We Agree On Border Security, Don't We?
By Charles Krauthammer

Comprehensive immigration reform is in jeopardy because it is a complex compromise with too many moving parts and too many competing interests. Employers want a guest worker program; unions want to kill it. Reformers want to introduce a point system that preferentially admits skilled and educated immigrants; immigrant groups naturally want to keep the existing family preference system. Liberals want legalization now; conservatives insist on enforcement ``triggers'' first.

There is only one provision that has unanimous support: stronger border enforcement. I've seen senators stand up and object to the point system, to chain migration, to guest workers, to every and any idea in this bill -- except one. I have yet to hear a senator stand up and say she is against better border enforcement.

Why not start by passing what everyone says they want? After all, proponents of this comprehensive reform insist that the current situation is intolerable and must be resolved. It follows, therefore, that however much they differ in the details of how the current mess should be resolved, they are united in the belief that such a mess should not be allowed to happen again. And the only way to make sure of that is border control.

So why not pass it, with the understanding that the other contentious provisions would be taken up subsequently? Because for all the protestations, many of those who say they are deeply devoted to enforcement are being deeply disingenuous. They profess to care about immigration control because they have to. But they care so little about the issue that they are willing to make it hostage to the other controversial provisions, most notably legalization.

Why am I so suspicious about the fealty of the reformers to real border control? In part because of the ridiculous debate over the building of a fence. Despite the success of the border barrier in the San Diego area, it appears to be very important that this success not be repeated. The current Senate bill provides for the fencing of no more than one-fifth of the border and the placing of vehicle barriers in no more than one-ninth.

Instead, we are promised all kinds of fancy, high-tech substitutes -- sensors, cameras, unmanned aerial vehicles -- and lots more armed chaps on the ground to go chasing those who get through.

Why? A barrier is a very simple thing to do. The technology is well tested. The Chinese had success with it, as did Hadrian. In our time, the barrier Israel has built has been so effective in keeping out intruders that suicide attacks are down over 90 percent.

Fences work. That's why people have them around their houses -- not because homeowners are unwelcoming, but because they insist that those who wish to come into their domain knock at the front door.

Fences are simple. They don't require much upkeep. Two fences with a patrol road between them across the length of the U.S.-Mexico border would be relatively cheap, easy to build and simple to maintain.

Why this preference for the fancy high-tech surveillance stuff that presents no physical impediment to illegal entry but instead triggers detection -- followed by alarm, pursuit, arrest and possible violence? It makes for great TV. But why is that good for the country?

It is certainly good for the Border Patrol, ensuring a full employment program till the end of time. But why for the rest of us? Fences have no retirement benefits.

The final argument against fences is, of course, the symbolism. We don't want a fence that announces to the world that America is closed. But this is entirely irrational. The fact is that under our law, America is indeed closed -- to all but those who, after elaborate procedures, are deemed worthy of joining the American family. Those objecting to the fence should be objecting to the law that closes America off, not to the means for effectively carrying out that law.

A fence announces to the world that America is closed to ... illegal immigrants. What's wrong with that? Is not every country in the world the same? The only reason others don't need such a barrier is because they are not half as attractive as America, not because we are more oppressive or less welcoming.

Fences are ugly, I grant you that. But not as ugly as 12 million people living in the shadows in a country that has forfeited control of its borders.

Comprehensive immigration reform has simply too many contentious provisions to command a majority of Congress or the country. We all agree on enforcement, don't we? So let's do it. Make it simple. And do it now. Once our borders come visibly under control, everything else will become doable. Including amnesty.

From The New York Times:
Paul McCartney Plays a ‘Secret’ Show
By BEN RATLIFF

“I love you, Paul,” someone shouted, halfway through Paul McCartney’s “secret” set at the Highline Ballroom on Wednesday night. Well, more than one: A lot of people were shouting that. They couldn’t help themselves. He was right in front of them.

“I love you, too,” Mr. McCartney answered, but almost as a defensive block: he put on a Tony Soprano accent, and he kept a straight face. “It’s the beauty of these intimate shows, you know,” he followed, dryly. “You get to have intimate conversations with the audience. ‘How ya doin’?’ ‘You’re the man!’ ‘Naw, you’re the man!’ “

Cheery, but essentially trying to get his work done, Mr. McCartney struck a formal facsimile of intimacy: 90 minutes on stage in a 700-capacity room full of reporters, assorted V.I.P.s, contest winners and stand-in-line-for-a-long-timers who heard about the show only a day or two before.

The gig was a promotion for his new album, “Memory Almost Full” (Hear Music), and he put on the same show at the Electric Ballroom, a slightly larger club in London, last week. (He has not announced plans for a proper tour.)

It’s not unusual these days for big acts to play a promotional show at a club they’ve outgrown. The same night in New York, Franz Ferdinand played a “secret” gig at the Bowery Ballroom, and likewise with Interpol last week.

For Mr. McCartney, however, who can sell out stadiums at hundreds of dollars a ticket, this was unusual. He used no pyrotechnics or video backdrop, and the audience stood close enough to its hero that it could hold non-conversations with him. He played beautifully, in tight control of his voice (even in high range) and his musicianship, through a clutch of new songs and some of the oldest Beatles repertory.

But much of what was special about hearing someone like Mr. McCartney in a place like this was counteracted by the glibness of his touring band, almost the same crew that backed him on his stadium tour last year. These musicians—two guitarists, a keyboards and drums — were accurate, reliable, in the pocket and kind of flavorless.

Mr. McCartney is a fascinating alloy of raw and slick, eccentricity and efficiency. When you hear the tracks on “Memory Almost Full” in which he plays all the instruments — his drumming one step ahead of primitive, his bass lines so melodically inventive they’re almost evil — you wish he could just multiply himself for performances.

When the band replicated old parts, touching on the tiniest details of Beatles songs like “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Hey Jude,” the show felt something like an homage to composition and production, rather than the great thing that performances can be: two-way rituals between band and audience.

But something about the joy and simplicity of the new songs made the set more special. There were five of them, including “Dance Tonight,” a naively sweet call for fun, with Mr. McCartney’s mandolin-strumming as the through-line; “Nod Your Head,” a slow, chugging rock song; and “That Was Me,” full of spry astonishment at looking back on a strange and notable life. (It went over big in the V.I.P. section, where people may be prone to similar thoughts.)

The onlooker’s stupid reflex, after decades of Beatlesology and Paul-versus-John studies, is to scrutinize Mr. McCartney for honesty, whatever that is. But all he had to do was play a few songs alone with guitar—”Blackbird” and “I’ll Follow the Sun”— and he seemed as guileless as the next guy. Later, alone at the piano, he sang “Here Today,” an elegiac song he wrote after John Lennon’s death, and dedicated it to “our fallen heroes: John, George and Linda.”

When he finished, he stopped the flow of his own efficiency, and thought out loud. “It’s good to play that song in the town John loved,” he said. “And where Linda was born in. And where we played the Ed Sullivan show.”

Who is Illiberal on Immigration?
By Victor Davis Hanson

The collapse last week of a comprehensive immigration bill in Congress that called for a huge guest-worker program, fast-track visas and a sort of earned citizenship for illegal aliens has unleashed a backlash against those opponents of it who prefer to close the border first and legislate the details of illegal immigration later.

Washington pundits and Beltway politicians are furious at various critics of the bill, from radio talk show hosts and writers for conservative magazines to frontline congressional representatives and Republican presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.

These critics are dubbed cynical nativists - or racists - who have demagogued the issue and scapegoated hardworking illegal aliens. Even President Bush got into the fray when he alleged that conservative obstructionists were somehow not working in America's best interests.

But who's really being cynical when it comes to illegal immigration?

The government?

Of course.

It has caved to pressure groups for over a quarter-century. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 ensured neither reform nor control. Instead, the law simply resulted in millions entering the United States through blanket amnesty and de facto open borders.

In many cities, current municipal laws bar police officers from turning arrested illegal aliens over to immigration officials. So why should the public believe that the proposed new law, with hundreds of pages of rules and regulations, would trump local obstructionism or effect any real change?

Had the bill passed, could we really have expected that the first impoverished alien unable to pay the fee or fine under its provisions would have been sent summarily home? More likely, he would have appeared on the 6 o'clock news as a victim of American mean-spiritedness and racism - and thereby instead won a reprieve or an outright apology.

Congressional supporters of the present legislation are themselves often engaging in politics of the most cynical kind. Rare "bipartisan" cooperation on the bill, which brought Sen. Trent Lott from Mississippi to the side of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, is hardly statesmanship or a sudden outbreak of civic virtue. Rather, it is a new public face to the old alliance between profit-minded employers (and those who represent their interests) and demographically obsessed liberal and ethnic activists.

The former want assurances that there will be millions of aliens available to work at wages that Americans will not - with the ensuing medical, housing, schooling and legal costs subsidized by the taxpayer. The latter can't wait for more constituents in need of group representation who, it is hoped, will someday support them at the polls.

Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics and journalists who deplore the "nativism" of Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting and teaching are rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers.

Few of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies and gardeners commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well - and cheaply.

In general, such elites don't use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They don't drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don't struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish.

For many professors, politicians and columnists, the gangs, increased crime and crowded jails that often result from massive illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo.

So, what is the truth on illegal immigration?

Simple. Millions of fair-minded white, African-, Mexican- and Asian-Americans fear that we are not assimilating millions of aliens from south of the border as fast as they are crossing illegally from Mexico.

In the frontline American Southwest, entire apartheid communities and enclaves within cities have sprung up whose distinct language, culture and routines are beginning to resemble more the tense divides in the Balkans or Middle East than the traditional melting pot of multiracial America.

Concern over this inevitable slowdown in integration and assimilation is neither racist nor nativist. It grows out of real worry that when millions of impoverished arrive in mass without legality, education and the ability to speak English, costly social problems follow that will not be offset by the transitory economic benefits cheap wages may provide.

Those fretting about delays in sealing the border along with proposed fast-track visas, millions of new guest workers and neglect of existing immigration law are neither illiberal nor cynical.

But their self-righteous critics may well be both.

Give it a rest, Mr. President
By Lou Dobbs

NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush is building his legacy, adding another unfortunate line of hollow bravado to his rhetorical repertoire. To "Mission accomplished," "Bring it on," "Wanted: Dead or alive," and of course, "I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it," he has added "I'll see you at the bill signing," referring to his own ill-considered push for so-called comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

Bush emerged from a midday meeting with Republican senators on Capitol Hill to declare, "We've got to convince the American people this bill is the best way to enforce our border."

No, Mr. President, someone you trust and respect must convince you that kind of tortured reasoning should never be exposed before cameras and microphones. Isn't there anyone in this administration with the guts to say, "Give it a rest, Mr. President"?

Sen. Jeff Sessions came close when he said, "He needs to back off." This president desperately needs to be reminded that he is the president of all Americans and not just of corporate interests and socio-ethnocentric special interest groups.

In what other country would citizens be treated to the spectacle of the president and the Senate focusing on the desires of 12 million to 20 million people who had crossed the nation's borders illegally, committed document fraud, and in many cases identity theft, overstayed their visas and demanded, not asked, full forgiveness for their trespasses?

Illegal aliens and their advocates, both liberal and conservative, possess such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they demand not only legal status, but also that the government leave the borders wide open so that other illegals could follow as well, while offering not so much as an "I'm sorry" or a "Thank you."

This bill would be disastrous public policy and devastate millions of American workers and their families, taxpayers and any semblance of national security. Yet even in defeat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, one of the reform bill's chief architects, declared: "Doing nothing is totally unacceptable." Like the senator, Bush says the status quo is unacceptable.

The president and the senator are wrong. It is the sham legislation they support that is totally unacceptable. But if Bush and Kennedy sincerely desire resolution to our illegal immigration and border security crises, I'd like to try to help. But a word of caution, if I may, to our elected officials: Resolution of these crises will require honesty, directness and an absolute commitment to the national interest and the common good of our citizens. Here are what I consider to be the essential guiding principles for any substantive reform:

First, fully secure our borders and ports. Without that security, there can be no control of immigration and, therefore, no meaningful reform of immigration law.

Second, enforce existing immigration laws, and that includes the prosecution of the employers of illegal aliens. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, put it, illegal employers are the magnet that draws illegal aliens across our border. Enforcing the law against illegal employers and illegal aliens at large in the country will mean bolstering, in all respects, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Third, the government should fund, equip and hire the people necessary to man the Citizenship and Immigration Services. To do so will ensure that the agency is capable of fully executing and administering lawful immigration into the United States and eliminating the shameful backlog of millions of people who are seeking legal entry into this country.

Those three steps are necessary to the security of the nation and the effective administration and enforcement of existing immigration laws. Those steps should be considered non-negotiable conditions precedent to any change or reform of existing immigration law.

At the same time, the president and Congress should order exhaustive studies of the economic, social and fiscal effects of the leading proposals to change immigration law, and foremost in their consideration should be the well-being of American workers and their families.

The president and Congress should begin the process of thoughtful reform of our immigration laws. Public hearings should be held throughout the nation. The American people should be heard in every region of the country, and fact-finding should be rigorous and thorough. The process will be time-consuming and demand much of our congressmen and senators, their staffs and relevant executive agencies.

The importance of securing borders and ports and reforming our immigration laws is profound, and that security is fundamental to the future of our nation. That future can be realized only with a complete commitment to a comprehensive legislative process of absolute transparency and open public forums in which our elected officials hear the voices of the people they represent. American citizens deserve no less.

NO DRUG SMUGGLER LEFT BEHIND!
By Ann Coulter

June 13, 2007

President Bush was so buoyed by the warm reception he was given in Albania that he immediately gave all 3 million Albanians American citizenship, provided they learn Spanish. The offer was withdrawn when Bush found out most Albanians haven't broken any U.S. laws.

Bush keeps claiming he's dying to enforce the border, but he just can't do it unless we immediately grant amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens. I wonder if that worked on Laura Bush:

Laura: George, it's time you quit drinking.
George: OK, honey, let's discuss it over cocktails.

How about Bush enforce the border and then we'll discuss his amnesty plan?

He assures us that granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants already here won't inspire millions more to run across the border because ... he's going to put infrared lights at the border!

Well, that's a relief. What precisely will infrared lights do again? This is worse than those fake cameras they sell at hardware stores to make it look like you have cameras outside your house. We still need something or someone — say, a wall or a Border Patrol agent — to stop the Mexicans illegally crossing the border as we watch them on the infrared cameras.

Bush won't build a wall and he keeps prosecuting law enforcement officers who stop illegal border crossers. But trust him: He'll get right on that border enforcement business as soon as we grant amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens.

Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean are normally the sort of Mexican-Americans Bush would tear up at while promoting amnesty for illegal aliens. Both served in the military and are taxpaying, law-abiding citizens. They've been risking their lives as Border Patrol agents for years.

Ramos was nominated for Border Patrol Agent of the Year in 2005. His nomination received a major setback when the Bush administration decided to put him in prison instead. Ramos and Compean are now serving more than 10 years apiece in solitary confinement for chasing a drug-running illegal alien back to Mexico.

Bush's pal, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, gave immunity to a Mexican drug dealer hauling a million dollars worth of drugs across the border so that the drug dealer could testify against two Border Patrol agents who shot him in the buttocks.

The border patrol agents were presumed guilty of an unlawful shooting because they neglected to fill out the proper paperwork. For busting a cap in the butt of a drug courier crossing the border illegally — who was so mortally wounded that he proceeded to scamper back to Mexico — they were supposed to spend five hours filling out paperwork. This is what the Bush administration means when it talks about a "cover-up." As U.S. prosecutor Debra Kanof said, "You have to report any discharge of a firearm."

Intriguingly, Kanof also says: "The Border Patrol pursuit policy prohibits the pursuit of someone." (Hence, the oft-heard warning of the border agent in hot pursuit, "Stop or I'll ... do absolutely nothing!") Can we apply this rule to meter maids and tax collectors? At least now border agents will be able to watch the illegal aliens they can't pursue on infrared cameras!

But wait — that's not all! The Border Patrol agents also exceeded the speed limit. "In order to exceed the speed limit," Kanof said, "you have to get supervisor approval, and they did not." It's just so hard to fill out a written request to exceed the speed limit when you're off-roading at 65 mph. There's a whispering campaign suggesting that Ramos and Compean failed to use their turn signal.

As I understand it, you're also supposed to not cross the border illegally from Mexico with a van full of drugs. But the Bush administration has no interest in enforcing those laws. Ninety-eight percent of illegal aliens captured crossing the border illegally are not prosecuted. Those drugs are doing the job American drugs just won't do!

The Bush administration pulls out the big guns only for serious violations like a Border Patrol officer not filling out paperwork.

In addition to giving the illegal alien drug smuggler full immunity to testify against U.S. Border Patrol agents, the government gave him taxpayer-funded medical care for his buttocks wound, an unconditional border-crossing card, the right to sue the U.S. for "civil rights" violations, and a GAP gift card. The drug runner is also on the short-list to replace Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

He's now suing the U.S. for $5 million, but the Bush administration is hoping to bargain him down to $10 million.

That border-crossing card came in handy when the winged illegal alien brought in another load of drugs a short eight months later — for which he has still not been charged, nearly two years later. Who does he think he is? Rep. William Jefferson?

Bush's pal Sutton keeps defending his decision to prosecute Border Patrol agents for paperwork violations, rather than an illegal alien for drug trafficking, on the grounds that the drug dealer has not been charged with any crimes. Let's see, whose job is it to charge that Mexican drug runner with a crime? Why, I believe that would be Johnny Sutton!

Maybe Sutton was too busy prosecuting another Mexican-American law enforcement officer for trying to stop illegal aliens from crossing our border. Deputy Sheriff Gilmer Hernandez shot at the tires of a van full of illegal aliens, inadvertently wounding one of the aliens. Sutton prosecuted Hernandez. The government proceeded to give the illegal aliens green cards and $100,000 each.

I didn't realize "living in the shadows" meant in the shadows of palm trees around the pools at taxpayer-funded houses.

Illegal aliens might want to rethink Bush's amnesty plan. The only Hispanics Bush seems to prosecute are the ones who are law-abiding U.S. citizens.

COPYRIGHT 2007 ANN COULTER

From NJ.com:
David Chase speaks!
Posted by Alan Sepinwall

June 11, 2007 10:50PM


What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.

"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.

Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?

"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.

"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.

"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."

Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:

-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.

"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."

Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.

"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."

-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."

-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?

"I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."

-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com

From The New York Times:
(Don’t Go Back to) San Francisco
By MICHAEL WALKER

Los Angeles

SHAKE the stems and seeds out of the Persian rug and put some flowers in your hair: the Summer of Love is 40 years old. The patchouli-scented commemoration has fixated on San Francisco, the Summer of Love’s blissful nexus. What wretched Midwestern longhair-in-waiting in the summer of ’67 could resist the siren of Scott McKenzie’s Top 5 hit, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”? Untold VW microbuses from Ann Arbor to Amherst chugged west on little more than the song’s purple-hazy promise: the tribes were gathering, and they were gathering in San Francisco.

But as a lasting cultural artifact, San Francisco’s Summer of Love can’t hold a stick of incense to the rafter-shaking sounds coming out that same year from a Los Angeles neighborhood 370 miles south, above the Sunset Strip. If we measure ’60s pop-cultural landmarks by the epoch-producing music they generate — and, from Liverpool to Woodstock, we do — then Laurel Canyon was the more evolved and influential destination that summer.

Laurel Canyon had been filling up with the baby boom’s brightest musical lights since 1965, when members of the Byrds, Los Angeles’s seminal folk-rockers, moved in, just as their version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a triumphant, worldwide smash. Soon, it seemed, every musician of note in Los Angeles had moved next door: members of the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors, the Seeds, the Turtles and Love were later joined by Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Frank Zappa, Carole King and untold transient rock royalty from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones.

By the summer of ’67, the Laurel Canyon mafia had defined the budding West Coast counterculture with an avalanche of generation-unifying songs that blended the last vestiges of the folk-music revival with the impudent exuberance of the British Invasion.

Laurel Canyon and Los Angeles were home to the murderers’ row of rock: alongside the Byrds — “America’s Beatles” according to the not entirely undeserved hype — lived Buffalo Springfield, from whose ranks would come Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay. The Mamas and the Papas, Laurel Canyon’s house band, had already recorded a string of landmark hits starting with “California Dreamin’.” The revolutionary flower-punk of Love produced the blistering “Seven and Seven Is,” a slap to the face masquerading as a hit single. The Turtles bounced the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” from No. 1 with “Happy Together,” and a couple of months later, The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” with brooding couplets that juxtaposed sexual longing and funeral pyres, rode the charts for weeks during the putatively flower-strewn summer.

San Francisco’s music scene developed under conditions vastly different from those in Los Angeles. Unstructured gigs at the city’s acid-drenched ballrooms encouraged epic jams of the sort perfected by the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane, along with a naïve anticommercialism — hit singles were for the hacks in Laurel Canyon. The irony is that San Francisco’s bands are remembered today chiefly for the few times they made commercially successful music, as with Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 “Surrealistic Pillow” album and its Top 10 singles “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”

Where San Francisco’s music scene was administered by a handful of show-business novices, Los Angeles was home to Capitol Records, the Beatles’ label, as well as the world’s finest recording studios, producers and engineers. Laurel Canyon’s proximity to this infrastructure — the unsparing proving ground of the Sunset Strip’s clubs was a five-minute hitchhike away — instilled in the musicians a professionalism that stiffened the spine of the material they wrote and performed.

In the end, 1967’s most prescient generational temperature-taking can be found in yet another Los Angeles song that hit the Top 10 just before the Summer of Love took off. Buffalo Springfield’s chilling “For What It’s Worth,” inspired by Stephen Stills’s eyewitness account of police officers brutalizing longhairs on the Sunset Strip, questioned the motives of both the establishment and the self-congratulating counterculture. Given the turmoil that lay just around the corner in 1968, the paranoia of “For What It’s Worth” strikes deep and true: “there’s a man with a gun over there,” it turned out, would have as much to do with the baby boom generation as would wearing flowers in your hair.

The Summer of Love will forever be entwined with San Francisco. But the rock critic Robert Christgau predicted in 1967 that “the real music would come from Los Angeles.” And he was right. The songs that came out of the Haight that summer now seem fixed in amber, as temporal as a Fillmore poster, while the music from Los Angeles and Laurel Canyon soldiers on, impervious to age and ridicule.

Even the Summer of Love’s anthem, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco,” was written and recorded in Los Angeles. The song was conceived by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a come-on for the Monterey International Pop Music Festival, which Mr. Phillips and Lou Adler, the Los Angeles record producer, were organizing. The lyrics vividly imagine a hippie-sanctified San Francisco, but the flowers in the title are literally from Los Angeles: Mr. McKenzie recorded the song while wearing garlands of wildflowers plucked in Laurel Canyon.

Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock ’n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”

A lame joke becomes reality
By MARK STEYN

About five years or so back, I started making references in columns to "fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community." But from the lame Steyn joke of yesteryear to the reality of tomorrow is a mere hop and a skip. A few days ago, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, declared:

"This week we will vote on cloture and final passage of a comprehensive bill that will strengthen border security, bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows, and keep our economy strong."

Talk about "a fast track to citizenship"! Never mind probationary visas, Z-visas and Green Cards, in the eyes of the Democrat steering "comprehensive immigration reform" through Congress these guys are already "undocumented Americans." Was it simply a slip of the tongue? Or did Senator Reid mean it?

If he did, the very concept of citizenship is dead, and the Senate might as well opt for really comprehensive immigration reform" and declare everyone on the planet a U.S. citizen with backdated Social Security entitlements.

I don't know whether this sham of a bill is dead or just resting "in the shadows" like a fine upstanding member of the Vampiric-American community. But, if it rises on the third night to stalk the land once more, I would advise its supporters to go about their work more honestly.

First of all, the only guys "living in the shadows" are the aides of American senators beavering away out of the public eye to cook up this legislation and then present it as a fait accompli to the citizenry (if you'll forgive the expression). That is an affront to small-"r" republican government, and, if intemperate hectoring mediocrities like Trent Lott and Lindsay Graham don't understand that, then their electors should give them a well-deserved lesson.

Second, the bill's supporters should stop assuming the bad faith of their opponents. On Fox News the other night, I was told by NPR's Juan Williams, "You're anti-immigrant!" Er, actually, I am an immigrant – one of the members of the very very teensy-weensy barely statistically detectable category of "legal immigrant." But perhaps that doesn't count any more. Perhaps, like Colin Powell's blackness, it's insufficiently "authentic." By filing the relevant paperwork with the United States government, I'm not "keepin' it real."

I wouldn't presume to speak for the millions of Americans who oppose this bill, but it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I object to the most patent absurdity peddled by the pro-amnesty crowd. The bill is fundamentally a fraud. Its "comprehensive solution" to illegal immigration is simply to flip all the illegals overnight into the legal category. Voila! Problem solved! There can be no more illegal immigrants because the Senate has simply abolished the category. Ingenious! For their next bipartisan trick, Congress will reduce the murder rate by recategorizing murderers as jaywalkers.

Back in the real world, far from those senators living in the nonshadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America's immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room.

Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That's not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. Under political pressure to "bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows," the immigration bureaucracy will rubber-stamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There's never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency.

Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's "visa express" system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications – "Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA" – that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

All the above passed through the legal immigration system. Whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because U.S. immigration had no real idea who these men were.

But, don't worry, they'll be able to handle another "12 million undocumented Americans" tossed in for express processing.

The real "immigration fraud" is not Mahmoud abu Halima's or John Lee Malvo's or Mohammed Atta's, but that of the politicians who attempted to foist this sham bill on the nation.