Free Republic

As the 2014 elections draw near, panic is setting in for President Obama and Democrats across the country. As John Harwood of The New York Times observed on Tuesday, “The very structure of the 21st-century national Democratic coalition makes its November turnout predicament bad, perhaps historically so.” Blacks, women, and young people turned out in historic numbers for Obama in 2012; those groups will experience significant turnout drop off in 2014.

Texas lawmakers said mass protests in Dallas and other cities haven't moved the immigration debate much, with some expressing irritation at the widespread student walkouts. (snip) "It is offensive and outrageous for people who have broken the law to demand to be treated equally," said Rep. John Culberson, a Houston Republican who said federal authorities should have deployed buses to round up illegal immigrants at the marches. "It's as if we had mass protests of trespassers after they're caught, demanding the same rights as homeowners."

House conservatives yesterday issued a dire warning to President Bush and Republican leadership that they will pay a devastating political price if they proceed with a guest-worker program or anything resembling amnesty for illegal aliens before securing the borders and enforcing existing immigration laws. "They will remember in November," Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Republican, said of voters nationwide. "And many of those who have stood with our Republican majority in the last decade are not only angry, many of them plan to be absent from the polls" this year when the entire House and one-third of the Senate is up...

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush reassured Mexican President Vicente Fox on Thursday he was committed to getting the U.S. Congress to approve broad immigration reforms, including a guest worker program. (snip) "I'm committed to having a comprehensive immigration bill on my desk, and by comprehensive I mean not only border security, a bill that has border security, a bill that has security enforcement in it, but a bill that has a worker permit program in it," Bush said. Republicans are split on whether to back Bush's call for sweeping reforms to create a guest worker program...

I'm confused. The left, in the personage of Amnesty International, is claiming that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is as bad as the old Soviet Gulag camps. They called it "the gulag of our time." Notice that they artfully avoid using the words "Soviet" or "Russian" or "Siberian" before the word Gulag. Why even Al Jazeera quoted them saying that. Didn't New York Times writer Walter Durranty win a Pulitzer Prize in the 1930s, despite covering up the intentional famine in Ukraine? Could it be that the New York Times misinformed its readers about the truth of conditions in the...