Life is tough for Helen Krieble, whose Illegal Immigration “Amnesty with a trip home attached” plan (as Tom Tancredo calls it) has now become “the Pence Plan” and is being used to try to split House opposition to the Bush Administration’s effort to dissolve America.

We learn today (Coloradan rides into immigration fray By M.E. Sprengelmeyer The Rocky Mountain News July 3, 2006 ) that she not only has to decide which of two homes to use, how to spend the Loctite fortune she inherited, and which pet causes to support with her Foundation, but that her huge horse operation in Colorado is bothered by the annoying habit of U.S. citizens of wanting to be paid well.

Claiming

hands-on experience struggling to find American-born workers willing to fill entry-level jobs at the equestrian center in Parker

she says

farmers, ranchers and businesspeople around the country are unable to find American workers for certain jobs, even when they raise wages.
“To criminalize those people - both the worker and the employer - for doing what’s necessary in each of their lives without providing any legal way for it to work is immoral in my view,”

So there you are. It is necessary in Helen Krieble’s life to have a monster horse outfit. For that, ordinary Americans must be subjected to massive economic erosion and the country turned into a Spanish speaking third world slum. This reminds one of Mayor Bloomberg’s argument that mass immigration is justified because it supplies him with a more elegant golf course.

This account is valuable because it gets Pence on the record that the plan’s key virtue is that it delivers amnesty more efficiently

To gain legal status, the estimated 12 million workers in the United States illegally would have to return to their home countries, undergo background checks and health screenings, and reapply for jobs - potentially with their former employers.
With the private sector in charge of the employment centers, Pence believes the turnaround time could be a matter of weeks.

With astonishing obtuseness, Pence, in flattering his patron, likened Helen Krieble to Harriet Beecher Stowe

The reference is to the 19th century author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose writings exposing the evils of slavery helped set the stage for the Civil War. It’s rumored that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe, he famously quipped: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

Pence said that Krieble smiled when he told her she stirred the immigration fight the same way because her part-time home in Connecticut is not far from Stowe’s historic residence.

In terms of the economic and political damage done to America by the Civil War, Pence may have a point. But putting aside the misapprehension that the war was primarily about slavery, one might wonder why Mexican peasants have the same moral claim possessed by America’s blacks (huge losers under the Bush/Kennedy Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration Bill).

The fact is Helen Krieble is a fully accredited member of the Cheap Labor Lobby, her plan is a fraud, and Mike Pence is a contemptible disgrace.

This boils down to a squalid attempt by a rich and selfish old woman to put her interests ahead of her less fortunate compatriots. Complain to Helen Krieble (please be polite).

Besides a bushel of Bushes, immigration enthusiast money, the GOP hierachy etc. etc., Chris Cannon’s primary challenger apparently faced an even more formidable opponent: God. Ot at least the leadership of the Mormon Church. The Salt Lake City Tribune’s Robert Gehrke reports that, in an unusual step, church leaders issued a statement urging the faithful to vote in the primary. An increased turnout is generally presumed to help the incumbent. (LDS letter may have helped Cannon, June 30 2006.)

The LDS statement came at the behest of Joe Cannon, chairman of the Utah GOP and Chris Cannon’s brother. In his excellent article, Gehrke reports that Joe Cannon is already under fire for his lack of neutrality in the race.

All of which bears out Patrick Cleburne’s comment after the primary: “How strange it is that Mormonism, that most American of religions, might well be causative in the Nation’s fall.”

So it took heaven and hell (or at any rate Karl Rove’s White House) to save Chris Cannon this time. What will it take next time? Do other GOP incumbents really want this problem?