[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Robert Cruickshank

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, California believed it could solve its economic crisis by deporting 2 million Mexican and Mexican American residents - including many US-born citizens. It did absolutely nothing to ameliorate the Depression - you cannot exclude your way to prosperity - but nevertheless the deportations went on throughout the decade.

The Assembly Republicans, better known as the Yacht Party, appear to be heading down the same failed path. They have come up with the foolish idea that the budget crisis can be balanced by attacking immigrants:

Assembly Republicans this week promoted nearly two dozen bills they said would reduce the "negative impact" that illegal immigrants have on the state budget and border security. The proposals range from requiring individuals to show proof of citizenship when receiving state-funded benefits to repealing a law enabling undocumented students to pay in-state college tuition....

by Robert in Monterey [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, dean of the neocons and now a weekly columnist for the New York Times, says the big difference between John McCain and the rest of the Republican field is that McCain seems refreshingly old-fashioned.

Read between the lines, it implies that McCain has a certain integrity that the others, being thoroughly modern men, are bereft of. McCain, he suggested, was a neo-Victorian – rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled. Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. But can it work Tuesday in California?

Someone less committed to the cause might put the comparison in less flattering terms. McCain's sense of principle shines in comparison to the flippers and flakes he's running against.

Mike Huckabee – who began as a straight shooter, defending his record as governor of Arkansas to provide in-state college tuition to illegal aliens, OK'ing a tax increase and sounding like an economic populist – has now joined the immigration exclusionists and touts a regressive flat tax that makes President Bush look like a Marxist.