Compassionate Conservatism, an Oxymoron

I guess those $49.95 seats behind home plate only available to lobbyists are safe for now. The House ethics reform bill still allows lobbyists to buy gifts for lawmakers, as long as they are worth $50 or less. So we have $49.95 seats behind home plate readily available only to the Republican-created K-Street crowd to buy and pay for Congressmen using seats that would cost anyone else in the hundreds. Such is Republican reform, too little and far too late.

Happy May Day, primo de mayo, whatever you want to call it. I wore my white shirt in solidarity today, my conservative friend black. Such is the compassion of the Right, deport 'em all and let God sort them out despite his own Polish nose and English last name, none of which to my recognition are native to North America, while the very ones he wants to deport are native to this continent, at least partially. But that makes no difference. My conservative friend, compassionate as he is, trots out all the arguments that have ever been used against immigrants, his Polish forefathers included, to protest the current "wave" of immigration, a slow-motion roller that has been going on for years with complicity, if not tacit support, from our Government. Only when the Republican base started making noise did we dust off the tired old racistic, xenophobic statements used for everyone since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth (unfortunately, the Native Americans were the only ones that were right about what immigrants would do to the native culture). The ultimate Compassionate Conservative argument remains they're violating the law of the land. This is the argument they would have used to support King George (the English one, not Crawford's absentee idiot) and the English Monarchy as the very forefathers they claim a telepathic connection to fought against it. It's the law of the land and it must be enforced.

Those forefathers were immigrants or sons of immigrants. They'd come here for the promise of a better life and when the law of the land was wrong, they acted. They rebelled, something we Progressives do not advocate today but certainly did then, and became the Government. Since then, every wave of immigration has been met with scepticism, hostility, even violence from the conservatives who always claim they will dilute the culture, take advantage of our resources, weaken us. In every case, they've been proven wrong. We're stronger, more diverse, more creative because of those immigrants with names like Boehner, Frist, Hastert, Bush, Tancredo, Buchanan and many, many more but more so immigrants such as Clinton, Kerry, Kennedy, Edwards, Murtha, Gore, Feingold, Hickenlooper, Salazar. But still they trot out the old lines to fire up their Minuteman base. They don't learn.

Indeed Tom the Xenophobe Tancredo (what kind of name is that?) predicted a backlash from today's protests. I, too, join Tom in a prediction: Republicans have lost the Latino vote. That bodes well for us but it isn't the prediction my xenophobic representative would have. Tom, who wants to change the Star Spangled Banner into Spanish? Didn't we raise some of the same protests when Jimmy Page played the Star Spangled Banner on his electric guitar? Much the same, Mr. X. Jimmy, if I recall correctly, was an immigrant himself, although probably not voluntarily. Slavery, Mr. X, was another platform the Conservatives supported. We don't want amnesty for those here to pick our strawberries and clean our toilets, we want to give them a chance. They're here with Government approval, otherwise border control would have been an issue long ago. All we want is a chance for them to earn their right to stay.

We reached another turning point in Iraq today according to Mr. Mission Accomplished. Democrats bashed Bush deservedly in the Congress today. Telling for the Shrub's political future, none of his fellow Republicans stood to defend him. A failed Congress fails to defend a failed President, pretty much sums up the failure of Republican rule. They were wrong on every point when it came to Iraq. Never fail to remind them of that.

Quick to snag onto any straw, the Administration trumpeted a slowdown in the increase of gas prices this week. I blame uncertainty in the market - uncertainty over whether Congress might take some meaningful action to encourage conservation. The Republican bribe certainly failed much to their suprise (surprised at the failure of their plans, picking up a theme here?) as their telephones lit up and even conservative bloviators such as Limbaugh lambasted their weak ideas. Gas is now 68 cents above the price last year.

The FISE court made modifications to 68 requests for secret intelligence intercepts last year but disapproved none. Requests for secret surveillance were up 18 percent over the previous year at just over two thousand. The Patriot Act was used 155 times to search business records. And Bush claims he needs extralegal authority to conduct clandestine surveillance?