater wealth by making careful cuts in Social Security and Medicare. We've done little.

Unfortunately, the two problems intersect. Just coincidentally, the Census Bureau projects both the 65-and-over population and the Hispanic population to be about a fifth of the total by 2030 (the elderly population is now about 12 percent). The tax increases that will be required to pay for existing federal commitments to the elderly are on the order of 30 to 40 percent. People who don't think there will be conflicts between older beneficiaries and younger taxpayers -- Hispanic or not -- are deluding themselves. People who imagine there won't be more conflicts between growing numbers of poor Latinos and poor African Americans for jobs and political power are also deluding themselves.

As the president says, we need a "comprehensive" immigration policy. He's right on some elements: controlling the border; providing reliable identification cards for legal immigrants; penalizing employers that hire illegal immigrants; providing some legal status for today's illegal immigrants. But he's wrong in wanting to expand the number of low-skilled immigrants based on the fiction of U.S. labor "shortages." In his testimony, economist Chiswick rightly argued that we should do the opposite -- give preferences to skilled immigrants. We should be smart about the future; right now, we're not.

Read My Lips: No New Amnesty
by Ann Coulter

On the bright side, if President Bush's amnesty proposal for illegal immigrants ends up hurting Republicans and we lose Congress this November, maybe the Democrats will impeach him and we'll get Dick Cheney as President.

Get Yours FREE!
At least Bush has dropped his infernal references to slacker Americans when talking about illegal immigrants. In his speech Monday night, instead of 47 mentions of "jobs Americans won't do," Bush referred only once to "jobs Americans are not doing" -- which I take it means other than border enforcement and intelligence-gathering at the CIA. For the record, I'll volunteer right now to clean other people's apartments if I don't have to pay taxes on what I earn.

Also, someone must have finally told Bush that the point about America being a "nation of immigrants" is moronic. All nations are "nations of immigrants" -- as Peter Brimelow pointed out brilliantly in his 1992 article in National Review on immigration, which left nothing for anyone else to say.

Of the "nation of immigrants" locution, Brimelow says:

"No discussion of U.S. immigration policy gets far without someone making this helpful remark. As an immigrant myself, I always pause respectfully. You never know. Maybe this is what they're taught to chant in schools nowadays, a sort of multicultural Pledge of Allegiance. ... Do they really think other nations sprouted up out of the ground?"

Brimelow then ran through the Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman-French, Welsh and Celtic immigrant influences in Britain alone.

Instead of a moratorium on new immigration, I'd settle for a moratorium on the use of the expression "We're a nation of immigrants." Throw in a ban on "Diversity is our strength" and you've got my vote for life.

Bush has also apparently learned that the word "amnesty" does not poll well. On Monday night, he angrily denounced the idea of amnesty just before proposing his own amnesty program. The difference between Bush's amnesty program and "amnesty" is: He'd give amnesty only to people who have been breaking our laws for many years -- not just a few months. (It's the same program that allows Teddy Kennedy to stay in the Senate.)

Bush calls this the "rational middle ground" because it recognizes the difference between "an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years." Yes, the difference is: One of them has been breaking the law longer. If our criminal justice system used that logic, a single murder would get you the death penalty, while serial killers would get probation.

Bush claimed the only other alternative -- I assume this is the "irrational extreme" -- is "a program of mass deportation." Really? Is the only alternative to legalizing tax cheats "a program of mass arrest of tax cheats"?

This is the logic of the pro-abortion zealots (aka "the Democratic Party"): Either lift every single restriction on abortion or ... every woman in America will be impregnated by her father and die in a back-alley abortion!

Those are your only two answers? Do you need another minute?

How about the proposal made on Brimelow's Web site, Vdare.com, that illegal immigrants be told they have two months to leave the country voluntarily and not have their breaking of our immigration laws held against them when they apply for citizenship from their home countries -- or not leave and be banned from U.S. citizenship forever?

Or how about just not giving illegal aliens green cards -- as Bush is proposing -- and deport them when we catch them?

Instead of choosing immigrants based on the longevity of their lawbreaking, another idea is to choose the immigrants we want, for example, those who speak English or have special skills. (And by "special skills" I don't mean giving birth to an anchor baby in a border-town emergency room.)

Why not use immigration the way sports teams use the draft -- to upgrade our roster? We could take our pick of the world's engineers, doctors, scientists, uh ... smoking-hot Latin guys who stand around not wearing shirts between workouts. Or, you know, whatever ...

As Peter Brimelow says in his book "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster," why not choose immigrants who are better than us?

Bush thinks it's not fair to favor people with special skills -- a policy evidenced by his Harriet Miers pick.

How about this: It's not fair to want to go out with someone just because that person is attractive and has a good personality because it discriminates against people who are ugly with bad social skills! That's our immigration policy.

Press "1" for English; press "2" for a new President ...

Back in The Bluff

Tyler Hansbrough on celebrity, signing autographs, and trying to win a game of pool
"I enjoy Chapel Hill now, but I'll always miss home."

By JEFF McNIELL

His autograph has sold for well over $100 on eBay and he has 1,747 friends on MySpace.com.

Yet when he comes home, Tyler Hansbrough is still the goofy, shy kid he's always been.

Hansbrough returned to Poplar Bluff this past week to spend time with his family and enjoy the perks Chapel Hill can't offer ---- high school friends, his old bed and mom's home-cooked meals. It also allowed him the opportunity to step away from the frenzy he created by enjoying one of the best freshman seasons in the storied tradition of North Carolina basketball.

At UNC, Hansbrough has rock star status.

At Poplar Bluff, he's just one of the guys.

"When I walk in the door, they're like, 'Oh, it's still the same old goofy person,'" Hansbrough said Friday afternoon. "I'm still the same person no matter who knows about me and what I accomplish."

Hansbrough made the 13-hour drive home on May 5 with the intention of soaking in his old stomping grounds.

He wanted to spend time with his younger brother, Ben, who is leaving for Mississippi State at the end of the month; his dad, who will get married in Hawaii in less than two weeks; his grandfather and mother.

"I missed my friends and people I've grown up with,"

Tyler said. "I missed my mom's food the most. To get some home-cooked meals, that was really good. I also miss my bed because I'm living in the dorm and it's a small bed."

He also found out he missed Ben and Gene polishing their pool games. There's been a week's worth of intense matchups that Tyler has lost every time.

"I've been so horrible and they've gotten so good,"

Hansbrough said. "I just can't stand it and they let me know about it. I get so mad, but I'll get them a loss before I leave."

Coming home offers Hansbrough a brief escape from the whirlwind of attention he created. His popularity skyrocketed as the baby-faced, tenacious freshman made the Baby Heels unexpectedly good. Leading a group that lost its top seven scorers, Hansbrough became the first freshman in the team's storied tradition to lead the team in scoring (18.9) and rebounding (7.8). He was a unanimous All-ACC selection and third team AP All-American.

Game by game and one rim-rocking dunk after another, Hansbrough became more beloved on Tobacco Road. Fans began wearing maroon to support the former Mule, his autograph was being sold as fast as it was posted on eBay and T-shirts reading 'Got Psycho T?' popped up on the same website.

A post on Inside Carolina's message board touting his greatness ---- one reads, "If at first you don't succeed, you're obviously not Tyler Hansbrough" ---- has 1,391 replies and has been viewed 60,596 times. Another titled 'Tyler vs. Godzilla' has 5,212 views.

Although he's not completely comfortable being a celebrity, Hansbrough said he has learned to accept it.

"Some fans expect me to be the coolest person in the world or something like that," he said. "I'm like that kid. I look up to people as much as they look up to me. I understand where they're coming from."

Which is why he doesn't turn down an autograph, no matter how silly the request seems. Hansbrough said he's often asked to sign body parts.

"I will sign somebody's hand, but I always tell them that it's kind of pointless," he said.

Hansbrough's visit home didn't last as long as he would have liked. He'll leave today to return for summer school and won't be back until the beginning of August.

Don't think he'll be relaxing, though. Hansbrough said he plans to improve his conditioning, quickness and perimeter shot in preparation for a run at next year's national championship. He said spending time on the basketball court when he first arrived is what helped Chapel Hill begin to feel like home.

"I just concentrated on basketball and did the thing I know best to do, and that's play basketball," he said.

"I enjoy Chapel Hill now, but I'll always miss home."

Tyler Hansbrough returned to Poplar Bluff last week after one of the most successful freshman seasons in the history of North Carolina basketball.

Assistant sports editor Jeff McNiell caught up with Hansbrough after a Friday afternoon scrimmage at Three Rivers Community College to get his thoughts about his first year in college, going one-on-one with Duke's Sheldon Williams and his little brother being named Mr. Show Me Basketball.

JEFF McNIELL: Tell me about your first season at North Carolina and how it went. Obviously, you were very successful and received several individual accolades.

TYLER HANSBROUGH: At first I was nervous. It's a different place playing in front of a lot of different people. You're under the spotlight. People talk about how different college is from high school and it is, but it's still doing what you've always done ---- do all your hard work and let it carry over to the games.

JM: Were you surprised by your immediate success or did you expect to do what you did?

TH: If I went into the season and didn't work as hard as I did, then I wouldn't expect as much success. But I felt that I worked as hard as I could, prepared myself and I expected success.

JM: How did you feel about the season your team had?

Expectations coming into the season were low because even though UNC was the defending national champions, the team lost its top seven scorers and was relying on so many freshmen. Were you happy with the way things went?

TH: It wasn't at successful as we wanted it to be and it was a tough loss to George Mason (in the second round of the NCAA Tournament) at the end, but we did prove a lot of people wrong. That's something that made the season so special. I felt like each practice we grew closer as a team.

JM: What was your favorite moment of your freshman season?

TH: Beating Duke at Cameron (Indoor Stadium). But there's still some things we want to accomplish next season that I look forward to.

JM: What was it like playing at Duke and being part of what many consider to be the biggest rivalry in college basketball, and maybe any sport?

TH: Man, it is unbelievable. People talk about it but once you're part of it, it's really hard to put into words. You go over there and they know everything about you and have all these pictures of you. They're right on the floor and they can touch you if they want to.

I remember they came back within three points late in the second half and that place erupted. I remember going in the huddle, coach (Roy Williams) was yelling and I couldn't hear a word he was saying. He was right in front of my face and my ears were ringing. But after that game was over, you go in the locker room and you don't have anything left, but boy, you're happy.

JM: You faced some elite competition in the ACC. Which individual matchup did you enjoy the most?

TH: One of my favorites was Sheldon (Williams). The first game at Chapel Hill, I didn't know what to expect. Everyone talks about, 'The Landlord this,' and you have to pay your dues. But once I got a feel for his game, I felt I could hold my own. Once I played well against him, I felt that I proved myself.

JM: You considered leaving college for the NBA and many believed you would have been a lottery pick. Why did you ultimately decide to stay?

TH: I looked at some of the things I want to achieve and there's still so many things I'd like to do at North Carolina. I'd like to win an ACC championship, tournament and win the whole thing. That's something that I want to do and I think we have a shot at next year. We're definitely contenders. That was a big reason I didn't go.

Also, I feel there's a lot of things I need to improve on. I still love college and I don't know if I was really ready to leave.

JM: The North Carolina basketball program is like a fraternity of brothers once you play for the Tar Heels. Which former players have you gotten to know the past year?

TH: Marvin Williams, I got to know him over the summer. He's a great player and someone I look up to.

I got to know Sean (May) pretty well. He was my host when I was being recruited. Shammond Williams came back and played with us, Hubert Davis practiced with us a little bit and King Rice practices with us all the time. It is a close family thing at North Carolina.

JM: There was an Internet rumor last summer that in a pick-up game with former UNC players, you dunked over Jerry Stackhouse and screamed, 'Weight room!' Is that true?

TH: I tried. I almost got it, but it came out and someone kind of hyped up the story.

JM: Your little brother, Ben, followed in your footsteps by being named Mr. Show Me Basketball and having his No. 23 Mules jersey retired. I'm sure that made you proud.

TH: I know what type of potential he has. I pretty much knew he'd be the man of the team. I honestly think he's the best player in the state and was deserving. Ben has done a lot of things for the program. People thought that with everyone leaving that the team might not be that good, but he really picked it up and played well.

JM: He's going to Mississippi State. Is there any chance that you could convince UNC to get the Bulldogs on the schedule so that you could play him?

TH: I don't think you're going to talk me into playing against my little brother. That would be a tough situation.

Bush's border shift needs policing

Those who want to toughen our southern boundary should be wary of the president's sudden change of heart
James P. Pinkerton

May 16, 2006

So George W. Bush wants to get tough on border enforcement. Nothing like an approval rating in the low 30s - including a hemorrhage in his conservative base - to concentrate the political mind.

Bush talked like a cop last night, but, of course, he also reiterated his support for a guest-worker plan, which everyone knows will eventually morph into an amnesty for illegal immigrants. So Bush is a cop who wants to let the crooks go free. One is reminded of the old adage: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

And Bush has held a pro-immigration opinion for a long time. His business background convinced him that low-wage immigration was good for the economy, Karl Rove convinced him that Hispanic immigrants could become future Republicans, and his father - who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement back in 1992 - convinced him that the Bush destiny was to preside over improved U.S.-Mexico relations. As governor of Texas, he was proud to show off his Spanish; as president, he has been no foe of bilingualism.

So, of course, Bush was hostile to the Minutemen, the volunteers who stepped forward to do what the U.S. government had lost interest in doing - defend the country. "I am against vigilantes," he said dismissively in March 2005.

A year later, as the debate over a new immigration bill heated up, this open-border view became manifest yet again. An "analysis" in the April 6 Washington Post, clearly inspired by Rove, laid out the White House spin: "For the past six years, Bush has sought to expand the GOP coalition by appealing to the fast-growing Hispanic community."

But there was a problem, the piece warned: "Republican divisions over immigration put the Bush political project at risk. The president finds himself caught in a battle pitting what has been his most important constituency - conservative Republicans angry over the flood of illegal immigrants - against what he and advisers such as Rove regard as an emerging GOP constituency - Latinos." In other words, according to Rove's-eye view of the situation, the only obstacle between Bush and grand-coalition greatness were those pesky right-wingers.

One pesky conservative is the movie director Ron Maxwell, who has put his own reverence for American tradition on screen, in Civil War movies such as "Gettysburg" and "Gods and Generals." By coincidence, on the same day as the Rove-inspired Post piece, Maxwell published his own op-ed in The Washington Times. Addressing the president respectfully but directly, he wrote: "I understand that in your heart you want to believe that the border should be an open place where goods and people can move freely back and forth for the good of all."

The filmmaker then stipulated that he didn't question Bush's sincerity, only his realism. Such open-bordering, he added, "is a utopian creed, which must be discarded before it is too late." And as for the amnesty - oops, "guest workers" - featured in the legislation sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and supported by Bush, Maxwell snapped, "The McCain-Kennedy bill looks like it was drafted by bureaucrats at the United Nations, not by representatives of the United States."

And exactly that sort of new-world-orderish thinking is visible even now; The Daily Bulletin of Ontario, Calif., reports that the U.S. Border Patrol has been routinely notifying Mexican officials as to the whereabouts of the Minutemen. Why? Because the Bush administration wants harmony with the Mexican government at all costs - even as the Mexican government actively promotes "migration" into the United States.

Bush now says that he wants to call out the National Guard - but only temporarily. Indeed, after all these years of one stance on immigration, it's hard to believe that he has truly converted to the opposite stance. So border-tougheners should remember another adage: "Trust, yet verify." Or, better yet, mistrust and be all the more insistent about verification.

James P. Pinkerton's e-mail address is pinkerto@ix.netcom .com.

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.

Did these ploys sneak into Bush's speech?
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN

For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I will perform a death-defying stunt -- no, not climbing a 300-foot ladder, diving through seven rings of fire and landing perfectly safely in a glass of water. That's easy once you know how to do it.

Instead, I shall advise you on how to interpret President Bush's speech on immigration that you heard last night but that was delivered several hours after this column was written. Very simply: Ask yourselves the following questions:

Did the president use the phrase ''comprehensive immigration reform'' several times? That's revealing because this phrase is an example of smuggling. He hopes that by wrapping a ''temporary guest-worker program'' and the ''not an amnesty'' provision to legalize the 12 million illegals already here -- both of which are unpopular -- inside a tough-sounding popular promise to secure the border with the National Guard, he will persuade most Americans to accept the first two proposals.

Did the president spend a large part of his speech on promising to secure the border by sending the National Guard there? Heigh-ho. This is the umpteenth time that Bush has promised to toughen up border security with a new initiative. He does so whenever there is public disquiet about illegal immigration.

Yet this kind of mini-initiative is fundamentally irrelevant. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, porous borders are the result of uncontrolled immigration as much as its cause. You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.

Besides, a guest-worker program that admits as many people as employers are willing to hire (at sweatshop wages Americans won't accept) makes extra border security pointless. If everyone can come in legally, there won't be any illegals crossing the desert or swimming the river.

Did the president deny that he and the Senate are proposing an amnesty because the 12 million illegals ''will have to go to the end of the line''?

The trick here is the identity of the line. You thought it meant the line to enter and live in the good old USA, didn't you? That's exactly what the president and his speechwriters wanted you to think. In fact, it means the line to become a citizen. Under the Senate-White House ''compromise,'' the illegals will immediately be granted the right to reside here permanently while legal applicants still wait outside.

It's the line to enter that really matters, however, since a U.S. permanent resident has all the rights and duties of a U.S. citizen except the right to vote and the duty to serve on a jury. Illegals will have to wait a dozen or so years inside America before they obtain those last two. And they will probably be casting votes when those ''ahead of them in the line'' are still sitting in consular waiting rooms in Warsaw and Manila. Still, all together now, ''IT'S NOT AN AMNESTY.''

When the president stressed that the guest-worker program would be temporary, did he mention ''anchor babies''? No? Well, just guessing, but that omission may be because ''anchor babies,'' as the phrase implies, make ''temporary'' guest-workers permanent.

Here's how: Under the U.S. Constitution, if a temporary guest-worker or spouse gives birth during their stay, they become parents of a U.S. citizen and enjoy a right of residence and, in due course, citizenship. The baby anchors them in the United States and nullifies the president's pledge that temporary guest-workers will have to return when their job assignment ends. Unless Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to remove that right of citizenship (and my guess is that he proposed no such change), then the guest-worker program is simply another route to permanent U.S. residency and citizenship.

Did the president quote many statistics about the number of people likely to be admitted under the ''compromise'' legislation? Or the likely cost of granting amnesty? No? Well, that's hardly surprising. When Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions produced a chart suggesting that something like 30 million people would be admitted under provisions of the compromise bill, his brave and effective speech halted it dead in its tracks in the Senate before Easter.

But the latest estimates suggest that Sessions was being overly cautious. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has just added up all the provisions of the bill -- for instance, it doubles the number of legal immigrants -- and discovered they would admit 103 million new people over the next 20 years. It's estimated that 19 million people would otherwise enter America over the same period.

The same author last week added up the fiscal costs of the Hagel-Martinez compromise bill. He concluded that the long-term cost of government benefits could be $30 billion per year or more: ''In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.'' It was very sensible of the president not to bore the listeners with such details.

Finally, did the president cite polls arguing that the American people were on the side of such generous reforms? If so, he's been reading the New York Times or Time magazine again. Both media outlets, which favor open borders, have been asking questions designed to push people into supporting amnesty and guest-worker programs. So the Center for Immigration Studies designed a scrupulously fair opinion poll that laid out all the real-world options in neutral language. It found that the ''enforcement only'' bill favored by House Republicans was preferred over the Senate ''compromise'' bill by roughly 2-1.

All in all, Mr. Bush seems bent on committing political suicide. Will the American people join him?

Bush Talks Big on the Border
By Debra Saunders

President Bush is making a big mistake in announcing that he wants to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to the border. What a shoddy way to say thank you to troops who have seen plenty of action in Iraq and after Katrina. It is also an insult to conservative and moderate voters, whom he apparently thinks this feckless gesture will appease.

The whole focus on the border shows that Bush is not serious about curbing illegal immigration. Washington already has increased the ranks of the Border Patrol, which is good. Meanwhile, as many as one-third of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America are visa violators. They didn't sneak over the border.

Want to find them? Want to discourage more people from coming to America so they can work here illegally? Squeeze employers.

In the private sector, Chicago attorney Howard Foster has masterminded class-action lawsuits on behalf of legal workers against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers with dubious documents and no English skills. Zirkle Fruit, a Washington-based apple-packing company, recently agreed to a settlement that will require it to compensate legal workers to the tune of $1.3 million for the wages they would have earned in a marketplace not depressed by illegal immigrants.

Why put Guardsmen at the border when the government doesn't even require that employers check with authorities to see if workers are legal? In 1997, Washington began work on the Basic Pilot program, which allows employers to check new hires' Social Security numbers. Problem is, Foster noted, Basic Pilot is "only voluntary. It's not mandatory. Congress doesn't want to make it mandatory, they don't want to burden employers with it."

Basic Pilot also needs to be improved so that it can detect pilfered identities. As it is, Foster noted, some corporations that hire largely illegal workforces have learned how to use the database "as a ruse to keep the feds quiet and keep them from getting raided again."

As Foster sees it, the government should routinely raid corporations in industries notorious for hiring undocumented workers.

Bush would not need to consult Congress -- he could direct his government to focus on workplace enforcement. (If the feds feel too understaffed to raid known hirers of illegal immigrants, they might consider pulling a few agents from medical-marijuana raid details.)

Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, argues that the Social Security Administration should send out more no-match letters to employers -- to inform them that workers don't match their Social Security numbers. Bush also could order that change and would not need to wait for Congress.

As for the National Guard at the border, that's "just cosmetic silliness. It's an expression of contempt for people who are concerned about immigration. In the White House, they think that anybody who is concerned about immigration must be a yahoo."

"You send in the National Guard if there's a hurricane," Krikorian added. "What's the emergency now? The emergency now is they're trying to get an amnesty bill, and it's dying."

Sending the National Guard is a cheesy way to get around the fact that voters want Washington to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in America today, while Washington wants to reduce the number of illegal immigrants by making them legal. And everyone knows that amnesty -- or what Washington calls "earned citizenship" -- will send a signal to would-be Americans that it pays to violate federal immigration law. California schools will admit more children who don't know English, while state emergency rooms care for workers without health benefits.

Employers won't have to pay the cost of their cheap labor. That's what the National Guard is for.

Clintonian at the Border
President Bush's final, desperate descent.

By Rich Lowry

President Bush has a bold new approach to immigration enforcement: He wants to police the Mexican border with symbolism.

That's the point of his proposal to send the National Guard to our border with Mexico. This represents Bush's final, desperate descent into Clintonian sleight of hand. He wants to distract enough of his supporters with the razzle-dazzle of "National Guard to the Border!" headlines that they won't notice he is pushing through Congress a proposal that essentially legalizes all the population influx from Latin America that has occurred in the past 10 years and any that might occur in the future.

Like President Clinton's gesture of sending more U.S. troops to Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu, when everyone knew we were really on our way out, Bush's Guard deployment is a prelude to surrender. The immigrants who have come here in defiance of our laws will get to stay, bring their families and be joined by just as many immigrants in the future—at least if Bush gets his way.

It is with this position that Bush has wrecked his political standing, kicking out from under himself the support of his conservative base. Bush's National Guard feint is a sign that the White House thinks conservatives are not just disaffected, but credulous. The Guard won't have any real enforcement duties. It will merely provide logistical backup to the Border Patrol. The Guard's presence will be temporary, until a proposed doubling of Border Patrol agents takes place. But if the past is any guide, all of those new positions ultimately won't be funded, once the political heat passes.

Having the National Guard sharpen pencils and fetch coffee for the Border Patrol can't fix our broken immigration system. It is no substitute for a fence, nor for real interior enforcement that punishes employers for hiring illegal labor. The Bush approach to the latter also relies on symbolism. A 26-state immigration raid garnered extensive press attention last month, but most of the aliens arrested were quickly released again.

There is no sign that the raid was a harbinger of a broader crackdown on the employment of illegals, which is the source of the surge of illegals. This isn't surprising, since if it were a Bush priority to enforce the immigration laws, there presumably would have been some sign of it prior to the sixth year of his presidency. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, Bush's position on enforcing these laws has been only a firm, "I'd prefer not to."

That a president from the country's law-and-order party has been so blase about both when it comes to immigration presents an obvious opening to the opposition. Shrewder Democrats are picking up on it. A new report from the centrist Democratic group Third Way notes that from 2001 to 2004, border apprehensions declined 31 percent from the last four years of the Clinton administration, and apprehensions within the country dropped 36 percent. There were only 46 convictions for violations of laws against hiring illegals in all of 2004.

Bush's heart just isn't in enforcement. Perhaps it's a tribute to his sincerity that he is so bad at faking it. With his sympathy for the struggle of desperate people coming here for work, his "compassionate conservatism" doesn't stop at the Rio Grande. And it is reinforced by his chamber-of-commerce conservatism that wants to welcome the world's huddled masses as long as they will work without complaint on hot roofs for cheap wages.

The Senate bill Bush hopes to help pass would put 12 million illegal aliens on the path to citizenship, double the level of legal immigration from 1 million to 2 million a year and welcome hundreds of thousands of guest workers, according to the Washington Times. Those are the numbers that reflect Bush's true policy preferences, not the couple of thousand unarmed National Guard troops that he wants to deploy to the border as a political prop.

From USA Today:

Where's the passion over 'Da Vinci Code'?
By Amy Welborn

When Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released two years ago, something strange and unprecedented happened. The secular news media could not get enough of the Gospels. Of course, this mass Bible study had a twist and a purpose: to show how Gibson got it wrong.

The criticisms began in 2003, well before the film's release, when a committee of scholars obtained a copy of the script. It issued a highly critical 18-page report, the views of which were summarized in a New Republic article by one of the committee members, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University. The article was called "Mad Mel" and centered on the issue of culpability for Jesus' death and purported anti-Semitism in Gibson's version of events.

The template was set. For two months before the release of the film, which broke box office records with $370 million in the USA alone, the question was raised in countless articles, culminating in Newsweek's cover story a week before the film's release: "Who Killed Jesus?"

After more people had actually seen the film, the controversy intensified as TV talk shows hosted pseudo-scholarly debates in between commercials for American Idol and laundry detergents.

All of a sudden, a movie's faithfulness to the biblical record was extremely important to a lot of people.

Now, two years later, The Da Vinci Code, another movie with biblical implications, is about to be released. Like Gibson's film, it tells a story about Jesus, but one that self-consciously has nothing in common with the New Testament. Indeed, its scholar characters proudly proclaim that the New Testament is completely wrong about Jesus.

But it's just a story, right?

Only a novel. Fiction. I know, I know. But The Da Vinci Code is a problem in the eyes of many Christians because it presents a deeply deceptive account of what Christians believe about Jesus. It's not Brown's version that is the real problem. It's what Brown claims about the Christian account of Jesus: that the Jesus of Christianity is distant, abstract — a figure whom human beings can't relate to, when actually the opposite is true.

The book is bothersome because it not only doesn't tell the truth about Jesus, it also doesn't tell the truth about what Christians say about Jesus. As a writer of many books on Roman Catholic issues with a widely read blog, I've been getting e-mails and fielding questions for three years, and a surprising number of my correspondents express, well ... faith that the story the novel tells about Jesus is historically accurate.

This new "history" says that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that Jesus didn't preach the Kingdom of God or repentance from sin or carrying one's cross, but rather he preached the Good News about the unity of the masculine and feminine principles of reality. And impregnated Mary Magdalene — who is the real Holy Grail. Because she carries the "blood" of Jesus within her. Which Leonardo da Vinci worked into his art.

Crazy stuff. But when I get e-mails from people who are either disturbed by what they read in The Da Vinci Code or are enraged at me for mocking it — calling me a "typically brainwashed Catholic," as if there could be any other kind — I know that something's up.

And something's down, as well, namely the U.S. educational system. That so many have swallowed this fairy tale — albeit an interesting and provocative one — as fact should embarrass both religious and secular teachers alike.

So, will the secular news media get busy on this? Judging from the coverage of the novel's impact, as well as the recent coverage that greeted National Geographic's The Gospel of Judas, I'm not optimistic.

'Christians React'

Just as was the case with The Passion, The Da Vinci Code coverage has a template. It's called "Christians React" for short. The established storyline so far is Christians are "offended" and have busied themselves "reacting" and "defending."

Note the distance, absent from The Passion coverage, which actively sought to be engaged in the question itself: What do the Gospels say about Jesus' death?

The Da Vinci Code coverage hasn't asked a similar question. It hasn't asked, "Is what The Da Vinci Code says about Jesus accurate?" Instead, it presents the picture we're used to: The defensive Christians taking stuff way too seriously. Questions being raised about the accuracy of the story aren't being directly addressed, unlike the way the secular media outlets expressed great concern that the story of Jesus be accurately and fairly portrayed on film.

Sure, there's a slight difference in genre, but the fact is, The Da Vinci Code presents its theories authoritatively, and a startling number of readers embrace them as such. I've stood next to people studying copies of Leonardo's Last Supper talking to each other about the figure to Jesus' left and how, "Everyone knows that's Mary Magdalene now."

Does this not bother anyone who cares about an intelligent approach to art and history?

It's not history

The issue isn't about personal faith in Jesus. But The Da Vinci Code says wild things about the past that even secular historians scoff at and are bothered to hear readers take so seriously. No, Constantine did not transform Christianity from a feminine-centered wisdom movement to a Jesus-worshipping mega-movement. It just didn't happen.

I sometimes think that the secular media are afraid to take this nonsense on and, frankly, mock it for the silliness it is because the news media might then be perceived as giving support to narrow-minded conservative Christians.

Too bad. Because by refraining from frankly asking and answering the question, "Was Jesus all about the sacred feminine? Er ... no," they're giving support to something more dangerous than narrow minds:

Empty ones.

Amy Welborn has a master of arts in church history from Vanderbilt University and is author of De-Coding Mary Magdalene: Truth, Legends and Lies and De-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of The Da Vinci Code.

Civility, Not Censorship, Is Issue in 'Da Vinci Code' Debate
By John Leo

Tom Hanks thinks Christians shouldn't become irate about "The Da Vinci Code." He says it's just a story, "loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense." He's right, but so is an official of the Christian Council of Korea, who said, "'The Da Vinci Code' is a movie which belittles and tries to destroy Christianity."

Isn't "destroy" too grand a word for a Tom Hanks entertainment? Maybe, but this thriller is mounting the powerful argument that Christianity is rotten to the core, based on lies and political conspiracy. It is surely one of the most effective attacks on Christian faith in generations. One of the cardinals at the Vatican said, in effect, we've had this kind of assault before, but not addressed to such a large audience of religious illiterates and uncritical minds.

Sony and director Ron Howard repeatedly brushed off requests for a disclaimer at the beginning of the film. But disclaimers are common in stories that liberally mix fact and fiction, and there should have been one here. Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" had one, mostly in gibberish, and in that story Jesus is merely tempted to consort with Mary Magdalene. He doesn't marry her and raise a long line of European royals.

The handling of Opus Dei was crude as well. The organization has a controversial and somewhat spooky image even within Catholicism, yet it gave great access to the best reporter at the Vatican, John Allen, for his recent book "Opus Dei." Allen's book was ambivalent, but gave Opus Dei credit for much good work. Among its many activities, the Opus Dei operates 15 universities. The group's bent is authoritarian, but it is not the sinister and murderous cult depicted in "The Da Vinci Code." Using a fictional name would have been fairer.

So the calls for the movie to be banned, or at least boycotted, are understandable, but wrongheaded. But where is the muscular pro-censorship lobby that usually leaps into action whenever "hate speech" is detected? After all, eccentric historian David Irving is sitting in an Austrian prison for two speeches he gave denying the Holocaust. Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk narrowly escaped prosecution for "denigrating Turkishness," i.e., he thought the slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I was genocide. And a Swedish pastor was convicted (though cleared on appeal) of violating a hate crime law that specifically included sermons against homosexuality as hate speech.

"The simple practice of reading biblical texts teaching the sinfulness of homosexuality is now against the law in Sweden," said Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Eleven European nations have laws that criminalize "hate speech." After the Danish cartoons controversy, the European Union indicated it would try to draft a media code of conduct. "We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," said EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini. "We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right." Uh-oh. Here comes more censorship posing as voluntary restraint.

The fondness for censorship that doesn't quite look like censorship surfaced in an op-ed piece this month at the Baltimore Jewish Times. Dr. Robert O. Freedman called for the creation of an International Religious Court that could ask governments to penalize insults directed at religions or religious figures. "All governments must agree that the negative depiction of religion is out of bounds," he wrote.

But why? All belief systems should be equally open to criticism. Ordinary civility should make us cautious about attacking religions that so many people hold dear. But if you believe that any religion is dangerous or nonsensical, you should speak out.

Europe has put itself into a box on censorship. The ban on Holocaust denial was a mistake that launched what law professor Eugene Volokh calls "censorship envy." Multiculturalism worked hard to spread the envy. Now Europe is itching to ban negative comments against all religion whose adherents are likely to cut your head with a rusty saw when criticized. Since this doesn't include Christianity, double standards are clearly being set up. Wouldn't it be simpler just to defend free speech across the board?

John Leo is a contributing columnist for RealClearPolitics.

From www.suntimes.com:

To connect the dots, you have to see the dots
BY MARK STEYN

Here are two news stories from the end of last week. The first one you may have heard about. As "The Today Show's" Matt Lauer put it:

"Does the government have your number? This morning a shocking new report that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans."

The second story comes from the United Kingdom and what with Lauer's hyperventilating you may have missed it. It was the official report into the July 7 bus and Tube bombings. As The Times of London summarized the conclusions:

"Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the bomb cell, had come to the attention of MI5 [Britain's domestic intelligence agency] on five occasions but had never been pursued as a serious suspect . . .

"A lack of communication between police Special Branch units, MI5 and other agencies had hampered the intelligence-gathering operation;

"There was a lack of co-operation with foreign intelligence services and inadequate intelligence coverage in . . ."

Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

So there are now two basic templates in terrorism media coverage:

Template A (note to editors: to be used after every terrorist atrocity): "Angry family members, experts and opposition politicians demand to know why complacent government didn't connect the dots."

Template B (note to editors: to be used in the run-up to the next terrorist atrocity): "Shocking new report leaked to New York Times for Pulitzer Prize Leak Of The Year Award nomination reveals that paranoid government officials are trying to connect the dots! See pages 3,4,6,7,8, 13-37."

How do you connect the dots? To take one example of what we're up against, two days before 9/11, a very brave man, the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated in Afghanistan by killers posing as journalists. His murderers were Algerians traveling on Belgian passports who'd arrived in that part of the world on visas issued by the Pakistani High Commission in the United Kingdom. That's three more countries than many Americans have visited. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people -- and kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's -- but, on the whole, they fill in less paperwork. They're very good at compartmentalizing operations: They don't leave footprints, just a toeprint in Country A in Time Zone B and another toe in Country E in Time Zone K. You have to sift through millions of dots to discern two that might be worth connecting.

I'm a strong believer in privacy rights. I don't see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don't require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it's hard to see why lists of phone numbers (i.e., your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, "connecting the dots" involves getting to see the dots in the first place.

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) feels differently. "Look at this headline," huffed the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The secret collection of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. Now, are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida?"

No. But next time he's flying from D.C. to Burlington, Vt., on a Friday afternoon he might look at the security line: Tens of millions of Americans are having to take their coats and shoes off! Are you telling me that tens of millions of ordinary shoe-wearing Americans are involved with al-Qaida?

Of course not. Fifteen out of 19 of the 9/11 killers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. So let's scrap the tens of millions of law-abiding phone records, and say we only want to examine the long-distance phone bills of, say, young men of Saudi origin living in the United States. Can you imagine what Leahy and Lauer would say to that? Oh, no! Racial profiling! The government's snooping on people whose only crime is "dialing while Arab." In a country whose Transportation Security Administration personnel recently pulled Daniel Brown off the plane as a security threat because he had traces of gunpowder on his boots -- he was a uniformed U.S. Marine on his way home from Iraq -- in such a culture any security measure will involve "tens of millions of Americans": again by definition, if one can't profile on the basis of religion or national origin or any other identifying mark with identity-group grievance potential, every program will have to be at least nominally universal.

Last week, apropos the Moussaoui case, I remarked on the absurdity of victims of the London Blitz demanding the German perpetrators be brought before a British court. Melanie Phillips, a columnist with the Daily Mail in London and author of the alarming new book Londonistan, responded dryly, "Ah, but if we were fighting World War Two now, we'd lose."

She may be right. It's certainly hard to imagine Pat Leahy as FDR or Harry Truman or any other warmongering Democrat of yore. To be sure, most of Pat's Vermont voters would say there is no war; it's just a lot of fearmongering got up by Bush and Cheney to distract from the chads they stole in Florida or whatever. And they're right -- if, by "war," you mean tank battles in the North African desert and air forces bombing English cities night after night. But today no country in the world can fight that kind of war with America. If that's all "war" is, then (once more by definition) there can be no war. If you seek to weaken, demoralize and bleed to death the United States and its allies, you can only do it asymmetrically -- by killing thousands of people and then demanding a criminal trial, by liaising with terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan and then demanding the government cease inspecting your phone records.

I yield to no one in my antipathy to government, but not everyone who's on the federal payroll is a boob, a time-server, a politically motivated malcontent or principal leak supplier to the New York Times. Suppose you're a savvy mid-level guy in Washington, you've just noticed a pattern, you think there might be something in it. But it requires enormous will to talk your bosses into agreeing to investigate further, and everyone up the chain is thinking, gee, if this gets out, will Pat Leahy haul me before the Senate and kill my promotion prospects? There was a lot of that before 9/11, and thousands died.

And five years on?