The Immigration Bill: Another Failure of Government
by Paul Craig Roberts

The immigration bill does not address the problem. Like most bills, it is the product of influential moneyed interests. It serves these interests at the expense of the American people.

I have nothing against immigration in principle and nothing against Mexicans. Illegals, or what are known in the construction trades as “first generation Mexicans,” are hard workers. They show up for work sober. They will work from dawn to dark and on holidays. They don’t take a job in order to restore their eligibility for unemployment compensation, or in order to claim or arrange an injury that pays worker’s compensation and drives up the worker’s comp tax on the employer until he can no longer compete for contracts.

As for crime committed by illegals or immigrants generally, it pales into insignificance compared to the crimes of the neoconservatives against humanity, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Neoconservatives used lies and deception to lead America into a lost war that has killed and maimed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, made the United States a hated and reviled country, and destroyed our soft power. Neoconservatives have re-established the medieval practices of torture, self-incrimination, and hearsay and secret evidence. By overturning habeas corpus, neoconservatives have laid the foundation for a tyrannical police state.

If I could rid America of neoconservatives, I would accept the entire population of Mexico.

Immigration is a problem because it is occurring on a scale that cannot be assimilated and thereby is helping to balkanize our country. America is already being balkanized by other factors, the most important of which are the quotas that, in an ironic twist of history, came out of the Civil Rights Act.

The purpose of the Civil Rights Act was to reaffirm and to reinforce the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection of law. As Larry Stratton and I documented 12 years ago in “The New Color Line,” the new federal civil rights bureaucracy turned the act upside down and created new status-based privileges, or quotas, based on race, soon to be expanded to gender and disability. By sabotaging the act, federal bureaucrats, abetted by federal courts, introduced de jure privilege, which has since been expanded to all Americans except white males. Blacks had to cope with de facto inequality, but males are saddled with de jure inequality.

Mexicans fit the federal definition of a racial minority. Amnesty that leads to citizenship for millions of Mexicans or Hispanics brings with it the requirement that Mexicans be represented in university admissions, professions and all sectors of employment in proportion to their percentage of the population. Failure of universities and employers to adjust their percentages for the new quotas will result in lawsuits and penalties.

White males, already hammered by the existing quotas and offshoring of manufacturing and middle-class professional jobs, will sink into an underclass.
The other massive cost of unchecked Mexican immigration is that it raises the percentage of the population that is poor and poorly educated precisely at the time when offshoring is shrinking the jobs that constitute ladders of upward mobility. If the obscene salaries of the corporate elite are removed from the income data, it is clear that the real incomes of the American people have ceased to rise. Adding a large number of lower-income citizens will further overburden demands on public resources, as well as common resources such as water and air quality.

The failure of the U.S. government to address the immigration issue should surprise no one, as the government has failed to address every issue. It responds to organized moneyed interests—and nothing else.

From Irish Times:
Bruce Almighty

It might be hard to believe now, but there was a time when Bruce Springsteen was seriously uncool. As he releases his Live in Dublin album, recorded at the Point last November, Jim Carroll looks at how a New Jersey icon has become a towering musical influence again.

Somewhere in deepest New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen is probably chuckling away to himself. Every time he goes into a record store these days - and he's still an avid music buyer by all accounts - he hears something on the sound system which reminds him of his own glory days.

It might be The Killers or The Hold Steady, Arcade Fire or The National.

Springsteen may well make a mental note to get his manager Jon Landau to talk to the label about re-releasing the back-catalogue. He continues browsing the racks for the new Four Tet CD.

It really does seem as if every new kid on the block at the moment has become a fully paid-up member of the cult of Bruce. Play any of Springsteen's classic 1970s albums, such as Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town , back to back with, say, Neon Bible , Boys & Girls In America and Sam's Town , and the similarities in the passion, drama and energy of the new school are there for all to see.

While songs such as Antichrist Television Blues and Chips Ahoy are clearly Springsteen-like in spirit and composition, his own songs about dreamers in dead-end towns, cars screaming towards the horizon and the other side of the American dream remain infinitely better.

Of course, there's nothing quite new about this kind of homage. While many Yankee rock bands gratuitously knocked off Born In The USA in an attempt to fill sheds and auditoriums, others went for the less obvious stuff in the Springsteen canon.

When you listen to the haunting, sparse, ghostly Nebraska , you can almost picture Will Oldham sitting on his porch in the twilight taking notes for I See A Darkness . It's apt then that Oldham, with the help of Tortoise, turned out the most spine-chilling version of Thunder Road you'll ever hear.

But what has changed on this lap of the tribute track is the sheer number of acts coming out of the indie-rock closet to tip the hat to Springsteen and The E-Street Band. You could say that even winsome harpist Joanna Newsom is getting in on the act, titling her new EP Joanna Newsom & The Ys Street Band.

Indie rock's constant need for reinvention was always going to end up at The River at some stage. Once a couple of indie bands had started listening to second-hand copies of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle , others were certain to follow. Naturally, then, some of the current wave of Bruce love can be attributed to how he has replaced Talking Heads and Gang Of Four as the hip name to drop.

On the other hand, though, many acts have embraced Springsteen's emotional maelstrom with considerable relish. After a couple of years of self-conscious, uptight introspection at every turn, the time is right for bands who are happy to wear their hearts on their ragged sleeves.

Audiences too have embraced the new Bruce creed, if the manner in which The Hold Steady, with their beery, cheery mini-epics about characters who could easily have holidayed for a week or two in Springsteen's world, have won over both critics and crowds is any guide.

A few weeks ago, a whole host of acts turned up for a Springsteen tribute at New York's Carnegie Hall. His peers Patti Smith and Steve Earle were there, but it was the new kids such as The Hold Steady, Josh Ritter, Jesse Malin, Badly Drawn Boy, M Ward and Joseph Arthur who were to the fore.

Springsteen himself also turned up, probably as keen to make sure this was not some kind of memorial bash as he was to check out the devotees. Just in case anyone thought otherwise, Springsteen's first words to the gathering were "I'm still alive!" Onlookers report his tongue was firmly in his cheek.

Bruce Springsteen and The Seeger Sessions Band's Live In Dublin is released today

The Boss and me: musicians pay tribute to the master

JOSH RITTER

Bruce Springsteen was always around when I was growing up, but it wasn't until I started writing songs and started thinking about a life in music that I began to look to him as an example.

He made me feel like everything was going to be alright, that people might not understand me, but that I needed to write and sing anyway. So when Mr Springsteen tapped my elbow while I was tuning up guitar before going onstage at Carnegie Hall and shook my hand, it meant a great deal to me.

CRAIG FINN (The Hold Steady)

Springsteen's first three records are a huge influence on us because they kind of defined how to do rock'n'roll piano tastefully. I suppose he is why I started using characters in the first place, because I'd hear references to these seemingly real people, like Wendy in Born To Run, and I'd think, "Wow, I'd like to know a little more about her."

PAUL NOONAN (Bell X1)

Born in the USA was the first record I bought. I loved the full-throttle bombast of it - that huge snare drum opening the title song, tight blue jeans, stars and stripes, blue collar. Then there are records like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, sparse and humble.

I suppose the constant is the power of the narrative and the conviction - be it the glorious cacophony of The E Street band or just him and the guitar - with which it's delivered. You're always right there.

BRANDON FLOWERS (The Killers)

What struck me about him is that I believe what he says. Bruce always wears his heart on his sleeve. The guy is so incredibly sincere, whatever he sings. He touches on the American dream - and that's everybody's dream. Most of the songs are about making it to the promised land. It's not about getting rich, it's the idea of working hard and having your castle in the sky. When we were making Sam's Town, there was something in his music that touched what I was going through, that process of falling back in love with my America.

MUNDY

My friend Liam Owens played me the live collection when I was 13 or 14. His brother had tons of vinyl. I remember the long intro to The River and it used to put goose bumps all over me. Then the lonesome harmonica, and the song would start. It was a story that I could relate to. It's a small-town song. It's why everyone loves the Boss. He lets you wear his boots for a while in your home town.

RO YOURELL (Delorentos)

My dad was a massive fan and he played him in the car all the time when I was a kid. I've always been a big fan, but I wasn't allowed talk about it for years. I really don't know what made him so uncool, maybe it was the all-American image, but the music rocked.

WILL BUTLER (Arcade Fire)

I grew up in the suburbs in Houston and it wasn't cool. I didn't know anything about cool bands like Pavement or Dinosaur Jr or Radiohead or Björk - I listened to Bruce Springsteen. That was the stuff that was playing at the malls, and I was like: "I like that." I know that Springsteen is so much more over-the-top than our stuff but I think that the emotional quality in our music owes something to him.

Jim Carroll

Special to washingtonpost.com:
All Is Not Well And Good With Duke Athletics
By John Feinstein

Monday, May 28, 2007

So the Duke lacrosse team's saga will not be a Disney movie after all.

You know the story: Unfairly accused group of athletes finds redemption by coming back from a season cancelled to win a national championship. Sadly for the movie-makers, Duke came up short in Monday's national championship game, losing to Johns Hopkins in the final for the second time in three years.

Even with the loss, a lot of Duke people will tell you that the lacrosse team coming so close to a national championship and the charges against the three players accused of rape and sexual assault finally being dropped last month means that all is well and good with Duke athletics.

It is almost pointless to argue with the Duke loyalists who have bought into the notion that the lacrosse players were guilty of nothing more than, "boys being boys," (and it should be noted here that I am the holder of a Duke degree).

I have in my possession an e-mail sent by a friend and fellow Duke alum in which he details the Duke version of what happened that night. In between commas, he wrote the following: "Some racial epithets were directed at the strippers¿" Oh is that all? Just a few racial epithets? He also pointed out that the players had requested a white stripper and a Hispanic stripper but were sent two African-Americans. Don't you just hate when that happens? Poor kids. No wonder the party got out of control.

Enough apologizing and enough martyrdom. It was a known fact on the Duke campus for years that the lacrosse team overdid it when it came to partying. There was a written report in 2004 that said just that and Tallman Trask, the university vice president allegedly overseeing the athletic department, and Joe Alleva, allegedly the athletic director, did absolutely nothing about it. Alleva fired Mike Pressler, the lacrosse coach, because a scapegoat was needed in the immediate aftermath of the incident and Pressler took the hit.

Here's what's wrong with all this: No one at Duke is ever wrong. Duke's last president, Nan Keohane, made a terrible choice when she selected Alleva as athletic director in 1998. Everyone at Duke knew that Alleva was a pleasant man whose next original idea would be his first, someone whose main asset when applying for the job was the fact that his racquetball partner was Mike Krzyzewski.

Five years later, Alleva had lived down to everything expected of him: taking a bad football program and making it worse, hiring a crony as baseball coach who HAD to be fired because the team was awful and former players came forward to say he had encouraged them to use steroids, and looking foolish almost everyone time he opened his mouth in public (which he rarely did, usually hiding behind press releases). Alleva did what everyone else at Duke has done for years and rode the coattails of Krzyzewski's successful basketball team. Keohane looked at this record and gave Alleva a new contract.

Why? Because she was a typical academician: Completely unable to admit a mistake.

Keohane finally left in 2004, going off to write tedious, self-righteous academic tomes. She was succeeded by Richard Brodhead who eventually was saddled with the lacrosse scandal¿And handled it horribly.

Suspending the season while waiting for the results of DNA testing was understandable. But once the DNA tests came back completely negative, Brodhead should have reinstated the season. He didn't though, in large part because his closest advisors: Trask, Alleva and university flack John Burness --ALL Keohane hires --didn't have the spine to tell him to do so. It is an indictment of Brodhead's leadership that, in spite of the fact that Trask, Alleva and Burness have consistently proven themselves incompetent, he hasn't brought in his own people to replace them.

Alleva is now overseeing a football program that hasn't won a game against a Division 1-A team since 2004. He had the chance to hire Bobby Ross as his football coach three years ago --the same Bobby Ross who won a national championship at Georgia Tech (not Notre Dame, not Nebraska, Georgia Tech) and took the San Diego Chargers to their only Super Bowl -- and hired the immortal Ted Roof instead.

Of course no one really cares about football at Duke. That's because Krzyzewski built a national power in basketball, winning three national titles and reaching 10 Final Fours. Therefore, money continues to flow into the athletic department and people just makes jokes about the football team. Which must make it great fun to be a Duke football player: You get your head handed to you every Saturday and get laughed at the rest of the week.

But, the apologists argue, everybody graduates. Trust me when I tell you graduating from Duke isn't all that hard. What's hard is graduating AND representing the school well. The lacrosse team represented the school poorly off-the-field and the football team is an embarrassment on the field.

The football players aren't to blame for not being better football players. One can only hope that those playing lacrosse learned their lesson from the disaster of 2006. What's sad is that the adults appear to have learned nothing. Brodhead continues to do his Mr. Chips act, sending out lengthy e-mails to alums about how everything is going just fine now. Trask is still employed. Burness is still employed and so is Alleva. No one from Duke has apologized to the lacrosse kids for throwing them under the bus -- the kids are hardly victims here but the school chose to protect its image rather than its athletes -- and the entire athletic department is in disarray. People like me get angry mail from Duke people saying that, really, everything is just fine -- that it's the media (people like me) who are causing all these problems.

Not exactly.

Even Krzyzewski's basketball team slipped in 2007, losing in the first round of both the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament after nine straight years of reaching the final of the former and at least the Sweet Sixteen of the latter. Gail Goestenkors, the highly successful women's coach, fled to Texas after her team gagged in the round of sixteen against Rutgers. The women's lacrosse team just blew the biggest lead in NCAA Tournament history in losing to Virginia in the semifinals. Of course the women's golf team DID win a third straight national title. Maybe Dan Brooks, the women's golf coach, should succeed Alleva. Or Brodhead. Or both.

There is a lesson in all this: It isn't about over-zealous prosecutors or media running amok. It's a lesson about a society in which no one ever admits they're wrong (see G.W. Bush and R. Cheney as exhibits 1 and 1A), especially allegedly smart people. Smart people make mistakes too. Mistakes are forgivable -- but only after you admit them.

No one at Duke has admitted to a single mistake yet. Until they do so, they don't deserve forgiveness.

From NoMaas.org:
You may think it's cool to look like this...

But sooner or later, it will catch up to you:

Jason Giambi will be sidelined at least three weeks and possibly far longer after tearing tissue in the arch of his left foot while rounding the bases on a home run.

The latest setback in a tumultuous season for the New York Yankees designated hitter occurred Tuesday night in Toronto. Giambi was examined in New York on Thursday by Dr. William Hamilton and will be placed on the disabled list before Friday's game at Boston.

"I'd say it's a severe injury," Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said.

While the best-case scenario likely would have Giambi returning in three-to-six weeks, Cashman couldn't rule out that Giambi could miss the remainder of the season. (Source)

From Opinion Journal: Brilliant analysis.

PEGGY NOONAN

Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.

Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m.

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

A GREEN CARD IN EVERY POT
by Ann Coulter
May 30, 2007

Americans — at least really stupid Americans like George Bush — believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law and a robust democratic economy. On this view, most of the existing world and almost all of world history is a freakish aberration.

In fact, the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.

The British Empire once spread the culture of prosperity around the globe — Judeo-Christian values, tolerance, equality, private property and the rule of law. All recipients of the British Empire's largesse benefited, but the empire's most successful colony was the United States.

At the precise moment in history when the U.S. has abandoned any attempt to transmit Anglo-Saxon virtues to its own citizens, much less to immigrants, George Bush wants to grant citizenship to hordes of immigrants who are here precisely because they are fleeing cultures that are utterly dysfunctional and ruinous for the humans who live in them.

Yes, this country has absorbed huge migrations of illiterate peasants in the past — notably Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century. But also notably, half of them went back. We got the good ones. America was not yet a welfare state guaranteeing room and board to the luckless, the lazy and the incompetent from cradle to grave.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, immigrant and first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, said that Americanization required that the immigrant adopt "the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here" and that he adopt "the English language as the common medium of speech."

But, Brandeis said, this is only part of it. "(W)e properly demand of the immigrant even more than this — he must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American."

Or as George Bush would call it, "empty rhetoric." And as Linda Chavez would call it, "racist."

I wish our new immigrants had come to America back when the foundations of civic society and patriotism were still inculcated in all immigrants (and when half of them went home). But traitors who are citizens have destroyed all acculturating institutions. Traitors who are citizens have also destroyed all incentive for the poor to work or even keep their knees together before marriage.

Until the recipient culture is capable of doing an effective job of Americanizing immigrants, it's preposterous to talk about a massive influx of Hispanic immigrants accomplishing anything other than turning America into yet another Latin American-style banana republic. And it is simply a fact that no one is trying to turn immigrants into Americans.

To the contrary, Democrats are trying to turn new immigrants into wards of the state — and with some success! — so they will be permanent Democratic voters. Rich Republicans and their handmaidens in Washington are trying to turn immigrants into a permanent servant class.

In an astonishing exchange on Fox News last weekend, Dan Henninger of The Wall Street Journal responded to Heather MacDonald's point that Hispanics in this country have a 50 percent illegitimacy rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate of any group and the highest high school drop-out rate of any group, by asking: "Why don't we feel we are under cultural assault in New York City? You have no sense of this at all here."

You also have no sense of the existence of a middle class in New York City. The rich have hidden the evidence, transplanting all but the massively wealthy to the suburbs. Manhattan is white and getting whiter, while the boroughs are noticeably less white and more dysfunctional.

What evidence is there for the proposition that American culture will leap like a tenacious form of tuberculosis to today's immigrants? Americans display no evident desire to defend their culture, much less transmit it, and immigrants show no evident desire to adopt it.

To the contrary, immigrants are replacing American culture with Latin American culture. Their apparent constant need to demonstrate is just one example.

As Mac Johnson wrote in Human Events last year, these immigrant protests represent "the colonization of America by the Latin style of politics." He listed just some of the demonstrations drawing thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of protesters over the last few years in Mexico alone. Among the targets of the protests were a new regional trade pact, plans to allow private investment in the state-owned electricity industry, energy and tax reforms, and support for the mayor of Mexico City.

In 1993 — long before 9/11, before the USS Cole bombing, before the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — the eminent Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington predicted that the greatest threat to Western civilization would come from a clash of civilizations, noting with particular concern the "bloody borders" of the Muslim world.

So it ought to be of some interest that Huntington is now predicting, in his book "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity," that America cannot survive the cultural onslaught from Latin America.

American Hispanics responded to Huntington's book with a flurry of scholarly papers and academic debates to counter his thesis that Mexicans were not assimilating.
Just kidding! They called for national protests against Huntington, his publisher and Harvard University.

COPYRIGHT 2007 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

From nomaas.org:

05.29.2007 Joe Torre: "Brian Bruney has leprosy"

Tonight's game was an illuminating illustration of Joe Torre's managerial incompetence. With the game tied 2-2, Andy Pettitte gave up a lead off double in the 8th inning. The Blue Jays followed that by sacrificing the runner to third, after which Torre (correctly) pulled Pettitte for the bullpen.

The situation was such that a sacrifice fly would have scored the run. In an ideal world, one would use a pitcher who could either strike a batter out to take away the sac fly possibility or a pitcher who at least tends toward groundballs to potentially keep the runner from leaving third.

As a matter of fact, the Yankees have just such a pitcher: Brian Bruney. Although he tends to be a flyball pitcher (.59 G/F on the season), he more than makes up for this disadvantage by his excellent K/9 of 9.00.

However, Scott Proctor, recovering from the flu and sporting both a worse G/F ratio (.49) and a significantly worse K/9 (5.47), was inappropriately brought into the game here. Throughout his career he has had flyball tendencies, and so far this season he has not struck out enough batters to potentially make sense in a situation where a strikeout is needed. Predictably enough, Proctor then surrendered the sacrifice fly to the Yanks' own center field noodle arm, allowing the winning run to score.

Does 'The Decider' Decide on War?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran?

For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war.

Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran is making progress in the enrichment of uranium and denying it access to Iran's nuclear sites.

Bush is calling on Russia and China to toughen sanctions.

A flotilla of U.S. warships, including the carriers Stennis and Nimitz, has passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.

U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell has told CNN there is "very credible intelligence" Iran is funding Sunni extremists engaged in the roadside bombing of U.S. troops.

CBS reports the United States has engaged in the industrial sabotage of Iran's nuclear program by making the equipment Iran acquires on the black market unusable or destructive.

ABC reports that Bush has authorized the CIA to mount a "black" operation to destabilize Iran, using "non-lethal" means. The absence of White House outrage over the leak suggests it may have wanted the information out.

ABC.com reports U.S. officials are supporting a militant group, Jundallah, in the "tri-border region" of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jundallah, a Sunni Islamist group seeking independence for Baluchistan, claims to have killed hundreds of Iranians.

While U.S.-Iran discussions have begun, there are reports Vice President Cheney and the neo-con remnant, along with the Israelis, are opposed to talks and believe that the only solution to Iran's nuclear program is military. Whether this is part of a good-cop, bad-cop routine to convince Tehran to suspend enrichment, we do not know.

But this much is sure. If the U.S. government is aiding Islamic militants who are killing Iranians, and Iran is providing roadside bombs to Iraqi militants, Sunni or Shia, to kill Americans, we are in a proxy war. And it could explode into a major war.

So the questions come. Where is the Congress, which alone has the power to take us to war? Why are the Democratic candidates parroting the "all-options-are-on-the-table!" mantra, when as ex-Sen. Mike Gravel noted in the first Democratic debate, this means George W. Bush is authorized to attack Iran.

Why does Congress not enact the resolution Nancy Pelosi pulled down, which declares that nothing in present law authorizes President Bush to launch a pre-emptive strike or preventive war on Iran�and before launching any such attack, he must get prior approval from both houses of Congress?

If we are going to war, is it not imperative that, this time, we know exactly why we must go to war, what exactly the threat is from Iran, what are the likely consequences of a U.S. attack on a third Islamic country and what are the alternatives to war?

For there are arguments against war, as well as for war�and the former are not receiving a hearing, as both parties compete in their fulminations against Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler of the Middle East.

What are those arguments?

On Iran's nuclear progress, there is a real question as to whether they are producing purified uranium. Iran's refusal to let the IAEA see what it is doing suggests it may be covering up failure.

Second, though Iranians sound bellicose, Iran has not started a single war since the revolution of 1979. Indeed, Iran was the victim of a war launched by Saddam Hussein, whom we secretly supported. Not within living memory has Iran invaded or attacked another country.

But in the last 110 years, peace-loving Americans have fought Spain, Germany twice, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Italy, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq twice and Serbia. We have intervened militarily in the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Lebanon and Grenada. We bombed Libya. Now, a case can be made for most of these wars, whose fallen we honor on Memorial Day.

But the point is this. Why would Iran, with no air force or navy that can stand up 24 hours against us, no missile that can reach us, no atom bomb, and no ability to withstand U.S. air and sea attack, want a war with us that could mean the end of Iran as a modern nation and possible breakup of the country, as Iraq is breaking up?

Whether one is pro-war or antiwar, ought we not�if we are going into another war�do it the right way, the constitutional way, with Congress declaring war? Or does the Democratic Congress think that what is best for America is to let "the decider" decide?

Because that is what George Bush is doing right now.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.

Lots of memories made in this building, especially considering how far away it is. Saw several games between the Showtime Lakers and the Charlotte Hornets. A great U2 concert on the Achtung Baby tour. An excellent Christmas show on The Young Messiah tour. And of course, several Springsteen shows: 1992 on The Human Touch/Lucky Town tour, in 2000 on the Reunion tour (notable, among other reasons, for performances of "Rendezvous" and "Double Shot of My Baby's Love"), 2002 on The Rising tour, and in 2005 on the Devils and Dust tour.

From The Charlotte Observer:
Coliseum is coming down in Sunday blast
STEVE LYTTLE

Its opening in August 1988 ushered Charlotte into the big time of major league team sports.

With 24,000 seats, the Charlotte Coliseum was the biggest building in professional basketball. Alonzo Mourning made an NBA playoff series-winning shot there in 1993. A year later, President Clinton sat in a skybox and watched the NCAA men's Final Four in its only visit to the Queen City.

Frank Sinatra opened the building, and entertainers ranging from U2 to Luciano Pavarotti performed there.

In June 1995, Mother Teresa spoke to a full house there.

But in 10 seconds Sunday morning, the Charlotte Coliseum will come tumbling to the ground, officially marking an end to the city's biggest-ever indoor arena.

CST Environmental, a Mint Hill-based demolition firm, will use 550 pounds of explosives on the 465,000-square-foot building.

The Coliseum hasn't been used since October 2005, replaced as an indoor sports and entertainment venue by the Charlotte Bobcats Arena in uptown.

The Charlotte Hornets enjoyed 364 consecutive sellouts in the Coliseum, but the building became the central part of a nasty controversy that ended with the NBA team moving to New Orleans.

By the mid-1990s, owner George Shinn began lobbying the city for a new arena -- somewhere uptown and with more of the luxury boxes that provide sports franchises with much of their revenue. Shinn said the Coliseum's small amount of premium seating was causing the Hornets to lose money.

But Charlotte voters rejected a bond referendum in 2001 that would have provided funding for an uptown arena.

A year later, Shinn and co-owner Ray Woolridge got approval from fellow NBA owners to move the Hornets.

The building will live on: CST officials say 93 percent of the building's materials will be recycled. Much of its brick and masonry will be used on the site as fill for City Park, a 170-acre development that will include residences, retail and office space, a hotel and with a three-mile trail for walking, running and biking.

Mason Zimmerman of Pope & Land, an Atlanta-based developer that bought the property from the city of Charlotte, said the Coliseum site is perfectly located for mixed use.

"In addition to amazing infrastructure, the property is literally surrounded by a creek, a golf course, mountain bike trails, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts and one of the largest farmers markets in the state," Zimmerman said.

But the Coliseum's design, with far fewer luxury boxes than most other indoor sports arenas, made it expendable.

Crews have been at the site for about two months, demolishing the arena floor and seating area. The rear service area also was demolished, in preparation for the implosion at 10 a.m. Sunday.

Coliseum Facts

Construction: Began in 1986 and finished in August 1988.

First concert: Frank Sinatra was the first performer at the building.

First pro team sports event: Charlotte Hornets played the Cleveland Cavaliers on Nov. 4, 1988, and lost 133-93.

Other notable sports events: NCAA men's Final Four in 1994. NCAA women's Final Four in 1996. NBA All-Star Game in February 1991. Boxing champion Thomas Hearns fought in February 1994.

Other notable guests: Grateful Dead in October 1989, one month after Hurricane Hugo. Mother Teresa in June 1995. Tina Turner's farewell tour in October 2000. U2 in March 2001. And several hundred survivors of Hurricane Katrina stayed there in September 2005.

Nickname: The Hive (during days of the Charlotte Hornets).

Forgettable event: On Aug. 12, 1988, the day after the Coliseum opened, the state-of-the-art scoreboard broke loose from its ceiling moorings and crashed to the floor.

Amnesty Spin Zone
by James R. Edwards, Jr.

Posted 05/29/2007 ET

The White House and U.S. Senate are busy selling us a bill of goods on this amnesty bill.

How to respond to the spin? The falsity level hasn’t been this high since Clinton’s impeachment days.

We’re asked to believe the word of the same folks who proclaimed “catch and release” over, but failed to mention that it still releases many illegal aliens, including Salvadorans.

To foster a toehold for truth, here are a few plain-language, straight-talking explanations of what amnesty proponents are saying.

“We can’t deport 12 million people.” Well, if the government can’t take custody, process, and physically remove the entire illegal immigrant population, what makes Bush, Chertoff, Kennedy and company think the government can repeatedly process and “document” 12 million people, perform background checks, etc. while processing visas for hyperdrive chain migrants and “guestworkers?

The straw man argument implies we have only two choices: mass amnesty or mass deportation. Tons of other options lie between those two options.

Hey, tell Mexico no more visas till it stops its illegal emigration and they’d take care of it themselves.

“Attrition is ‘silent amnesty.’” That’s a clever, cutesy, but stupid moniker. The opposite of “silent amnesty” is “shouted amnesty.” It’s “broadcast amnesty.”

At least with an attrition strategy we get something that hasn’t been tried before: enforcing the laws on the books with some faithfulness.

Let’s actually enforce the 3-year and 10-year bar on re-entry for illegals who remained in the United States. Let’s prosecute felonies for multiple unlawful re-entry. Let’s throw more employers of illegal aliens in the slammer. We’d grow the volume of self-deportation, which currently is at about 200,000 a year.

As it stands, we’re repeating the 1986 amnesty approach — reward illegality; put amnesty first; loophole- and procedure-laden process and endless appeals; all-promise, no-delivery “enforcement.” At least trying Attrition Through Enforcement for 5 years would be doing something different.

“We have to bring them out of the shadows.” I don’t know what gated community these losers live in, but any politician who thinks illegals are cowering somewhere are worse than out of touch.

Illegals are everywhere. They’re brazen! They march by the hundreds on Commie May Day. They’re at the 7-Eleven, day labor center, overcrowding suburban houses-turned-apartments, criminally preying on innocent Americans, stealing expensive health care at American emergency rooms for which they don’t pay.

“We need to know who these people are.” Why? If the majority are “law-abiding,” harmless busboys and nannies, then what’s the rush?

Rather than reward their lawbreaking, at least they might look over the shoulder now and then. Besides, all we’ll know afterward is who they claim to be.

What else is there to be skeptical about in the Senate bill? Oh, plenty. It’s pure bait and switch.

• “Ends chain migration.” Actually, the distant relative visas don’t disappear for 15 years. Chain migration is escalated, at least doubled, for 15 years for backlogged applicants. The new point system would award aliens points for being extended relatives, i.e., chain migrants. So, no real end in sight.

• “Makes Z visa applicants go to the back of the line.” False. Practically all illegal aliens get “provisional” status immediately. They don’t leave the U.S. for them. Illegals can stay here, work here, have their spouses, children and aged parents with them and receive a Social Security number immediately. In other words, game over! Illegal invaders win!

• “Makes them learn English.” Pure misinformation. The amnestee doesn’t have to know squat in English to get probationary status or a Z visa. After four years when seeking to renew the Z visa the first time, he only has to take – not pass, just take – the naturalization language test or be on a waiting list for English classes. “Learn English” only happens after eight years, and then it’s not actual mastery of the language.

• “They pay their back taxes.” Nope. An illegal alien gets complete forgiveness. That’s well worse than last year’s Senate bill, which gave a two-year tax amnesty (i.e., payment of three of the previous five years’ income taxes owed). No IRS penalties. Nothing an American who hadn’t paid his taxes would face, like maybe time behind bars.

Overall, the Senate bill is even worse than last year’s. This one contains an even more generous amnesty, increases overall immigration levels irresponsibly and guts any good things (e.g., enforcement measures, elimination of visa lottery) with spoilers by the Ted Kennedy crowd that decimate the stated effect.

It’s easy to see why President Bush has zero credibility on immigration. His administration let workforce enforcement drop off the map before deciding to put on a show of raids. Within hours of each high-profile raid, many of the illegals are released.

The administration “eliminated” the visa backlog by recategorizing, presto-chango. It sent the National Guard to the border, but tied their hands with Barney Fife bullet-in-pocket rules. It actually stopped sending employers “no-match” letters indicating possible illegal aliens working on stolen Social Security numbers.

It secretively is pushing a sovereignty giveaway called the Security and Prosperity Partnership with Mexico and Canada. It dumbed down the Ashcroft Justice Department’s NSEERS registration program, morphing it into the joke called US VISIT — this program is only at airports, only applies upon entry and exempts Canadians and Mexicans.

The administration, pro-amnesty Senators, special interests and others do the country and the American people a grave disservice by engaging in lies, half-truths and distortions. If the nation is to come to some agreement on how to address the multifaceted immigration conundrum, the proponents of amnesty-guestworker ought at least to be truthful.

Until the pro-amnesty crowd can agree to discuss these matters spin-free and truthfully, the immigration issue should be tabled. “Trust us”? No, thanks!

Mr. Edwards, coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform, is an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.

I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose.
We Were Both Doing Our Duty.
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging "the terrorists," opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops -- today's civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush's response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some -- the members of the "the-surge-is-already-working" school of thought -- even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. "The long war is an unwinnable one," I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. "The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We've done all that we can do."

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others -- teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks -- to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."

To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His son died May 13 after a suicide bomb explosion in Salah al-Din province.

Band of brothers:

Immortal words to honor the warriors

Monday, May 28, 2007

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Memorial Day 2007 comes in the midst of a long and controversial war that shows no sign of ending. Today is no day to debate the merits of that war but rather to recognize again the great debt this nation owes to its fighting forces from the Revolution until the present day, from Bunker Hill to Fallujah and beyond.

Every year at this time the Post-Gazette pays tribute to those who risk their lives and have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedoms that we Americans hold dear.

This year, words almost fail us in noting the continuing dedication of the brave Americans in uniform who do their duty without complaint. So this year, we are moved to borrow some of the most famous words in the English language.

Because they were written by a master, these words have never been equaled in capturing the spirit and courage of all patriotic warriors, even if they were written about men who were the forebears of our allies today. These immortal sentences do something else, too: They anticipate a day of future remembrance, a Memorial Day if you will, when brave deeds are remembered with pride. We offer them today as our tribute.

As told by William Shakespeare in his play "Henry V," we join the heavily outnumbered English army in its camp facing the French force before the battle of Agincourt.

Enter the KING

WESTMORELAND

O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work today!

KING HENRY V

What's he that wishes so?

My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;

It yearns me not if men my garments wear;

Such outward things dwell not in my desires.

But if it be a sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:

God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour

As one man more, methinks, would share from me

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart; his passport shall be made

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

We would not die in that man's company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This day is called the Feast of Crispian:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say, 'Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.'

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names.

Familiar in his mouth as household words,

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember'd;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

From NoMaas.org:
Torre should be on a "big hook"

05.27.2007

Time and time again, Joe Torre has demonstrated a neurotic refusal to trust his starting pitchers. If a pitcher has cracked the mythical 90 pitch/6 inning barrier, they are given the slack of a disobedient dog before he starts ripping through the bullpen. Mike Mussina began the sixth inning with a strikeout, his sixth of the game, an indication that, despite his inferior fastball mileage, he still knew what he was doing. He followed that with a walk to Casey Kotchman. Forgetting his green tea, Torre walked out of the dugout with his hand pointing to Scott Proctor.

Although Brian Bruney, a far superior reliever, had also been warming, Proctor has been mostly effective this year. But why exactly does Torre think Proctor had a significantly better chance than Moose of recording the inning's two remaining outs? And why was Scott Proctor then handed a rope long enough to hang himself?

The first batter Proctor saw doubled. His inherited runner had not scored, so no harm no foul as yet. Then, however, Proctor loaded the bases with a walk. This was not a nibbling walk, where strike three was missed by a centimeter or the umpire blew a call: Proctor was missing the zone by a mile and was clearly ineffective. Bruney and Myers, two of the team's better relievers, were already warming.

But Proctor was given more slack than Mussina yet again. And, in an 11 pitch battle against Erick Aybar, Proctor inexcusably walked in the tying run with balls that were feet out of the zone. After Proctor walked Aybar, Torre left him on the mound to next pitch to Figgins. Proctor then walked him on 5 pitches, bringing in another run & making the score 3-2 Angels. Only then did Joe emerge from the dugout to call for Bruney. And, for perhaps the first time ever as Yankee manager, he was jeered by the Yankee Stadium crowd.

The boos are beginning to attach to Torre now. His complacent offense is no longer capable of masking him for the incompetent manager that he is.

So much news, so little sense
MARK STEYN

May 27, 2007

News, news everywhere -- so much one can hardly take it all in:

Item One: In Gaza, Islamic Jihad is planning to send waves of female suicide bombers into action against the Zionist Entity. Asked by an Israeli reporter whether self-detonating ladies enjoy the same 72-virgin deal as the lads, an Arab scholar said no, but that the gals will be served in Paradise by "dwarfs." Snow White got seven dwarfs, but it's unclear whether Blow White will get the full 72: Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, etc., all the way down to Incendiary, Non-Alcoholic and Anti-Zionist.

Item Two: From Sikeston, Mo., comes the touching story of a 3-year-old girl and Raymon and Richard Miller, two brothers who happen to be the father and uncle thereof. Unfortunately, they don't know which is which. Four years ago, Holly Marie Adams, who was in town for the rodeo, "slept with" both men on the same day. And in the fullness of time, upon discovering the fullness of her belly, she decided Raymon was the dad and demanded child support.

Raymon decided he saw himself as more of the uncle type, and so dragged his brother into court. What did the DNA results show? Well, they're identical twins, so there's a 99.5 percent probability Raymon's the father and there's a 99.5 percent probability Richard's the father. And, as they're both crying uncle, that suits neither of them. Naturally, Raymon wants the state of Missouri to pick up the child support. Technically, the state of Missouri didn't "sleep with" Holly Marie Adams, though, if it too had been in town for the rodeo that day, its chances would have been better than even.

Given that neither man wants to be the father in any meaningful sense, the famous split decision of the wisdom of Solomon might be in both their interests, if not the little girl's. What passes for heartwarming family sentiment in this case comes from the brothers' mother, who said, "I felt like I had gained a granddaughter but lost my sons."

Item Three: America's bipartisan "comprehensive immigration reform" bill. Just because this story comes above the fold on Page One doesn't mean it's not just as nutty as the foot of page 27 news-in-brief stuff up above. Peggy Noonan's take at the Wall Street Journal bore the sub-headline: "Open Borders? Mass Deportations? How About Some Common Sense Instead?"

Indeed. Everyone wants to sound reasonable and be the chap who charts the middle course between the Scylla of open borders and the Charybdis of mass deportation. But these are not equivalent dangers. The Charybdis of mass deportation is a mythical monster: It does not exist. It will never exist. No politician is arguing for it, and no U.S. agency is capable of accomplishing it. Indeed, even non-mass deportation does not exist. Go on, try it. Go to your local immigration office and say: Hello, boys. Here I am. I'm an illegal immigrant, got no right to be here, been breaking the law for 20 years, but I've seen the light and I want you to deport me back to Mexico, Yemen, you name it. The immigration guys will say: Leave your name and address and we'll get back to you in a decade or three.

But the Scylla of open borders does exist. It's the reality of the situation. What else would you call it when a population the size of Belgium's (the lowball estimate) or Australia's (the upper end) moves onto your land? And with the connivance of multiple state agencies, not to mention those municipalities that proudly declare themselves to be "sanctuary cities?"

In life's rich tapestry, there are bound to be questions to which there are no good answers -- that Missouri paternity suit is one of them. That's how advocates of the "bipartisan compromise" prefer to talk about immigration: difficult business, no ideal solution, and only extremists would pursue such theoretical perfection as "mass deportation."

OK. But whatever happened to non-mass deportation? Not long after Sept. 11 I chanced to be heading north on I-87 between Plattsburgh and Montreal. At the border crossing from Champlain, N.Y., to Lacolle, Quebec, I noticed that what appeared to be a mini-refugee camp had sprung up. It's not often that you see teeming hordes lining up to get into Canada, so I asked the immigration officer what was going on. He rolled his eyes and did a bit of boy-those-crazy-Yanks stuff and then explained that most of the guys waiting to get in were from Pakistan. In the wake of 9/11, the authorities had rounded up various persons of interest in the New York City area. Whether or not they were terrorists, they'd certainly violated immigration law, overstaying visas and so forth. And as a result, many other illegal immigrants from Muslim countries had concluded it was time to liquidate their assets and break for the border. In other words, the roundup of a relatively small number of persons sent thousands more fleeing to Canada. As that Missouri grandma would say, don't look on it as losing a Pakistani illegal but as gaining a Canadian neighbor.

So the question is: Why is enforcement of U.S. immigration somewhere between minimal and nonexistent? By some estimates, half of all illegals have arrived on George W. Bush's watch -- i.e., they broke into a nation at war with borders supposedly on permanent "orange" alert.

To return to the 72-virgin jackpot, even the looniest jihad-inciting imam understands that human nature responds to incentive, to the tradeoff between obligation and reward. But the immigration bill is all reward and no obligations. The only clause that matters is the first one: the mandatory open-ended probationary legal status the bill will confer the moment it's passed. All the rest -- the enforcement provisions on border agents and security fences that will supposedly "trigger" Z-visas and then green cards -- is nonsense, most of which will never happen. If you're "undocumented," you don't care about whether your Z-visa leads to citizenship 15 years from now: What counts is crossing the line from illegal to legal, which in this bill happens first, happens instantly and happens (to all intents and purposes) irreversibly. All the rest is Beltway kabuki.

That Missouri case should remind us that in a wealthy society the knottiest problems are usually the consequences of moral choices. To embed lawbreaking at the heart of American immigration and to allow it to metastasize through the wider society was perverse and debilitating. Most Americans see this differently from Washington and Wall Street. They're pro-immigration but they don't regard it as a mere technicality, a piece of government paper: after all, feeling American is central to their own identity. They rightly revile the cheap contempt the rushed Senate bill demonstrates not just for transparent, honest small-r republican government but for the privilege of being American. Happy Memorial Day.

© Mark Steyn 2007