Another day of interviews and calls, and my overwhelming sense is that the immigration bill as drafted is as dead as dead can be.  The president's speech on Tuesday had the effect of throwing gas on the flames, and the anger has multiplied, and it isn't nativist in the least.

Could the bill be saved?  Only if the Republican leadership comes back with a package of amendments which it announces beforehand and insists be voted on serially and all of which must be adopted if cloture is to be invoked on the final amended version.  The choice before the Democrats is whether they will accept genuine enforcement (the whole fence first, big hikes in federal law enforcement beyond the Border Patrol, a burden of proof requirement on non-Spanish speaking immigrants from countries with jihadist networks and perhaps even for gang-age Spanish speakers etc.)  What happened over the past ten days was a huge shift against the bill so that the amendment package must be real reform of the reform or the dead end will be reached. John McCain knew what he was doing when he demanded a jam down --the bill has lost support with every day of scrutiny.

Quick: Name one person who went from undecided or opposed to supporting since the bill was unveiled.  Proponents have produced such a bad bill and marshalled such bad arguments that they have brought no one to their cause.

Expect more and more Democrats to try and keep the bill as it is because of the inferno on the right.  Even lefties pushing for more family member migrations etc have got to see that unity in pushing the present version forward will splinter the GOP as surely as the Corn Laws did Peel's Tories or as Ireland did Gladstone's Liberals.  If the GOP doesn't get its amendment package out and adopted, the Republican Leader has got to call a halt to the meltdown.  See this story for a clue on the deep damage done to the GOP over the past few days. 

At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table:  This push for this bill is a disaster, Mr. President.  Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer.  On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill.  It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!).  No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million.  No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built.  No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.

No one believes passing the bill will help catch the jihadist sleepers already in the country. The constituency that has always been with you except on the ports deal --the security voter-- has left the room.  If you want them back, act quickly.

This isn't a talk radio fueled shout from the far right.  It isn't the Minutemen or the Tancredo people.  It is the GOP faithful who don't want it, nor anything like it.

Huddle up, D.C. GOPers, and unveil a new and very different, very improved version.  Couple it with the argument that Hillary is coming and this is the best we will get if we lose the White House.  But the deal has to be one worth taking, not the same deal we'd get under a second President Clinton.  That's why the political rebelion is here: This looks like a bill that Hillary would have sold as tough on enforcement.  We can wait two years for that.

Time's awasting.

It is just not believable.  Fix it or kill it

The author of thgis week's Letter from Washington charting stresses within the GOP joined me in the first hour.  The transcript of the interview will be up here later, as will those of my interviews with Mark Steyn and James Lileks.

And in a Don King-like moment, I'll be conducting separate interviews with National Review's Rich Lowry and the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley on the immigration bill.  Trash talking and taunting will no doubt mark these two sit-downs, as both jockey for position in the upcoming showdown debate (which the Journal has yet to accept.)

Is Cynthia McKinney thinking of leaving the Democrat Party -- and running for President as a 3rd Party candidate?

This is from Opinion Journal:

Hello, Cynthia

Last week, a scream from the political past echoed again. Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, who was ousted from Congress in a Democratic primary last year over her bizarre behavior and extreme left-wing views, appeared on New York radio station WBAI and hinted that she might leave the Democratic Party and run for president as a Green Party candidate. Ralph Nader won 2.3% of the vote running on that ticket in the photo-finish 2000 election.

Ms. McKinney clearly has her stump speech already down: "With the failure of the Democratic Congress to repeal the Patriot Act, the Secret Evidence Act, the Military Tribunals Act, I have to seriously question my relationship with the Democratic Party," she told radio listeners. "All the current Democrats running for president support the principle of potential military action against Iran; none of them is for impeachment of the President. They can't speak for me. I am open to a lot of ideas in 2008." No doubt many of those ideas will be generated for her by the tinfoil-hat brigades of the loony left.

Journalists, naturally, are thrilled at the prospect of Ms. McKinney entering the race and providing a constant source of entertainment and copy.

Please, please, PLEASE let this happen...

H/t: Amanda Carpenter

I would say they’re rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic, but a more apt analogy would be they’re throwing deck chairs off the Titanic. Admittedly that doesn’t make any sense, but since when has the McCain campaign been about making sense?

According to this report on a website that I’ve never heard of but seems really reliable since it has a lot of alcohol-related imagery, the McCain campaign has parted ways with its South Carolina political director Brad Henry and three other field operatives. And this in spite of the great progress reported by that one outlier poll!

All of which reminds me – have you entered the pool yet?

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

Gabriel Schoenfeld has some thoughts on next Tuesday's decision.

The judge will finally get his say on the charade.

Tomorrow night, I'll be speaking at The Leadership Institute's Public Relations School -- and on Saturday morning -- I'll be speaking at Campaigns & Elections Magazine's Seminar, "The Art of Political Campaigning." 

If you're interested in running for political office, or just becoming a more effective conservative activist, plan on attending one of these fine programs ...

They dislike him!  They really dislike him!

Time Magazines’ Joe Klein has an article on Mitt Romney today that isn’t particularly favorable. Actually, it’s downright hostile. Before continuing, I must confess to liking Joe Klein. I enjoyed “Primary Colors,” and have always thought him a far more entertaining media presence than the leftwing bloggers do. Those guys hate him.

The point of Klein’s article is that Mitt Romney rubs him the wrong way. There’s really nothing more substantive there, or certainly nothing more substantive that you haven’t already heard 8 million times before. As required by the Time Magazine style-book, Klein hits the flip-flop thing (breathtaking originality!) and misstates Romney’s past immigration positions which are the same as they are today, but big deal. Such things are all in a day’s work for a media Bigfoot. Fresh insights and reporting accuracy aren’t job requirements at dinosaurs like Time Magazine. No newsflash there.

But check out the way Mitt Romney obviously makes Joe Klein’s flesh crawl, and the way Klein makes no effort to disguise that fact:

Mitt Romney is the fastest-talking presidential candidate I have ever seen. He dashes through his stump speech like a racehorse in full gallop — he even looks a bit equine… But his speed of delivery also has an element of sleight of hand… When Romney slowed down and focused on a single issue — immigration — at a press conference in Dover, N.H., the brazen cynicism of his candidacy became almost embarrassing… Romney takes postures, not positions…

"You know," he often says, very Reagan, "there are people out there who actually believe America is great because of its government." Gasps and groans. "Well, we have a great system of government, but America is great because of" — pause for effect, cue passion — "its people."

There is something slightly anachronistic about all this. Romney is the most perfect iteration I've seen of the television-era candidate. At one point, I squinted a bit and saw him in the middle distance: blue suit, white shirt, red tie, high forehead, slick black hair, tan, tall and ramrod straight — he could have been an exhibit in some future Museum of Natural History: Politicianus americanus… His success or failure will be a reflection of how serious the electorate is in 2008.

Battle-hardened conservatives will recognize this tired media meme. As with the rest of Klein’s piece, it’s breathtakingly clichéd. In the eyes of super-smart reporters like Joe Klein, successful Republicans have only succeeded because they were so skilled at hoodwinking the unwashed masses who couldn’t recognize hokiness and “sleight of hand” when they stared them right in the eye.

Ronald Reagan got the same kind of relentless criticism from enlightened lefties for decades. Oh, how his purportedly empty platitudes about the greatness of America and the American people maddened the media. He, too, was labeled an anachronism, one that came straight out of the 1950’s. Why, the simpleton Reagan even selected “Family Ties” as his favorite TV show, a program that was frighteningly redolent of anachronistic 1950’s family values.

The fact that Romney has emerged as the candidate who most irritates the left is an unmistakably good sign for his campaign. Liberals by nature loathe their opponents. (Conservatives, on the other hand, mock their opponents.) The fact that Romney so angers adversaries like Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, and the Boston Globe is a good thing; for whatever reason, the only Republicans who ever get into the Oval Office are the ones who really rub lefties the wrong way.

The Klein article also reveals a fundamental divide between the liberal media and a guy like Romney. Romney really does believe in the greatness of America and her people. That’s why, even though we face such enormous challenges, he’s still honestly optimistic. He radiates this optimism, and it drives some people nuts. Shouldn’t he be despondent about Gitmo like everyone else?

Also, like Ronald Reagan, Romney effortlessly gets under his critics’ skin for having the audacity to be smarter and more insightful than they are. The media routinely dismissed Reagan as a senile dunderhead. Reagan was in good company there. Eisenhower had the same reputation a generation earlier. It never dawned on the gluttons at the press buffet to wonder how such dopes habitually ran circles around them. And how it must have shocked them when it turned out that Reagan was a more skilled and lucid writer than all of the knights of the keyboard who so vainly hounded him.

While Romney will be tougher to dismiss as an intellectual lightweight than Reagan was because of his impressive resume, his “simple” faith in America is sure to madden the media. It’s also telling that Klein attacks Romney for his “speed of delivery” and “sleight of hand.” One of the things that drove the liberal Boston media nuts about Romney is that they were convinced he had something up his sleeve, but could never find it. For four years the local media unloaded haymakers in Romney’s direction, and never laid a glove on him. Drove them nuts.

I got a glimpse into exactly how deep this frustration ran when I appeared on a local chat-fest with Boston Globe columnist and longtime Romney nemesis Joan Vennochi last week. I mentioned that Romney had balanced a wildly out of whack budget without raising taxes. Joan countered that he had balanced the budget only by raising fees and – I hope you’re sitting down for this – closing corporate loopholes! Since every Democrat since Woodrow Wilson has had “closing corporate loopholes” as the lynchpin of his economic plan, this was an odd attack for a liberal to make.

But such is the effect that Mitt Romney has on the liberal media. He has brought his message directly to the rubes, and it has resonated. Curses! No wonder why Joe Klein is so frustrated.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

David Yepsen writes:

There is some evidence to suggest Thompson would hurt Romney, one of the three front-runners in Iowa, by entering the race.

It comes by comparing two polls of likely GOP caucus-goers taken during May. The Iowa Poll, taken by the Des Moines Register, did not include Thompson, who has not formally announced. But the American Research Group poll, taken by a Manchester, NH research firm, did include Thompson.

When you compare the findings of the two polls, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain actually increase their support if Thompson is in the race. Romney drops.

Giuliani got 17 percent in the Thompson-free Iowa Poll. He gets 23 percent in the Thompson-included ARG poll. McCain’s numbers were 18 percent in the Iowa Poll and 25 percent in the ARG.)

By contrast, Romney scored 30 percent in the Iowa Poll that did not include Thompson. But he dropped to 16 percent in the ARG poll that included Thompson. That’s a drop of close to 50 percent so it seems clear Thompson is taking a least a little something away from Romney here.

The editors of the National Review have challenged the editors of the Wall Street Journal to debate the merits of the immigration bill.

I offer an entire show, pretaped if necessary for the convenience of the east coasters.  Next Wednesday or Thursday anyone?

(I am the perfect moderator as I have actually read the bill, interviewed the key players about it, and would support it but for the flaws on the enforcement side.  If it could be made to work --we'd have to pretape before his show, or conduct the debate live from 6 to 9 PM-- I'd also invite Michael Medved to pose questions, and he's a supporter of the bill as written.)

RSVPs to hugh@hughhewitt.com.

Sheesh.  That wasn't very bright.  From the Boston Globe:

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.

Was Lindeman Flea?

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.

Who else but Congressional Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus?

Well, not so much. La Shawn Barber talks about the rewards the black community is reaping for its fealty to Democrats:

Swain cites statistics that show the national unemployment rate was 4.5 percent inApril 2007. For Hispanics, it was 5.4 percent. For blacks, 8.2 percent.For black men, the rate of unemployment was 9.7 percent.

Swain accused the race-centric, taxpayer-supported caucus of turning a blind eye on a mounting pile of data that reveals illegal immigration is harming low-income, low-skilled black Americans. In anew book of essays, Debating Immigration, Swain contends that lax enforcement of immigration law helps businesses hirewage-suppressing illegal aliens at the expense of citizens.

But the CBC couldn’t care less. The group hasn’t listed immigration reform as a legislative priority, according to Swain, andit mentioned illegal immigration in only one press release out of closeto 100 on the web site. Instead of focusing on the well-being of constituents, the CBC is forming a black-brown coalition with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to “create a task force to study immigration issues and provide information about the impact of immigration reform on the black and Hispanic communities,” according to The Hill.

Then, read the National Review's "you wanna take this outside?" moment, here.

If there's a fight, I'm so there.

On Wednesday Hillary Clinton was forced to defend her use of private jets provided by corporate CEOs - you know, the evil CEOs who make too much money.  

Sen. Clinton, who complained about corporate America's largesse and skyrocketing executive pay during campaign events Wednesday, said she did not believe her message was undermined by her acceptance of the private flights. In line with Senate rules then in effect, Clinton's campaign has said she reimbursed Gupta at the cost of a first-class flight, typically a significant discount off the expense of a private jet.

"Those were the rules. You'll have to ask somebody else whether that's good policy," she said.

We're supposed to ask somebody other than the senators themselves whether their rules are good policy?  Didn't she vote for the rules?

Senate rules only require her to reimburse the corporation and CEO for the cost of a first class ticket.  $500-$1,000 doesn't seem like a bad trade off for the luxury of a private jet costing $5,000-$15,000 a trip.   It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that she's getting a steep discount.   Sounds like a gift to me.

Even more interesting is that some of her corporate sponsored campaign travel is being provided by InfoUSA a company who scoops up the personal information on Americans and sells it to telemarketers in less than honest ways.

Dick Morris looks at the details:

According to the The New York Times, InfoUSA compiled and sold lists that disclosed the names of elderly men and women who would be likely to respond to unscrupulous scams. The lists left no doubt about the vulnerability of the elderly targets. The Times reported, for example, that InfoUSA advertised lists of "Elderly Opportunity Seekers," 3.3 million older people "looking for ways to make money," and "Suffering Seniors," 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer's disease. "Oldies but Goodies" contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: "These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change."

InfoUSA sold lists to companies that were under investigation or closed down by courts because of their criminal activity. The company's internal emails show that employees were aware that the investigation for elderly fraud involved their customers, but sold the lists anyway. The Times profiled one unfortunate 92 year old man who entered a sweepstake sponsored by InfoUSA. The information that he innocently provided was then sold to the predator marketers. After responding to their telemarketing calls seeking financial information, his entire life savings was stolen from his bank account at Wachovia Bank. These practices, using lists supplied by InfoUSA were repeated all over the country.