Mother's Day is, perhaps, the lightest blogging day around the entire blogosphere, if my brief skimming of other sites is any indication. Likely this is proof that bloggers have mothers, or at least most do. Mr. Reynolds is an android, I think, or a team of clones. Things were certainly quiet at JTF. I've taken the liberty of retroactively posting some thoughts I didn't get to yesterday.
However, time doesn't stand still, and there are a lot of events worthy of comment.
- President Bush gave a prime time speech tonight discussing immigration. It was a study in contradictions; I think it might have been Mr. Bush's most earnest effort yet at Clintonian triangulation. To wit:
- We're going to send National Guard troops to the border and increase the numbers of border patrol agents, but we're not "militarizing" the border.
- We're not going to have amnesty, but many of those here illegally will have a "path" to citizenship.
- We're going to seal the border from more illegal immigrants, but we're not going to build a wall.
Well, it worked for his predecessor. It was clearly better that Mr. Bush led with the border security elements of the program, but conservatives are not likely to be doing cartwheels over the pseudo-amnesty aspects. I think that if border security is taken seriously, if illegal border crossings are dramatically diminished, if those who are already here want to be part of America instead of make their part of America into an extension of Mexico, then Americans may be willing to cut Mr. Bush a little slack on his guest worker/amnesty ideas. If, however, the stream of illegals continues unabated, and those illegals continue to celebrate the land they left behind then the President will want to convert his approval ratings to Farenheit from Celsius.
Video here, in case you missed it.
- Funny polling on the NSA phone number crunching story, summed up wonderfully today in Taranto's Best of the Web.
So Page could have written her lead paragraph as follows:
A majority of Americans do not think the administration has gone too far in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism. Thirty-four percent say the balance it has struck is "about right," while 19% say it doesn't go far enough.
The paper, that is, could have written a pro-administration story or an anti-administration story based on this poll, and it opted for the latter.
He also notes the differences between the way the USA Today asked about the program and the way the Washington Post asked about it, differences that largely account for the different results.
- If any of you are watching Grey's Anatomy tonight, the 2 hour season finale, I just want you to know that the show is a work of fiction, and you do not have to worry that your intern will cut the wires of the machine keeping you alive. I want you to know that the cardiac transplant patient will not be managed exclusively by fresh faces right out of medical school. And you need to know that that the entire medical staff will not be occupied at a "prom" in the hospital, absent from patient care responsibilities.
I just thought you'd want to know.
5/16/06 0645: Some reactions:
Jay Tea, echoing my thoughts above, sees the speech as an attempt to please the wavering middle. He's unimpressed with the security efforts, and, like I said above, if those fail the rest of the proposal is also a failure.
Confederate Yankee is calling Mr. Bush out for dividing conservatives, though has moderated his first thoughts and thinks this might not be a fatal split. Remember, Mr. Clinton survived signing welfare reform in the eyes of Democrats.
Things are schizophrenic at Polipundit, where Polipundit himself is calling the President a liar, and Lorie Byrd is
leavingasked to leave due to differences over the immigration issue. A real-world example of Confederate Yankee's analysis. Ms. Byrd will be back at a high traffic blog soon. If she wants a low traffic blog, she's welcome here.Ms. Malkin is unimpressed. Again, the problem seems to be border security. Mr. Bush's proposal for pseudo-amnesty might be better received if a palpably serious proposal for stopping the flow of illegals were part of the plan. His proposals may work, but they are equally likely to fail. That's not good enough.
A little schizophrenia at Power Line also, where Mr. Hinderaker is scolding Mr. Bush for not giving the speech he advised, Mr. Mirengoff thinks the speech only failed on the pseudo-amnesty point, provided the border security measures work (my position), and Mr. Johnson thought it might be more "mush from the wimp" before the speech.
Hugh Hewitt thought there was a fence; then he found out there wasn't.
John Hawkins has another collection of initial reactions.
I'll reiterate: If the security measures succeed, Americans will accept the "temporary worker" and pseudo-amnesty provisions; if the security measures fail, then the whole program will be seen to have failed. That's why those security measures needed to be serious. Very serious.
