Free Republic

As we watch the tragicomedy in the U.S. Senate on immigration reform, it behooves us to hark back to the last time the Senate debated major immigration reform. It was in 1985. Why does it behoove us to learn this history? Because the promises being made today are exactly the same promises made back then. The bill that the Senate produced in 1985, which became law in 1986, was ambitiously titled the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). It is probably the most fraudulent legislation in American history, for it neither reformed nor controlled immigration. In fact, it actually exacerbated...

When Bill Shakespeare observed that life is but a shadow strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, he must have been imagining Crawford, Texas, circa August 2005. Indeed, recent events surrounding the war protest led by Cindy Sheehan have added a new dimension to the definition of tragicomedy. Not just tragic, not just comedic, but also ridiculous. The theater of the absurd has found pay dirt in East Texas. Of course, there's nothing amusing about war, or loss of life, or a mother's pain. But those noble human concerns become something else once the red eye of the television...