There's some good news, and some bad news.

There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.

"It's now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico," Sacramento's Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. "We have become a middle-class country."

Mexico's unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

We sure spend a lot of time planning how to make the lives better for foreign nationals, don't we? Rather less about American citizens.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (112)
Post contains 181 words, total size 1 kb.

Don't have a link yet but I'm watching the White House briefing and he says idea the joint committee can't come back with a package that includes revenues is "false".

Last night Boehner said there's almost no way that could happen given the requirement that current law be the baseline that is used for CBO scoring.

Basically since the current baseline assumes that the Bush era tax cuts expire in 2013 anything that raises taxes less than the $3.5 trillion would be counted as an increase in the deficit and out of bounds.

Here's the problem...there's no way to force the joint committee or Congress to live up to that when push comes to shove. If the only way to get a deal that avoids the draconian across the board defense and entitlement cuts no one wants is to fudge which baseline is used in scoring instructions to CBO, guess what...they are going to fudge the baseline in the instructions.

If Congress wants to change or ignore the law, there's nothing but political pressure to prevent that. The real political pressure will be a desire to do anything to avoid the automatic cuts built into the deal. Of course, writing a new law that waives or mitigates those cuts would be an option. The simple fact is, when it comes to Congress and laws, there's no way to bind them to anything. That's just the nature of the beast...they write the laws and they can re-write them.

Now, maybe Carney is just trying to buck up the liberals who are pissed at this deal, and there are plenty of them, or maybe all we've done is agreed to a debt ceiling hike and kicked the can down the road on half the cuts until November.

FWIW: Mitt, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham(!) are opposed. DeMint is a no but says he won't filibuster it.

Looks like the House is going to vote first, sometime early this evening (though that's always subject to change).

The theory yesterday was the Senate would go first since it's likely the deal will enjoy more support there and that would give cover to the House not to cause a panic. The new theory seems to be to get the House to vote before grassroots opposition can take hold.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:37 AM | Comments (224)
Post contains 409 words, total size 3 kb.

You know him. The one that always plays the sleazy two-bit con-man who always has the one piece of information that breaks the case wide open?

UPDATED for being too specific. Include any character actor. The town drunk, the sappy boyfriend, the eternal sidekick...

I have a bunch of favorites. Harry Dean Stanton never fails to deliver a performance that makes you feel at least a little sorry for his character.

My all time favorite is probably M. Emmet Walsh, who uttered one of my favorite movie lines in a movie full of great movie lines.

No, not that mother-scratcher! Bill Parker. Anyway, we're approaching the wreck, and there's this spherical object a restin' in the highway. And it's not a piece of the car.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:14 AM | Comments (93)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

Lots of debt-ceiling stuff broke over the weekend. I'll put a placeholder story here that covers the basics. Like many of you, I am tired of this whole ridiculous exercise. We, as a nation, just went through a wrenching two weeks to eke out a bill that barely changes the status quo -- our debt goes up, our spending goes up, and most of the "cuts" are imaginary.

Still, if the compromise bill is passed by both houses and gets signed by the President (still not a sure bet), it will represent a small tactical victory by the GOP. A political victory, to be sure, not a fiscal one. But we must take what ground we can ahead of the elections next year. Every inch of ground we take now is one inch we won't have to take later.

Some additional debt-ceiling links:

• The President's "over the cliff" moment.


• The GOP wins the rhetorical battle over cuts rather than taxes.


• You can almost feel the spittle hitting your face in this NYT screed. (This is the best evidence that the GOP won significant concessions, by the way. You don't win when you think you've won; you win when the enemy thinks you won.)


• Ding dong, the Keynesian witch is dead.


• Don't forget: the Hobbits prevailed in Lord of the Rings.


• Will the debt-ceiling fight lead to the end of Harry Reid as we know him?

It turns out that American cities aren't the only ones who are over-borrowing. Chinese cities are also loading up on debt.

The myth of the "jobless recovery". Jobless, yes. Recovery? Not so much.

Atlas has shrugged in Detroit.

Stocks: the asset class of low expectations.

Hard times may get harder still. These are the wages of depending on the "And then a miracle happens!" theory of economic recovery -- when the miracle fails to happen, there is no plan B.

UPDATE 1: Teh Krugman doesn't love Obama any more. Also, it's apparently the End of Days. I expect to see Krugs running around Times Square later on today, wearing a sandwich-board that says THE END IS NIGH, ringing a bell, and hollering, "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!"

UPDATE 2: America is merely wounded, Europe risks death. It's bad here, but it's much worse over there. Pull quote:

We can only pray that at least one half of the Atlantic system holds relatively firm. If both go down together, buy a shotgun and prepare for 1932.

UPDATE 3: Greg Mankiw (a fairly conservative guy and a good economist) -- "I do not come here to bury Teh Bernank, but to praise him." Needless to say, I disagree with Mankiw's reasoning...but it's important to realize that there is a positive case to be made for Bernanke's actions.

UPDATE 4: Debt Deal or Not, Confidence in America Is Shredded. Via Insty, who dryly notes, "Well, we have the worst political class weÂ’ve ever had, with the possible exception of the 1850s."

UPDATE 5: Er, about that debt-ceiling deal that won't raise taxes? Well...it might raise taxes. more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:02 AM | Comments (370)
Post contains 531 words, total size 5 kb.

Late Friday night word began to circulate that the ACU board of directors had voted to exclude GOProud from CPAC in February. GOProud's participation in the conference has been a sore point for some, but by no means all or even most, social conservative interest groups for the past two years.

The American Conservative Union is preparing to open registration and announce sponsorship opportunities for our Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2012. As a courtesy to your organization, a previous co-sponsor of CPAC, this letter serves to inform you GOProud will not be invited to participate in a formal role for CPAC events scheduled during the 2012 election cycle.

It's seriously disappointing, but not exactly unexpected, to see this decision taken now, when conservatives should be most united in driving the Democrats out of the Senate and White House. I was pleased to see many prominent conservatives, including Andrew Breitbart and Roger Simon, immediately denounce the decision.

YID with LID and Joy McCann have noteworthy posts on this.

I've tucked GOProud's legislative agenda below the fold. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:39 AM | Comments (200)
Post contains 525 words, total size 4 kb.

Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:54 AM | Comments (69)
Post contains 58 words, total size 1 kb.