There are several things wrong with this story, although it does contain good news.

Immigration plan fails Senate test vote | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

By JESSE J. HOLLAND
Associated Press

Legislation to give some children of illegal immigrants a path toward legality failed a crucial Senate vote Wednesday, probably dooming any chance of major changes to the immigration system this year.

Supporters needed to 60 votes to advance the proposal, but the tally was 52-44. The measure would have allowed illegal immigrants who plan to attend college or join the military, and who came to the United States with their families before they turned 16, to move toward legality.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — DREAM ACT for short — was a popular part of a broad immigration plan that would have legalized as many as 12 million unlawful immigrants and fortified the border.

That larger bill failed in the Senate in June. But proponents of the DREAM Act wanted to see if it would pass on its own.

“Children should not be penalized for the actions of their parents,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

They definitely shouldn’t refer to the young people to be amnestied by the bill as children of illegal immigrants. The point here is that they’re juvenile illegal immigrants themselves. And giving them amnesty and American citizenship is rewarding both them and their parents for a crime, and creating an incentive for further lawbreakers. As for the idea that defeated amnest bill would have “fortified the border,” you can believe as much of that as you like.

The DREAM Act is back–it promises amnesty for anyone who graduates high school, or joins the Army:

The Borjas Blog: Amnesty Vote #3458
Amnesty Vote #3458

Because of travel and teaching, I’ve been unable to blog much about the reappearance of the DREAM amnesty. As always, Mickey Kaus is on top of things.

My simple take on the matter: it is profoundly unwise to enact any policy that encourages illegal immigration as long as the border is so porous.

Take care of the border problem and I’ll then be willing to talk about what to do with the 12 million illegal immigrants now in the country.

Some of the illegal border crossers motivated by this may die, something I wrote about in “The Moral Hazard Of Not Enforcing Immigration Law“–it’s the size of the taxpayer-funded reward that lures immigrants to their deaths in the Arizona desert.

Joe Guzzardi will be a guest on the George Putnam Show today, Wednesday, at 4:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time. 1:06 Pacific Time.

Listen live here

The New York Times has an interesting article on Jpod taking over as editor of Commentary, cleverly tying it to the 2003 book by Adam Bellow, In Praise of Nepotism:

New Commentary Editor Denies Neo-Nepotism

By Patricia Cohen

The new appointment puts three generations of Podhoretzes at the magazine, with Norman holding the title of editor at large and his grandson Sam Munson as online editor. Of course, the ancestral streak is not exactly surprising. The Podhoretz, Kagan (Fred, Donald, Robert and Kimberly) and Kristol clans have dominated the movement for 40 years.

“There’s a family business aspect to the neoconservative enterprise,” said Mr. Bellow, whose book “In Praise of Nepotism” was published in 2003. Such kinship ties are part of “a very broad phenomenon across American society; it’s not really right to single out neoconservatives.”

(Here’s my review-essay on Bellow’s “In Praise of Nepotism” in The National Interest.)

The NYT reporter had asked me:

“How is he [JPod] thought of in conservative circles?”

I replied:

Among conservative intellectuals, John Podhoretz is widely considered proof of the statistical tendency toward regression beneath the mean. The only reason he has a career is because he is, as they say in Little Italy, connected.

As blogger Larry Auster has been pointing out, only one of his many colleagues at National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner, has congratulated him on his ascension. On Tuesday morning, Kathryn Jean Lopez (”K-Lo”) offered this minimalist salute:

Congrats Are in Order [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

for JPod.

10/16 08:33 AM

As a fellow right-wing film critic, I can safely say that making John Podhoretz editor of Commentary would be like making me editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Seriously, the appointment of the buffoonish Pod the Lesser calls attention to a long-term problem: the intellectual decline of neoconservatism. Back in the 1960s, neoconservatism started out, essentially, among social scientists such Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and James Q. Wilson. They were quantitative analysts, not pundits.

Over the generations, however, that neoconservative emphasis on datacrunching has evaporated. Irving Kristol crunched more numbers on an adding machine that William Kristol has crunched on a personal computer. (Charles Murray is just about the last neoconservative quant jock left.) Along with that decline in analytical rigor has come a shift in focus from domestic policy to foreign policy, with, as we’ve all seen, unfortunate consequences in Iraq

Yet, putting a TV-trivia obsessive like JPod in charge of Commentary takes the intellectual downfall of the neocons to a whole … ‘nother … level.

This is from the New York Times’s blog:

He wasn’t the only Republican who delved into the issue. Representative Tom Tancredo, a fierce opponent to amnesty for illegal aliens, made headlines — a rare event for him — by informing federal immigration services that undocumented foreigners would appear at a news conference today. Three illegal immigrants are to speak with Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, in support of a Senate bill to give legal status to those who finish high school or enroll in the military.The Early Word: Immigration Returns to the Stage - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog

Here’s my question–why is it a “rare occurrence” for Tancredo to make headlines, and whose decision is it? Assuming he doesn’t drive off bridges like Ted Kennedy or dive under bathroom stalls like Larry Craig, then the number of headlines he makes in the Mainstream Media depends on the media’s own prejudices. After all, Tancredo makes headlines at VDARE.com.