A Case Of Sparkling Perry Error

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has apparently come up with the perfect GOP delusion on immigration:  reforming it magically no longer matters!

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, no stranger to the tough debate over the nation’s immigration laws, thinks recent legislation passed by Mexico’s Congress, a major priority of President Enrique Pena Nieto, may have set in motion a reversal of the flow of undocumented immigrants northward. In a short time, Perry said in an interview Saturday, undocumented immigrants may be streaming back over the U.S.-Mexico border, headed for lucrative energy sector jobs back home.

“The landscape on immigration is fast changing,” Perry said. “My instinct is that immigration and immigration reform are going to be substantially less of a flashpoint than they have been in the last several years.”

 So what miracle is this that will see undocumented workers flood back south to Mexico?  Drill baby drill!

The change, Perry predicted, will come as private investors begin taking stakes in Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil monopoly. In December, Mexico’s Senate ratified outlines of legislation that would allow private investment in the company, which could eventually lead to complete privatization. Outside analysts believe the new rules will eventually make Mexico one of the world’s largest oil producers.

The new jobs that result from the energy boom, Perry predicted, will attract immigrant labor that would otherwise come to the United States.

Well, if you're, say, Halliburton or Exxon/Mobil, getting in on the ground floor of Mexico's oil boom, with cheap labor and zero Environmental Protection Agency in the way, has got to be the economic equivalent of snorting Viagra off of supermodels.  America's energy giants will be stabbing each other in the back (and the front) to get the lion's share of this.

Bonus points:  dangerous and heavily armed Mexican drug cartels means private military contractors will be making fat cash too conducting "security operations" and "dealing with the locals" for the oil guys.

It's Iraq all over again.  Only a lot closer.  No wonder Rick Perry can barely contain himself.

Now whether or not this "reverses" the flow of undocumented immigrants from the south, Republicans can say it will and just ignore immigration reform.  In this scenario, Obama gets zero credit and the demographic changes in border states slow dramatically, so they think they can ignore it completely, anyway.

“At that point in time, this whole issue of immigration reform, I think loses a lot of steam. And then the immigration debate may become, how are we going to efficiently allow people into this country to fill the agricultural or hospitality or construction jobs that these people had historically been filling,” Perry said.

Perry said that takes the pressure off Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, where immigration reform legislation has stalled in recent months after passing the Senate.

“I would suggest [Congressional Republicans] continue to push for a federal solution to securing the border, working with the states,” Perry said.

I'm betting voters might not agree.

Obamacare Takes The Stage In Florida...Or Does It?

Next month's special election for the House seat of the late GOP Rep. Bill Young in Florida's 10th District is all about how the Sunshine State's senior citizens feel about Obamacare.  Democrat Alex Sink is backing the program 100%, and her GOP opponent, David Jolly, is attacking Sink over it.  But Republicans have bigger problems in Florida, namely Social Security.

No matter the winner, Democrats appear to have little chance to capture the 17 seats needed to win a House majority in November. Yet this race has drawn national attention also because Obamacare figures prominently already in races in the Senate, where enough seats appear competitive nine months before Election Day to give Republicans an opportunity at winning control.

The candidates took different paths to their March 11 matchup to serve out the term of the late Republican Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, who died last fall.

Sink, 65, had a career in banking before she was elected the state's chief financial officer in 2006. A longtime resident of Tampa in next-door Hillsborough County, she is attacked by Republicans and their allies as a carpetbagger for moving over the county line into the district in preparation for the campaign.

Jolly, 41, was born in the congressional district. Yet he has long experience in Washington, first as an aide to Young, whom he features in his advertising and public remarks, and then as a lobbyist. Democrats seized on his lobbying work, saying he was retained by a special interest that wants to privatize Social Security.

The Social Security privatization scheme card goes a long way in Florida, as both McCain and Romney found out.

The race to serve the balance of Young's term has attracted outside groups on
the left and the right even though evidence is spotty at best that so-called special elections can predict which party will win a nationwide fall campaign.

Each one "has its own particularly unique and hyperlocal dynamics," said New York Rep. Steve Israel, who heads the House Democratic campaign organization.

And for all the attention paid to Obamacare, Republicans betray concern that Sink's persistent attacks linking Jolly to efforts to privatize Social Security are paying dividends.

What's this?  Obamacare is not the noose around Democrats' necks that Republicans hoped it would be?

We'll see.

The Great Wall Of Orange

Just a reminder that GOP House Speaker John Boehner has spent his entire career in Congress opposing minimum wage hikes, and that if it were up to him, the federal minimum wage would still be where it was when he first arrived in Congress in 1991:  $4.25 an hour.

Speaker John Boehner is so against raising the minimum wage that he once said he would rather commit suicide than vote for a “clean” increase.

The Ohio Republican and son of a barkeep has repeatedly opposed federally mandated hike increases, which have been a constant in the Democrats’ election-year playbook.Boehner has “always believed that it's a job killer,” former Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette, a labor-friendly Republican who is close to Boehner, told The Hill. He pointed to the Congressional Budget Office’s recent report that found that increasing the minimum wage could cost the economy 500,000 jobs.

Some Democrats are optimistic Boehner will cave and allow a vote this year, but the record shows there is little if any daylight between the pro-business Speaker and his conservative conference on this issue.

Boehner made the comments about suicide in an April 1996 interview with The Weekly Standard.

“I’ll commit suicide before I vote on a clean minimum-wage bill,” Boehner, then the head of the House Republican Conference, said at the time.

Nice guy, John Boehner, right?  And let's keep in mind Ohio has a higher state minimum wage at $8 an hour.  How does he keep getting elected?  Oh that's right, his district is the blood red Butler County suburbs north of Cincy where the only people making minimum wage are the people who don't live there.

Four months later, President Clinton over Boehner’s objections signed a minimum wage hike into law that lifted the wage by 90 cents, from $4.25 per hour to $5.15.

It wasn’t a clean wage hike because it included some Republican sweeteners such as tax breaks aimed at small businesses. The bill passed the Senate, 76-22 and cleared the House, 354-72. Boehner voted no.

Boehner voted against the wage hike again in 2007, when Democrats took over the House majority and in one of their first actions voted to lift the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour.

And he still did everything he could to block it.   But he cares about Ohio's working class.  Sure he does.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Apple co-founder Steve Jobs may appear on a US postage stamp as early as 2015, according to reports.
• President Obama has defied a protesting China and met with the Dalai Lama at the White House, while voicing strong support for the protection of Tibetans' human rights.
• A major peace breakthrough in Ukraine has halted violence as President Viktor Yanukovich has agreed to give up power and hold early elections for a national unity government.
• Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has kicked CNN and its reporters out of the country saying the news network is part of a US effort to "demonize" his government.
• Harvard University is reviewing access procedures for the school's supercomputer cluster after it was illicitly used to mine Dogecoins.