Showing posts with label Chris Warburton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Warburton. Show all posts

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Color me pleased as punch: Wash. Post: Defeat of DREAM Act reveals failed White House strategy, advocates say

Given this bit of good news from Capitol Hill on what is otherwise a wet, cool and miserable Saturday afternoon exactly seven days before Christmas -may I suggest some hazelnut coffee at Panera's?- where I'm listening to BBC Radio's 5 live's Saturday Edition with Chris Warburton, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tl9cb and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/#two, amidst all the reports about the bad weather -6 inches of snow in 25 minutes at a North London mall and canceled football matches everywhere- I can hardly wait for tomorrow.

Yes, there will likely be hard-luck stories galore in Sunday's
Miami Herald but likely little insightful analysis that matches what I have for you below from the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam, who wisely keeps to the facts and doesn't editorialize in his stories, as seems so common at the Herald, where facts that don't support the passage of the DREAM Act simply don't appear with regularity in stories, despite the fact that a clear majority of the country opposes it.

Not that this stops the Miami Herald or their minions.
Their editorial board, reporters, columnists and editors have long championed a ridiculous immigration policy that defied logic and reason that was the very definition of "backdoor amnesty for lawbreakers" that critics like me said it was.

They lost because it was a bad idea that failed to persuade.

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The Washington Post

Defeat of immigration measure reveals failed White House strategy, advocates say
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 18, 2010; 12:55 PM


Whenever Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and other immigrant-rights advocates asked President Obama how a Democratic administration could preside over the greatest number of deportations in any two-year period in the nation's history, Obama's answer was always the same.


Deporting almost 800,000 illegal immigrants might antagonize some Democrats and Latino voters, Obama's skeptical supporters said the president told them, but stepped-up enforcement was the only way to buy credibility with Republicans and generate bipartisan support for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.


On Saturday that strategy was in ruins after Senate Democrats could muster only 55 votes in support of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a measure that would have created a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children. Under Senate rules, Democrats needed 60 votes to overcome Republican opposition to the bill. The House of Representatives had passed the measure earlier this month, 216 to 198.


Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/18/AR2010121801679.html