The “Gang of Eight” has a bogus crap immigration proposal a brewin’.

Senate negotiators on Tuesday were putting the finishing touches on a bipartisan immigration bill as labor and agriculture groups argued about restrictions on immigrant farmworkers and their pay, lawmakers and officials involved in the negotiations said.

“We’re making progress. We’re trying to get it done this week,” Senator John McCain told reporters.

The Arizona Republican is one of eight Democrats and Republicans in the Senate trying to cobble together a complicated bill that would update immigration laws for the first time since 1986.

. . . .

The linchpin of the immigration bill would end deportation fears for most of the approximately 11 million people who are living in the United States illegally, many from Central America and Asia. The legislation would eventually put many of them on a path to citizenship, if further progress was made in securing the southwestern border with Mexico.

There actually is room for “immigration reform” — just maybe not what you think.

I used to think that people who wanted to come here from Mexico could do so, although they would have to wait a while. If people were willing to wait in line, I thought, why should the line get jumped by people who broke the law to come here?

But then, I listened to this Planet Money episode from NPR, and listened to an economist say that if you are an unskilled worker from Mexico with no relatives here, the waiting list to come to the U.S. is . . .

130 years.

Clearly, there is economic demand for unskilled workers from Mexico. But if you’re following the law, there is no way you can come legally.

No. Way.

Now. I don’t want people coming here a) with the possibility of carrying communicable diseases like TB; b) with no background check; and/or c) who have broken the law to get here.

I think it’s unrealistic to deport over 10 million people, but I have no problem with it in theory.

So my general idea would be: if you want to get in line, we’ll make the line realistic. If you don’t, we’re not pandering to you and giving you citizenship. You can live in the proverbial shadows as far as I am concerned.

So here is my off the cuff, totally unresearched, random immigration proposal.

Your options: live in the shadows, or become a legal immigrant. We will liberalize the rules for green card holders from Mexico like mad. Whether you are skilled or not. Whether you have family here or not.

But you go back and get in line. We’ll make the line realistic for once. But get in line.

You don’t like the line? Enjoy the shadows.

That’s my idea. You tell me where I am wrong.

(I warned you about my newfound learning on creating memes.)

Charles C. Johnson and Ryan Girdusky have a piece at the Daily Caller about Touré’s history of militant anti-white opinionating:

MSNBC host Touré founded a student newspaper dedicated to black liberation theology while he was a college student attending Emory University from 1989 to 1992.

Touré’s flagship publication, The Fire This Time, lavished praise on famous anti-Semites, black supremacists, and conspiracy theorists whom Touré helped bring to campus. Before he became an intense-but-sardonic TV personality, Touré also decried “the suffocating white community” and defended a nationally famous fake hate crime.

The article quotes the budding racist saying: “The Black tribe is possibly the strongest of all the tribes and Black students who choose not to be a part pay a heavy social price.” It describes a list of people that Touré’s group brought to campus and described as “role models” including anti-Semites (one blamed Jewish “bloodsuckers” for creating holes in the ozone layer and another said Jews functioned as mass murderers of people of color to stay in Israel) and violent people (one had served time for robbery and is now serving a life sentence for murdering a cop).

His career as a budding Al Sharpton was cemented when he championed the cause of a student who claimed to be the victim of a vicious racist incident — and who later admitted it was a hoax. Touré continued to champion the cause after she admitted the controversy was fraudulent — and said it didn’t matter whether it had actually happened.

And . . .

And . . .

Oh, why do I bother? I could be talking about the President of the United [several expletives deleted]ing States and nobody would care. And this guy is just another racist on MSNBC. (Remember: it’s not racism if they hate the white guy.)

Sorry for wasting your time.

UPDATE: Touré ripped to shreds by an obvious racist.

BOOM.

Thanks to Steve57.

Thank God for our all-knowing protectors:

New York City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. introduced legislation Tuesday that would either ban or introduce tight regulations on costumed characters in New York City.

The proposal comes in the wake of several incidents involving the costumed characters in Times Square. Most recently, a man dressed as Cookie Monster from “Sesame Street” was arrested this past Sunday after allegedly shoving a 2 1/2-year-old boy.

. . . .

“We’ve had an anti-Semitic Elmo. We’ve had a groping Mario. And now we have a shoving monster,” Vallone said.

Costumes don’t shove infants. Failing to register costumes shoves infants.

P.S. I learned how to make memes tonight for the first time. Whee! This post is really just an excuse to put my first one up.

Don’t be surprised to see more of these.

Via Hot Air. Like just about everything else on this site.

Ace (at that Breitbart conversation thingie):

Suppose you hear something — a fact, a word — for the very first time. You’ve never in your life heard of this thing.

Have you ever had it so happen that you then hear this thing two or three more times in the next few days?

Apparently the killjoys call this the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon” (if you’re hip and with it), or the frequency illusion (if they’re total killjoys).

It’s a good illusion, because I think everyone has experienced this. And you really do end up thinking: This is no illusion. I just learned about this concept. Are you trying to tell me that I have heard this same concept mentioned multiple times every day for years and I just now picked up on it?

Bull%^&! I heard it like three times today! That’s a coincidence? That’s an illusion??

Maybe it is, you know. It just seems hard to believe sometimes.

Any crazy examples you have experienced?

Because all of a sudden, they have to:

Spelling-bee champions have a lot in common with Scrabble players. They might not have the same command of all the three-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary, or have impressed on their memories the anagrams for all the common combinations of letters, but the purpose of the spelling bee has been the formal arrangement of letters in the right order, not the meaning of the resulting word.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee — the biggie of them all — is about to change that. In the elimination rounds, contestants also will be judged on their ability to define words, or at least pick out the definition from a multiple-choice question.

“It represents a deepening of the bee’s commitment to its purpose,” Director Paige Kimble told USA Today, “to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives.”

I have a theory, and I want to see how it plays out in the comments. My guess is a lot of people who are into writing in some form or another are spelling nerds who did fairly well in spelling bees as children. (And who would be only too happy to tell you just how well they did in those spelling bees.) And my guess is that those people have an affinity for spelling bees being about, you know, spelling.

Whereas probably other people either support the whole vocabulary thing, or (say it isn’t so!) just don’t care at all.

Where do my readers come down on this — and how do your feelings correlate, if at all, with your childhood success at spelling bees? Is my theory right or wrong?

And he was caught — steel yourself — planning to campaign against Ashley Judd!!

He even discussed her possible weaknesses and ways to exploit them!!!

Meanwhile, after all the manufactured angst over James O’Keefe (not really) planning to bug a U.S. Senator, we now have someone who . . . actually did bug a U.S. Senator.

Cue the lefty outrage.

Because of the principles!

UPDATE: It is, of course, possible that McConnell was not bugged by the opposition, but that someone on his team (perhaps illegally) recorded the conversation. Hopefully the FBI can get to the bottom of it.

Reporter tells world that police were warned in advance about possible danger posed by Aurora shooter James Holmes. Reporter is threatened with jail for refusing to disclose her sources. The world ignores the story.

Because the reporter is from Fox News.

Jake Tapper is breaking the silence. Good on him.

And to hell with the New York Times.

Why, it was part of a cultural exchange:

A visit by American pop star Beyonce and rapper husband Jay-Z to Havana last week was a cultural trip that was fully licensed by the U.S. Treasury Department, a source familiar with the itinerary said on Monday.

The longstanding U.S. trade embargo against Cuba prevents most Americans from traveling to the communist-led island without a license granted by the U.S. government.

Some lawmakers are not happy:

In a letter dated on Friday, reports Reuters, U.S. Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, asked Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, for “information regarding the type of license that Beyoncé and Jay-Z received, for what purpose, and who approved such travel.”

. . . .

“Despite the clear prohibition against tourism in Cuba, numerous press reports described the couple’s trip as tourism, and the Castro regime touted it as such in its propaganda,” the letter said. “We represent a community of many who have been deeply and personally harmed by the Castro regime’s atrocities, including former political prisoners and the families of murdered innocents.”

. . . .

Sen. Marco Rubio also had strong words about the trip and issued a statement Monday accusing the Obama administration of not properly enforcing the law that bans tourism:

“U.S. law clearly bans tourism to Cuba by American citizens because it provides money to a cruel, repressive and murderous regime. Since their inception, the Obama Administration’s ‘people to people’ cultural exchange programs have been abused by tourists who have no interest in the Cuban people’s freedom and either don’t realize or don’t care that they’re essentially funding the regime’s systematic trampling of people’s human rights,” said Rubio.

I am not a fan of the policy of prohibiting people from traveling to Cuba. I understand the purpose of the ban, but I am generally for freedom. My default position is that we should be able to travel where we want to travel.

But if the ban should be lifted, it should be lifted for all — not just those who are friends with Obama.