As I go to pixel, the congresscritters are still fighting over whether to close down the federal government in the name of 800,000 illegal aliens. I'll leave you to find out the result in tomorrow morning's news.

As I noted last week, the standard of debate over immigration is higher than it used to be—better for sure than it was in the previous recent attempts at immigration legislation in 2006, 2007, and 2013. I'd like to think that we here at VDARE.com have had something to do with that.

But the so-called Gang of Six bill, the attempted Senate solution, was still advertised brightly as "bipartisan." Uh-oh.

The "six" in "Gang of Six" are six senators, three Republicans and three Democrats. To be precise they are Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (SC), Jeff Flake (AZ), Cory Gardner (CO), and Democratic Senators Dick Durbin (IL), Michael Bennet (CO) and Robert Menendez (NJ). [ New Gang of Six ‘Bipartisan Deal’ on DACA Amnesty Is Not Serious, By Jessica Vaughan, CNS, January 15, 2018] As is my habit I shall just read off to you the NumbersUSA grades for those senators on immigration votes in the Senate, 2015-2018: F-minus, C-minus, D-minus, F, F-minus, F. The median grade there is F.

What did it propose to do, this Gang of Six bill? Executive summary: It offered the same bait-and-switch as the old Gang of Eight Rubio-Schumer effort five years ago. Permanent residency leading to citizenship for Dreamers, temporary—and we know what "temporary" means in an immigration context, don't we?—temporary status for their parents, promises of improvements to border security … Read more >>

Does “Temporary” Mean “Temporary”?
The Trump Administration recently terminated “Temporary” Protected Status for Salvadorans (TPS) for an earthquake that occurred in El Salvador 17 years ago. The Salvadorans have until September 9, 2019 to return to their country.

Needless to say, the U.S. Main Stream Media described this as a great injustice, even though most reporters didn’t even know what TPS was. [ Lawmakers and journalists often have no idea what they’re talking about , by Mark Krikorian, January 9, 2018] TPS only applied to eligible nationals of designated countries who were already present in the U.S. during a disaster. Shouldn’t they want to go home and help their countries recover?

What actually happens: the “temporary” status stretches out, so when the time comes to go home, they screech about suffering injustice rather than being thankful they were able to stay for years. Worse, while they’re here, they’re having children who are U.S. citizens because they’re “Anchor Babies.”

TPS has become just another way to sneak in illegal aliens and make it hard to ever deport them. Read more >>

The war for dominance in the Middle East, following the crushing of ISIS, appears about to commence in Syria—with NATO allies America and Turkey on opposing sides.

Turkey is moving armor and troops south to Syria's border enclave of Afrin, occupied by Kurds, to drive them out, and then drive the Read more >>

"Fishing Wars: Drowning in Regulations" debuts on CRTV.com's "Michelle Malkin Investigates" program this week.

Salt water. Seagulls. Striped bass.

My fondest childhood memories come from fishing with my dad on the creaky piers and slick jetties of the Jersey shore. The Atlantic Ocean is in my blood. So when Read more >>

One thing no liberal will ever turn down is the opportunity to get a standing ovation for accusing someone else of racism.

Democrats have placed their opening bid in the immigration talks on Trump's 10-yard line--a hilariously unbalanced "compromise" that is worse than their original proposal. Now, they are battering him with accusations of racism to force him into an amnesty deal that he was specifically elected to prevent.

Forced to choose, soccer moms are going with MSNBC-- and, hey, if that means we'll still have Rosa to clean the house, well, that's OK, too! Read more >>

Democracy is decaying and it’s President Trump’s fault, according to the consistently hysterical Nicholas Kristof in America’s Paper of Record. Shilling for a new book, How Democracies Die, Kristof tells us Donald Trump has met every single criterion for an aspiring authoritarian. But if Kristof [Email him] was serious about who is the real threat to what’s left of Americans’ traditional liberties, he should just look in the mirror.

Kristof moans:

For all my confidence that our institutions will trump Trump, the chipping away at the integrity of our institutions and norms does worry me…This unraveling was underway long before Trump (Newt Gingrich nudged it along in the 1990s), but Trump accelerated it.

It matters when Trump denounces the ‘deep state Justice Department,’ calls Hillary Clinton a ‘criminal’ and urges ‘jail’ for Huma Abedin, denounces journalists as the ‘enemy of the American people’ and promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who ‘beat the crap’ out of protesters. With such bombast, Trump is beating the crap out of American norms.

[ Trump’s Threat To Democracy , New York Times, January 10, 2018]

Similarly, President Trump was recently identified as the greatest threat in the world to the freedom of the press [ Trump Named The World’s No. 1 Oppressor Of Press Freedom , by Willa Frej, Huffington Post, January 9, 2018].

Meanwhile, back in what the Left used to call the “reality-based community,” it was only last Tuesday that yet again a Federal judge, based on nothing except his political opposition to the president, decided the unliteral liberalization of immigration law must remain in place forever and that the Commander-in-Chief had no authority to reverse DACA. Even the toothless Respectables at National Review found themselves aghast at “rhetoric in a judicial decision [which] would have been unthinkable barely a year ago… but now it passes for the new normal” [ A Ludicrous Ruling That Trump Can’t End DACA , by Josh Blackman, January 10, 2018]. Letting a random Federal judge dictate immigration policy seems like something even Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t tolerate, let alone a Vladimir Putin. Read more >>