This news is good enough to be posted on two blogs…Sam Zamarripa will not seek re-election!

From The Dustin Inman Society:

While the motivation remains unclear, the illegal alien/open borders lobby - and illegal aliens themselves - have lost a tirelesss and well conected advocate in the Georgia senate today…Sam Zamarripa has today announced that he will not seek re-election.

We couldn’t be happier.

Stay tuned: maybe he will resign his memebrship on the national board of MALDEF next!

Maybe the AJC will now inform its readers of Zamarripa’s vested financial interest in continued illegal immigration.

Then again…maybe I’ll need to go out and buy a hair dryer tomorrow.

From the AJC today:

Zamarripa to bow out of politics
Outspoken state senator will pursue business opportunities
By SONJI JACOBS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/05/06

State Sen. Sam Zamarripa, an Atlanta Democrat who became the first Hispanic elected to Georgia Senate in 2002, announced Wednesday that he will not seek re-election this year.

Zamarripa said that he has decided to bow out of politics for the time being to focus his energy on spurring economic development — particularly global business opportunities — in Atlanta.

“My feeling was that the greatest opportunity for me was to pursue things I am very good at related to economic development, and to do that out of the Senate,” Zamarripa said.

Zamarripa said that during his four years as a state senator, he was most pleased with his work on the Senate Economic Development Committee. There, he sponsored and passed legislation that encourages the People’s Republic of China to invest in Georgia and build strong business relationships that will create jobs and encourage economic growth in the state. The lawmaker said he plans to continue his work in that area both within his private business and as a volunteer for the city and state

I make the observation that this announcment represents a welcomed step back from the path to Georgiafornia.

I would write more, but I am on my way out to do my happy dance.

Here’s the deal:

Senate Republicans want to amend the pending legislation to limit the number of illegal immigrants who would qualify for temporary Visas.

Senate Democrats want to bill to remain “as-is” to allow Visas for nearly all 12 million illegal aliens in the U.S. today.

Therefore…

Democrats are objecting to every proposed amendment and Republicans refuse to end debate and allow a floor vote.

Democrats don’t have the 60 votes necessary to end debate and Republicans are not backing down on the amendment process.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is scheduled to speak on the floor at 3:15 EST and maybe get things moving…we’ll see.

Hopefully this bill will just die…no bill is better than the garbage we have now.

Imagine that you and several thousand of your closest friends decided to sneak into Mexico illegally. And imagine you then gathered in one of the largest cities, waving American flags and blocking traffic. Imagine you demanded in English that the Mexicans change their laws to accom modate you.

How long do you think it would take before the policia came along and gave you the thumping you would so richly deserve?
Bush burns his base on the borders, by Paul Mulshine, New Jersey Star-Ledger, March 30, 2006

Not very long, of course, and in fact, Allan Wall has reported on a case just like that, where 18 American students were deported from Mexico for taking part in a demonstration.

Mulshine has more to say, though:

The force at work there is called nationalism. There’s nothing wrong with it. Nationalism is the reason every good, old-fashioned, red-blooded American gets ticked off when he sees Mexican flags in the streets of Los Angeles.

Everyone except the comandante in chief, that is.George Bush seems to believe he was elected to advance the national interests of Mexico rather than the United States.

Read the whole thing.

I received about five million emailed copies of Robert J. Samuelson’s March 8 column in the Washington Post calling for a border fence. This morning (April 5), Samuelson has a softer column, The Immigration Impasse: A Way Out, dismissing the current House bill as “mean-spirited and delusional” and combining his advocacy of a fence with…re-emphasized advocacy of an amnesty for illegals currently here.

This doesn’t dismay me. When you follow a complex issue like the economics of immigration, as I have for some fourteen years, you get a sense of whether another writer knows the underlying technical literature. Samuelson does; Tamar Jacoby does not. That’s why I sent him a copy of Alien Nation when it came out in 1995.

But Samuelson didn’t acknowledge my generosity, and writes about immigration so rarely that each column is greeted as a revelation by the more naive immigration reformers, probably for the same reason: the immense political and peer group pressure that is brought to bear on any immigration critic in the MSM. One symptom of this is irritability with your putative but unfashionable allies, such as the House Republicans. Another is clumsy compromising, such Samuelson’s amnesty aberration, which obviously contradicts completely his concern for lower-income Americans and would just inspire more illegal immigration, like all previous amnesties.

Steve Sailer has blogged some incisive comments this morning on similar triangulating behavior from another Big Foot economics columnist who seems to have seen the light on immigration, the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman. (As usual with Steve when I’m not editing him, it’s buried under several tons of other interesting ideas - scroll to example 4).

Samuelson, of course, deserves vastly more credit than Krugman. He has been not just correct, but (fairly) courageous.

Stiil, the moral: put not your faith in MSM princes. Leadership in the immigration crisis has to come from outside the Establishment.