Sovereignty Blog

Will vote change border policy? (Lornet Turnbull, 11/13/06, Seattle Times)

Immigrants — legal and illegal — and their advocates throughout the Northwest and across the country are looking to a newly elected Congress with renewed hope.

They see potential for the kinds of changes a Republican-controlled Congress did not deliver this year: a guest-worker program that could bring thousands of new immigrant workers into the country, a speedier process for reuniting families separated because of immigration rules, and amnesty for the estimated 12 million immigrants living in the country illegally.

“Democrats have favored a more comprehensive approach to reform which balances both what they call earned legalization [amnesty], and some kind of guest-worker program … with more and increased border security,” said Michael C. LeMay, professor emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, and an author of five books on immigration.

Democratic control of Congress, he said, “will make it a bit more likely that immigration legislation will be passed early in 2007.” [...]

In the end, immigration appeared to have played little role overall in Tuesday’s election — particularly in states like Washington, which had no immigration-related issues on the ballot.

In an absentee-voter survey and an Election Day exit poll conducted by Hate Free Zone and the University of Washington, voters in King County reflected the sentiments of those across the country who cited the war in Iraq, taxes and the economy as issues important to them.

“It’s very clear the Republicans and folks who are against immigration reform have been trying to make it into a polarizing issue,” said Jayapal, of Hate Free Zone. “It’s equally clear that nobody’s buying.”

Call Lieberman an Independent Democrat (The Associated Press, 11/13/06)

He was a Democrat who won re-election as an independent, so Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman now says he wants to be called an Independent Democrat.

If that’s not confusing enough, the three-term lawmaker who will caucus with Senate Democrats would not rule out entertaining entreaties from the GOP if he starts to feel uncomfortable among Democrats.

Lieberman was returned to office on Election Day with strong GOP support, running as an independent after he lost the Democratic primary in August to Ned Lamont.

The senator is in line to become chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The question is whether his ambitions end there. If they do he can stay a Democrat. To go higher he probably needs to switch.

McCain moves forward on presidential bid (The Washington Post and The Associated Press, 11/13/06)

Sen. John McCain of Arizona said he will form an exploratory committee as the first step toward a possible run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Pelosi Endorses Murtha as Next Majority Leader (Jonathan Weisman, 11/13/06, Washington Post)

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) yesterday as the next House majority leader, thereby stepping into a contentious intraparty fight between Murtha and her current deputy, Maryland’s Steny H. Hoyer.

The unexpected move signaled the sizable value Pelosi gives to personal loyalty and personality preferences. Hoyer competed with her in 2001 for the post of House minority whip, while Murtha managed her winning campaign. Pelosi has also all but decided she will not name the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to chair that panel next year, a decision pregnant with personal animus.

Not that she could do much to avoid it, but it’s good to see she doesn’t even care about losing the House again in ’08 as long as she gets to settle personal scores.

Borat spanked by angry Yank (EMILY SMITH, November 13, 2006, Daily Sun)

BORAT star Sacha Baron Cohen was beaten up by a passer-by after he tried to play a prank as his alter ego.

He approached the man and said: “I like your clothings. Are nice! Please may I buying? I want have sex with it.”

But the bystander didn’t see the joke. He took one look at Cohen and punched him in the face.

An Aggressive Game Plan Leads to an Improbable Win (ALLEN BARRA, November 13, 2006, NY Sun)

This victory was all about aggression. Faced with the extinction of their season, Mangini and his staff chose to do the opposite of what most teams do when facing a superior foe (and New England was much the superior team, at least coming into this game): They designed an aggressive game plan on both sides of the ball, blitzing on 40 of the Patriots’ 66 plays. More importantly, perhaps, when they weren’t blitzing they were showing blitz, something that neither Tom Brady nor Mangini’s mentor, Bill Belichick, expected.

On offense, the Jets weren’t, in truth, a great deal more effective than they were in some of their losing efforts this season, but they sure looked as if they were trying harder. On the sloppy turf, Chad Pennington couldn’t control the wet ball any better than his New England counterpart, but 17 of his 33 passes came on first or second down. (Someone in the Jets’ offensive brain trust finally got hip to the fact that you are far more likely to complete a pass, or at least not get sacked or intercepted, on first and second down than on, say, third-and-nine.) With a little less than six minutes to play, Pennington began two out of three series with first down passes, gaining seven and eight yards and setting up two key first downs. A third first down, just as significant, came on a 12-yard slash by Kevan Barlow, whose path up the middle was made clear because the Pats took out two linebackers and substituted two defensive backs in anticipation of a pass.

Actually, the Jets’ win was about aggression and execution. They drew just four flags all afternoon and fumbled the slippery ball not once. (New England fumbled twice.) Pennington was sacked only once, and, that wisely, when he refused to put the ball up for grabs. And, the Jets finally got a big play — the biggest, in fact, of the season — late in the fourth quarter when Jerricho Cotchery made the best catch I’ve seen in the NFL this year. Dropping back from the 22, Pennington could see that Cotchery, in the right corner of the end zone, was well covered by a defensive back in front and a safety from behind. He looped the ball anyway, assuming that Cotchery would catch it. And he did, with a leaping over-the-shoulder grab to the amazement of the Pats’ D-back who was waiting with his arms outstretched. The game-winning play showed aggressiveness not just on Cotchery’s part but on the part of Pennington, who normally, when seeing his man double-covered in that situation, would have thrown the bal out of the end zone and settled for the field goal try.

The Jets’ improbable victory frees them to think of next Sunday’s meeting with the Bears as a one-game season. If the Jets can suck it up again and beat the Bears at the Meadowlands, the rest of their schedule will all be sharply downhill: not a single game against a team with a winning record (though playing the Packers in Green Bay in December will be no day at the beach). They have already won more games this year than in 2005, and the key to the rest of the season will be in not being satisfied with that fact.

Upsets Place Rutgers In Striking Distance (RUSSELL LEVINE, November 13, 2006, NY Sun)

Barely 48 hours later — not even long enough for the tidal wave of Rutgers calls to New York’s sports-talk radio stations to subside — a series of upsets had the potential to turn Rutgers’ nice little moment in the spotlight into something much greater.

Even the most euphoric of Rutgers fans following their school’s stunning, come-from-behind win over Louisville Thursday night knew that even finishing the regular season undefeated probably wouldn’t be enough to get the Scarlet Knights into the national-championship game. But that was before a string of upsets decimated the ranks of the oncebeaten Saturday. By day’s end, Rutgers’s chances had improved from nearly impossible to merely improbable.

With Auburn, Cal, and Texas all picking up a second loss, the number of teams standing between Rutgers and the coveted second spot in the Bowl Championship Series standings has been thinned. And it no longer takes an abacus and vivid imagination to cook up a scenario that could see Rutgers rise that high.

Influence Rises but Base Frays for Iraqi Cleric (SABRINA TAVERNISE, 11/13/06, NY Times)

Few have ever described Moktada al-Sadr, the mercurial leader of Iraq’s mightiest Shiite militia, as a statesman.

Yet there he was last month sitting on a pristine couch with the prime minister (no longer cross-legged on the floor), making public calls as well as sending private text messages to aides discouraging sectarianism, and paying visits to the home of Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric.

For years an angry outsider, Mr. Sadr, 33, has moved deep into the inner sanctum of the Iraqi government largely because his followers make up the biggest and most volatile Shiite militia. Now, after more than a year in power, he and his top lieutenants are firmly part of the establishment, a position that has brought new comfort and wealth. That change has shifted the threat for the American military, which no longer faces mass uprisings by Mr. Sadr’s fighters when it enters their turf.

But the taming of Mr. Sadr has produced a paradox: the more settled he becomes in the establishment, the looser his grip is over his fighters on the streets and those increasingly infiltrating the security forces. In the two years since they fought against American tanks at Mr. Sadr’s command, many have broken away from the confines of compromise that bind him, and have taken a far more active role in killing, something his supporters say worries him. He says he is trying to weed them out — 40 were publicly dismissed last month. [...]

Mr. Sadr has disavowed a number of his commanders. At a Friday Prayer last month, the names of 40 dismissed Mahdi Army commanders were read aloud at a lectern in front of a sea of men holding umbrellas against the hot sun. Among them were Hassan Salim, the leader of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, and Hajj Shimel, a prominent cleric. Abbas al-Kufi, Mr. Sadr’s strongman enforcer, arrived from Najaf to attend the reading.

That public response fits snugly with the agenda of the American military, which is chipping away at the most corrupt edges of Mr. Sadr’s empire through arrests.

Even though the military has made more than six forays into the area since early August, including an Oct. 25 attempt to arrest Abu Dera, Mr. Sadr has been largely silent, and the only repercussions were a few angry public remarks by Mr. Maliki.

Indeed, the challenge Mr. Sadr presented to the American military in 2004, when his followers fought tanks in flip-flops, seems to have melted away.

“We have arrested people who in 2004 we would have had to move M1 tanks to Sadr City to suppress an uprising over,” said one intelligence official who spoke to reporters in September about Mr. Sadr’s army. That is in part because Mr. Sadr is standing by a newly declared truce with the Americans and also because of the Sadrists’ new proximity to power, well-connected local residents critical of the Mahdi militia say.

One of the reasons democratization works is because once you’re a participant in government any enemy of the state is an enemy of yours.

MORE:
Cleric al-Sadr may hold Iraq’s future in his hands (Rick Jervis, 11/12/06, USA TODAY)

Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric President Bush once dismissed as the head of a “band of thugs,” has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in Iraq, commanding a large militia and a growing political organization.

U.S. and Iraqi forces passed on a chance to arrest al-Sadr two years ago. Instead, Iraq’s Shiite leaders encouraged him to enter the political process. The idea was to co-opt a threat to the Iraqi government. Critics say the plan backfired, placing Iraq’s future in the hands of a firebrand whose Mahdi Army militia has intensified religious warfare and threatened the country’s stability.

“I believe that the Mahdi Army continues to pose a threat,” Sen. John McCain said in Arizona last week. “I believe al-Sadr has to be taken out.”

That may not be realistic. “There are no good options in dealing with al-Sadr,” says Wayne White, who formerly headed the State Department’s Iraq intelligence team and is now at the Middle East Institute. “He has grown too powerful to be addressed in any reasonable way.”

These two stories nicely illustrate how much perception is shaped by the reporter’s sources.

Lieberman refuses to close door on switching parties (AP, November 12, 2006)

Sen. Joe Lieberman on Sunday repeated his pledge to caucus with Senate Democrats when the 110th Congress convenes in January, but refused to slam the door on possibly moving to the Republican side of the aisle.

Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if he might follow the example of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republicans in 2001 and became an independent, ending Republican control of the U.S. Senate, Lieberman refused to discount the possibility.

“I’m not ruling it out but I hope I don’t get to that point,” he said.

Democratic Gains Raise Roadblocks To Free-Trade Push (GREG HITT and NEIL KING , JR., November 11, 2006, Wall Street Journal)

The Democrats’ sweep of Congress is set to deliver a blow to President Bush’s free-trade ambitions and could hamper impending trade deals both big and small.

Democrats’ stances against free trade helped build the party’s success at the polls and could tip the balance on trade matters. The new dynamic could put a definitive end to the already troubled effort to reach a global agreement to reduce tariffs and open markets, known as the Doha round. It also could put in jeopardy smaller deals such as those the U.S. has crafted with Peru and Colombia, intended to boost two-way trade by lowering tariffs and increasing intellectual-property protections.

Two dozen tightly contested races turned partly on Democrats’ protectionist platforms, according to Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group. All told, 16 incoming “trade skeptics” are set to replace “trade friendly” Republicans in the House, according to a study by the Swiss Institute for International Economics at the University of St. Gallen. Five new Senate Democrats are viewed as more critical on trade than were their opponents.

Kind of sad how far backwards they’ve gone since Al Gore smooted Ross Perot upside the head.

Deer breaks free of plastic jack-o’-lantern (AP, 11/11/06)

A deer whose head was stuck in a plastic Halloween jack-o’-lantern for nearly a week has freed itself and will be fine, animal rescuers said Saturday.

…the Darwinist bulletin boards lit up with the credulous thinking deer had evolved orange heads to deter hunters.