Making promises that pander to a particular voting bloc is one thing.  Sitting in the Oval Office is, apparently, quite another.

After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers.

“We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an interview.

Translation: It’s the same policy but we’ve tweaked it just enough to give enough cover to still talk about the eeeevil Bush regime.  But even this has an ulterior motive.

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

That approach brings Mr. Obama around to the position that his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, espoused during last year’s presidential campaign, a stance Mr. Obama rejected then as too hard on Latino and immigrant communities. (Mr. McCain did not respond to requests for comment.) Now the enforcement strategy has opened a political rift with some immigrant advocacy and Hispanic groups whose voters were crucial to the Obama victory.

“Trust me, I’m on your side” is a mantra many have heard from Obama, only to be disappointed.  Ask anyone hoping for fiscal responsibility.

While there have been recent scattered protests (dubbed “Tea Parties” after a rather famous one in Boston one 235 years ago) against huge government expansion, economic control, bailouts, borrowing and spending, the day of the individual tax deadline, April 15th, was a day of concerted protests.  The “Tax Day Tea Party” was an event held at over 500 locations all across the United States.

In case you’re still wondering what all the fuss was about, a budget deficit graph may help.  (Click on the image for the source.)

Yes, we’ve had budget deficits in the past.  These and the ones to come are in a class all by themselves.  Hence the outrage from all over the country.

From Michigan to South Carolina to California (where the state GOP chair got boos) to Ohio to Kentucky to Atlanta (the largest crowd in the nation, as far as I know, at over 15,000).  This was no localized phenomenon.  This was a national movement.

More below the fold…

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This was the title of a post on Redstate by Aaron Gardner, regarding where the Republican Party goes from here.  Gardner started, as his foundation of what the Republicans need to stand for, from the party platform of 1980, when Reagan was swept into the White House with 489 electoral votes.  He made some of his own modifications, but overall the (lengthy) statement stands as a good starting point.

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Though “stealing” would be more the verb I’d use.  In Obama’s latest ad running in the southwest, with narration in Spanish, he ties McCain to Limbaugh and then quotes Limbaugh on immigration issues.  It calls McCain two-faced and a liar.  But as Jake Tapper of ABC News discovers, the ad itself is where the deceit is.

The Obama camp draws a very tenuous link between Limbaugh and McCain to start the smear.  Essentially, they say, they both supported the Minutemen.  Well, except McCain didn’t, and Limbaugh has openly and loudly disagreed with McCain on immigration for a long time.

And then the two quotes from Limbaugh are out of context, one in the extreme.  They took a quote from Rush’s sense of what American immigration law would be if they were like Mexico’s.  He paraphrased protest laws for foreigners in Mexico by saying, “shut your mouth or get out”, and the ad makes it sound like he’s speaking to immigrants.

Tapper’s article has the full context for the quotes and both sides of the story on the “lies”.  Karl Rove would be proud.

Oh, and someone please tell Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post that his entirely uncritical reporting on this new ad does a disservice to his readers (but a rather nice service to Obama).

It doesn’t get any more blatant than this. Here’s Hillary Clinton talking to people in a Las Vegas neighborhood.

A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal.

“No woman is illegal,” Clinton said, to cheers.

Ever, or just where border crossings are concerned? Just wondering.

Technorati Tags: Hillary Clinton, politics, presidential election, pandering, Las Vegas, Nevada, illegal immigration

Would be nice to see here. Instead we get marches supporting illegal immigration and against a President fighting terrorism. We’d need both sides of the political aisle to pull something like this off, but methinks one side would be difficult to recruit.

In the meantime, Gateway Pundit takes us to Colombia.

Over one million Colombians marched from the Amazon jungle outpost of Leticia to the Caribbean city of Cartagena to demand liberation of the country’s kidnap victims from Leftist terrorists.

People attend a protest against violence and kidnapping, in Medellin July 5, 2007. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians headed for the streets on Thursday to show outrage at last week’s news that 11 provincial politicians had been killed while held hostage by leftist rebels.

And guess who is backing the terrorists? The Left’s favorite socialist.

The BBC reported that this was a rare national unity protest against the FARC terrorists who are known to be supported by the Chavez government.

Color me unsurprised.

Technorati Tags: Colombia, FARC, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez

As of now, Democrats have been given control of the House of Representatives, and there are two outstanding races in the Senate that will determine who controls that chamber. This is definitely going to make it harder for Republicans to get their initiatives through, to be sure, but let’s look a little closer.

As Michelle Malkin notes, Republicans may have lost but conservatism did not. She lists a number of indicators.

Property rights initiatives limiting eminent domain won big. MCRI, the anti-racial preference measure, passed resoundingly. Congressman Tom Tancredo, the GOP’s leading warrior against illegal immigration–opposed by both the open-borders Left and the open-borders White House–won a fifth term handily. Gay marriage bans won approval in 3 states. And as of this writing, the oil tax initiative, Prop. 87–backed by deep-pocketed Hollywood libs, is trailing badly in California.

While an AP article headlines 3 items that could be considered conservative setbacks–rejection of SD abortion ban and AZ gay marriage ban, and approval of stem cell research in Missouri–it lists later on in the article all the items that could be considered conservative wins, and on balance conservatism did very well. Written after Malkin’s post, it notes 8 states that banned gay marriage, as well as the aforementioned sunsetting of affirmative action in Michigan, and a number of anti-illegal-immigration initiatives in Arizona. (And the Missouri stem cell amendment, as I noted previously, was passed with a margin that could suggest that if it had been worded honestly, it may not have passed at all.)

Also, as ScrappleFace notes, the win for Lieberman and the loss for Lincoln Chafee could be considered a gain of 2 seats for Republicans. >grin< So unlike Democrats after previous elections, you won't find Republicans hiding under the covers for days, packing for their move to Canada, or suing Diebold. (Gee, where did all those Democrats go that insisted that Diebold machines were “fixed”? Is it OK when they’re “fixed” for Democrats? Love the choice; either Democrats win, or someone cheated.) The victory for Democrats was more a typical 6-year-itch midterm result mixed with some “throw the bums out” mentality with some hope by Republican voters that this may wake up the Republican lawmakers, as I noted in this thread. I think that there was plenty of deserved anger with Republican lawmakers, but this, in my opinion, wasn’t the way to express it.

And don’t forget all the moderate to conservative Democrats that were elected, including many former Republicans like Webb in Virginia (though the “elected” part has yet to be determined there).

What will they do with that platform?

Will they try, for instance, to impeach the president? Or will they stick to Ms Pelosi’s stated goal of leadership?

Probably the latter. Many of the new intake are moderate Democrats, conservatives even, who are not looking for an ideological fight.

Could they have won without pro-Iraq-war, anti-abortion Democrats? Given some of the margins of victory, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they’d all looked more like Ned Lamont.

So Republicans should not, and most likely won’t, go sulking around your office. Yeah we’re disappointed, and we deserved much of what we got. On the other hand, apart from party label, this election shows that the American public in general still leans conservative.

Technorati Tags: election, republican, democrat, conservative, government, congress