This seems to becoming an issue – and the left appears to be gleefully latching on to it on the theory that they can paint conservatives as racist over it: modify the 14th Amendment in order to prevent the children of illegal immigrants from obtaining automatic American citizenship. It all stems from this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside…

This amendment, ratified in 1868, was designed to prevent any State from denying citizenship to any freed slaves, or their children. It was a wise and necessary amendment – but it also does need to be modified.

Back when it was enacted, it took a couple weeks to get from Europe to the United States – longer to get from any other overseas area. And even traveling 50 miles to the United States from inside Mexico was an arduous, lengthy and expensive task – especially for any woman who was expecting a child. So, the problem of illegal immigrants giving birth in the United States simply wasn’t even a problem. Heck, it wasn’t even a concept.

Times have changed. You can get to the United States from pretty much anywhere in the world within 24 hours – and in great comfort and with readily accessible medical care along the way. There is just no bar to coming here – as long as you don’t get caught at the border (and most don’t), your only problem is deciding just where to have the baby inside the United States. And, once born, that child is an American citizen – no doubt about it and fully within the protections of the United States constitution.

What we are seeing because of this is a rising number of women coming to the United States for the express purpose of giving birth here. Their child is thus an American and eligible for all aid any other American child can obtain – and, of course, having an American citizen child makes it more likely you’ll be able to stay in country, should the authorities ever question your residency status. This is not what the 14th amendment was intended to do – it was intended to secure basic rights, it has become a vehicle for special privileges.

The logical thing to do is change it like so:

All persons born to at least one citizen of the United States or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside…

Neat and simple and solves the problem. Enact this, and women who are pregnant will stop coming because there will be no purpose in doing so.

Our liberals, of course, will still try to play this as racist. Their plan would be to make the concept so hateful that GOPers would run screaming away from it and liberals would reap the electoral benefit. It wouldn’t, however, work out that way – this will be another one of those things of late (like the Arizona law) where once people learn the provisions, support for it will be overwhelming. Liberals try to play the race card on this and it will blow right up in their faces.

What this debate will do is firmly illustrate just how deformed our political debate has become. Rather than seeing an issue and coming to a swift and rational resolution of same, everything has to be ground up in the liberal propaganda machine. We can’t just argue about things – liberals insist that hatred and division be sown and that all problems become a crisis. Fortunately, the liberal MO is rapidly running out of steam – as more and more people realize just what liberalism has been up to, the more likely it becomes that liberalism will suffer a crushing defeat at the polls.

And that is what needs to happen. In order to start America on the path to recovery, it is required that liberalism be crushed. Liberalism has become a problem – and the major problem, because unless liberalism is out of the way, no other problems can be resolved. Issues like this will play in to the destruction of liberalism, and so we should press them with full vigor.

Larry Kudlow lays out some possibilities – all of them bad:

…Already there are rumors of an August surprise (to use the phrase of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis) where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forgive underwater mortgages held by millions of Americans. And with state and local government jobs having fallen 169,000 year-to-date, perhaps the Democratic Congress and the White House will seek an even bigger spending plan for teachers and Medicaid workers — on top of the $26 billion plan that just passed the Senate.

Or maybe the Democrats will come up with a new infrastructure-spending bill, perhaps for green technologies and whatnot. Or maybe they’ll extend unemployment benefits even more. My liberal friend Robert Reich is even talking up the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), where the government employed millions during the 1930s…

All of which is possible for two reasons:

1. Democrats haven’t figured out that the Keynesian economic model is flat wrong. It doesn’t work – it can’t work; you can’t print, borrow and spend your way in to wealth. But, Democrats remain wedded to it.

2. Democrats don’t conceive of any policy move which doesn’t have them dispensing taxpayer money in return for votes. If there isn’t an immediate and direct benefit to Democrats, why do it?

So, the sort of policies which would save the day – even at this late a date – simply won’t be tried. And thus we’re stuck with the very real prospect of the Democrats doing all or some of what is listed above – and all of that would simply make matters worse.

Fundamentally, only a change of government can allow us to start the economic recovery – Step One in that comes in November, but it must be kept in mind that the actual levers of power will remain in Obama’s hands until at least January 20th, 2013. This could get very ugly.

Victor Davis Hanson notes just where the cretins currently ruling our nation came from:

…The present symptoms that characterize both our popular culture and current governance — shrill self-righteousness; abstract communalism juxtaposed with concrete pursuit of the aristocratic good life; race/class/gender cosmic sermonizing with private school and Ivy league for the kids; crass and tasteless public expression; a serial inability to take responsibility for one’s actions; the bipartisan mega-deficits; the inability to cut pensions and social security for the baby boomers — from the trivial to the fundamental, all derive from a bankrupt cohort that came of age in the sixties and seventies.

…Yes, one walk across the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed power. If that is reductionism, so be it.

It will take a revolution to get these people out of office. Fortunately, they are pretty clueless about what is going on and that will help us.

First game is today – Dallas at Cincinnati, at 8pm eastern. And it is about time that we finally get some real sports back on TV. Sorry, baseball. Too bad, basketball. Are you kidding, soccer? Football is coming back to town!

Of course, all discussions of the teams chances are moot as we all know that the Chargers will romp to an undefeated season ending with a crushing Super Bowl victory over whatever hapless team gets to play victim. But, if you really think your non-Charger team might have a chance to at least make a game of it in the Super Bowl, then feel free to discuss your pathetic, little hopes.

Looks like it would be the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Given the six-digit salaries these folks are pulling down for their never-ending battle against “hate” (however they choose to define it), it’s pretty obvious that Santa is very good to them every year.

It’s also curious that the world’s leading civil rights organization can’t seem to find a single minority whom they consider to be worthy of a top management position…

Race is just a tool for the left – they aren’t interested in equality so much as interested in tearing down the United States and its institutions. The goal is not freedom and equality on the left, but a leftist government – always good to keep that in mind when you hear them yammer on about “hate” or “racism”.

Treat people with disrespect, and this is what can result.

Talk about carrying the fight to the enemy:

Hot Air points out that the district is rated D+23 – in other words, the conventional wisdom is absolutely no chance for a Republican to win the seat.

But I think there is – in fact, I don’t think any seat is out of range for the GOP. Some are a lot harder than others, of course, but a well done campaign can move the ball – and, just maybe, produce a GOP victory anywhere on the map.

To me, two things are important in politics – that each office holder have a primary challenger and that each seat be contested. No one gets comfortable – everyone has to continually re-state their views and win support.

Joel Demos has the second hardest political task in 2010 (the hardest is for the GOPer running against Nancy Pelosi, John Dennis – a pro-gun, anti-Fed, gold-standard, pro-gay rights, anti-war, libertarian Republican), and as he asks in the video – let’s help him out.

A horrible tragedy for which the perpetrators have never expressed full remorse:

…Late on Tuesday morning, when Nanking had been in Japanese hands for thirty-six hours, former Tokyo secret police chief Nakajima and his 16th division rolled in to town through the Water Gate in trucks and armored cars. he had been delayed by the capture of some 10,000 prisoners at the last moment. All through night his men has been busy herding the prisoners drove by drove to the edge of the Yangtze. They had worn their fingers to the bone pressing machine-gun triggers. At least 6,000 of the prisoners had died. Now in the flat drear light of the next noon, Nakajima’s men began a systematic search inside Nanking for Chinese soldiers who had run away, taken off their uniforms, and vanished. The orders from Prince Asaka, the Emperor’s uncle, were explicit: kill all captives…

…The 80,000-odd soldiers turned loose in Nanking by Muto, Nakajima and Prince Asaka would have raped, killed, stolen, and burned if left to their own devices. In the event they acted under the guidance of their officers; they worked at being drunk and disorderly; they ran amok, but systematically. Their rape of Nanking began when Nakajima entered the city on December 14; it continued for six weeks; and it was not stopped, despite world-wide protest, until Prince Konoye admitted to Hirohito that there was no longer any hope of unseating Chiang Kai-shek…

…In all, according to figures accepted after two years of hearings by a panel of eminent jurists from many lands, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which sat in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, 20,000 women were raped in Nanking and its vicinity and over 200,000 men, a least a quarter of them civilians, were murdered. – David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, Volume 1

Kind of puts that atomic bomb thing in to perspective, doesn’t it? As William Manchester once wrote, while time has blurred the jagged edges of Japan’s Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere it should be remember that the Japanese were a savage foe. After 14 years of Japan committing crime after crime and resisting our advance with fanatical determination even after it was clear the war was lost, it is no surprise that America’s leaders in 1945 opted for the atomic bomb.

…she thinks I’m a piano player in a whore house:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 23% of Adults share a favorable opinion of members of Congress. Seventy-two percent (72%) have an unfavorable view of congressmen. These findings include five percent (5%) who have a Very Favorable impression and 45% who have a Very Unfavorable view of the legislators…

That guy you saw slipping in to town with the hat pulled down over his eyes? That was your Representative. If he was a Democrat, he also had on a false mustache.

From CNBC:

U.S. employment fell for a second straight month in July as more temporary census jobs ended while private hiring rose less than expected, pointing to an anemic economic recovery…

Its not even an anemic recovery – it is no recovery, at all. The only reason the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5% is because the BLS says that labor force participation continues to drop. In fact, labor force participation is down to levels last seen in 1983. If we put the 3 million or so people who left back in to the mix, unemployment would be in the 11%+ range (whether or not BLS is fudging the participation rate to keep us officially below double-digit unemployment is an open question and if there is a GOP Congress next year, it should be looked in to).

We’re in a bad way and only a complete change in economic policies will allow us to start climbing out of the hole.

UPDATE: Zero Hedge decided to re-crunch the numbers using the labor force participation rate of 2000 instead of the much reduced rate of 2010. This makes sense – even given that a large number of people have left the labor force since 2000 through retirement or death, the growing population would indicate at least that number of people able and willing to work. The unemployment rate if we use that participation rate? 14.7%.