WHY NOT SANCTIONS? Canadian immigrant Charles Krauthammer wants to build a wall across our southern border, rehashing the usual arguments and remarking, “Opponents pretend that these barriers can always be circumvented by, say, tunnels or clandestine entry by sea. Such arguments are transparently unserious. You’re hardly going to get 500,000 illegals lining up outside a […]
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias is a senior editor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a former Prospect staff writer, and the author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.
Follow @mattyglesias
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THE CHICANO DIFFERENCE?…
THE CHICANO DIFFERENCE? David Frum tags me with glossing over some wage data in regard to the assimilation debate. He doesn’t challenge the point about language use, so I’ll take it that he’s conceding this point to me. Frum observes that intergenerational Latino-Anglo wage convergence has slowed markedly since 1980 or so, which seems to […]
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THE RACE CARD….
THE RACE CARD. It’s worth linking to some recent Media Matters items on Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson who, rather than adopting the Robert Samuelson bad statistics approach to immigration restrictionism, have left the racism pretty close to the surface of their thinking about the issue. And, one has to concede that O�Reilly and Gibson […]
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WHY DO POLITICAL…
WHY DO POLITICAL ADS SUCK? I don’t really know what to make of this Ned Lamont ad featuring Markos Moulitsas, but two things immediately jump out. One, you’re not going to just forget that you ever saw it. Two, it’s destined to attract some buzz, free media, attention, etc. These are things you would think […]
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WHO OWNS FACTS?…
WHO OWNS FACTS? Major League Baseball has apparently decided that it not only owns the rights to broadcast baseball games but owns the statistics as well, so it can shut down unlicensed commercial fantasy baseball operations. Personally, I’d be thrilled if fantasy baseball gets wiped off the planet, but that’s neither here nor there. If […]
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They’ve Got Your Number
The single greatest blog post ever written about the Bush administration contains this wise dictum at its heart: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” Thus, it should raise eyebrows when former Bush administration official Richard Falkenrath’s prominent defense of the National Security Agency’s massive, […]
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LATINO ASSIMILATION FACTS….
LATINO ASSIMILATION FACTS. Along with the fake issue of immigration and national security is the fake concern that Hispanic immigrants don’t assimilate. For example, Robert Samuelson earns his bones today as one of those white pundits, employed by white editors, writing for an audience of white people, who has the courage to speak uncomfortable “truths” […]
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IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL…
IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL SECURITY. Heather Hurlburt notes that the American people definitely see immigration as a national security issue and politicians need to deal with that reality. And so they do. But is immigration a national security issue? I don’t really see why. No terrorists have ever been apprehended trying to cross the border from […]
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HOW TO ARGUE…
HOW TO ARGUE LIKE A HAWK. As you may recall, a little while back Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad sent George W. Bush a somewhat rambling letter. One passage in the letter noted that if the billions of dollars spent on the Iraq War had instead been spent on fighting global poverty and improving worldwide public […]
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GATOR GONNA GETCHA….
GATOR GONNA GETCHA. Now this is alarming. From 1948 to 2005, 17 people have been killed by alligators in Florida — about 0.30 deaths per year. In 2006, so far three alligator-related fatalities have occurred — a tenfold increase over the trend. If this keeps up, 30 people will die next year, 300 in 2008, […]
