The Democratic Party finally released what appears to be their official strategy/talking points intended to counter the Republican immigration wedge.

Now, I'm not a high paid consultant, or a professional Washington strategist with a long history of losing campaigns, but for the life of me I can't seem to figure out what the Democratic leadership is trying to accomplish with this plan.

Up until now it appeared that the "Republican-lite" strategy developed by Rahm Emanuel and the DLC centrists looked like it would become the party line. But with this new strategy, recently released on the party's website, I frankly haven't a clue what the Dems ultimate plan is.

With each new ad from Team Tancrazy, the level of hysteria gets ratcheted up one more notch.

For the first six years of the Bush presidency the Democratic leadership continually stepped away from the hard fights. At each impasse, whether it was war funding, judicial appointments, or oversight, they acquiesced to the ruling majority out of fear that they would be even further marginalized. Yet, even after regaining control of the Congress, they still behave as if they are the minority party. With a President whose approval ratings are in the toilet, and a Congress where Republicans would rather "retire" than face the electorate, one would think that Democrats would be emboldened.  But to the contrary, the mere thought of being called "weak" on any given issue by the Republican noise machine drives them to abandon all principle, and grab hold of the right-wing bandwagon for dear life.

Nowhere is this truer than with the Republican formulated wedge issue of immigration reform.

147 – just keep that number in the back of your mind for the time being – I'll get back to it's significance a little later on . ... but for now, just file it away somewhere where we can find it when we need it.

For almost three years now, anti-immigrant forces have been ratcheting up  their message of opposition to  anything short of deportation and/or attrition for the approximately 12 mil unauthorized immigrants currently living and working in the US, coupled with increased militarization  and "security" along the southern border as the only way to solve their self-defined "immigration crisis."  Armed with talking points crafted by Republican right-wing spinmeisters like Frank Luntz and zero-population-growth advocacy groups like the  Federation for American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA, pundits, politicians and talking-heads have hit the airwaves with a constant barrage of misinformation and distortion.

By now we all know the drill.

Sorry, did I say Howard Beale?....I meant to say Lou Dobbs....It's just that I sometimes confuse fictional ranting media lunatics with real life ones.

But in any case .... It appears that America's favorite crotchety racist with delusions of grandeur plans on expanding his power to bring out the worst in the American public beyond the reach of his nightly stint as the "Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda" at CNN.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Dobbs has told friends that under the right circumstances he's considering a run for the White House as a third party candidate.

On Sunday, participants in a week-long protest against further militarization of the southern border and further construction of the border wall came under attack from US Border Patrol officers at the Caleixco/Mexicali port of entry. The protest, which took place on both sides of the border simultaneously, appeared to have been proceeding peacefully until a symbolic "cross-border kissing booth", which involved making a hole in the border fence approximately four inches in diameter, was installed along the barrier. With that, approximately 100 Border Patrol officers descended upon the 30 demonstrators of "No Borders Camp" with pepper gas pellets, tazers, and batons.  In the ensuing melee, three were arrested; many more were injured or suffered from the effects pepper gas.  

One witness said, "I think that people should really understand that the border is a totally militarized zone and that this isn't your normal police repression at a demonstration. This is an occupation force ... And that is the real context of what happened today, rather than simple policing"

Even for the nation's premier fear-mongering, racist, lunatic, this one seem like a stretch. He's actually reached the point where he's becoming a sad, comic, self-parody. If I didn't know better, I might think this was a skit on the SNL or a report from Colbert.

Unfortunately in a double-wide somewhere, there's a guy combing his mullet, yelling, "hell-yeah" as he watches this newest Tancredo ad.

(Rescued last night, but worthy of wider readership because it serves as an excellent framework to begin discussion of a complicated and often divisive issue. SusanG)

With the defeat of the Republican "sliver bullet wedge" of immigrant-bashing in last Tuesday's election, it appears that Markos' has had a sudden "road to Damascus" epiphany about discussing immigration issues here at Daily Kos. After three years of barely a peep about the topic on the front page, we have seen a plethora of diaries in support of comprehensive immigration reform in the last few days. (But that's not the point of this dairy ...I'll discuss that at length at a later date.)

This sudden conversion has had seismic effects on the site as a whole. Immigration diaries which traditionally garnered little attention, or wallowed in flame wars, are now the hot topic du jour.

With that in mind, I figured it might be a good time post up a diary that sums up everything I've learned in my past three years here posting on immigration issues.

Parts of this have been posted before in various other forms  .. But what follows is the completed version of a:  A progressive plan for immigration reform

On April 26, 1937, twenty-four bombers of the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" with the help of a subordinate Italian expeditionary force, dropped forty tons of bombs, on the town of Guernica in the Basque Country of Spain.  Up to 1,600 people were killed and three quarters of the city's buildings were reported completely destroyed. The raid, called Operation Rügen, is generally viewed as the Luftwaffe's first test of the tactics of terror-bombing that would become the hallmark of the Nazi blitzkrieg as it swept through Europe two years later.

Just as Franco's Spain was used as a testing ground for the tactics, men, and machines that would later wreak havoc on a global scale, tomorrow in Virginia, we will be witness to a test of a new blitzkrieg of sorts. The Republican Party will be testing, on a statewide basis, its latest strategy and weaponry for the coming 2008 election cycle... the immigration wedge.    

In last election cycle one of things we kept hearing about was the rise of a new demographic, the "Lou Dobbs Democrats". Dems, who for one reason or the other found Lou's mix of protectionism and reactionary populism appealing. Taking up the anti-"illegal" immigrant mantra of the right, our Lou Dobbs Democratic friends like to wrap their enforcement-only positions in the trappings of labor politics. ....they just want to protect American jobs and workers.

Most, if not all, opposed any attempt at forging a comprehensive plan for reforming our failing immigration system, and many in fact favored the strict and punitive legislation  introduced by the Nativist Right.  Just yesterday they were joining in the chorus of those claiming that the DREAM Act, a bill that would have provided thousands of undocumented kids the chance to earn a legal place in society, was nothing more that another "amnesty" from the far left.

But now today, they must come face to face with reality. Their longtime allies on the right who have opposed any meaningful reform, and instead call for harsher penalties and stricter enforcement, are planning on stabbing them in the back

It's not like Tam Tran and the other DREAM students haven't been through enough harassment already. After having her story published in a front page story in USA Today last week, the entire Tran family were arrested and detained by immigration official in what Representative Rep. Zoe Lofgren, (D-Calif), who chairs the House immigration subcommittee, characterized as a classic case of "witness intimidation."

Tran, whose parents escaped from Vietnam as "boatpeople" had testified earlier this year in front of Lofgren's committee on the plight of the thousands of immigrant children who were brought here by their undocumented parents and an early age, and now due to their undocumented status face uncertain futures.

According to the Congressional Quarterly, a spokeswomen for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that the Dream Act will be taken up following Tuesday's expected  final vote on the 2008 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill (HR 3043).

Being of a certain age, much of my early worldview was shaped by childhood indoctrination about authoritarian states, I guess you could call me part of the "Duck and Cover" generation.  Taught from an early age about the evils of communism and fascism, we were often told that one of the greatest differences between free societies like our own, and evil totalitarian states, was that here in America one was safe to voice political views or dissent without fear of government retribution. We had no Siberian exile, Gulags, or internment camps. The police did not burst into your home in the middle of the night and arrest you on trumped up charges simply for voicing opinions contradictory to government policy.

Ok, I know America's all filled up, and that bombing Mecca would solve all our foreign policy problems. I even know that Miami is like a third world country and that the only way to solve all this nation's problems is to build a giant wall and outlaw the Spanish language.

But now even by his own absolutely insane standards, Colorado Congressman, and Republican Presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, may have actually stepped over the rather narrow line that separates wingnuttery from sheer lunacy.

On the same day the diminutive, Coloradoan, tough-guy registered as the first Republican Presidential candidate in the New Hampshire primary,  he introduced a bill in Congress that would require all foreigners  seeking visas to join family members in the US to supply DNA samples to prove their family ties.

Of course their citizen, or legal-resident family members would also be required to supply a corresponding sample to it check against.

We can now add Arizona to the long list of states in which recent studies prove that the current influx of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, have contributed far more to the economy and tax base than they receive in government services.

Joining studies from California, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Washington DC, and Long Island, NY, a new report from Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at The University of Arizona looks at the contributions and costs of Arizona's immigrant population and finds not only an overall net gain for the state, but that the loss of this population would likely cause long term economic problems.

Sometime in the next few weeks the Senate will once again take up legislation regarding immigration reform. This time it will be the DREAM Act sponsored by Sen.Dick Durbin(D-Il). The legislation would allow hundreds of thousands of students who were brought here as children by their undocumented parents to go on and complete their education and eventually earn the right to become legal residents and citizens.

This piece of legislation is so important right now because the right-wing, flush from their victory in stalling any form of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, have decided to make defeating the DREAM Act their top priority. They feel that they are in a position now where they do not need to give an inch on any reforms, and would view the passage of DREAM as a major defeat.

Unfortunately it is the lives of hundreds of thousands of kids that are being effected by this Washington gamesmanship. With that in mind, I'm more than willing to risk the appearance of monotony, and discuss another group of young people who anxiously await the passage of DREAM ...those who have already graduated from college ...because their futures depend on it now.

Each year approximately 2.8 million students graduate from US High Schools. Some will go on to college, join the military, or take other paths in life, hopefully all becoming productive members of society. But for approximately 65,000 of them, these opportunities will never be available. Not because they lack motivation, or achievement, but because of the undocumented status passed on to them by their parents.

Lacking legal status and social security numbers, these students, raised and schooled in the US, cannot apply to college, get jobs other than those at the bottom of the economic ladder, or otherwise follow their dreams. They grew up on American soil, worked hard and succeeded in spite of all odds, and want nothing more than to be recognized as individuals and not just the holders of a status they had no part in acquiring.

In Washington, politicians have debated the fate of these kids for more than seven years, holding lives and futures in their hands while vying for political advantage. But lost in the debate are the voices of the children – voices that should be heard.  

This past week we witnessed the responses of two local law enforcement agencies to increasing political pressure to rely upon them to enforce federal immigration policy:

In Irving Texas, a suburb in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, 2000 protester marched this week to highlight that city's participation in a Federal program that has caused deportations to increase 500% from that city in the last year alone.

In Nassau County NY, a suburb in Metro NYC, the county's highest ranking police official announced this week that his department would no longer assist federal authorities with the apprehension of undocumented immigrants.

Across the country, municipalities large and small are now being forced to examine exactly what their rights and responsibilities are when it come to enforcing federal immigration policy.

In a heated political climate where incendiary speech and inflammatory rhetoric often pass for public discourse, too many local leaders have chosen to make political hay by claiming it is now their responsibility to take on the burden of enforcing Federal law.

Others have taken a much wiser approach.