In other words, more deceitful. Byron York:

Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican behind the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, says he “probably should have been more artful in the use of terms” when he said in a Spanish-language interview last weekend that the bill first provides for legalization of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and then, after that, for increased border security.

Rubio made the comments in an interview Wednesday afternoon with radio host Sean Hannity. In the conversation, Hannity referred to earlier Rubio appearances in which the two discussed the role of border security in the Gang of Eight bill. “I remember when I first interviewed you about this,” Hannity said to Rubio, “and I asked you very specifically, do you support border security first, and your answer was yes.”

“Right, but it is border security before the green card,” Rubio responded. “The problem is in the interim you have to do something with the people who are here illegally so we know who they are.”

The exchange highlighted the confusion that exists about the Gang of Eight bill even among well-informed followers of the issue. From the very beginning, the Gang of Eight bill has provided for the near-immediate legalization of the 11 million, once they have undergone a background check, paid a fine, and the Department of Homeland Security comes up with, but does not actually implement, a plan for enhanced border security. In broad terms, the sequence of events laid out in the bill is legalization first, then new border security measures, and then green cards and a path to citizenship.

At times conservatives have interpreted Rubio’s remarks to mean that he supports putting new border security measures in place before the initial legalization. He doesn’t, and he emphasized that in the weekend Spanish-language interview with Univision. “Let’s be clear,” Rubio said. “Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence.”

. . . .

Toward the end of the interview, Hannity returned to Rubio’s statement on Univision. “You understand that people read the interview, those of us that didn’t speak Spanish, and it was interpreted as first comes legalization, then comes secure the border, that legalization is not conditional. I think you would then understand why people thought this.”

“Right,” Rubio said. “So maybe, I probably should have been more artful in the use of terms.”

Yeah, because now people understand exactly what is going on.

Rubio, by the way, says he wants to get people legalized in part because they need to pay the fines that are going to fund border security. Bull, says me. Illegals will have to pay about $17 per month over ten years in “fines” — and guess what? They’ll be able to get welfare once they are immediately legalized before the border is secured:

The immigration bill introduced to the Senate a week and a half ago would, if passed, allow illegal immigrants to access state and local welfare benefits immediately, Breitbart News has learned. The financial impact of allowing potentially millions of immigrants onto state and local public assistance could overwhelm these programs’ budgets.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) uncovered this loophole in the bill and many others, and he will circulate a memo detailing the gaps in the bill on Tuesday. Breitbart News exclusively obtained a copy of the memo before its public release.

“The Gang of Eight made a promise that illegal immigrants will not be able to access public benefits,” Sessions said in a statement to Breitbart News. “We already know that, once granted green cards and ultimately citizenship, illegal immigrants will be able to access all public benefit programs at a great cost to taxpayers. We have, however, identified a number of loopholes that would allow illegal immigrants to draw public benefits even sooner than advertised.”

That $17 per month is going to come out of our pockets, ultimately — not the illegals’ pockets.

This thing is junk. Kill it.

UPDATE:

RT @conncarroll: Rubio just voted with Democrats against Grassley amendment to secure border first before legalization

— John Ekdahl, Jr. (@JohnEkdahl) June 13, 2013

UPDATE x2: Deport Legalize the Criminals First.

Last night I asked for specific links and quotes that show Obama’s surveillance is more intrusive than Bush’s. Thanks to papertiger for providing this link to a Michael Isikoff article:

The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

The FBI’s increased use of the Patriot Act’s “business records” provision — and the wide ranging scope of its requests — is getting new scrutiny in light of last week’s disclosure that that the provision was used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of telephone calls.

Taken together, experts say, those revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court accepted that broad interpretation of the law.

Apparently the number of requests has gone up, but I’m not sure that the focus on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections is new. I know I keep quoting this article, but according to this USA Today article from 2006, Bush was collecting information on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections:

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

It sounds like the upshot of this is that Obama is not doing anything different in kind, but is doing something different in scope.

Which makes him a hypocritical scumbag for embracing and expanding a program that he had criticized when a candidate, as this video shows:

“No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.” Oh, did I say “no more”? I meant 1000% more.