The Next Bush Scandal?

"Representative John Shadegg, an Arizona Republican who joined Bush in Yuma yesterday, said he believes the president 'is moving in [the] direction' of denying citizenship to those who came to the country illegally. . . .

"But the president's rhetoric seemed to point in a different direction, one more friendly to the Democrats, and the shifting messages from the White House has some observers wondering about Bush's immigration plan."

The Los Angeles Times editorial board writes that if the law's "penalties are so onerous that they keep illegal immigrants in the shadows, they're counterproductive. . . .

"The danger for Bush, then as now, is to concede too much to anti-immigrant partisans at the (re)start of this debate."

Labor movement leaders John J. Sweeney and Pablo Alvarado write in an Los Angeles Times op-ed: "Corporate America has made an expanded guest worker program the cornerstone of its preferred brand of immigration reform, and no wonder: It will assure a steady flow of cheap labor from essentially indentured workers too afraid of being deported to protest substandard wages, chiseled benefits and unsafe working conditions."

Up is Down; Down is Up

Robert Pear writes in the New York Times: "President Bush said Monday that tougher enforcement and a new fence at the Mexican border had sharply reduced the influx of illegal immigrants, and he pressed Congress to pass a sweeping revision of the nation's immigration laws. . . .

"In the last six months, the White House said, Border Patrol reports showed that apprehensions of illegal immigrants along the Mexican border fell by 30 percent, to 418,184, from 594,142 in the comparable period a year earlier. In the Yuma sector, which spans parts of Arizona and California, apprehensions fell by 68 percent, to 25,217, from 79,131 in the comparable period a year earlier. . . .

"The White House interprets the decline in apprehensions as a sign that the tighter security is working.

"'When you're apprehending fewer people, it means fewer are trying to come across,' Mr. Bush said. 'And fewer are trying to come across because we're deterring people from attempting illegal border crossings in the first place.'"

Pear notes that declining numbers are not necessarily that significant: "[I]mmigration experts note that apprehension figures swing erratically over the years. The numbers can be driven by a variety of factors aside from enforcement, including weather, Latin American economics and decisions by illegal immigrants to make fewer trips back and forth between the United States and Mexico."

But Pear misses a key point: Wouldn't Bush have said it was a good thing if apprehensions had been up, too?

As it happens, Ryan Powers of the Think Progress Web site found evidence that Bush has done precisely that in the past.

In a November 2005 speech in Tucson, Ariz., Bush had this to say: "Our actions to integrate manpower, technology and infrastructure are getting results. And one of the best examples of success is the Arizona Border Control Initiative, which the government launched in 2004. In the first year of this initiative -- now, listen to this, listen how hard these people are working here -- agents in Arizona apprehended nearly 500,000 illegal immigrants, a 42-percent increase over the previous year."

Finally, there may not be much to celebrate in the decrease. Kevin R. Johnson, a law professor at University of California-Davis and co-editor of ImmigrationProf Blog tells me that one effect of the kind of fortification around Yuma that Bush was praising yesterday is that it "basically reroutes people to places where there aren't fences, in the desert, where they're more likely to die."

Niger and Uranium

UPI reports: "A U.S. House of Representatives committee renewed calls for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify on claims Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Niger. . . .

"House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman sent a second letter on Monday reiterating the request that Rice appear before the committee on April 18."

From Waxman's letter: "One of the issues the Committee is examining why the President asserted in his State of the Union address in 2003 that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. In my March 12 letter, I requested information about what you knew about this assertion and how it ended up in the State of the Union address. I asked you to answer specific questions raised in a June 10, 2003, letter and a July 29, 2003, 1etter, both of which I enclosed. These questions included: (1) whether you had any knowledge that would explain why President Bush cited forged evidence about Iraq's efforts to procure uranium from Niger in the State of the Union address; (2) whether you knew before the State of the Union address of the doubts raised by the CIA and the State Department about the veracity of the Niger claim; (3) whether there was a factual basis for your reference in a January 23, 2003, op-ed to "Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad"; and (4) whether you took appropriate steps to investigate how the Niger claim ended up in the State of the Union address after it was revealed to be fraudulent."

Rice was national security adviser at the time.

Fourth Anniversary (Not) Observed

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "As Iraq observed the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein yesterday, the lead item on the White House Web site, under the heading 'LATEST NEWS,' was a photograph of Clifford the Big Red Dog at the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn.

"The president marked the anniversary by going to Arizona to give a speech -- about immigration. In his 24-minute address, he didn't so much as mention Iraq. The vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense had no public events on their schedules yesterday."

Meanwhile, Edward Wong writes in the New York Times: "Tens of thousands of protesters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, took to the streets of the holy city of Najaf on Monday in an extraordinarily disciplined rally to demand an end to the American military presence in Iraq, burning American flags and chanting 'Death to America!'"

AFP reports: "The White House on Monday downplayed anti-US rallies in Iraq called by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and said such demonstrations were a hopeful sign of freedom.

"'While we have much more progress ahead of us -- the United States, the coalition and Iraqis have much more to do -- this is a country that has come a long way from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein,' said spokesman Gordon Johndroe."

Or, as Editor and Publisher put it: "A huge anti-American protest swept two cities in Iraq today, but White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters this only underscores how much 'progress' the U.S. is making in that country."

And Peter Spiegel and Richard Simon write in the Los Angeles Times: "The Pentagon will send four National Guard brigades to Iraq and may extend the tours of five active-duty Army brigades by as much as four months as it strains to find troops to sustain the buildup in Baghdad through the end of the year."

Message From the Grave

David Corn blogs for the Nation: "From the grave, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the godmother of the neoconservative movement, speaks: the Iraq war was something of a mistake."

In a new book, Kirkpatrick reports "that she had 'grave reservations' about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. She notes that at the time, 'I was privately critical of the Bush administration's argument for the use of military force for preemptive self-defense.' She does not say where and to whom she voiced her misgivings--if she did. Most strikingly, she argues that the war--with respect to bringing democracy to Iraqis--did more harm than good."

Poll Watch

David Espo writes for the Associated Press: "Public approval for Congress is at its highest level in a year as Democrats mark 100 days in power and step up their confrontation with President Bush over his handling of the Iraq War, the issue that overshadows all others. . . .

"Overall approval for Congress is 40 percent. The survey shows Bush's approval ratings remain in the mid-30 percent range, that a striking 39 percent strongly disapproves his handling of foreign policy and the war on terror, and that the public has scant hopes that the president and Congress can work together to solve the country's problems."

Google Bomb Explodes Again

Mike Sachoff writes for Webpronews: "Google may have fixed a link bomb in January that had President George W. Bush listed as the top results for 'failure' or 'miserable failure', but now due to a White House oversight the President is once again ranked number one for the search term ' failure' on Google

"The White House had seemingly put the Google bombing behind them. So how did the President once again yield a number one ranking for the search term 'failure?'

"Danny Sullivan explains, 'The White House used the word "failure" on Bush's page, which resulted in the page becoming relevant for the query again.' . . .

"Here is the exact text from the President's radio address that has him associated with the term failure. 'The bottom line is that Congress's failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines.'"

Rove's Next Gig?

Benjamin H. Johnson, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and author of the Bush Library Blog, writes: "Last weekend while at the ever-scintillating meeting of the Organization of American Historians I ran into a few friends in administrative positions at research libraries. The Bush people, they told me, have been scoping out research facilities, taking a look at how institutions try to set themselves up to house both archival records open to a wide range of researchers and provide a productive working environment for fellows. The person leading this effort was nobody other than Karl Rove. . . . Rove is personally going around to these libraries, meeting with their directors and checking out their facilities. According to one colleague, he seems to know exactly what the square footage of the building will be and where it will be located on campus. . . .

"An important backdrop to all of this is the Bush administration's continued political collapse, which amazingly enough keeps getting worse. My sense is that this collapse makes the library-museum-institute complex all the more valuable to the Bush people: especially after the crushing defeat in the last Congressional election, the complex may be all that they will have left to leverage to secure their place in history. I wouldn't be surprised if Rove's days as a top political strategist are over, so perhaps a position as head of the Bush Institute would be attractive to him in a way that it wouldn't have been earlier in his career."

Very Appreciative

Ken Herman blogs for Cox News Service: "President Bush appreciates lots of things and people. We know that because he frequently says so in his speeches. Today, during an immigration policy speech in Yuma, Arizona, we learned of 19 more things and people appreciated by the appreciater-in-chief.

"The number of appreciations seems to have appreciated by an appreciable amount."

Live Online

I'll be Live Online tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET. I'd appreciate you stopping by.

Duck for President

Natasha T. Metzler writes for the Associated Press about the White House Easter Egg Roll, at which "the first lady sat in one of the area's designated reading nooks and read 'Duck for President,' by Doreen Cronin. It's a story of a duck who gets sick of farm chores and decides to run for office -- first for head of the farm, then governor and, finally, president. In the end he decides running the country is too much work and goes back to the farm."