Obama to take on amnesty issue this year!

That is what the New York Times reported yesterday, here.  

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

It really makes no sense to take up this issue this year when so many Americans are out of work. 

Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Mr. Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.

“It just doesn’t seem rational that any political leader would say, let’s give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs,” said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Mr. Beck predicted that Mr. Obama would face “an explosion” if he proceeded this year.

“It’s going to be, ‘You’re letting them keep that job, when I could have that job,’ ” he said.

“Incredulous” indeed!   The only thing that makes any sense is that the Obama Administration knows that this is the only year for his administration to get anything done.  His popularity is already sinking and if the recession deepens, with each successive year it would be even more difficult to explain why we are adding immigrants to compete for scarce jobs.

Looks like Joe Biden didn’t get the message.

The Leftist/Islamist alliance explained

It first came to my full attention in March 2007 when I attended a counter demonstration, Gathering of Eagles, to the anti-war demonstration by International ANSWER in Washington, DC.  Judy and I were proudly on the side of the Eagles!  ANSWER is an international Communist organization but they were being sponsored by the likes of the Muslim America Society, a Muslim Brotherhood inspired organization.

I remember thinking, what the heck, what do these Communist/leftists have in common with fundamentalist Muslims.    Ever since, I have wondered what on earth this alliance is all about and have predicted on these pages that if the Communists/Socialists, whatever you want to call them, ever succeeded in destabilizing our democracy their Muslim cohorts would turn on them.    Here is the concept of this alliance explained by Sultan Knish (Hat tip: Avid Editor’s Insights) with  an analogy to a “tiger in a box.’

Here is how Sultan Knish begins:

The current Leftist-Islamist coalition wrecking much of the first world with its combination of inside-outside warfare in America, Europe, Israel, Australia and across the world seems paradoxical in nature, but has both its origins and precedents.

The irrationality of the Leftist-Islamist alignment is the seeming ideological contrasts between the two. Islamists after all would behead or forbid most of the left’s agenda. There is little room in the heart of the average Imam or Mullah for Feminism, Homosexuality, Atheism, or the whole multicultural progressive rainbow. By contrast there is seemingly little room in the progressive agency for Theocracy, Gender Segregation or the rest of the Islamist Smorgasboard.

But what allows this Gruesome Twosome to overcome their differences is that both see a common enemy in Western Civilization. The presence of a common enemy allows the “The Enemy of my Enemy” doctrine to kick in, which is what has made many of the unlikely and self-destructive ideological relationships in history kick off. Accordingly the left has embraced Islamists as “protected minorities”, more “brown people” being persecuted by the “Patriarchal Military Industrial Complex” that bedevils their nightmares. And the Islamists have learned to talk like progressives, turning out Koranic edicts about beheading your wife that sound like liberal platforms.   [I have previously also noted that I think the Islamists are smarter than the leftists.]

Read on.  And, then in conclusion:

To the left, Muslims have become the ultimate oppressed minority, admired for their willingness to kill their Western “capitalist oppressors”. The political and military chaos spread by Muslim terrorism has allowed the left to gain its victories, most notably in Spain, Israel and now America. This has always been a fundamental doctrine for the left, ever since Lenin’s days, to transform military warfare into class warfare… or more currently into racial warfare.

And while the left employs Muslims and Muslim Terrorism as political leverage to gain power in America and Israel, and imports large numbers of Muslim immigrants into Europe [and America!] to secure political victories at the polls… Islamists see the left as once again a convenient way to pave their path to power. It is doubtful that the Islamic Republic of Iran would have existed had the left not joined forces with Ayatollah Khomeni. A similar situation too is now unfolding in Egypt. And in Europe. And given time in America as well.

An ideology like Communism, Nazism or Islamism is a tiger trapped in a box. Freeing it may be in your short term interest, but it is in your long term interest to hammer the lid shut, because once the tiger is out of the box, he’s just as likely to make a meal of you.

Well said!